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Moving From ‘Post And Pray’ To Robust Inbound Recruitment

By Sebastian Dominguez - Talent.com
Vice President, Sales - Latam

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By Sebastian Dominguez | Vice President, Sales - Latam - Fri, 11/11/2022 - 09:00

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Having worked in the recruitment technology sector for 12 years across Latin America, I am excited by the prospect of the Mexican market and its potential for growth. 

On Talent.com alone, there are 250,000 job openings in Mexico. In reality, there are thousands more that haven’t made it online in a meaningful way. Industries, such as technology, retail, warehouse, and operations, are exploding with opportunities. Competition for talent is fierce, especially for companies in sectors that require in-person work in an increasingly remote world. Once attractive, sought-after job titles like “Sales” or “Call Center” are being replaced by titles like “Business Developer” or “Customer Service,” some of the most searched-for jobs in Mexico.

As a solid and diversified market connected to the world and growing quickly, especially in technology and the startup ecosystem, now is the time for businesses to take a good hard look at their recruitment processes and bring them up to speed.

Leaders in Mexico are hungry for the transformation of their HR processes from manual and slow to a more digital and efficient model, but they are unsure how to do it. One company I met on a recent trip to Mexico hires 5,000 people every month! Retailers are struggling to hire people to work on-site as remote working options are on the rise. No matter if it is volume that employers are looking for or filling difficult roles, the process from job seeker, to candidate, to hire needs to be in order, efficient, and on budget.

HR departments across the country are using all the techniques available, there’s no doubt. With so many positions to fill, teams are using excel to track referrals, headhunters (my old job), and even some advanced recruitment tech tools like an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) — every trick in the recruiter’s hat to find candidates. The issue is they aren’t using any of these techniques or tools in a strategic, intentional, and optimized manner. Having an ATS is a great first step, and more and more ATS companies are coming to Mexico as they see the needs here, but if talent acquisition (TA) teams don’t use their ATS to its fullest capacity, and in conjunction with other media and platforms, they will continue using all the techniques in the handbook and still wait there praying that something will work. 

Add to this muddled process the challenge of being decentralized. If a retail giant, for example, needs to hire in cities across the country, especially in competitive cities like Monterrey, Guadalajara, or Tijuana, but has no centralized intelligence or data supporting recruitment efforts, the company will never meet its hiring goals, or at least not this year.

Decreasing the manual work and converting to an inbound recruiting strategy will accelerate the monumental task of filling so many positions exponentially. An inbound strategy will allow a company to work with a steady pipeline of candidates more quickly and with better visibility on the status of their recruitment efforts across their operations.

To understand how to use digital channels to attract more quality candidates, TA leaders must learn how digital marketing works. Concepts like CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per application) and lead should become familiar to them if they want to win the battle for talent. The marketing funnel is very similar to that of recruitment, so if recruiters understand the need for different channels to bring in more candidates, their recruitment strategies will be more effective. 

The objective of regular marketing is to get consumers to purchase goods or services. The end goal of recruitment marketing is to get job seekers to apply for jobs.  In both cases, an array of content can be marketed via several channels, not only online (corporate websites, career pages, job boards, social media, emails, podcasts) but also offline (TV, radio, billboards, press, word of mouth). These channels can be used to turn people into customers (marketing) or into employees (recruitment marketing). While it is a priority for marketers to strengthen their brand’s reputation as a provider of products, recruitment marketers focus on their brand’s reputation as an employer. This is called employer branding.

Mexico needs to fully step into this new era of diversified recruitment measures. With more jobs than candidates and more options for remote work making many types of on-site positions less attractive, it’s time to up the game of attracting and targeting talent. It may seem nerve-wracking to start learning the new language of recruitment marketing but familiarizing yourself with and tracking your CPC, CPA, and especially your CPH (cost per hire) is no longer an option if you want to successfully recruit and plan for growth.

Photo by:   Sebastian Domínguez

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