Harnessing the Power of Customer Journeys in Recruitment 

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘candidate experience’ bouncing around the recruitment industry. 

Have you ever thought about your customer journey though? 

On Episode 6 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Rich Evans about how we can utilise the customer journey to our advantage across recruitment. 

The customer journey is where branding and marketing meet sales, and work together to give clients and candidates the smoothest experience possible. We can look at both a client and candidate journey, and use their experience to streamline our process. 

Wherever you’re looking to get more candidates into your market and interview for your business, every step between not knowing who you are to saying, ‘I want to come and speak to you about potential opportunities at your firm’ is part of their customer journey. It’s our job to break down that journey and support them through it. 

Here’s how to do that:  

Eliminating Friction

Friction occurs in the customer journey when people have to overcome obstacles to access your solution. 

Rich put it this way: “The more mental calories a buyer needs to burn during the process, the less likely they are to buy something. They’ll be looking for the next solution. It’s about clarity and digestible information.”

If you want to create an enjoyable customer journey, you have to anticipate their questions and have the information ready to go. 

Using Branding

The aim of branding is to make sales easier, whether that’s by creating brand loyalty so that new products are sought-after by loyal customers or by positioning yourself as an exceptional employer, where candidates are eager to apply for your roles. 

Successful branding communicates your purpose to your customers. Rich recommends building your brand around the questions “Who are we selling to? What are their pain points? What are their needs?” and “How are we going to position our business around that?” 

This will translate into purposeful content that directly addresses your clients’ pain points. Your sales team (or consultants in the recruitment industry) will have resources that are ready to share with prospects, removing that friction that we talked about earlier. 

Combining Marketing & Sales

Marketing and sales departments have to work together to create a successful customer journey. Rich’s advice was that ultimately, “your job during that journey, whether you’re marketer or a salesperson, is to help them buy.” 

The aim of marketing is to help consultants build a relationship with customers. You can do that by building trust in the marketplace and changing people’s perception of your business. 

Mindsets are one of the biggest obstacles in a customer journey. It’s the role of marketing and sales to change that, convincing customers that your solution will benefit them. It’s essentially education. 

Sales and marketing can also work together to use feedback. The consultants are the ones in the field, speaking to customers. They’re often receiving feedback about what your customers’ pain points are, and they know the points that are turning customers away. If that’s fed back to marketing, the two teams can work together to build those points into your solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Both teams are helping people decide to buy your product or service. 

Creating Conversations

The most important step of the customer journey is getting customers to talk to you. “From a marketing perspective, we’re not really selling the full solution,” Rich said. “We’re selling an initial conversation.” That’s the culmination of outbound sales, marketing and branding; one conversation. 

If you’ve got those areas of your business to work together, your customer will already have gone through most of the buying journey. They should already know what you offer, your price points, your turn-around time and how your product can help them. This conversation is just about giving them the opportunity to ask any really specific questions about their bespoke requirements. 

Customers should never have to work things out themselves during that conversation. It’s down to you to move them through to the next step of their journey. 

To learn more about the customer journey in recruitment, tune into the full episode of The Skill Point Podcast here.