What is Inbound Recruiting?

Inbound recruiting is the discipline that drives quality candidates to your company, similar to how inbound marketing allows marketing teams to drive leads to their company.  Inbound recruiting has allowed employers who've adopted this methodology to decrease both time to fill, and cost per hire.  It's no surprise that talent acquisition teams who're hunting top candidates are adopting this methodology.Inbound MarketingAround 2005, marketing teams started to adopt the inbound approach aided by software solutions like  Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, etc.  Prospects were constantly bombarded by sales people's calls and emails.  This meant in order to stand out, one had to offer useful information in order to attract and convert leads.Here's the inbound marketing lifecycle that a prospect goes through:

Inbound RecruitingInbound recruiting looks a lot like inbound marketing, and has risen as a way to attract talent in the past few years.Recruiters are now bombarding top talent with Inmails, emails and calls, just like sales people are to their prospects.  It's hard to cut through this noise.  Therefore, the best human resources teams are using inbound tactics to share their employee value propositions, their culture, and their employer brand.  The best companies are also using inbound recruiting to provide useful information to candidates - like career advice, open sourced projects, and mentorship.As we can see, the inbound recruiting lifecycle looks very similar to the inbound marketing example:

Attract, Convert NurtureWhen it comes to tactics and ROI, inbound recruiting's playbook is fairly simple:

• Attract: Get more people into your pipeline by sharing useful information where candidates will find it.  The information could be anything from resume help to career path examples.  And, the sharing can be as simple as social through employee advocacy, or something more creative like your robots file or http response headers.
• Convert: Get more of the people who are exposed to your company to apply for jobs.  You do this through a great candidate experience, as well as a strong base of content that SELLs candidates into working with you.
• Nurture: For the candidates who aren't ready to apply, grab their email and then keep them up to date on what's going on at your company, just like you marketing team would.

The video this week is meant to be a 101 explanation of Inbound Recruiting for anyone in your life who wants to learn what's going on in the space (perhaps a hiring manager, CFO, etc):

For companies ready to start using inbound recruiting to drive lower time to fill and cost per hire, a talent community is a great way to get started.