Diverse Audience Among Digital Natives

Know your audience. This phrase has been drilled into the heads of marketers and content creators since the beginning of marketing and content creation. And while your mind may immediately jump to a consumer audience, the reality is that recruitment marketers must be in-tune with their job seeker audience in order to really connect and make an impact.

This brings us to a “shocking” statistic (although it’s not so hard to believe if you take a look around). Digital natives – a.k.a. Generation C, Gen Y and Millennials – shift their focus between different media platforms 27 times per hour… or approximately every other minute. This ever-shortening attention span of job seekers makes it increasingly difficult to market employer brand and draw them in to your organization. However, they’re not the only ones you have to worry about.

The Dividing of the Talent Pool

Yes – I said pool. While the whole idea of talent community is nice, for the sake of simplicity, we’re not going there right now. The real point is that consumer marketers identify and target segments before developing a strategy, and the same process should hold true for recruitment marketers. And though the segments will not always be as clear cut as digital vs. traditional, it is a good starting point.

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

Typically, marketing segments are based on demographics, geography, behavior, etc…, while your recruitment marketing segments likely target experience and cultural fit. But to break it down further, your platform and content choices must be geared toward an audience that’s diverse in their digital usage and preferences. Here’s why: The number of digital natives who send or receive a text message on a given day is 63% higher than that of digital immigrants, with Facebook usage 40% higher and Twitter close to 86% higher. And because jobs – unlike many products – are not age-specific, these varied digital habits call for multifaceted recruitment marketing campaigns.

Adapting to a Digitally Diverse Audience

In every industry – whether it’s HR, recruiting or other – hot, new trends make us susceptible to Shiny Object Syndrome. Instead of using a data-driven approach and getting to know our audience and our community, we drift toward the latest tool and latch on like it’s our only hope. Then, many wonder why things like social and mobile recruiting don’t work for them.

While it may be tempting to get involved with every new development, the reality is that your recruitment marketing strategy must be well-rounded and well-researched to reach target talent. Think about it: Using Facebook to advertise jobs isn’t going to capture your entire target market, just as e-mail campaigns won’t effectively engage every type of job seeker.

The key to successful engagement is getting to know your job seeker audience, their habits and their preferred methods of communication. While the latest trends may seem like the greatest, you can’t walk away from traditional methods just yet.

Autumn McReynolds is the Content Strategist and Lead Blogger for TalentMinded, an online publication focused on talent attraction and engagement in the digital age. After landing in the recruitment space in 2009, she has spent the past three years in the job board industry as both a recruiter and project manager, consulting with clients about job advertisements, employment brand and SEO strategies for attracting new candidates via job postings. You can connect with her on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.