In today’s candidate-driven engineering job market, attracting and retaining the right talent is more challenging than ever. Candidates have more options when selecting the ideal role for their specific needs, and their priorities are changing.
This means business leaders and recruiters need to take a new approach to connect with potential employees if they want to overcome the challenges of a major talent shortage.
Recruitment now has a lot in common with effective marketing. Just as companies need to establish an effective “go to market” strategy to engage buyers and demonstrate value to customers, they also need a similar approach to intrigue top talent.
A strong go-to-market (G.T.M.) strategy framework paves the foundation for a powerful product launch, gaining customer trust and differentiating a brand from its competitors. A similar “G.T.M.” approach to recruitment can help companies target the right talent, strengthen their employer brand, and build deeper connections with employees.
Here’s how to embed a go-to-market strategy into your engineering recruitment process.
What is a Go-to-Market Strategy? The Basics
A go-to-market strategy is a tactical plan companies use to determine how to bring a new product or service to their target audience.
It’s an exercise that outlines the steps a business should take to engage a potential customer, differentiate themselves from the competition and increase sales.
With a strong go-to-market strategy, business leaders determine why they’re launching a product, their target market, and how they will convince consumers to buy what they’re selling.
Similarly, in the engineering recruitment world, a go-to-market strategy outlines the key information businesses need to capture, engage, and retain the right talent.
Business leaders answer questions such as: “Why are we hiring this professional?” and “What value can we bring to employees?” This gives them the guidance they need to position their roles more effectively in the competitive talent market.
Moreover, a go-to-market strategy can help companies consider any issues candidates might experience with a role, such as a lack of clarity around responsibilities or a complex interview process.
Here’s how companies can approach engineering recruitment with a “go-to-market” mindset.
Step 1: Align Recruitment Goals to Business Goals
As mentioned above, when organisations establish a go-to-market strategy for a product, one of the first questions they ask is why they’re launching this new solution or offer. Similarly, when you use a go-to-market strategy for engineering recruitment, you’ll need to define why you’re looking for a specific employee to fill a gap in your team.
The first step is developing a clear understanding of the current business goals. For instance, you might want to expand your engineering company into new markets in the years ahead and need new talent to help you identify and serve the right customers.
Alternatively, your goal may be to innovate and evolve, using new tools and strategies to improve team productivity and efficiency. Defining your goals will help you understand what key attributes and skills your new engineering employee will need. It should also ensure you can provide your candidates clear insight into their roles.
Crucially, aligning business and recruitment goals also means you’ll be able to identify how you will evaluate your candidate’s success after they join your team.
Step 2: Identify your Employee Personas
Once you’ve established your goals for your go-to-market recruitment plan, the next step is deciding what kind of engineering employees you want to attract.
A key component of creating a go-to-market strategy for a product is defining who the ideal buyer will be.
In the recruitment world, you’ll need to understand the key attributes and characteristics of the candidates you want to attract. Think about the essential soft and engineering skills your new team member will need to have and what their educational background should look like.
Think about what kind of people are most likely to thrive in your existing engineering company culture, what their personality will be like, and what values they might have. You could even create a candidate persona, which you can use to inspire and guide your team when creating job descriptions, interview questions, and onboarding strategies.
Step 3: Building Your Employer Brand
When bringing a new product or service into the market, companies must determine what benefits and values they can offer above and beyond their competitors. In today’s competitive engineering recruitment space, you must also take the same approach to engaging candidates.
Ask yourself and your team what sets your company apart from other organisations with similar roles available to candidates. If your company is relatively small, you might not be able to compete in salary, but you could offer other benefits by providing flexible working opportunities or access to more training and development options.
Look at your “employee personas” values and ask yourself how you can build a brand that appeals to your target candidates. This might include focusing on things like:
- Unique opportunities: Do you allow engineering employees to work remotely, choose their hours, or get involved with training initiatives and mentorship programs?
- Corporate Social Responsibility: How can you appeal to your candidate’s ethical values? Do you have a strong focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity? Do you take a sustainable business operations approach or give back to charitable organisations?
- Company culture: What are the core components of your company culture? How do you ensure your team members feel supported in your team?
Step 4: Creating Your Outreach Strategy
In a typical go-to-market strategy, companies need to build a “market strategy”, which involves thinking about how they’ll position their product and connect with consumers. You can take a similar approach in a engineering recruitment-focused G.T.M.
Start by thinking about the messaging you will use and how you will highlight the unique components of your employer brand in your job descriptions and social posts.
For instance, alongside listing job descriptions on your website, work with a engineering recruitment company to create a job description and leverage their ability to promote your vacancy into the market and within their database and connections.
Step 5: Prepare for the Interview Process
Finally, you’ll need to think about how to connect with candidates once you are in an interview situation. As companies use offers, discounts, demos, and promotions to increase conversions, business leaders use interviews to assess candidates and provide talent with an opportunity to evaluate their company.
Constructing an effective interview process is essential to boosting the power of your employer brand. Ensure you have a plan to eliminate common issues like bias. This could mean training your interviewers and providing them with scorecards to help them focus on specific attributes. Your recruitment partner can facilitate all of these processes.
Provide interviewers with step-by-step guidance on evaluating each candidate, and consider the questions your would-be employees might ask you in return. At the same time, remember to think beyond the interview to the full onboarding process.
How can you give your candidates a good first impression of your company?
Commit to constant, transparent communication, and look for ways to empower your staff members with the right training and support from day one.
The Go-To-Market Strategy for Engineering Recruitment
A go-to-market strategy is a powerful tool for businesses bringing new products and services to their customers. However, many of the components of these strategies can also be applied to the recruitment world. Taking a go-to-market approach to hiring can help you to target the right candidates, differentiate your company from competitors, and engage the best talent.
With the help of a engineering recruitment company, you can build a full go-to-market strategy designed to fill the gaps in your team, improve your employer brand, and strengthen your connections with existing and future employees.
All the best
Steve
At Coalesce we have been partnering with engineering firms with the Go-To-Market Strategy for Engineering Recruitment for over 27 years; if you want to find out how we can help, call us on 07512 821708 or email us here.