Let’s begin with the obvious: Good talent is in high demand and short supply. Candidates have become discerning shoppers, more aware of their worth than in recent market cycles.
As a result, the onus is on us to change the way we source candidates and generate demand for our company. It’s no longer a case of boosting job ads across a few different channels; to court the best people, we need to focus on strategies that build meaningful and beneficial connections over the longer term. Today, branding, Employee Value Proposition (EVP), messaging, positioning, and creative differentiation are more important than ever.
Here are some questions you and your team may be asking:
- How do we best promote our business as the one to work for?
- How strong is our brand?
- What is our content strategy (Or: What do we say, when/how/why and to whom do we say it)?
- How do we revitalize our Employee Value Proposition (EVP)?
- How do we reach the best candidates in new and memorable ways?
The essence of new-school recruitment marketing
Summarized in a single phrase, your best recruitment marketing strategy is this: Add value. Sounds simple, but it does need some unpacking.
Take this recent episode of Sapia.ai’s Pink Squirrels! podcast, in which we spoke with Jennifer Paxton, VP of People at Smile.io. Jen has taken an always-on approach to talent acquisition by being active as a content creator on LinkedIn. Jen regularly posts helpful tidbits and articles about people leadership, employee engagement, career development, and plenty of other topics. In doing so, she is also able to organically (and indirectly) promote the virtues of Smile.io.
Here’s what’s neat about this: Jen is promoting Smile whether she references Smile or not. If you’ve built a dedicated audience, and that audience sees your other associations, they are much more likely to look favourably on those associations than if you mentioned them overtly or if they came upon the association in a different context (e.g., a display ad on LinkedIn). That’s good marketing.
According to Jen, this has been a big success for Smile, because she is constantly engaged in the process of creating and fostering good relationships with potential employees. Today, they may simply be followers and consumers of her content; tomorrow, they may be teammates. When a vacancy opens up, Jen has more tactics up her sleeve than merely boosting job ads. Her first (and best) option is to put a call out to her always-growing network of engaged professionals.
What Jen does is not necessarily easy – it requires dedication and consistency – but it is simple. It’s about adding value as a people leader, and creating a first-hand connection with the market. Everyday customer facetime is truly invaluable, and for Jen, it’s certainly working.
If you want to learn more about how you can lead recruitment marketing through an always-on content strategy, you can also check out this Pink Squirrels! episode with Russell Ayles, a veteran recruiter and LinkedIn Top Voice for 2022.
The challenge of recruitment marketing attribution
Here’s the rub: If you’re having to do all these new things over a long period of time to prime and court the talent you want, how do you know what’s working? For example, if it takes six months, at minimum, to build and execute a recruitment content strategy, how will you know in month two or month four how things are tracking?
Trickier still, when your CEO or CHRO asks to report on outcomes, what will you tell them? What level of analysis is suitable for stakeholders at that level? How do you reconcile the need for patience with the performance pressures of the executive?
This conundrum is the main reason most companies don’t bother with an add-value strategy, even when their talent pools have dried into a puddle. After all, the ‘boost-your-job-ad’ method still yields concrete and easily-understandable numbers, even if those numbers are bad.
Going new-school with recruitment marketing requires a bit of faith, supplemented by regular analysis of the signals of success. So let’s look at one of the biggest signals for success: Self-reported attribution.
Ask your candidates: How did you hear about us?
Seems far too simple to be useful, doesn’t it? In actuality, this one question can inform the success and evolution of your entire recruitment marketing strategy. It’s not a quantitative metric, of course, not as black-and-white as your abandonment rate or NPS metrics, but the insights can be truly transformative. Here’s how it works.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your team has decided on a three-pronged strategy:
- All talent acquisition leaders will start posting on LinkedIn, three times a week, according to a pre-set content plan.
- The Head of Talent Acquisition/CHRO, the CEO, and the company’s marketing leader will create a twice-monthly podcast on an area of interest related/adjacent to the business (for e.g., if you’re a retail fashion brand, you might consider a podcast on the principles of design, or merchandising, or upcycling).
- The regional Community Manager will take tidbits from the podcast and post them on Twitter daily, alongside a bunch of other fun and light content suited to the medium.
Three tactics, three different channels. Now, to track the ongoing health of these measures, you might look at the following metrics on a monthly basis:
- Trending traffic to website/careers page
- Increase in social media followers
- Increase in podcast shares
And plenty others besides. But, crucially, you should also add a field to the form you use as a first step in a job application: A free-text field with a simple, mandatory question: How did you hear about us?
(Ensure that, in form design, you don’t lead the candidate in any way. Don’t have any pre-text in the field (saying something like ‘e.g., Seek’). You want unbiased results.)
You’ll be amazed at what you can learn. Some candidates will offer you vague and unhelpful responses (like ‘Internet’), but over the medium term, you should start to see trends emerge. For example, if a great many of your good candidates are hearing about you through the podcast, they will tell you, and you will come away with hard numbers showing which of your long-term brand-building strategies is working best.
After six months, you’ll start to see more candidates. And you’ll see the following (for e.g.):
- 30% of candidates say they heard about you through LinkedIn
- 40% will say they heard about you through the podcast
- 10% will say Twitter
- 20% might cite some other channel, like referrals
This kind of recruitment marketing attribution is helpful because it is simple, it is highly indicative (both of past performance and future improvements), and it is compatible with the reality of the market we’re in. Right now, the majority of candidates aren’t looking for work with you – but they are looking for useful, valuable, enjoyable content. It may be a six-month journey from awareness to application readiness, and you should be with them along that journey, helping, educating, informing.
If, instead, you get stuck looking at the ROI of job ad boostings, or even the success of individual pieces of content, you’ll be led astray by the data. In isolation, individual customer touchpoints do not help you iterate. In fact, they will have you doing something different every week. You’ll confuse your audience, see limited success, get frustrated, and quit.
Channels, conversely, paint a picture of customer consumption behaviors and traffic patterns. They show, over time, that your presence is of net benefit.
The best part about self-reported attribution? You can start doing it now, without making any changes, and start to capture data about your activity and brand strength to date.
Give it a try.
Related
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Mirrored diversity: why retail teams should look like their customers
Walk into any store this festive season and you’ll see it instantly. The lights, the displays, the products are all crafted to draw people in. Retailers spend millions on campaigns to bring customers through the door.
But the real moment of truth isn’t the emotional TV ad, or the shimmering window display. It’s the human standing behind the counter. That person is the brand.
The missing link in retail hiring
Most retailers know this, yet their hiring processes tell a different story. Candidates are often screened by rigid CV reviews or psychometric tests that force them into boxes. Neurodiverse candidates, career changers, and people from different cultural or educational backgrounds are often the ones who fall through the cracks.
And yet, these are the very people who may best understand your customers. If your store colleagues don’t reflect the diversity of the communities you serve, you create distance where there should be connection. You lose loyalty. You lose growth.
We call this gap the diversity mirror.
What mirrored diversity looks like
When retailers achieve mirrored diversity, their teams look like their customers:
- A grocery store team that reflects the cultural mix of its neighbourhood.
- A fashion store with colleagues who understand both style and accessibility.
- A beauty retailer whose teams reflect every skin tone, gender, and background that walks through the door.
Customers buy where they feel seen – making this a commercial imperative.
How to recruit seasonal employees with mirrored diversity
The challenge for HR leaders is that most hiring systems are biased by design. CVs privilege pedigree over potential. Multiple-choice tests reduce people to stereotypes. And rushed festive hiring campaigns only compound the problem.
That’s where Sapia.ai changes the equation: Every candidate is interviewed automatically, fairly, and in their own words.
- Bias is measured and monitored using Sapia.ai’s FAIR™ framework.
- Outcomes are validated at scale: 7+ million candidates, 52 countries, average candidate satisfaction 9.2/10.
- Diversity can be measured: with the Diversity Dashboard, you can track DEI capture rates, candidate engagement, and diversity hiring outcomes across every stage of the funnel.
With the right HR hiring tools, mirrored diversity becomes a data point you can track, prove, and deliver on. It’s no longer just a slogan.
Retail recruiting strategies in action: the David Jones example
David Jones, Australia’s premium department store, put this into practice:
- 40,000 festive applicants screened automatically
- 80% of final hires recommended by Sapia.ai
- Recruiters freed up 4,000 hours in screening time
- Candidate experience rated 9.1/10
The result? Store teams that belong with the brand and reflect the customers they serve.
Read the David Jones Case Study here 👇
Recruiting ideas for retail leaders this festive season
As you prepare for festive hiring in the UK and Europe, ask yourself:
- How much will you spend on marketing this Christmas?
- And how much will you invest in ensuring the colleagues who deliver that brand promise reflect the people you want in your stores?
Because when your colleagues mirror your customers, you achieve growth, and by design, you’ll achieve inclusion.
See how Sapia.ai can help you achieve mirrored diversity this festive season. Book a demo with our team here.
FAQs on retail recruitment and mirrored diversity
What is mirrored diversity in retail?
Mirrored diversity means that store teams reflect the diversity of their customer base, helping create stronger connections and loyalty.
Why is diversity important in seasonal retail hiring?
Seasonal employees often provide the first impression of a brand. Inclusive teams make customers feel seen, improving both experience and sales.
How can retailers improve their hiring strategies?
Adopting tools like AI structured interviews, bias monitoring, and data dashboards helps retailers hire fairly, reduce screening time, and build more diverse teams.
Blog
The Diversity Dashboard: Proving your DEI strategy is working
Why measuring diversity matters
Organisations invest heavily in their employer brand, career sites, and EVP campaigns, especially to attract underrepresented talent. But without the right data, it’s impossible to know if that investment is paying off.
Representation often varies across functions, locations, and stages of the hiring process. Blind spots allow bias to creep in, meaning underrepresented groups may drop out long before offer.
Collecting demographic data is only step one. Turning it into insight you can act on is where real change and better hiring outcomes happen.
What is the Diversity Dashboard?
The Diversity Dashboard in Discover Insights, Sapia.ai’s analytics tool, gives you real-time visibility into representation, inclusion, and fairness at every stage of your talent funnel. It helps you connect the dots between your attraction strategies and actual hiring outcomes.
Key features include:
- Demographic filters – Switch between gender, ethnicity, English as an additional language, First Nations status, disability, and veteran status. View age and ethnicity in standard or alternative formats to match regional reporting needs.
- Representation highlights – Identify the top five represented sub-groups for each demographic, plus the three fastest-growing among underrepresented groups.
- Track trends over time – See month-by-month changes in representation over the past 12 months, compare to earlier periods, and connect the data back to your EVP and attraction spend.
- Candidate experience metrics – Measure CSAT (satisfaction) and engagement rates by demographic to ensure your hiring process works for everyone. Inclusion is measurable.
- Hiring fairness – Compare representation in your applied, recommended, and hired pools to spot drop-offs. Understand not just who applies, but who progresses — and why.
From insight to action
With the Diversity Dashboard, you can pinpoint where inclusion is thriving and where it’s falling short.
- See if your EASL candidates are applying in high numbers but not progressing to live interview.
- Spot if candidates with a disability report high satisfaction but have lower offer rates.
- Track the impact of targeted campaigns month-by-month and adjust quickly when something isn’t working.
It’s also a powerful tool to tell your success story. Celebrate wins by showing which underrepresented groups are making the biggest gains, and share that progress with boards, executives, and regulators.
Built on science, backed by trust
Powered by explainable AI and the world’s largest structured interview dataset, your insights are fair, auditable, and evidence-based.
Measuring diversity is the first step. Using that data to take action is where you close the Diversity Gap. With the Diversity Dashboard, you can prove your strategy is working and make the changes where it isn’t.
Book a demo to see the Diversity Dashboard in action.
Blog
Neuroinclusion by design. Not by exception.
Why neuroinclusion can’t be a retrofit and how Sapia.ai is building a better experience for every candidate.
In the past, if you were neurodivergent and applying for a job, you were often asked to disclose your diagnosis to get a basic accommodation – extra time on a test, maybe the option to skip a task. That disclosure often came with risk: of judgment, of stigma, or just being seen as different.
This wasn’t inclusion. It was bureaucracy. And it made neurodiverse candidates carry the burden of fitting in.
We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.
Shifting from retrofits to inclusive-by-design
Over the last two decades, hiring practices have slowly moved away from reactive accommodations toward proactive, human-centric design. Leading employers began experimenting with:
- Sharing interview questions in advance
- Replacing group exercises with structured simulations
- Offering a variety of assessment formats
- Co-designing assessments with neurodiverse candidates
But even these advances have often been limited in scope, applied to special hiring programs or specific roles. Neurodiverse talent still encounters systems built for neurotypical profiles, with limited flexibility and a heavy dose of social performance pressure.
Hiring needs to look different.
Insight 1: The next frontier of hiring equity is universal design
Truly inclusive hiring doesn’t rely on diagnosis or disclosure. It doesn’t just give a select few special treatment. It’s about removing friction for everyone, especially those who’ve historically been excluded.
That’s why Sapia.ai was built with universal design principles from day one.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
- No time limits — Candidates answer at their own pace
- No pressure to perform — It’s a conversation, not a spotlight
- No video, no group tasks — Just structured, 1:1 chat-based interviews
- Built-in coaching — Everyone gets personalised feedback
It’s not a workaround. It’s a rework.
Insight 2: Not all “friendly” methods are inclusive
We tend to assume that social or “casual” interview formats make people comfortable. But for many neurodiverse individuals, icebreakers, group exercises, and informal chats are the problem, not the solution.
When we asked 6,000 neurodiverse candidates about their experience using Sapia.ai’s chat-based interview, they told us:
“It felt very 1:1 and trustworthy… I had time to fully think about my answers.”
“It was less anxiety-inducing than video interviews.”
“I like that all applicants get initial interviews which ensures an unbiased and fair way to weigh-up candidates.”
Insight 3: Prediction ≠ Inclusion
Some AI systems claim to infer skills or fit from resumes or behavioural data. But if the training data is biased or the experience itself is exclusionary, you’re just replicating the same inequity with more speed and scale.
Inclusion means seeing people for who they are, not who they resemble in your data set.
At Sapia.ai, every interaction is transparent, explainable, and scientifically validated. We use structured, fair assessments that work for all brains, not just neurotypical ones.
Where to from here?
Neurodiversity is rising in both awareness and representation. However, inclusion won’t scale unless the systems behind hiring change as well.
That’s why we built a platform that:
- Doesn’t rely on disclosure
- Removes ambiguity and pressure
- Creates space for everyone to shine
- Measures what matters, fairly
Sapia.ai is already powering inclusive, structured, and scalable hiring for global employers like BT Group, Costa Coffee and Concentrix. Want to see how your hiring process can be more inclusive for neurodivergent individuals? Let’s chat.