From customer journey to candidate journey: applying Marketing principles to build a winning hiring culture : A case study

Abstract

The intensifying global war for talent has revealed the strategic role of talent acquisition in enterprises, making it particularly challenging and expensive. Different macroeconomic trends have shifted the power equation more to quality talents’ hands and changed their behaviors in their job seeking journey. This has created a pressure on employers to go beyond conventional recruitment practices to a more strategic and long-term approach of Talent Acquisition, which puts candidates in the center of the hiring process and involves a lot of tools and techniques that are similar to what Marketing people do with customers.

The objective of this thesis was to deliver a new look at Recruitment from a Marketing perspective and to provide strategic planning tools along with examples through a case study. This aimed at enabling hiring professionals to achieve a comprehensive understanding of modern strategic Talent Acquisition and thus, to have a reliable reference source in building their own hiring framework in action to have an edge on fighting the war for talent.

A qualitative approach was used to conduct the case study where emprical data were collected through depth-interviews with key hiring personnel of a tech company faced with typical challenging talent sourcing. The results from literature review and case study revealed the importance of hiring, the changing talent market and applications of a candidate-centric mindset in using Marketing tools in planning strategies and tactics in effective talent acquisition to build a winning hiring culture.