Recruiting top talent is no easy task. You've got to attract the best and brightest while ensuring you're offering something unique and compelling enough to keep them interested. This is where recruitment marketing comes in.
The goal of a recruitment marketing strategy is to help companies attract the best candidates possible, efficiently. Recruitment marketing can reduce your advertising spending by 50%. As we move into the next decade, it's important to understand what makes someone want to work for your brand.
As a recruiter, you know that the job market continues to change. With the rise of online platforms like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, candidates are now empowered to research potential employers. They're able to see what the culture looks like, and even ask questions directly to employees about the workplace.
This power shift has led to a massive increase in transparency across industries. Companies must adapt to meet the needs of their current workforce, while simultaneously recruiting for the future.
In this article, we're going to explore how to develop a solid strategy that works for your brand. We'll go over some of the most effective ways to use recruitment marketing. We'll also look at the benefits of building a strong recruitment marketing strategy.
So let's get started!
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Recruitment Marketing |
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing involves using inbound marketing strategies to attract potential employees to your company.
Job seekers learn about your company, understand why it matters to them, and ultimately choose to apply for jobs there. In essence, it’s creating a positive experience for candidates that makes them want to apply for open roles within your organization.
Just like how the buyer personas help marketers understand their audience better, your organization needs to create a candidate experience as well. This allows your team to build out what they need at different points in time for attracting top talents and filling their recruitment pipeline.
Recruitment marketing is focused on the first three stages of the candidates' journey:
1. Awareness
Your primary focus during this initial phase is building awareness of your business and your employer brand.
2. Consideration
Your goal at this stage is to get potential candidates thinking about you as their next employer.
3. Interest
At this stage, your main goal is to persuade potential applicants to take action by applying for your open jobs.
The Benefits of Recruitment Marketing
There are many reasons why you should consider developing a recruitment marketing strategy. Here are just a few:
1. It helps you attract top talent
When you have an active recruitment marketing strategy, you can attract the best and brightest talent.
You can make sure you're providing a great candidate experience from day one. And if you do a good job here, you'll be able to retain these high performers.
2. It saves money
You don't have to spend money on advertising or hiring expensive recruiters. Instead, you can invest in other areas of your business.
3. It improves employee retention
If you provide a great candidate experience, you'll likely keep your existing employees happy. This will lead to higher morale and more productivity.
4. It builds trust with candidates
Candidates feel more comfortable when they know you're investing in their success.
5. It increases your chances of getting hired
A strong recruitment marketing strategy will give you a competitive advantage over companies that aren't doing anything.
6. It creates a stronger relationship between your company and its employees
Employees love working for companies that care about them. When you show interest in their personal lives, they'll reciprocate.
7. It gives you a competitive edge
It's not enough to simply say "We value our people." You must demonstrate that you mean it through actions.
8. It attracts new hires
People want to work for organizations that are growing and thriving. If you're recruiting actively, you'll stand out from the crowd.
9. It reduces turnover
By showing candidates that you genuinely care about their careers, you'll reduce attrition rates.
10. It boosts your reputation
When you treat your employees right, word gets around. People talk. And that means you'll gain credibility and respect.
How to Build a Recruitment Marketing Strategy
To ensure that your recruitment marketing is effective, you need to develop a detailed strategy. Guesswork and randomness leave candidates with a weak candidate experience and a smaller pool of qualified applicants.
To make sure you're building a strong recruitment marketing strategy, here is a step-by-step guide:
Step 1: Define your recruitment marketing goals
Before you start any recruitment marketing activities, you need to define what you hope to achieve. Think about what you'd like to accomplish with your recruitment marketing strategy before you start.
Your ultimate goal is to recruit great candidates for your open jobs. You should also set clear objectives that can be measured.
Recruitment Marketing includes some of these common goals:
- Get more job applicants
- Get more high-quality candidates
- Increase candidate engagement
- Increase employer brand awareness
- Get more career site visitors
Step 2: Identify your candidate persona
To identify your ideal candidates, define your ideal candidate persona. A candidate persona is the semi-fictional representation of your ideal job candidate.
Who is your ideal job candidate?
Don't limit yourself to just looking at your current job requirements such as education level, years of relevant work experience, and skills. Try digging deeper to understand this person.
Try to figure out what they're interested in outside of work, habits, motivations, and goals.
Step 3: Define your employee value proposition
The employee value proposition is a message you will target your candidate persona with. The employee value proposition is a powerful tool because it helps you understand what makes your organization unique and how you stand out from competitors.
Why should your potential employees join your company? What makes you different from other companies?
The employee value proposition goes far beyond simply paying employees well.
There are also opportunities for professional development, exciting challenges, working on interesting projects, with cutting-edge technology, having an enjoyable office environment, etc.
Employee Value Proposition is a comprehensive offering made up of 5 main components:
1. Compensation
2. Benefits
3. Career
4. Work Environment
5. Culture
Each component plays a role in attracting top talent.
Step 4: Create recruitment content
One of the best ways to capture the attention of your potential candidates is by creating relevant and engaging recruitment content. This type of content helps you reach out to the right people at the right time with the right message.
And no, your job ads alone are not enough – no matter how good they are. If you want to stand out from the crowd, you need to do more than just post a job ad online. You need to make sure that your recruitment content is tailored to the needs of the person looking for a role.
There is a plethora of different types of recruitment material for every stage of the candidate's journey. Some recruiters use blogs to keep their audience up to date with news about the industry, while others prefer to send emails to inform potential candidates about upcoming events. And some even go one step further and start newsletters, where they provide regular information about what is happening within their organization.
Step 5: Optimize your career site
Your career site should be the center of your recruitment marketing activity — it should be the place where people go to learn everything they need to know about working for your organization. A well-designed career site can help you attract qualified candidates, increase conversion rates and improve employee retention.
When potential candidates land on your site, they should immediately see all the information they need about your company, including company history, mission statement, corporate values and company culture, job openings, careers, compensation, and benefits. They should also be able to easily navigate around your site and apply online.
Finally, make sure that your career site is mobile-friendly and optimized for SEO.
You can find detailed information on how to optimize your website in our guide.
Step 6: Use social media
Social media recruiting is one of the pillars of recruitment marketing. Recruitment marketers use it to promote their jobs and attract talent. But presenting your employer brand on multiple social media networks can be a big challenge. You must know what platforms are best suited for you and your organization.
Make sure to communicate your recruitment marketing messages on the social media networks that your candidate persona prefers and uses regularly.
Check out our guide to the best social media platforms for your business. We also prepared a guide to the best social media platforms for SEO.
Step 7: Develop employer brand ambassadors
LinkedIn's research found that candidates trust employees 3 times more than employers to provide information about working at the company.
This makes sense because employees tend to know more about the company than recruiters do. They're already familiar with it, and they've been there longer. And since most people don't want to work somewhere where they don't feel appreciated, they're likely to recommend a place they like over one they don't.
The good news is that your current employees are your best recruiter brand ambassadors. If you allow them to promote your company on their social media accounts, they'll be happy to do so. They might even write something positive about your company without realizing it.
So ask your employees to share your company's job postings on their social media feeds. Then encourage them to write articles for your career blog. When they do, make sure to include some of your company's core values and culture. These posts could become great resources for future applicants.
Step 8: Build your talent pool
You’ve built your brand, and developing your marketing strategy, and now it’s time to start filling up your pipeline. But where do you go to find the best people?
The answer is simple, your talent pool. This is a database of candidates that are interested in working for your company. And while there are plenty of places online to look for potential hires, most companies don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to building their talent pools.
Reach out to potential employees and ask them if they'd be interested in joining your talent pool. There are many different ways to generate leads for your business. Here are some great ways to build your talent pool:
- Every time you publish an article on your career site, include a call to action inviting people to join your talent network and connect with you.
- Create a social media posting that links to an online form for your company’s talent network.
- If you want to get the most out of an upcoming recruiting event, invite your candidates to attend and collect their details by filling out a form on the specialized event landing page.
- Create an online webinar that is relevant to your target audience and collects their contact information through the application form on a special landing webpage.
- Create an interesting job guide or an e-book and ask potential candidates to complete a short application in exchange for access to it.
Step 9: Manage your talent pool
Filling your talent pool with good people doesn't mean much if you don't actively keep track of it. If you want to make sure you're getting the best people, you must segment your talent pool into different categories.
For example, you might group your talent pool into three segments based on experience level: entry-level, mid-career, and experienced. Then, you'll use those segments to deliver targeted messages to each one.
You'll be able to nurture your candidates with high-quality, personalized, and customized marketing campaigns.
You must keep in touch with your potential candidates, engage with them, and help them get ready to be hired by you.
You'll do that by sending them useful, relevant content through your email newsletter regularly.
Step 10: Use paid advertising
The best way to attract candidates is to make sure your brand is visible. If you want to stand out, you'll need to use paid advertising.
Paid advertising offers so many different ways to target potential candidates, including passive ones - those that aren’t found on job sites.
Paid ads can place relevant job listings in front of your ideal candidates, whether they're looking for jobs on Google, through social media, or just browsing the web.
Step 11: Measure recruitment marketing results
Recruitment marketing is a complex endeavor. You need to know how well it’s working, and you need to do something about it if it isn’t. This step covers some of the key metrics you need to monitor, including call-to-action conversion rates, lead generation, and overall campaign performance.
You can gather metrics on what worked and what didn't so you can adjust and improve the recruitment marketing plan.
To get even better results, you must experiment.
You can use analytics to track which campaigns and call-to-actions perform best.
Therefore, HR departments need to continuously monitor, collect and analyze data and track the most relevant recruitment marketing metrics. Fortunately, with modern recruitment marketing software, this process can be fully automated.
Work smarter, not harder: Use recruitment marketing tools
If you want to attract top talent, you have to build a recruitment marketing strategy that will appeal to their needs and desires. This means understanding what motivates them and creating a job offer that matches their interests and values.
Remember, when recruiting top talent, you should always look beyond the obvious candidates. There may be someone else out there who has exactly what you're looking for.
That's why you need to use recruitment marketing tools. They allow you to find hidden gems and connect with them before anyone else does.
These tools are also great at helping you create a strong candidate pipeline.
They provide an easy way to manage all your open positions and identify new opportunities as they arise.
At Fine Media, we use an inbound marketing approach to recruitment. We believe that the best way to attract top talent is to understand what motivates them and create a job offer that matches these motivations.
If you need help building your recruitment marketing strategy, contact us today.
We'd love to hear from you.
