What is Recruitment Marketing? Top Strategies for it
Businesses across the globe are getting huge benefits from successful recruitment marketing. Read further to deep dive into Recruitment Marketing.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing refers to the strategies a company uses to find, attract, and engage with candidates before they apply for a job, also called the pre-applicant phase of talent acquisition. Simply, recruitment marketing is just promoting the value of working for an employer to recruit talent.
It is similar in many ways to corporate marketing except relates to trackable initiatives that drive awareness and conversion of applicants vs someone’s first impression of working at a company.
Others see employer branding as a subset of recruitment marketing, but it has an addition of extending the reach and exposure of career opportunities, building and nurturing candidate relationships through talent pools. It also includes the management of messaging and advertising of talent acquisition efforts.
A successful recruitment marketing strategy
Here is how you can create an effective recruitment marketing strategy.
1. Define your recruitment marketing goals
Think about what you set as goals with your recruitment marketing strategy. Your overall goal is to attract candidates to apply to your open job positions. You should also define the specific goals that can be measured.
Some of the common recruitment marketing goals include:
- Get more high-quality candidates
- Increase candidate engagement
- Increase employer brand awareness
- Get more career site visitors
- Get more applicants from social media
- Increase employee referral rates
- Get more diverse candidates to apply to your company
2. Define your employee value proposition
An employee value proposition is propositions you will target your candidate persona with. Why should the potential candidates come to work for the company? What can you give them that other companies can’t?
The employee value proposition is so much more than just a great salary. A proposition involves opportunities for career advancement, working on interesting projects and with advanced technology, great company culture, attractive workspace, etc, in a broad sense what will the candidate get by working for the company.
3. Create recruitment content
One of the best ways to attract your candidate’s attention is by presenting them with interesting and useful recruitment content. Here are some of the examples of different types of recruitment content you can create:
- Blogs
- Emails
- Newsletter
- Videos
- Webinars
- White papers, case studies, and eBooks
- Infographics, diagrams, flowcharts & graphs
4. Optimize your career site
Your career site should be the epicenter of your recruitment marketing activity. When a potential candidate lands on your career site, he/she should immediately find all the information they need to determine whether they want to work for your company.
A perfect career site explains who your company is, what you do, and contains information about your company culture, values, and work environment. It invites potential candidates to browse through all the open job positions and makes it easy for them to apply. Also, make sure that the career site is mobile friendly and optimized for SEO.
5. Develop employee brand ambassadors
Candidates trust employees 3 times more than the employer to provide information on working at the company and their experience, according to LinkedIn’s research. So it is better to get your employees involved in your recruitment marketing plan.
Ask them to share the company’s recruitment marketing content on their social media handles. You should make them help you create authentic recruitment content. Encourage them to:
- Write an article for your career blog
- Take photos of everyday life at your office and share it on social media
- Write a review of your company on Glassdoor.
6. Analyze recruitment marketing results
Finally, you need to analyze the success of your recruitment marketing efforts. By gathering data on what works and what doesn’t you can adjust and improve your recruitment marketing plan.
To achieve even better results, you need to experiment. By tracking your data, you can test different campaigns and identify job ads and calls to action which works best.
That’s why, HR teams must constantly measure, store, and evaluate data and track the most important recruitment marketing metrics. Luckily, with modern ATS tools, this process can be completely automated.
7. Build a solid brand that attracts top talent
The only way to stand out in the sea of similar businesses is to turn your company into a recognizable and memorable brand. Not only for consumers but also for potential employees.
Sure, employer branding is not something that happens overnight, this is a long-term strategy focused on bringing value to your audience and takes even more time for it to show any results. 75% of job seekers research an organization’s reputation before applying for a job. That’s why it is crucial to be consistent in your employer brand messaging.
8. Establish stronger relationships through social media recruiting
The number of social media users is rising at an astounding pace. A research study says that there are almost 3.5 billion active social media users worldwide.
Moreover, the average internet user has about 7.6 social media accounts. Therefore, most of your potential job candidates are on social media.
Moreover, the LinkedIn survey says that 49% of professionals are following relevant organizations and companies on social networks to keep pace with their recruitment processes. That’s why social media marketing is also a fundamental aspect of any solid recruitment strategy.
9. Host recruitment events
Throwing a recruitment event is an amazing opportunity for you to expand your talent pool. Most importantly, it lets you build stronger relationships with potential candidates and see things that cannot be found on their CV.
First, you should set what your goals are and determine what kind of recruitment events would work for you. If you’re a company that wants to build relationships in a warmer way, then an open-house event may be right for you. Design promotional materials that will spark people’s attention and inspire them to apply.
Or, you could hold a virtual event, create event pages and social media events. Promote them widely by sending email invitations, publishing regular social media updates, and having your event listed on key event directories.
Conclusion
The recruitment marketing sphere is evolving impressively fast. Most importantly, the success rate of the above-mentioned strategies depends based on your company’s specific goals and target candidates. Recruitment marketing has to be strategic, and it should be done in collaboration with marketing teams. So, if you are trying to build brand awareness and attract people to your organization then you should start with Recruitment Marketing.
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