4 Ways to Use Content Marketing to Hire Top Talent
By Heike Young
Content marketers are taking on more responsibility — and creating an increasing number of blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, videos, and other content pieces to inspire and educate customers. We usually talk about content marketing from that standpoint: marketing to potential and current customers.
But the power of great content doesn’t stop there. You can also use content to effectively attract top talent to join your company as an employee.
On this week’s episode of the Marketing Cloudcast — the marketing podcast from Salesforce — we’re discussing how employers can use content marketing to attract the right candidates and hire better. For details and key strategies, we talked to Alicia Garibaldi, Associate Director of B2B Marketing at Glassdoor.
Millions have used Glassdoor to search for a job, compare salaries across geographic regions or role, or write a review for companies they’ve worked for. In this episode, Alicia shares her content marketing and employer branding expertise to show you how content can be used for recruiting.
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To download the full episode to your podcast-listening device of choice, take a moment to subscribe. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alicia.
1. Know the importance of employer branding.
Websites like Glassdoor encourage employees to review their companies, just as we might review a restaurant on Yelp or a hotel on TripAdvisor. Securing and keeping top talent is a top priority for most companies, and we’ve seen an explosion in the number of free perks (like unlimited vacation days, free lunch, and ample parental leave) that businesses offer to retain employees.
This has ushered in an era of employer branding, where companies not only want to increase positive brand affinity with buyers, but they also want to build a reputation as a top employer.
Alicia and her team at Glassdoor created Employer Branding For Dummies to help brands learn more about cultivating an employer brand. This resource is part of their own content marketing strategy. At Glassdoor, Alicia says, “All the content I create is about how to promote your brand to the job seeker, how to find the right candidate, and how to get your job in front of them before any of your competitors do.”
2. Create templates to help your audience do their jobs better.
Hiring the right people who fit the culture of your company is one of a leader’s most important jobs. When it comes to creating content that will help companies attract and find the right candidate quickly, Alicia says, “I’m always thinking: What are quick templates I can give our audience so that they can do this job easier and quicker?”
“Our interview templates have done extremely well. For example, what are all the things you need to know about the interview process and how do you train that across your organization, at scale, so that your interview process runs smoothly and you get people in the door faster?”
For your own employer branding efforts, consider a similar approach of creating templates, toolkits, sample presentations, and checklists that potential employees will first benefit from, and then appreciate so much that they may consider joining your company.
3. Use content to bring events to life.
As a marketer, content bleeds into everything you do, whether you’re a true-blue content marketer or work in product marketing, email marketing, social media, or a different area. Content marketing is now all about lifting content right off the page and turning it into experiences.
“At Glassdoor, we have really adapted to a content-first approach for every program that we do. When we launched our Talent Analytics For Dummies book last year, we brought together talent analytics experts for an in-person event where the book would also be available. It was really a content first approach to our event strategy,” says Alicia.
“Content marketing has really expanded beyond a blog or an e-book. It’s how you bring events to life.”
4. Be clear and transparent about what it’s like to work at your company.
Telling your company’s story is a big part of employer branding. “As a marketer, if you’re not challenging yourself and doing different things, you’re not doing enough. We’re constantly thinking: What else can we do to tell our story in a different way?” shares Alicia.
When it comes to hiring talent, Alicia encourages employers to “be clear as an organization on what your culture is, what your team needs. Getting aligned on all of those things and having those conversations before you embark on the interview process makes everyone more efficient.” Then you can use that information to inform the content that you create to target potential new hires.
Do you want someone who really fits the bill for that job description and your company’s culture? Or do you say your company is flexible and parent-friendly, yet you won’t let employees work from home once in a while or get promoted before they go on paternity leave? It’s a big job, but you have to figure out the true values of your company before any content-plus-employer-branding strategy will truly work.
And that’s just scratching the surface of our conversation with Alicia Garibaldi (@albagaribaldi). Get the complete scoop on her unique approach to B2B content marketing in this episode of the Marketing Cloudcast.
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Originally published at www.salesforce.com.
