Recruitment Marketing is the Missing Piece of Your Recruiting Strategy

Employees are a business’ most important asset. Recruiting the best talent is critical to the success of your organization. Despite this, companies no longer have all of the power when it comes to hiring. 

Boosted by expanding budgets, greater transparency, and unique employee benefits offerings, the recruiting world has evolved into a cutthroat, candidate-driven market. Job candidates are now essentially customers—and they need to be treated as such.

So, how can your company stand out and win the best talent? Expand and elevate your hiring process with a combination of recruiting best practices, HR software, and recruitment marketing strategies.

READ: Discover how recruiting software changed the hiring process

What is recruitment marketing?

Just as marketing is integral to the sales process, marketing strategies can be used to nurture and attract the right candidates to your organization. Ideally in place before traditional recruitment even begins, recruitment marketing expands and elevates the hiring process.

The recruitment marketing funnel includes three main tenets:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Engagement

What recruitment marketing strategies can you implement into your recruiting strategy?

Employer branding

Before a potential candidate even applies or speaks with a recruiter, they need to be familiar with your company’s brand. Positive brand recognition ensures you will attract more top candidates, while a negative perception will hinder your recruitment process at every step. 

75% of job seekers consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job (source: Career Arc)

As the most significant part of your brand’s online presence, an up-to-date and easy to navigate website is the best way to accomplish this. Make sure your branding truthfully reflects your company’s mission statement, culture, and hiring goals. Clarity and consistency is important across the board, including:

• Company’s homepage
• About us page
• Careers page
• Job listings
• Social media accounts 

Much of this likely falls under the Marketing team’s duties. To enable better recruiting, HR must ensure that recruiting needs are taken into consideration.

Target candidate personas

Every job is different, and each one requires a set of skills and a specific personality. On paper, any candidate might look great, so how can you be sure they are really what you are looking for?

To find this perfect fit, you need to create a target candidate persona, a semi-fictional representation of your ideal candidate taking into account:

• Demographics
• Education/training
• Work history/skills
• Traits/characteristics needed for the job
• Where/how they search for a job

Personas are based on data collected from concrete research, not feelings or assumptions. Though it helps to study similar job postings, ultimately, your personas need to be more in-depth than just a standard job description. Talk with those already in a similar role, would-be managers, and other stakeholders to discover:

• Likes/dislikes about the job
• Skills/experience needed
• Desired career goals
• Personality fit within existing team

Finally, use your research to identify trends and craft your persona. Although personas are represented as a single character, they are actually a composite based on a wide range of information from numerous people.

Each job, even similar ones, should have their own persona. All stakeholders involved in the hiring process need to be familiar with the developed persona and your recruitment marketing strategy.  

Content strategy

As everyone in marketing knows, “Content is king.” The same applies to recruiting. Take what you learned while creating your personas and build out a comprehensive content strategy to appeal to and bring target candidates into the fold.

• “Careers” or “Jobs” page on your company’s website needs to be up-to-date, optimized for user experience, and mobile-friendly.
• Feature sections like “About Us,” “Our Mission,” and “Company Culture” emphasize your brand values and help candidates understand what your company is all about.
• Another helpful resource, an “FAQ” page geared towards applicants is always helpful.

Additional content pieces should be geared towards potential applicants, such as blog posts about company culture, industry expertise, and career advancement. Photos and videos are also a  great way to get your message across quickly and efficiently. To maximize recruitment marketing efforts, include this content in job postings and shared on social media.

Social recruiting

As Millennials and Gen Z quickly come to dominate the workforce, social media will continue to be one of the best ways to reach job seekers. Social recruiting allows you to connect and engage with candidates through shared interests and networks.

92% of recruiters use social media to find high-quality candidates (source: AdWeek)

• Use employer branding as a jumping-off point to project a unified, consistent message about your company’s values and culture.
• Create social-specific content—especially videos—to engage with all candidates, even passive ones.
• Crowdsource hiring via your network—including current employees— by encouraging them to share potential job openings within their personal networks.
• All social media platforms appeal to different audiences. Because of this, you must tailor your efforts to fit different channels.
• Seek alternate/niche communities other than the Big 4 (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter) such as Snapchat, YouTube, GitHub, Stack Overflow, Moz, etc.

87% of recruiters use LinkedIn to source talent, 55% use Facebook, and 47% use Twitter (source: AdWeek)

Digital Advertising

Marketers have revolutionized advertising in the digital space and recruiters must follow suit. Utilizing eye-catching designs, intriguing content, and strong brand awareness, digital advertising uses online ad buying and retargeting strategies to consistently stay front of mind for potential job seekers. 

Programmatic job advertising allows your ads to be distributed to major job-seeking platforms, as well as smaller, more specialized job boards. This ensures your ad spend is more likely to be seen by the top candidates you are looking for.

Inbound Marketing

When talking about inbound marketing, the main thing we are discussing is lead capture. These are job seekers who have expressed an interest in your job openings and taken a specific action (fill out a form, application, or asked for more information). Like in sales, these leads must be nurtured through relevant content and direct engagement.

Inbound recruitment marketing creates a memorable candidate experience through branded content and other marketing strategies to help build a relationship with top talent. This allows you to connect with potential job seekers, engage directly with them, and boost your entire candidate experience.

Analytics & Reporting

Like all forms of marketing, data is a recruiter’s best friend. By analyzing this data, you can gain granular insight into what parts of your recruitment marketing strategy are working and which ones need tweaking. 

As shown previously, recruiting is an ever-changing game destined to transform every few years. Having a static recruiting strategy is a death wish for companies eyeing growth. An evolving strategy where you experiment, learn lessons, and continuously improve your efforts is essential.

Discover how Netchex recruiting software can help you implement recruitment marketing strategies to boost your hiring process.