Quality content is part of all forms of recruitment marketing, whether the format is digital ads, social media posts, emails, or any other method of candidate communication. Content marketing is a long term strategy. It should have a “voice” that reflects your company brand and be an asset that aligns to your recruiting efforts, not one that replaces them.

You need great content to engage your target candidates. In recruitment marketing, we develop candidate personas to help us decide what type of content a particular segment is more likely to respond to. For example, if your target audience for a specific hard-to-fill, high-level job opening is passive job seekers, your content would focus on why they should consider your job listing as a better option than the job that they already have. If you’re looking for entry-level candidates who might still be in college or working on a specific certification, you’ll want to focus content on helpful support for your target candidate’s education and training.

Five Candidate Resources for Recruiting

There are many uses for the content you create in your marketing efforts, but in this post we’ll focus on the job candidate resources your recruitment marketing team should have available at all times. The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel for each candidate resource. These are scalable content pieces that you can use for a variety of situations.

1) Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

This can be a PDF or hosted on a page on your website. This is a list of commonly asked questions you can supply to all job seekers. When developing this content, consider the most common questions your team gets from job seekers, whether by email, website submission form, by phone, or in person.Write your questions from your customer’s perspective (e.g. “How do I…”) and answer from your business’s perspective (e.g. “You should…” or “We provide…”). Include the link to this page in your automated email response email to job seekers and use it to build and create content that supports those questions.

Related: How to Create a SMART Content Strategy That Helps You Recruit

2) “Day in the life” video

A simple video that demonstrates what a day for an employee at your company looks like can go a long way towards appealing to your ideal candidate. If you’re on a budget, it doesn’t have to be done professionally, but having an expert produce this for you means that you’ll hit the high points visually, have captioning for accessibility, and appeal to the type of candidates you want to interview. From your employee’s perspective, let them lead what a day looks like for them, outlining the highlights (what they love about their jobs) as well as what engages them (training, development, challenges to solve). This level of transparency offered to job seekers gives you the opportunity to have your employees tell candidates what they like about working for you, rather than you marketing the job.

Related: How Video can Transform your Recruitment Marketing

3) Employee testimonials

Testimonials are a powerful way to share what makes your organization unique and a great place to work. You can serve these with images or video (or both). Companies such as Twilio are combining video with testimonials that coordinate with their employment branding and social media efforts. The testimonials focus not just on employees but also on specific teams, including sales and engineering. Visual media and testimonials are infinitely useful to job seekers but are also shareable and memorable. This includes photography, videos and other digital assets that highlight your testimonials.

4) Employee benefits information

If this isn’t already on your career website and in your FAQ, it should be. Candidates want to know what the job is like, but also what you can offer them. They’ll compare your benefits to their current benefits and highlighting your top employee benefits and perks can be a guide for them to do so. Consider including your basic benefits, like medical, dental and vision, but also perks like health club memberships, sponsored tuition, and learning and development opportunities.

5) Suggested email scripts for job seekers questions for your recruiting team

Even the most experienced recruiters aren’t expert content creators on the fly. Rather than having to script a response from scratch to every candidate email, create a library of suggested email scripts that your team can use and modify for email outreach and response. Even with changes and personalization, this is a resource that can save your team so much time and ensure that the information resides in an easily searchable folder that can be updated as needed.

Create a Content Library for Your Own Recruiting Team

This is just a starter “must have” list. There are so many resources similar to these that you can maintain in an asset library and repurpose for a variety of uses, like social media campaigns or open house events. Your employee testimonials can live on your website but also be used in recruiting campaigns, your “day in the life” videos can be part of your job posting landing page, shared on social media, or sent out in candidate newsletters. Once you have a basic library of candidate resources, you can continue to build on it and have an arsenal full of great content for all aspects of your recruitment marketing.