I’ve talked about how recruiters can take a playbook directly from corporate marketers to develop a solid recruitment marketing strategy, and content marketing is at the heart of it. In its simplest terms, content marketing focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. For recruiters, this means candidate engagement and building a robust talent pipeline.

So once your content marketing strategy is humming along, how do you keep it fresh? And where does the content come from? In order to scale what is working in your recruitment marketing efforts, your content marketing should be robust and unique. After a few months of blog posts, emails, and posting helpful content to social media, it’s easy to hit a wall for new ideas. 

How to Scale Your Recruitment Marketing

Scaling your recruitment marketing efforts is a challenge. Heck, scaling anything is a challenge, which is why I am a huge proponent of reusing and repurposing your existing content. To make the most of every piece of content, it should be distributed multiple times through as many channels as possible to reach your audience (and new audiences), reiterate key ideas to improve message retention and maximize your existing resources and the time you’ve put into building a content library.

Here, I’ll outline six ways to use your existing content library and recycle it into new formats.

• Video to podcast. Q&A style videos can be repurposed into great podcasts about what it’s like to work at your company. When you plan ahead for these videos, include time to extend the Q&A in a recorded session and offer the content as a podcast download.

• Quotes and images. Use quotes from leadership and your employees from existing assets and give them new life in the form of social media quote images. Brand the images with your logo and use your career site as a landing CTA. These work well for Instagram in particular, but don’t neglect networks where they’re more easily shared like Facebook and Twitter. Use hashtags like #MondayMotivation or #FridayFeeling (depending on the quote content) and it makes it easy for your audience to find you there.

• Keyword focus. I like to reuse existing assets focusing on specific keywords. Maybe you dive in deeper on a specific topic or piece of information using existing articles or story content. You can also pull from a larger interview or article to get really specific and targeted with some content changes. If you have a series of articles around a theme, consider creating a downloadable “e-book” to offer via email or social media, plus host it on a landing page on your site with keywords related to the broader scope of the project.

• Scheduling as much of your engagement efforts as possible through your ATS or recruiting software. This includes “thank you” responses, status updates, interview reminders, and any other short form communication that improves the candidate experience. You can keep these fresh by including quotes from employee testimonials, facts about your company, perks, events, and so on – and all of these can come from your existing recruitment marketing content.

• Approved stock photos. Create a library of approved stock photos for other teams to share and use with existing content. I recommend working with a photographer to create your own stock photo inventory. This doesn’t have to be expensive especially if you leverage photos in combination with a video shoot or a company workshop that’s being facilitated. If you aren’t able to produce your own stock images, there are many sites that offer free stock images (like Pexels) and these can also be used for your quote posts.

• Shortened videos. Repurpose your existing employment videos by breaking them down even further into shareable videos that are Instagram-worthy in 15 second increments. If you’re doing this in-house on a small budget and phone, shoot the entire video, then do a series of shorter videos with the same subject, except have your subject answer one question at a time, or quote a response from the longer video that really stands out. You can also shoot longer, especially if you have someone on staff comfortable with video editing. Delivering 15 minutes of “what it’s like to work in X department” from one of your team leaders could reasonably produce a long-form 5-minute video, plus dozens of 2-minute, 1-minute, and 15-30 second shareable video clips.

Expand Your Digital Recruiting Efforts Leveraging Existing Digital Content

You should be able to use some or all of the above to expand your existing content library without writing an additional word. But if you’ve been reusing and repurposing content already and are looking for new ideas to share with your audience, there are a few easy ways to do that. Use a free keyword search tool or simply search common industry terms in Google to see what topics your ideal candidate looks for online, see what they share on social (especially LinkedIn), or ask your recruiting team what their most frequently asked questions are. You’ll generate dozens – or hundreds – of ideas for content quickly. People love lists, how-to articles, and information that isn’t already all over the internet (like an inside look at how applicants can snag a job at your company, for example)!

Finally, 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. If you’ve put the work into creating a content library, it should pay off in a solid source of endless content formats to present to your audience.