Gone are the days when companies could post a job opening and expect a wide range of candidates, including the best talent. Technology and social media have transformed how companies run, and branding and marketing are on a new level. Every company has had to up the ante to beat the competition and grow.
This need to stand out from the rest has finally caught up to the job market. With all these companies hiring and looking to expand, each must set itself apart from the rest.
Talent recruitment has become a commoditized market because there is supply and demand. Companies require talented, knowledgeable employees who are easy to train. Candidates in the work market supply that demand and thus drive the standards of the market.
Additionally, candidates have demands and can easily find a company that will supply them because they have many options.
Many organizations need help finding the right people to fill open positions. Many candidates are passive job seekers who expect to be approached by interested companies, meaning that jobs are now a commodity. You need to market yourself if you have many open positions in your company. This is where recruitment marketing comes in.
Read on to learn recruitment marketing tips, strategies, and best practices.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is a newer term in HR. It is the practice of promoting your organization as a valuable employer to recruit new talent.
Recruitment marketing involves finding strategies and practices that attract and engage new talent so they can apply for a job at your organization.
It is also referred to as the pre-applicant phase of talent acquisition.
Recruitment Marketing vs. Employer Branding
Employer branding is your brand, and recruitment marketing promotes and protects that brand to potential employees.
Why Use Recruitment Marketing?
To hire top talent, you must place your company in front of them. Refrain from assuming that your ideal customer or client will find you.
You must put the same effort toward recruiting the right employees as you would finding your ideal market.
The job advertising space is filled with job ads from companies around the globe. Top talent is sought after by thousands of other companies and is willing to do whatever it takes to secure it.
Your company must actively pursue these candidates instead of waiting for your available jobs to appear on their social media page.
Up to 86% of the best candidates for any job are not actively job hunting. This is because they are already employed and have excellent benefits that keep them satisfied. Candidates at this level are only available through recruitment and get snatched up quickly.
Candidates who are actively looking for jobs are not job hunting blindly. They research the company on search engines, read company reviews, and follow previous employees on social media. They already know about you before they come in for an interview.
Recruitment marketing helps you control what they know and build an employee-friendly brand before you even advertise available jobs.
The Recruitment Funnel Through Recruitment Marketing
Just as marketing campaigns toward customers have a conversion funnel, recruitment marketing also has a conversion funnel. This process of taking your ideal candidate from a disinterested or unaware person to a candidate for a job position is the recruitment marketing funnel. There are four distinct steps:
Catching Their Attention
The first step is to make your ideal candidate aware of your company’s existence and open positions that fit their skill set.
This stage of recruitment marketing is meant to make the candidate aware of your company, its culture, its practices, and the various open positions they can fill.
At this stage, the aim is to fire up their curiosity.
Holding Their Attraction
Once curiosity is caught, interest must be engaged and kept.
Your potential candidate should now want to know more about working at your company. They may want to see the history, job perks, and application steps.
This is an information-gathering phase for them and a chance for you to market your organization to them.
Encouraging Their Contemplation
This is a crucial stage in the recruitment marketing funnel.
At this point, the candidate is seriously considering interviewing for a role or taking your offer.
This is where you answer any questions they have, share about the job’s day-to-day and try to lure them with your benefits package.
Driving Them to Action
This is the end goal of recruitment marketing.
The recruitment marketing funnel is only successful if top talent joins you. Encourage your candidate to interview for the role and negotiate a fair job offer.
Once the candidate becomes an employee, your recruitment marketing efforts are successful.
Recruitment Marketing Interview Questions
Some general questions to help you start:
- What was the candidate’s biggest achievement/What are they most proud of?
- Can they tell you how they handled a time when something went wrong?
- What technology, software, etc., are they familiar with?
- What about your brand interests them?
- What can they do for you?
- What are their numbers? If you have a quota, do they think they can meet it?
10 Steps To Building an Ideal Recruitment Marketing Strategy
You will need a strategic approach to get the full benefits of recruitment marketing. Your company can source and acquire the best talent for open roles with the right strategy and recruitment marketing tools. So here is recruitment marketing 101:
Develop and Maintain a Company Brand
Marketing begins with branding, and every company must have a brand. Ideally, you already have a mission and vision you can stand on and expand to build a brand identity.
To build a company brand, think of what you want to say about your organization.
Your company brand should encompass your organization’s mission, vision, work culture, and the advantages that working there provides.
Increasing brand awareness should be your end goal.
Define Your Target Audience
You must target potential employees the same way you target customers. Data-driven recruitment marketing is what will get you the candidate you need.
Define what your ideal employee looks like for each available role. Use previously researched data to have clear parameters of what they are.
Use data from previous job advertisements and hires to build specific candidate personas for open positions.
If you have none, start using Talroo for proper job advertisement and general recruitment marketing analytics for your next recruitment marketing strategy.
Build Awareness
Once you have a brand and a target audience, you want your ideal candidate to know about you. You can market the best through social media.
Think of content marketing for recruitment on various digital media platforms. Recruitment marketing platforms include:
- TikTok
- WordPress
You can use these platforms to:
- Make interesting videos about your brand that follows recruitment marketing trends by using popular jokes, sounds, and more to boost your content.
- Write about your brand and product in-depth.
- Show off by posting beautiful pictures of your brand and products.
- Use humor and memes to attract an audience like Wendy’s.
Social media marketing for recruitment is the best way to build brand awareness and run a recruitment marketing campaign.
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Once you are on social media, you want to create consistent and engaging content to keep your audience’s attention.
Consistently update your company website, blog, and careers page. Ensure that the information shared is engaging and highlights industry trends and changes.
You want potential candidates to be attracted to your content by showing them you keep up with the industry trends.
Testimonials, employee profiles, stories, and spotlights are great ways to spruce up your company website.
Once they engage with your content, you can funnel them to your open jobs. This is a highly effective method called content recruitment marketing.
Recruitment Marketing Ideas
Marketing will be highly reliant on your industry, but the best way to come up with ideas is to see what other brands in your market are doing.
Are other companies promising candidates a future, saying that they are the first step to the candidate getting their dream job? Are they using humor or a more serious tone? Which of these tactics attracts the most and the best candidates?
Finding the most searched sounds, tags, etc., on your advertising platform and using them will get your brand views. Views do not guarantee that a potential candidate’s attention will stick if you do not research before advertising.
Funnel Potential Candidates
Convert your engaged audience into job candidates.
Create a recruitment marketing funnel from your social media pages and posts to the company blog or podcast that leads to open job postings.
The point is to increase your recruitment marketing ROI with each post.
Create an Advertising Strategy
While many potential candidates may be on social media, not all are. You must carefully curate your job advertisements to attract potential candidates to visit your blog or look up your brand on search engines.
Create job ads that target the kind of people you need in your organization using programmatic advertising tools.
Use Social Recruiting
Even as the world turns digital, one-on-one interactions are still the best. Career fairs, hiring events, and job fairs are some of the best ways to market available roles in your company.
You can showcase company culture and benefits and meet with potential candidates in a relaxed setting.
These recruitment marketing events make it easy for you to scout potential candidates and for candidates to hear about potential jobs.
Leverage Employee Referrals
Recruitment marketing is about making your company appealing to top talent. Having your employees refer top talent to the company is an easy recruitment marketing strategy. It shows your employees already enjoy working there.
They will likely refer friends and family who trust them. This bond of trust will make the position more appealing to potential candidates.
To make this easier during seasons of high-volume hiring, encourage your employees to refer individuals with an allowance for every successfully hired referral.
Record Candidate Leads
Only some visits to your social media page or website will result in the person scrolling through your careers page. However, you need to capture the data of people who visit the page.
Create a sign-up option. People could sign up for the following:
- Newsletters
- Giveaways
- Access to free tools
- Access to free browser extensions
- Access to downloads
Sign-ups help you successfully capture details that let you build more detailed profiles of potential candidates.
Cultivate Connections With Potential Candidates
Successful recruitment marketing means you have recruited your ideal candidate. Nurture any leads with potential candidates to increase the probability of your success.
Whether a candidate expressed interest through the website, a hiring event, or social media page, follow up with them. Refrain from being overzealous, as it could set off some red flags. Still, you want to engage with your ideal candidate and encourage them to send in their resume and interview for the role.
This part of recruitment marketing can also be outsourced and managed by recruiters.
Recruitment Marketing Resources
Recruitment marketing tools like job advertising management platforms and AI chatbots are great for cultivating connections with potential candidates. They help you engage and collect data for future reference.
Various recruitment marketing software will run an automated recruitment marketing campaign for you. These tools might:
- Do recruitment email marketing,
- Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Show you recruitment marketing metrics
- Give you your recruitment marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
What a given software will do varies, but the above are the most common services they offer.
Software like Talroo Insights will show you how your advertisements are performing and help you determine the platform on which you should focus your efforts. Additionally, it will show companies hiring from the same candidate pool to help you outperform your competition.
Start Your Recruitment Marketing!
Recruiting top talent is more complex than placing a job ad on a site and waiting for the applications to roll in. As the job market becomes more candidate-centric, companies must stay updated on the job market and engage with top talent to draw them in. HR has to become more digitized and work closely with marketing to build a company that attracts the right talent.
There is a greater need for data, analytics, social media, and automation tools as the world gets more digitized. This is where platforms like Talroo come in. With easier job advertisement management and application analytics, companies can now have the needed data to launch successful hiring campaigns.
Recruitment marketing makes it possible to attract, engage with and secure top talent in the job market. A recruitment marketing strategy enables you to identify, attract, engage, and hire the best talent in the job market. Curating a working recruitment marketing strategy is the key to growing your company to new heights in the coming decade.
To learn more about recruitment marketing from CEO and Talent Acquisition veteran, Thad Price, check out his webinar, Recruitment Marketing 101.
