Top 10 Recruitment Marketing Strategies Not To Be Missed

Recruitment marketing is fast becoming an essential discipline in HR and for a good reason. It is supported by best practices, methodologies, and technologies vital for hiring quality candidates.

You see, regardless of what your organization does, it is ultimately in the business of people as they are the vital ingredient to your business growth and success.

However, building a team of diverse yet talented personalities and skills is perhaps the most challenging task for any business.

Sourcing, engaging, and recruiting the right people is complicated and requires a team-wide effort for best results. Oddly enough, marketing for recruiting is not too different from the work marketers do to attract customers to your organization.

What is recruitment marketing?

It is a set of tactics you deploy to market your employer brand to potential candidates. Done well, it helps build awareness and visibility around your company culture, which, in turn, helps attract quality talent.

Top 10 recruitment marketing strategies

This article explores the top 10 tips your organization must follow to build and drive a successful recruitment marketing strategy:

1. Define your recruitment marketing goals

No marketing strategy is successful without an objective in mind. Before posting blogs or getting active on social media, identify what you want to achieve with your marketing. Of course, your end goal is to attract and engage the top talent for your open job positions.

However, you can take a step further and get very specific about the goals you want to achieve. Some examples include:

Boost employee referrals
Get more applicants from social media
Increase the footfall on your career site
Raise the number of diverse and inclusive applicants
Drive higher engagement on employer branding content
Improve how engaged candidates are in the hiring process

Please make sure that whatever you decide, you must be able to measure them down the road. Therefore, be precise.

2. Identify your candidate persona

This is similar to the buyer personas created in marketing and sales. You want to know who your ideal candidates are and think about the characteristics of the people you want to make a part of your organization.

This step is all about putting your head down and designing these fictitious personas. Although they are not real people but just a semi-fictional representation of your ideal job candidate, they will help you organize critical traits to supplement your marketing strategies.

Go beyond the standard job requirements such as education, experience, and skills. Did deeper to get a sense of the person. What could be their interests outside of work? What could be the biggest motivator for them? Where could they see themselves in five years?

Here is a list of traits you might want to think about when building your candidate personas:

Age and gender
Likes and dislikes
Geographical location
Hobbies and motivations
Dream companies they want to work at
Personality type — introvert/extrovert, analytical/creative

3. Create your employee value proposition

In marketing, a business’ value proposition is arguably a pivotal element of the overall messaging. It tells the prospect why they should do business with you and not choose your competitors. It makes the benefits of your products or services crystal clear.

Similarly, an employee value proposition tells your candidate personas why they should come and work with your organization and what perks you offer them that other companies cannot. An employee value proposition is much more than an excellent salary package.

It includes opportunities for career advancement, working on exciting projects, using cutting-edge technologies, enjoying a great company culture, and so on. An employee value proposition typically consists of:

Location
Compensation
Work-life balance
Respect (company culture and team camaraderie)
Stability (growth opportunities and career advancements)

4. Determine the channels for recruitment marketing

When you are ready to market job vacancies, you will need to identify the right channels to leverage. For instance, some platforms exist to help hiring managers market roles to diverse candidate pools, while others are specific to role types, such as software engineers.

Depending on the demographics you want to target, chalk out the best channels to source the top talent for your organization. However, digital marketing for recruitment is not the only option at your disposal.

In-person events or job fairs can be additional channels through which you can find candidates. Although such a physical form of networking came to a standstill because of the pandemic, it might be worth checking out events happening on a smaller scale.

5. Design your career site

One of the most significant recruitment marketing resources is your career site, as it is the perfect place for promoting open positions and driving greater brand awareness about your organization. It should explain what you do and give a sneak peek into the company culture, employee benefits, learning and development opportunities, and work environment.

When a potential applicant lands on the page, they immediately have all the information they need to decide whether they want to work for you. And if they do, they can browse through job openings and submit their resume with just a few clicks.

Make sure your career site is mobile-responsive and optimized for search. Keep updating the content to keep it fresh and engaging. There are various ways to market your career site:

Include a Call-To-Action (CTA) at the end of every blog post published on your official website, inviting potential candidates to check out current vacancies.
Create a social media post including a link to the career site. Suppose you are a large corporation with an already huge fan following on social media. In that case, it might be worth separating social media accounts for posting content on people, culture, and jobs.
Organize a webinar that could interest your candidate persona and collect their contact info through an application form on a specialized landing page.

Optimize the career site with appropriate keywords and phrases to have a better chance of appearing on the first page of the search results, if not on the first position.

In the past decade, social media has become a vital channel for various purposes, and recruitment marketing is no exception.

a. LinkedIn

It is, of course, is the first channel you should use to promote your vacancies as it is a network built specifically for professionals.

In fact, user profiles are essentially resumes on LinkedIn, so recruiters use that to find and recruit talent within their domains. They usually send InMails to contact the person, who then may check out the company page and respond accordingly.

That is why you must optimize the page — add a logo and cover photo, provide details about your organization such as location and company size, and write 250 to 2000 characters on what you do and why joining you is the best decision that any professional will ever make.

You can either add a link to your official site or your career site so that when potential candidates visit your page, you can redirect them accordingly. In addition, create job listings to fetch applications. These social listings function the same way as listings on employment sites.

Write a solid job description and be transparent about the benefits and perks the potential applicants can expect on getting hired. They can then sift through the listed vacancies and apply to the relevant ones.

Moreover, promote new hires and employees on your company page to humanize your brand. It will show your potential applicants how you treat your employees and the kind of work environment you believe in cultivating.

Apart from LinkedIn, use other platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to post company news, events, and team photos. These channels do not have specific job listings features, but you can still share employment-focused content.

They would be more confident to apply if they see an active page full of photos and videos of happenings around the office and links to various company news and accomplishments.

7. Pick out employer brand ambassadors

Besides checking out the company website or social media pages, potential applicants will likely visit employees associated with you. This is a crucial element of a recruitment marketing strategy as the goal is to attract real people to your organization.

According to LinkedIn, candidates are 3X more likely to trust a company’s employees than the company itself. Therefore, get your employees to update and maintain active online profiles.

Ask them to share your content on their personal social media profiles — whether it is a call for new job vacancies or photos of a company-wide event. That way, they will be able to reach a much wider audience.

You could also encourage them to write an article for your career blog, take photos of everyday life at work and share it on social media, or write a review of your company on Glassdoor. If giving a small incentive helps, do that.

All this will help you drive your company’s reputation forward while sharing valuable recruitment content to engage and nurture the top talent.

8. Create a lot of recruitment-focused resources

One of the most effective recruitment marketing strategies involves attracting your candidate persona’s attention by presenting valuable recruitment content.

This could be in the form of blog posts, newsletters, videos, webinars, whitepapers, eBooks, checklists, infographics, flow charts, case studies, and so on. Great recruitment content helps target the best candidates with the right message at the right time.

You could also use email to engage and nurture potential applicants through newsletter marketing. For instance, you can communicate business updates, new job vacancies, company culture news, and other relevant information.

9. Build a profile on job posting sites

In addition to search engines and LinkedIn, many people use job listing sites to browse career opportunities online.

Such sites eliminate the process of finding and visiting career pages on different company sites and efficiently searching for open positions by job title and industry. Sites such as Indeed, Google for Jobs, and SimplyHired allow you to post for free.

10. Finalize a paid advertising strategy for recruitment

Paid advertising does not necessarily mean opting for paid spots on online job boards. It helps put out relevant content in front of your ideal candidates — whether they are searching for jobs on Google, using social media, or simply browsing through the internet. Here are four types of paid advertising most useful in recruitment marketing:

Social media advertising: Promote your job ads or sponsored stories on Facebook, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Make sure your posts reach a more significant number of people who match your candidate persona.
Search advertising: As the name suggests, place your job ads on search engine results such as Google or Yahoo! to ensure your posts come up first when the potential applicants search for a relevant job title or location.
Display advertising: These are classic banner ads you usually see on the left-hand side of the web page while browsing. Display your job ads to people who match your ideal candidate’s characteristics and behaviors.
Retargeting: Show your ads to people who have already visited your career site. For instance, retarget people who started filling out your job application but bounced off without submitting it.

Measure and make adjustments accordingly.

To achieve the best possible results from your recruitment marketing strategies, you must experiment and see what works for you and what does not. Therefore, keep an eye on your metrics and adjust your recruitment marketing strategy accordingly.

Test different campaigns and identify job ads and Calls-To-Actions (CTAs) that best perform. You can also consider surveys from your current employees or job candidates (during the hiring process) to understand the areas that need improvement.

Given how the world has become more digitally connected, recruitment marketing will gain further precedence. You should start now if you do not want to get left behind.