Inside Brazen: Let’s Talk Recruitment Marketing Strategy and Sourcing with Drew Hebble

At Brazen, we know online hiring events and exactly how to make them successful.

And one important element to the recipe for virtual event success is how you’re marketing your event to the right job candidates and promoting your events to job seekers.

So, to talk about recruitment marketing and event promotion strategies, we’ve brought in a fantastic resource for recruitment marketing advice: Drew Hebble, Brazen’s own Senior Director of Marketing Solutions (and former Director of Product here at Brazen). Drew has a background in marketing and is an expert in online hiring events - a perfect combination for understanding the ins and outs of digital hiring events and recruitment marketing.

So let’s kick things off with some recruitment marketing basics:

How Do You Define Recruitment Marketing?

“Recruitment marketing is all about delivering your brand message at the right time to the right people. It’s getting people to buy into your culture, your vision, and getting prospective employees excited about what you do and what you can offer them,” Drew said.

In a candidate-focused market, the conversation is no longer about what prospective employees can do for an employer, but what you as an employer can do for them. “While salaries and benefits are still important, that’s not what you should lead with anymore. Instead, talk about your culture, what it’s like to work at your company, and the tangible ways in which the company cares about its employees,” Hebble explains. “This is especially important to younger generations; they want to be part of a bigger vision and believe in everything a company stands for; it’s not just about a company’s products or services, but instead, about everything they are.

Why is Recruitment Marketing so Important in Light of the Competition for Talent Right Now?

The war for talent is hot, and it’s up to companies to decide how much effort they’ll put in the fight for the best employees. “Now is really not the time to step back and wait for people to find you; you need to go out and seek people. Before the market for talent was reactive, while now it’s very proactive,” Drew said.

So if your organization isn’t already investing in its recruitment marketing and actively looking for ways to deliver its employer brand message to both passive and active job seekers, you’re already missing out on the best opportunities to find top talent. “It’s about finding prospective talent, delivering your message about your company, and doing it before, more quickly, and better than your competition does. There are definitely people out there who want to connect with your employer brand, but you have to put yourself out there first to start the conversation,” Hebble says.

What’s the Link Between Virtual Events and Recruitment Marketing?

Virtual events help make organizations more competitive versus their hiring peers. For one, virtual events allow a greater diversity of job seekers to attend online hiring events because they are significantly more accessible than in-person events, which often occur at fixed geographic locations and during regular working hours. They also do this by giving organizations an open line of communication with an unlimited pool of candidates for a fraction of the cost and effort, which is a basic requirement in any successful recruitment marketing push.

“The power of virtual events is that they make it easy for people to connect with you,” Drew noted. “This is especially important for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) with fewer resources than their larger competitors, because it allows them to connect with job prospects at scale. It’s the best way to attract talent, giving them the personalized time and attention they need to understand you better while being efficient and effective with your limited time and resources.” It also creates a better candidate experience than driving a large portion of your recruitment marketing budget towards a job application site where many candidates may end up feeling they are stuck in an application “black hole” that lacks feedback, communication, and authentic connection with the employer.

On top of this, virtual events provide a lot of rich and detailed event data, which is invaluable to well-run recruitment marketing efforts. “With traditional sourcing and in-person hiring, it’s hard to determine a lot of key factors, but virtual events offer a unique ability to understand where your conversions came from and what influenced them, as well as whether or not your candidates are engaged. Thanks to event analytics, we know who signed up, who showed up, and what topics mattered to them, and that’s worth a lot!” Hebble affirmed. This critical data can be vital in better refining and allocating your recruitment marketing budget, for instance.

What are the Most Important Types of Recruitment Marketing TA Teams Should be Investing in Right Now?

Short answer: that depends on your target audience. “Who your audience is will define what your marketing tactics will be,” Hebble explained. “No matter who you are targeting, you have to go where they are and use the communication channels they prefer to use. So if you’re looking to attract a younger generation of workers, TikTok resumes might be a good bet. But an older engineer might prefer to have a conversation over a phone call, and as a company you may be looking to fill both types of roles at the same time. It’s all about finding out how each group wants to be reached and investing in those channels for your key employee personas.”

External research can help with determining the right channels you want to use, but your own organization can also offer a wealth of information about the types of employees that have exceeded expectations there and where to find others like them.

“It starts with understanding who has performed well in your company, then identifying the qualifications, traits, personality, and intangibles that make them who they are to develop your ideal target audience for your company,” Drew said. Reach out to current employees and try to learn as much as you can about them, their communication styles, and how they found your company or organization when they were job hunters themselves. Then use that information to inform and hone your recruitment marketing strategy.

“There are no quick answers here. It’s about understanding your audience through trial, error, and optimization. It takes hard work, but that’s what I love to help our clients with when they reach out to me for help for their recruitment marketing,” Hebble says.

Any Other Thoughts or Advice You’d Like to Share?

“As I said before, there is no silver bullet to recruitment marketing and what will work for one company won’t work for the other. You have to put the time in, analyze the results, and use those insights to improve those the next time,” Hebble concluded.

But luckily for Brazen clients, our recruitment marketing solutions are there to help companies develop and launch their recruitment marketing strategies every step of the way, so they never feel like they have to do it all alone.

“Marketing can be a full-time job, and I want to let hiring teams focus on what they do best. My goal is for our Sourcing Marketplace to become an extension of our customers’ recruitment marketing teams that’s specifically catered to marketing their hiring events. We want to help them host great events and I want to be able to lead some of those efforts to get more and better people to show up. To do that, we’re going to apply proven marketing tactics combined with our marketplace of sourcing partners to achieve those results in a hands-on way, all while creating a great candidate experience for everyone involved.” 

If you're interested in supercharging your virtual events strategy and getting better candidates for your recruiting spend, visit brazen.com/sourcing to learn more about Brazen's Sourcing Marketplace. 

Like this post? Try these!

• Recruitment Marketing 101

• Why You Need To Double Down on Recruitment Marketing Right Now
• 5 Reasons Virtual Recruiting Events & Recruitment Marketing Work Better Together
• Everything You Need to Know About Recruitment Marketing

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