Recruitment marketing refers to all the strategies and tactics you might use to find, attract, connect with, and nurture qualified talent before they apply for a position at your organization or participate in a virtual hiring event. As the term suggests, it’s not entirely unlike marketing a product or service. From the onset, it’s key to acknowledge that job seekers, like consumers, have a lot of options and they are unlikely to pursue a relationship (employment, in this case) with an organization that doesn’t deliver the experience or the results they desire.
Recruitment marketing strategies help you grab job seekers’ attention initially, and then build their interest through the stages of the recruitment life cycle, ending in their decision to apply or engage with one of your virtual hiring events. Understanding how recruitment marketing can benefit your talent acquisition strategy throughout the funnel will help you attract more and better candidates, keep them engaged, and eventually lead to making better hires.
As with most aspects of talent acquisition, it’s best to have a plan. You’ll need to create a clearly defined content distribution strategy for your recruitment marketing content, and the advice in this article will help you design a strategy that works toward your goals.
Let’s take a look at how recruitment marketing works at each stage of the recruiting funnel, and some of the strategies you can use to improve your results.
Awareness: How can recruitment marketing build awareness?
The awareness stage of recruiting is all about making job seekers aware your organization, and your jobs, exist. Especially if they are passive job seekers, of which there are many. Recruiters new to marketing might think this means getting as many eyes as possible on your job postings, but that’s not as valuable as connecting with job seekers who might match your candidate personas. At this stage, recruitment marketing strategies should be created to reflect your ideal candidates’ interests and behaviors, and your tactics should be designed to connect with those job seekers where they are. This means researching and experimenting to determine which channels your ideal candidates are using and showing up there.
Building awareness requires a multi-pronged strategy that encompasses social media, targeted email and text communication, and might also include a career hub on your website as well that includes text and video. Paid advertising is another key method for increasing the chances of getting your content and job postings in front of the right people.
Interest: How does recruitment marketing help increase interest?
Once you have a job seeker’s attention, you have to work to increase their interest so you can convince them to apply or participate in a virtual hiring event. This is all about building curiosity by sharing more information about your organization, your available positions, and other topics job seekers have questions about. This stage offers a great opportunity to share content about your company’s culture, mission, and social responsibility as well as employee testimonials and other behind-the-scenes content that helps give job seekers a better idea of what it’s actually like to be on your team.
Sharing content, on social media and through other channels like email and your careers site, that consistently tells the story of who you are as an organization helps build interest that motivates job seekers to engage with your recruiting team, keeps them in the pipeline for present and future hiring needs, and helps to strengthen your employer brand.
Decision: Can recruitment marketing help job seekers make the decision to apply?
At this stage, you want job seekers to decide to apply or participate in a virtual career fair. A crucial turning point in the recruiting funnel, this is when some job seekers might abandon the process if they don’t feel they have enough information to keep them invested in your company, as opposed to your competition. At this stage, recruiters can tend to get overconfident, when it’s actually the time to compete fiercely for top talent’s attention. If you’ve navigated the first two stages successfully, however, job seekers will be primed to take the leap, and all you need to do is nudge them forward. Now, it’s time to use recruitment marketing to drive home the points that differentiate your organization from the other guys.
Put yourself in your ideal candidate’s shoes and imagine what it would take to get them really excited about the possibility of working at your organization. For most job seekers, it comes down to the details about benefits and other perks, compensation, and career advancement opportunities. But don’t be afraid to dive deeper into behind-the-scenes content that reinforces the messages you shared in earlier stages, and helps job seekers envision themselves working at your company.
Sealing the deal with recruitment marketing
When you approach talent acquisition with these basic marketing methodologies, you can prioritize your relationship with job seekers and improve their experience throughout the recruiting process. This is what top talent expects from their employers of choice. By breaking down your recruitment marketing strategy and looking at each stage of the funnel individually, you can identify opportunities for improvement and make simple changes to create a better candidate experience that attracts your ideal job seekers and converts more of them to qualified candidates for your open positions, now and in the future.
