What is recruitment marketing? (With benefits and stages)

Organisations may want to hire top talents to fill vacancies and ensure their success. Companies may embrace recruitment marketing as they abandon traditional recruitment methods when finding top talents. Understanding recruitment marketing concepts can help you find the best recruits for a company and help the organisation succeed. In this article, we provide an answer to the question 'What is recruitment marketing?', review why an organisation can use recruitment marketing, examine its benefits and stages, discuss tips for its success and answer frequently asked questions about it.

What is recruitment marketing?

We can examine the recruitment marketing cycle to answer 'What is recruitment marketing?'. It is when employers promote their brands throughout the recruitment cycle to entice, engage and nurture relations with qualified talents. Successful recruitment marketing attracts suitable candidates to submit their applications for vacant positions. Companies can build a positive relationship with prospects and share specific information about their brands to prove employee value proposition. Recruitment marketing involves the recruiter:

• monitoring the organisation's status on review pages and shaping the company's culture

• giving feedback to social mentions

• identifying candidate personas

• telling the organisation's work-life story via videos and blog posts

• organising events to boost the company's employer brand

Related: 9 essential recruiter skills for career success

Why use recruitment marketing?

Here are the top reasons to use recruiting marketing:

Minimise hiring costs

Managing hiring costs is essential since the figure can vary depending on the number of applicants. In the traditional recruiting process, recruiters would compare hiring expenses with the number of new employees. Recruitment marketing can minimise the cost via automation. One recruiter can shoot, post and upload recruitment marketing content for a week or month in a few hours. Their task afterwards is to monitor the accounts and engage followers or the talent pool.

Improve hiring speed

Recruitment marketing can generate a talent pool, saving money and time the organisation might have spent when outsourcing new candidates. Followers who like the company on social media can easily be excellent candidates for the latest vacancies. The company can also develop a landing page that accepts new applicants when vacancies arise.

Ease the candidate journey

The candidate journey involves six stages in traditional recruiting marketing. It comprises awareness, consideration, interest, application, selection and hiring. Recruitment marketing overlaps the first three stages. As the organisation expands its employer brand reach via events and social media, potential candidates already know, consider and want to apply once suitable job vacancies arise.

Improve the candidate pool's quality

Recruitment marketing often targets passive candidates undertaking projects. These individuals' jobs show they're capable. Passive candidates are comfortable with their employment status. They're honest about their expectations and experience. The company can better evaluate them on their skills, track record and cultural fit.

Recruitment marketing benefits

Adopting recruitment marketing in an organisation can have many benefits, including:

Encourage employee engagement

Recruitment marketing involves the human resources department and the entire workforce. Marketing the company brand can allow every employee to share their ideas. Employees can narrate their stories to help prospective candidates discover reasons to join the company. Potential candidates can engage employees to learn more about the job and career growth chances.

Get essential feedback

Recruitment marketing enables organisations to get feedback from potential candidates. The company can determine whether it is doing the right things from the responses. It can work to improve to better satisfy potential candidates.

Track engagement

HR departments gather extensive information about potential candidates. Few organisations use the data. Most companies only track the time and money spent during recruitment. Recruitment marketing enables organisations to track metrics and determine how effective the hiring process is.

Identify effective mediums

Organisations can identify effective sources when they use recruitment marketing data. They can test many recruitment messages on job platforms and target skilled candidates. Software analytics can help companies know how many potential candidates read those messages, who they are and how long they spent reading or engaging with the message.

Create diversity

Having a diverse team can enhance your organisation's performance. Recruitment marketing enables organisations to target specific people. For example, companies can create events and content targeting the desired candidates directly. These potential employees can join these institutions, improving their diversity and performance.

Related: The difference between diversity and inclusion

Stages of recruitment marketing

Here are the stages of recruitment marketing:

Create awareness

The organisation creates awareness among talented candidates. A company targets passive candidates by marketing its brand on popular platforms. The recruiting team needs excellent content to make the organisation competitive and attract qualified talents.

Generate interest

Organisations can create content and share helpful information that increases their companies' appeal among prospective candidates. They can establish an effective content strategy to generate consistent and relevant information for their campaigns. Scheduling the content can ensure candidates access new and exciting content to maintain their interest in the company.

Nurture the decision

Cultivate the potential candidates' decision to join the organisation. The value proposition can make the company unique. Organisations can outline the benefits, roles, compensation and other pertinent information to help prospective candidates choose them.

Drive action

Invite candidates to submit their applications for vacancies when they arise. The organisation can achieve this goal by reviewing the application procedure to remove unnecessary qualifications and simplifying the application process. The company can expand its candidate pool for future vacancies if only a few candidates meet the requirements during the recruitment.

Recruitment marketing tips

Here are some useful recruitment marketing tips you can use to ensure a successful campaign:

Enhance the employer brand

An employer brand comprises the company's values, mission, culture, perks and employee benefits. The organisation can embrace new strategies to promote its culture and position itself as a desired employer. Companies can create a positive culture, communicate their brand with total transparency, value their employees and use storytelling to share their everyday stories to enhance their employer's brands.

Related: What is employer branding, and why is it important?

Create candidate personas

Developing candidate-specific personas for each vacancy can be vital. The personas enable companies to target the right audience and create relevant content. Creating accurate personas can help the organisation attract suitable candidates.

Develop excellent recruitment content

Having the ideal recruitment content can help organisations attract suitable candidates. Using helpful and relevant content at each stage of the candidate journey can create awareness and generate interest in the company. Organisations can distribute recruitment content in various formats, such as emails, blogs, webinars, e-books and videos. They can share their content through multiple channels. Choosing the right mix of content formats and platforms is essential to reach suitable candidates.

Update the career page

Career pages contain more information than vacancy listings. They can tell the organisation's story. A modern career page can have a personal touch, such as employees' pictures at work and employee testimonials. The webpage can communicate organisational values and illustrate its work environment while allowing potential candidates to discover vacancies and apply easily.

Use a referral programme

Employees can be a company's best ambassadors. They can help the organisation find the best candidates quickly. Referred talents often perform better and stay in the company longer. Organisations also hire them quickly, as they usually possess the needed skills.

Use social recruiting

Social media can be an excellent platform to attract and convert the best talent using the organisation's recruitment content. Companies can develop a social media recruitment strategy to attract top talent. They can define their posts' topics and create a content calendar. Sharing regular, well-crafted content on social platforms can create engagement opportunities with passive candidates who comment, share or like an institution's posts.

Related: 8 best tools for recruiting: examples and benefits

Build and manage the company's talent pool

Companies can build and manage their talent pools using various tools, like applicant tracking systems. They can also store candidates' records in their databases. Organisations can use these resources to develop market intelligence, get referrals and form connections with people. If vacancies arise, they can use their talent pools to fill them with the right talents.

Measure the progress

Companies can develop reliable recruitment marketing metrics to measure their performance. For example, they can track their visitors-to-applicants ratio, application-to-hire ratios and cost-per-hire. Determining their performance can help them improve to attract and retain top talents.

Frequently asked questions

Here are common questions about recruitment marketing:

What are the duties of a recruitment marketing manager?

Large companies can build dedicated recruitment marketing teams or hire a recruitment marketing specialist. Smaller organisations can have one or more HR professionals handling their recruitment marketing activities, besides their other tasks. The individual managing recruitment marketing can identify candidate personas, shape the organisation's culture, share the work-life balance and organise events to promote the institution's employer brand.

What's the difference between employer branding and recruitment marketing?

Employer brand is the organisation's reputation as a place to work. Companies can undertake employer branding to define and improve their reputations among future and current employees. Recruitment marketing is more tactical and entails everything organisations do to market their employer brands externally to prospective employees and entice them to submit job applications.

How can a company's recruitment message captivate potential candidates?

Organisations can use striking visuals to capture prospective candidates' attention. They can also use multimedia, for example, video advertisements can get more engagement and traction than statics. Creative headlines can also help companies create messages that captivate their target audiences.