What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing is the practice of applying the principles of traditional marketing to the hiring process in order to reach a wider talent pool and make your job openings stand out. A recruitment marketing strategy can be built around existing or traditional hiring methods in order to enhance them. Recruitment marketing principles encourage organisations to put the candidates at the heart of the hiring process and focus more on building relationships rather than simply filling vacancies.
Why is recruitment marketing important?
In an ever-changing hiring landscape, keeping up to date with and implementing the latest tactics in recruitment marketing can help your company to stand out from the crowd and remain competitive, particularly in sectors with roles that are hard to fill. Let us look at some of the key benefits of creating a recruitment marketing strategy.
- Helps you build a talent pipeline for the future. By increasing your applicant pool, you can keep the most promising candidates on file for future positions, even if you are not able to take them on immediately.
- Can improve your company’s reputation. Enhancing the candidate experience is often central to recruitment marketing. By providing a positive experience to candidates – even those to whom you do not ultimately offer a job – you can build goodwill for your company and ensure past and present candidates are more likely to recommend you to their peers.
- May make the hiring process more efficient. By maintaining a proactive approach to recruitment, you are more likely to produce a consistent stream of talented applicants, alongside previous applicants with strong potential.
- Facilitates the creation of a strong shortlist. Compared to creating job listings on hiring platforms with millions of users, recruitment marketing strategies can be highly targeted, attracting the attention of potential employees who are the best match for your open positions. This can help you filter applications down to a strong shortlist more easily.
- Helps you retain employees. The employee retention benefits of recruitment marketing are twofold. Firstly, a more targeted approach to recruitment typically helps you find employees who are the best fit for the role and your company culture, making them more likely to stay. Secondly, marketing your company on platforms like social media often reaches existing employees who can place the company in a positive light and foster a sense of pride in working there. This helps increase company loyalty and job satisfaction.
Using the marketing funnel for recruitment
Recruitment marketing shares many similarities with traditional marketing – the biggest difference being that your objective is to attract talent rather than customers. Therefore, the widely used marketing funnel can be engaged in a similar way. Although there are several variations on the funnel, the AIDA model may be the most well-known. This acronym stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action. Below, we break down these four stages and examine how they operate in the field of recruitment marketing.
1. Awareness
When it comes to recruitment marketing, raising awareness is about reaching potential candidates who may not be actively seeking a new job but are open to the possibility of making a change for the right role or company. This stage involves increasing brand awareness in places where your target candidates may be found.
2. Interest
Once potential candidates are aware of your brand and that you are always open to fresh talent, it is important to hook them. This might involve sharing your brand story, offering content that showcases your work culture and providing regular updates on open positions or upcoming opportunities.
3. Desire
The desire stage of the marketing funnel is the process of converting interest into action. Why should potential candidates apply to your company? This is where you can share more about what makes you stand out, the benefits you offer, the company culture, the opportunities for learning and growth and what kind of roles you may be looking to fill.
4. Action
The recruitment marketing version of getting a customer to click ‘add to cart’ is getting talent to click ‘apply now’. By this stage, you have laid the groundwork for this conversion, but it is still important to ensure that your application process is as streamlined and positive as possible and does not frustrate candidates.
Read more: Tips for growing a company’s employer branding
Recruitment marketing strategies
There are many strategies you can use to capture the attention of potential candidates. Here are a few of the most common ones:
1. Social media posts
When planning a career move, candidates often seek out the social media accounts of companies they are curious about to get a feel for the brand’s identity and the company culture. This can be a convenient and low-cost way of attracting positive attention. If your company is a large brand, consider creating separate social media accounts for employees/potential employees to your main, customer-centric accounts. If it does not make sense for you to split your company’s social presence into separate accounts, you can make a point of regularly posting content that centres your employees. For example, playful behind-the-scenes images and videos or ‘day in the life’-style content can interest customers and talent alike.
Read more: Social media recruiting tips and strategies
2. Email outreach
Email marketing remains a popular and reliable form of outreach. Think about creating a special newsletter that centres employment opportunities and the employee experience. You could feature a subscribe button on your website’s Careers page or even offer all online job applicants an opt-in to your newsletter when they submit their CV, building an audience of interested candidates and potential future talent.
3. Targeted advertising
Job boards and social media websites typically offer detailed customisation when posting advertising. This enables you to use internal or industry data to better target your recruitment advertising to the people who are most likely to be interested and fit your requirements.
Read more: 7 tips for your next job advert
4. Referral programmes
Your existing talent can be a fantastic source for leads on fresh talent. They are highly likely to have peers in the same field, and if these people were former colleagues, they will already have an idea of their potential. Creating a reward-centred employee referral programme can incentivise your staff to refer others to your open roles.
5. Company website
Your website’s Careers page is typically a go-to for candidates who are already interested in working for you, so ensuring it is easy to find, informative and up to date is key. You can also focus on employment opportunities throughout your website by spotlighting the employee experience or employing eye-catching banners reading ‘We’re Recruiting!’ or similar. Consider adding a Blog tab to update regular site visitors on your latest activities, community outreach and innovative new projects. You can also use a blog space to provide useful information about your industry – demonstrating that your company goes above and beyond to be of value.
Related: 10 recruiting strategies for hiring great employees
Tips and best practices
The following tips and best practices can help you prepare your recruitment marketing strategy and ensure you get the most out of your chosen methods.
- Nurture your company’s reputation by seeking regular feedback from employees and customers, creating an open culture, embracing change and addressing any problems as soon as they arise.
- Ensure you are providing a great working environment for existing employees to help you retain talent and encourage genuine referrals.
- Get clear on your employer branding to ensure you stand out in an often-crowded recruitment field – who you are as a company, what you can offer employees and why working for you is desirable.
- Understand the current recruitment climate, including knowing whether there is a skills shortage, what candidates are seeking and what your competitors are offering.
- Stay attuned to candidates’ needs: in the post-Covid landscape, increasing numbers of employees are prioritising flexible working and meaningful roles that offer opportunities for learning, growth and career progression.
- Monitor your advertising analytics to determine what is and isn’t working and make adjustments where necessary.
Recruitment marketing is a reliable, strategic way to attract top talent and build a strong workforce as the hiring landscape continues to evolve. By prioritising your company’s reputation in the workforce, employing targeted outreach and centring an exceptional candidate experience, you can stay competitive and capture the attention of the most suitable and skilled candidates.
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