As the job market becomes extraordinarily competitive, finding specialized talent can be a daunting task. Employees are your most important asset, but building a team of professionals with diverse yet complementary passions and skills is difficult for every growing company. In this challenging economy, recruitment marketing can be the proactive hiring strategy you need.
Digital advancements have helped develop innovative ways to recruit talent. These new techniques make it easier for HR teams to create campaigns to market your employer brand. Whether you sell call center applications or have an e-commerce company, recruiters should be able to make your company’s culture visible and attractive to potential candidates.
What is recruitment marketing?
Instead of spending countless hours looking for prospective employees, recruitment marketing delivers qualified candidates to your doorstep. This approach to hiring is a pull rather than a push strategy. It’s not just about advertising your job openings; it’s about marketing yourself as an employer, promoting your organization, and work culture.
Recruitment marketing can be done by building an effective online presence to appear on your target prospects’ search engine results if and when they hunt for jobs online. Recruitment marketing can also include other popular online marketing strategies — such as SEO, affiliate marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. — so you can reach the maximum number of candidates.
Recruitment marketing is similar to traditional marketing as it includes the same four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action/retention. Your recruitment marketing methodologies will help attract, engage, and nurture your relationship with qualified talent throughout the recruitment life cycle.
Why is recruitment marketing important?
Recruitment marketing helps reel in the best candidates. It also reduces the risks associated with making the wrong hires, saving you considerable time and money. Recruitment marketing gives you access to a broad pool of potential candidates and streamlines the selection process.
An effective recruitment marketing strategy means you will have a constant flow of applicants, which will substantially lower the probability of having unfilled positions at your company.
Five recruitment marketing tactics
There are many channels to approach potential candidates. You could go the traditional route, but just as our landlines have been replaced by VoIP and IP conference phones, online marketing is your best bet to stand out throughout the candidate journey.
Here are the top five strategies to help attract qualified talent. These will help build a solid foundation for your recruitment plan:
Identify your ideal candidate persona
Determine what your ideal candidate looks like and what skills and qualifications are necessary for the desired role. For example, if you’re a company that deals in enterprise communication systems, your ideal software developer should have detailed knowledge on VoIP systems, videoconferencing, team chat, etc., and preferably experience with a similar software house.
Define what skills and traits would be a good fit for your team and company culture. Ask yourself what demographic they fall into and if you’ll be able to reach them through social media. The answers to these questions will help you select the best channels to engage with your target candidates.
Ensure your candidate persona is not limited to education, experience, and skills. While those are important, try to dig deeper to sift through the noise and find someone who aligns with your company’s goals. Pinpoint their interests outside of work, like their hobbies and motivational factors.
Your hiring avatar should reflect your potential candidates’ aspirations as well as your own. At the end of this exercise, you should know where to find these ideal candidates and what they want out of a new job.
Create branded content
The recruitment marketing funnel needs content for each stage. Create branded content like blogs, videos, eBooks, newsletters, white papers, case studies, and webinars to highlight your company’s expertise and leadership. If you offer digital reporting solutions and software, you could write blogs about white label reporting to catch the attention of professionals from that sector.
Creating content and then sharing it on your website, social media, or even other blogs is a great way to promote your brand to prospects. It does what job ads can’t. It subtly introduces the right candidates to your company at the right time and with the right message.
Create a career website
Develop a career site or a careers page on your existing website to centralize all your recruitment marketing activity. If a search through the internet has landed potential candidates on your career site, it should give them all the information they need to decide if they would like to apply.
The ideal career site showcases company values, culture, and work environment. For a firm that deals in DNS security, it would tell prospects about the company’s founders, their product, and their core team. Testimonials from current employees won’t go amiss.
Last, ensure your website is optimized for SEO and mobile-friendly. A large chunk of your traffic will be routed through popular search engines, and you need a robust SEO strategy built around your brand keywords.
Social media marketing
Ninety-two percent of employers use social media to reach out to candidates. With social media, the content you can share is practically unlimited — you can post content like blogs and videos to spread the word about your company and its employees. You can also share corporate volunteering events to show how your company gives back. Fun in-office events, like employee birthdays, can also give people a good idea about the type of employer you are.
As an e-commerce business, if you’re holding affiliate marketing conferences, you could do a live event on Facebook or Instagram.
Social media is a popular platform to attract attention because you can engage with people on your posts. Posts are one type of content, and the discussion and interactions in the comments sections are another.
Turn your employees into brand ambassadors
To market your company as an employer of choice, lean on your existing employees to spread the word. Candidates tend to trust employees more than employers. Talent acquisition leaders should involve employees in their recruitment marketing strategy to reach a wider audience. Not only would you have your own social media profile to share content, but your employees can use their own personal social media profiles to market your brand.
Employees can add to your recruitment marketing strategy in the following ways:
1. Write an article for your career website about what they like about you as an employer.
2. Share photos and videos of everyday work life on social media.
3. Write a review of your company on Glassdoor.
Ask thought leaders, like your CEO, to share their view on the company and its people. LinkedIn is the best place for such content.
If you are an electronic signature solution provider, let your employees answer common questions people ask about your products and job postings. Whether the question is how much is DocuSign or what is the employee retention rate at your company, let your employees answer on your behalf.
Remember that employees will speak fondly about you if you have invested in creating a culture and work environment that fosters teamwork and personal growth. To make ambassadors out of employees, you need to prioritize employee satisfaction initiatives and empower your teams. High employee retention also speaks volumes to the greatness of a company.
Start recruiting today!
Any marketing strategy is futile if you aren’t tracking the right metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your recruiting plan. If you are having a hard time retaining talent, maybe it’s time to change your approach. Recruitment marketing is a must-have for hiring teams who want to gain a competitive advantage.
Employee expectations and requirements are higher than ever, and if your company wants to attract the most talented people, you need to design a seamless recruitment journey for candidates.
For more information on global recruiting, visit G-P Recruit. G-P Recruit enables companies to quickly identify and hire employees anywhere in the world through our market-leading Global Growth Platform™. Manage your entire HR process, from recruitment and onboarding to compliant payroll setup and offboarding – all with one platform.
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About the author:
Richard Conn is the Senior Director for Demand Generation at 8×8, a leading Hosted VoIP services with integrated contact center, voice, video, and chat functionality. Richard is an analytical and results-driven digital marketing leader with a track record of achieving major ROI improvements in fast-paced, competitive B2B environments. Richard Conn also published articles for domains such as PropTechNOW. Check out his LinkedIn.