Over 70% of enterprises are investing in a more strategic and proactive recruiting process, which is the reason why recruiting marketing technology is one of the fastest growing areas of HR today.
When it comes to acquiring the best-in-class talents for organizations, the process of recruitment starts long before a prospective candidate applies for a job or the future potential hires consider getting a new job.
This brings recruitment marketing into play, which is a form of marketing strategy that helps organizations to engage better with candidates while also educating them about the employer and the job opportunities.
Let’s find out more about recruitment marketing, its benefits and strategies to make the best use of the recruitment marketing ideas.
Table of Contents
What Is Recruiting Marketing?
Recruiting marketing is a set of methodologies that any company’s HR can use to market the employer’s brand, mission and values to the candidates. Recruitment marketing is an essentially effective way of building visibility and awareness around your organization's culture and thereby attracting the best talents in the respective industries.
Recruitment marketing isn’t restricted to just sourcing talent; rather, it has to deal with the entire recruitment lifecycle, right from attracting candidates to nurturing the recruited talent.
What Are the Stages of the Recruitment Marketing Funnel?
Based on the areas that this comprehensive strategy covers, we can build a marketing recruiting funnel in the following way:
Increase Awareness
Even in today’s job markets where top talents are sourced from around the world, about 73% of candidates are passive, which means that they are open to new roles in spite of being currently employed.
Recruiters, as part of their recruiting marketing exercise, must reach out to these passive candidates too and market their organizations on platforms where these candidates are active. Creating consumable content in the form of blogs, videos and social media posts works well in this regard.
Generate Interest
Once you grab their attention, it is time to provide potential talents with information and insights that arouse their interest in your organization. For this purpose, it is ideal to create content that echoes the brand initiatives of the employer.
The key to generating interest is to make sure that the recruiting team is aligned on how you produce and distribute the content. The process of generating interest is an ongoing one.
Drive Decisions
Just as candidates begin showing interest in your organization, you need to drive them toward making a decision about joining your team.
Nurturing the prospects is a critical stage of your recruitment marketing funnel. It involves making that information transparent to the candidates in order to incentivize them to join your organization. These include the company’s benefits and perks programs, development opportunities, DEI initiatives and so on.
Prompt Action
Finally, it is time for the attracted, engaged, and nurtured candidates to take tangible action. At this stage, you need to ensure that they don’t face unnecessary obstacles which may make them abandon the application process. It is vital to eliminate the complexities in the application process and provide pertinent information that the candidates need to follow through with an application.
How to Develop a Recruitment Marketing Strategy in 4 Steps
Even before you start developing this strategy, you have to focus on building an employer brand and aligning your entire team with it. This employer branding comprises the employee value proposition, the mission and the value statement of the organization and its people and culture.
Once this employer branding is successfully established, you can build a recruitment marketing strategy with the following steps:
- Setting Defined Goals for the Team
- Defining the Roles and Responsibilities
- Identifying the Right Channels to Use
- Determining the Resources and Capacities
1. Setting Defined Goals for the Team
Building a recruiting marketing strategy starts with setting clear and measurable goals for the team. These goals can be growing the talent pool or bringing more senior leadership or simply increasing hires for a particular department. Outlining each of these goals and backing them up with coherent plans is necessary to ensure that you can measure the outcome.
2. Defining the Roles and Responsibilities
Clearly delineated roles help both the hiring team as well as the prospective candidates in a number of ways. Ensuring that everyone involved in the recruitment is aligned in these roles makes it easier to market the positions to potential hires. This also simplifies the application process for the candidates.
3. Identifying the Right Channels to Use
There are roles that appeal to a wide range of talent. When it comes to marketing these roles, it is crucial to determine the ideal channels that you can leverage.
You will typically find two types of platforms: one that is for hyper-specific roles and the other that is suitable for diverse candidate pools. Apart from digital recruitment, you can include networking and in-person events as part of your recruitment marketing strategy.
4. Determining the Resources and Capacities
Irrespective of the size of your recruiting team, resources can be limited, which means that often, you have to do more with less. It could also mean starting gradually and then working things out with frequent social media updates and content management.
Therefore, it is necessary to consider how effectively your team is managing its tasks and initiatives. In fact, outsourcing a few tasks can make the most sense at times.
5 Steps to Using Recruitment Marketing
Once you have grasped recruitment marketing and have a strategy in place, you can consider your team prepared to leverage recruitment marketing in the best possible ways such as these subsequent steps:
- Use Both Organic and Paid Advertising
- Leverage the Owned Channels
- Develop Subject Matter Experts
- Use Frequent Newsletters
- Repurpose the Existing Recruitment Marketing Content
1. Use Both Organic and Paid Advertising
As already mentioned, employer branding is the first step in recruitment marketing strategy building and social media occupies a significant portion of this strategy. To make the most of recruitment marketing, organizations need to leverage each social media channel tactfully.
Some of these channels like LinkedIn are more suited for posting open roles organically. On the other hand, it is a good idea to sponsor IG stories as Instagram is more effective in reaching millennial and Gen Z candidates. Regardless of your goals, make use of both organic and paid advertising for the recruitment content for your organization to be at the forefront.
2. Leverage the Owned Channels
A company’s own blog and website are the greatest resources when it comes to recruitment marketing. These are ideal for promoting employer branding as well as interest and awareness-generating content.
Leverage the ‘Careers’ page by constantly updating and adding content because candidates will typically visit these pages to get a well-rounded image of the organization's culture. The more the number of dedicated sections, the better it is.
3. Develop Subject Matter Experts
One of the primary goals of recruitment marketing is attracting real people to your organization. And it is an accepted fact that candidates look at people apart from the organization's profile and social channels. This is where internal subject matter experts can come to help. They can drive the reputation of your company forward by sharing valuable recruitment content to attract, engage and nurture the top candidates. Subject matter experts can also help in creating thought leadership, which can, in turn, be used to enhance the content channels.
4. Use Frequent Newsletters
Email marketing is very much here and HR can use email newsletters to engage and nurture passive candidates. That being said, email newsletters will be a key for future recruitment and these will enable you to stay in touch with candidates and develop an impressive talent pool. Newsletters make way for increased engagement and personalization as you can communicate important insights and information to the candidates who join the newsletter lists.
5. Repurpose the Existing Recruitment Marketing Content
Content marketers harbor a secret and that is they always find ways of repurposing valuable content. This implies that leveraging existing content is as important as creating new content from scratch. Repurposing content also makes optimum use of your limited budget and resources. An example of beneficial content repurposing is using webinar content in short video clips for LinkedIn or the company’s ‘Careers’ page.
Benefits of Marketing Recruiting for Employers
There is no denying that the competition for talent is more intense now than it has been earlier and recruitment marketing makes sure that your organization remains attractive to job seekers.
Further, recruiting marketing eventually forms the basis of an engaging sourcing strategy:
- Developing an influential employer brand with both masses as well as niche appeal
- Segmenting candidates into talent networks by customizing campaigns and communication
- Optimizing the recruitment sites to appeal to and convert quality candidates
- Nurturing the talent pools to stay in touch
The advantage of recruitment marketing lies in the fact that it not only connects you with the maximum number of potential candidates but also the top-of-the-funnel ones.
With engaging content being an essential part of the process, your prospective ideal fit can decide whether your organization is the right one for them.
Recruitment Marketing Ideas Takeaway
Backed by a well-built and implemented strategy and ways of using this recruiting marketing technique or process, a recruitment marketing strategy is undoubtedly a must-have for hiring teams willing to gain a competitive advantage.
Candidates’ expectations are growing in every aspect and organizations need to put their best foot forward in capturing top talents from all over the world. This is largely made possible through recruitment marketing and its emphasis on tailored content and personalized communication. With this, a seamless journey from application to onboarding and beyond is guaranteed.
