A recruitment marketing strategy can ensure you’re reaching the right candidates at the right time in the most efficient way possible. Here’s how it works.
In the simplest terms, recruitment marketing is a set of tactics you can use to market your employer brand to candidates. These tactics – along with tools like email marketing, social media, content, candidate outreach, and everything in between – are what make up your recruitment marketing strategy.
Can you attract candidates without a recruitment marketing strategy? Absolutely. However, if you want to reach the ideal candidates for your open positions (you do) and attract the most qualified candidates (you do), recruitment marketing is what helps you do that.
Related Article: Digital Marketing vs. Recruitment Marketing
Candidate personas. Traditional marketers create customer personas, or profiles of the wants, desires, and interests of the people most likely to buy the product or service they are promoting. Once personas are created, customized experiences are designed to lead these individuals through a customer journey – beginning with awareness and ending with conversion. Using this tactic to create candidate personas means that you can more easily speak to your ideal candidate via that persona, create content and messaging for that persona, and more effectively move candidates from awareness to consideration to application. Voila - your hiring funnel!
Your hiring funnel. Once you have identified your ideal candidate(s), you can create a hiring funnel for recruitment marketing. This is how we can create a compelling employee journey for our target job candidates. An effective hiring funnel is strategically designed to take candidates through various stages of the hiring cycle from attraction all the way to hire. Your funnel should focus on attracting candidates by bringing awareness toward a specific job opportunity. Once the attraction is there it should captivate your candidates and assist them to find out more about the opportunity, converting them to an applicant. A seamless and straightforward application and interview process will spark continuous engagement and BOOM - you got your hire!
Candidate touchpoints. Identifying the touchpoints along your candidate journey can help you map out a strategy for moving candidates into your hiring funnel. Touchpoints range from direct interactions like emails and interviews to indirect interactions such as visiting your company website or filling out an application online. Touchpoints also include interactions via third parties, such as reviews on Glassdoor, social media posts shared by employees, or customer interaction with your employer brand.
Content marketing. Your online campaigns, including social media, should do more than sell your open positions to job seekers. Content can be used in these campaigns to engage candidates with your company whether you’re currently hiring or not. If you offer useful, quality content targeted to the talent you’d love to connect with, you’re building a relationship, not making a sale. Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues, in this case, getting a shiny new job.
Email marketing and nurture campaigns. Think of this as a top-of-funnel marketing activity for candidates from any source. Focus your content marketing on awareness and consideration and showcase your employer brand using employee testimonials, videos, and other content along with links to open roles. This is an excellent opportunity to really engage “window shoppers,” or candidates who might be checking out your company but are not ready to leave their current position unless they have a compelling reason to do so. This is where you give them that compelling reason!
This is just a short list of what should be part of a successful recruitment marketing strategy and if it seems a little overwhelming…well, it is. BUT: There are shortcuts and automation and many other support functions that can make it much more manageable and effective. There are companies (ahem, like Talentcare) whose fundamental purpose is to help with everything we’ve mentioned here. And we’re fun at parties. Drop us a line or slide into our DMs.
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