What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing applies common marketing tactics to highlight the advantages of working for your company. Its goal is to attract, engage, recruit and retain top talent. This approach to talent acquisition focuses on building a strong employer brand, presenting your company and its culture in the best possible light, and providing a positive candidate experience. Recruitment marketing employs digital strategies, including social media management, omnichannel communication, data analytics, hyper-targeted messaging and automation.

The importance of recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing is essential to reach the best candidates and encourage them to apply for jobs, particularly in tight and competitive labour markets. Online platforms help job seekers research companies and decide whether to apply. Recruitment marketing can leverage these platforms to share brand stories with job descriptions, content like employee culture videos and interviews, SEO-optimized career sites and social media job advertising to highlight job satisfaction and happiness at work. This improves brand awareness, reaches a qualified talent pool, speeds up hiring time and enhances the candidate experience.

Elements of recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing synthesizes multiple elements to attract the best candidates and analyze the process, including:

• Branding: Develop and communicate a strong and consistent brand that reflects the company’s culture, employee experiences and value proposition to potential candidates.
• Segmentation: Identify various applicant groups based on the position’s requirements and customize advertising and content marketing strategies for each.
• Reaching candidates: Creating engaging and informative content to reach candidates, such as profiling employees, highlighting remote work policies and practices, maintaining a company blog, creating videos and infographics or discussing interesting projects.
• Social media recruiting: Amplify employer messages to reach and attract qualified candidates.
• Engagement: Use a variety of campaigns to engage and connect with potential talent throughout the candidate journey.
• Analytics: Employ analytics to track applicant numbers, conversion and hiring rates, employee referral program performance and other critical data.

Building an effective recruitment marketing strategy

To attract candidates effectively, it’s important to highlight what makes your company unique. Begin by developing a recruitment marketing strategy that sets clear goals and defines the roles needed to attract your target candidates. Next, identify the most effective recruitment marketing ideas and channels and allocate the necessary resources to execute a successful strategy. Finally, create a content calendar to streamline your approach and schedule content publication. This approach can help you reach, recruit and choose the right candidate.

Reaching and attracting talent

Recruitment marketing strategies can drive candidates further along the talent pipeline. Here are some important ways to reach and attract talent:

• Awareness: A candidate learns about a job opening or a company through job boards, social media campaigns, employee testimonials, the company’s website, referrals or employer branding efforts.
• Consideration: The candidate investigates the company, its culture and the job offer to determine if they align with their career goals and interests. This may include reading reviews, visiting the company’s website, exploring social media or speaking with current or former employees to gather information.
• Application: The candidate submits their resume and cover letter.

A successful campaign results in a candidate entering the final stages of hiring, which include:

• Screening: Candidates are screened and shortlisted based on qualifications, experience and fit.
• Interview: Conduct a job interview in person, over the phone or via video conferencing.
• Decision: The hiring team evaluates the applicants and chooses the right candidate for the role.
• Offer: A job offer detailing the salary, benefits package and other terms of employment is sent to the candidate.
• Onboarding: After accepting the offer, the candidate completes the onboarding process.

A positive candidate experience can lead to higher acceptance rates and a better perception of the company as an employer. Using a job recruiter to find the best candidates can streamline and improve your hiring process.

6 Recruitment marketing strategies

1. Start your recruitment marketing strategy by identifying social media platforms that targeted candidates engage with the most and using organic and paid advertising.
2. Leverage company-owned channels like your website, career pages, blog and newsletters.
3. Create content related to timely issues and trends to highlight the benefits of working in the organization and draw attention to job openings.
4. Develop internal subject-matter experts, capitalize on user-generated and related content to highlight insights on how to switch career paths within the company, be a remote worker, upskill and get promoted or target candidates with a learning series.
5. Use email and newsletters to engage candidates and continue the conversation beyond the first search hit or viewing of a job opening.
6. Repurpose content across various channels and maintain a consistent message to enhance your employer brand and build trust with candidates.

Benefits of recruitment marketing

A robust recruitment marketing strategy effectively reaches and attracts top talent while enhancing the candidate experience. This approach can shorten the hiring process and help you fill open positions more quickly. By focusing on the right candidates, you can improve the quality of your applicant pool and strengthen your employer brand. Happy and engaged employees are more likely to remain with your company and act as ambassadors, which leads to positive reviews and generates interest from future potential candidates.

Recruitment marketing is critical to any recruitment process and talent acquisition strategy. Investing in recruitment marketing can attract top talent, build a strong employer brand and create a positive candidate experience.