What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the comprehensive process of building and communicating an organization’s brand and employee value proposition to attract, engage, recruit, and retain top talent. This comprehensive marketing strategy, supported by a set of practices, skills, and techniques, has become essential for employers competing for the best talent. To be successful, employers and recruiters must think like marketers, leveraging various channels and strategies to sell their open positions by defining who they are as an organization, and why candidates would want to work for them.

The role of a recruitment marketer, also called talent attraction, talent marketing, employer branding, and candidate experience and recruiting operations, has varying responsibilities that typically include:

• creating employer brand
• building brand awareness
• engaging followers
• managing the careers page
• defining target candidate personas
• managing employer reputation
• overseeing the candidate experience
• creating a diverse recruiting strategy
• developing and curating employee stories and content
• selecting recruitment channels
• optimizing advertising and channel spend
• social engagement
• generating qualified leads
• email, text, phone, and chat communication
• driving qualified applicants to open positions
• converting leads into applicants
• garnering employee referrals
• managing recruitment events
• assigning employee ambassadors
• assessing recruitment marketing technologies and operation
• tracking, measuring, and reporting campaign results to demonstrate their value and impact
• managing contracts with agencies and vendors

Recruitment marketers authentically tell an organization’s story by illustrating it as a great workplace, attracting qualified talent, and keeping existing employees engaged in company culture. Here are some examples of recruitment marketing in action.

• Using an email sequence to engage candidates by sharing positive stories, like testimonials from happy employees or awards you’ve won.
• Optimizing job listings to reflect the search terms candidates in your field likely use, like “sales manager jobs [your location]” or “entry-level admin jobs”.
• Managing brand reputation by monitoring job search sites like Indeed.
• Using chatbots to prompt site visitors to ask questions or fill out an application on your career page.
• Creating “a day in the life of” videos showcasing what it’s like to work for your company.
• Using social media advertising to extend your post reach to select audiences.

Why is recruitment marketing important?

In a world where many people turn to online reviews to find everything from restaurants and hotels to products and experiences, the traditional way of recruiting doesn’t work anymore, as candidates discover and consider employers the same way. Searching online, reading reviews, and following social media empowers job seekers to learn everything about you, including your company mission and culture, career opportunities, and behaviours. What candidates learn can significantly impact their decision to accept employment or even apply for a position in the first place. Rather than becoming a brand ambassador, they may form a negative perception and become a brand detractor.

Because there are parallels between consumer and candidate behaviour, marketing and recruitment marketing have many similarities, such as:

• branding messaging, engagement, and measurement
• strategies like PPC, SEO, retargeting, personalization, nurture, and content
• various channels like web, email, mobile, social, chat, text, video, and events
• tools like CRM, marketing automation, AI, predictive analysis, and social media management

Top reasons for using recruitment marketing

While there are many reasons to use recruitment marketing, here are the top seven and how to make the most of each.

Develop your brand

You must make a remarkable first impression for ideal candidates to connect with your organization. Employer branding is your reputation among your employees and workforce. It also encompasses how you market your organization to internal employees and external job seekers. The better you are with employer branding, the more likely you’ll retain and attract top talent—active job seekers are more apt to apply for jobs when the company actively manages its employer brand. This strategy is critical to your bottom line, as recruitment marketing ensures your brand resonates with high-quality candidates while reducing turnover rates and cutting costs per hire.

Here are some ways to boost employer branding:

• Know your audience.
• Research your competitors.
• Have a solid online presence.
• Ensure your website is user-friendly for job seekers.
• Create high-quality content.
• Use video in your social media strategies.

Reduce hiring costs

Recruitment marketing helps reduce the costs of hiring new employees. In traditional hiring methods, recruiters would have to sift through various applications, losing valuable money and time. The amount would vary depending on how many candidates submitted applications. Recruitment marketing decreases hiring costs by using an automated system to send, upload, and post videos to social accounts for a week in just a few hours. The recruiter then monitors the accounts and engages with followers and potential applicants. Reduce hiring costs by:

• creating a candidate persona
• building talent pools
• creating referral schemes
• optimizing your career portal
• recruiting via social media
• limiting the number of candidates
• automating your processes
• developing strategies to improve employee retention

Improve hiring speed

Recruitment marketing can significantly improve how fast you hire new employees. Rather than wasting time and resources on scouting and outsourcing potential candidates, recruitment marketing helps build a warm and conversation-ready talent pool. Starting your sourcing process with candidates who are up to date on your organization’s news and opportunities speeds up your hiring time. Set up a landing page promoting your need for new applicants to make the hiring process go even faster.

Raise the quality of your candidates

Improve the quality of your applicants by targeting passive candidates (those with the qualifications and experience for your open position but who aren’t actively seeking a new job). Unlike those actively looking for work, passive candidates are more likely to be upfront about their experience and expectations. This honesty enables you to better evaluate their skills, records, and cultural fit to determine if they’re the right person for the job. Find passive candidates by asking your employees or other contacts within your network for referrals. You can also review data from previous applicants or employees, consult professional communities or websites, or use talent management systems or recruitment technologies.

Broaden your scope with a multichannel approach

Recruitment marketing is not about waiting for applicants to find your job postings. Instead, recruitment marketers actively search for top talent using a multichannel approach, including industry sites, paid advertising for recruitment, social media, and third-party job boards. Active outreach means using your employer brand to attract diverse applicants. After determining your channels, craft your messaging and ensure you’re directing it toward your candidate persona.

Establish trust in your organization

Modern top talents are highly selective. They consider much more than wages when deciding on where to work, weighing factors like an organization’s values and company culture. Recruitment marketing helps convey these messages positively, establishing trust so that when it’s time for applicants to accept an offer, working for you becomes a no-brainer.

Convert candidates into applicants

Job candidates today are like shoppers making a purchase. They check out reviews, compare features and benefits, and go through various “buy-in” stages. A well-known e-commerce principle is that it requires multiple touchpoints before consumers decide to purchase. Recruitment marketing enables these crucial touchpoints with candidates, bringing them closer to applying with each new interaction.

Stages of recruitment marketing

There are four stages of recruitment marketing.

• Boost awareness: The best way to boost awareness is to create excellent content that attracts top talent and makes your company stand out in your market. Attract passive candidates by marketing your brand on platforms where they spend most of their time.
• Generate interest: Create useful information and high-quality content geared toward your prospective candidates’ appeal. Do this by establishing a content schedule, ensuring you use consistent information related to your existing campaign. Regularly adding new content keeps potential candidates engaged and thinking about your company.
• Nurture decision-making: Appeal to potential applicants by showcasing what your company can offer them. Highlight the role, benefits, compensation, and any other relevant information that can help make the decision-making process easier. What makes your organization stand out when compared to others in your field?
• Drive action: The best way to drive action from candidates is to simplify the application process. Removing unnecessary qualifications is an excellent way to expand your candidate pool for job openings in the future. The more candidates to choose from, the better chance of finding the best fit for the job.

When determining your recruitment marketing strategy, consider your own consumer preferences. When you land on a site that doesn’t capture your interests, chances are you move on to a different one. Job candidates have the same mentality. Subpar recruitment marketing will likely deter candidates from wanting to work for your company, pushing them toward an open position with a competitor.