It’s a tough time to be hiring new employees. Companies across industries seem to have open roles to fill. In an employees’ market, how can you set yourself apart? More and more HR and talent acquisition departments are turning to marketing and advertising to find new ways to reach potential candidates. Let’s take a closer look at how branding, marketing and advertising can be leveraged to hire the right candidates for your open positions.
Why Recruitment Marketing?
Traditionally, when HR and talent acquisition teams have a job to fill, they share about the job itself. However, in today’s competitive environment, candidates are increasingly interested in more than just the role they’ll fill. They want to work for a company with a brand, mission and values that align with their own. It’s no longer enough to just post about your job opening. Recruiters must also be continually sharing about their brand, work culture and values. In fact, back in 2017, Glassdoor found that “Organizations that invest in employer branding are three times more likely to make a quality hire.”
Additionally, there are more ways to connect with potential candidates than ever before. With social media, email and digital advertising, you can start to pique the interest of talent before they head to a job board. Since most job seekers are passive, meaning they already have a job but are open to new opportunities, this is a huge chance for recruiters to make the right impression. Using a marketing approach to continually share engaging information about your brand and company culture will help you stay top of mind for potential candidates when a position that’s a good fit for them becomes available.
How to Get Started
How do you start leveraging recruitment marketing for yourself? Let’s take a look at how this might work at a high level.
1. Branding
Does your company have a strong brand? As an HR or recruitment professional, are you familiar with it? Recruitment marketing should be a team effort among the brand/marketing teams and HR. Identify the key mission, vision and values of the brand and come up with ways to talk about who you are, what you stand for and what you have to offer as a brand that would appeal to potential job seekers.
2. Awareness
Start increasing the overall awareness of your company with paid advertising. This could be in the form of more general, brand-based ads, but it’s likely your marketing team is already covering that angle. Work with your marketing team to craft eye-catching creative that speaks directly to the benefits of working for your company or the pain points candidates might be having in their current role. Offer to fix their work-life challenges. Then put those messages where your candidates spend their time, like on social media networks.
3. Interest
After you’ve built awareness, you can continue to interact with potential candidates who showed interest in your message and brand through your owned channels, like your blog, organic social media posts and website. Share content through newsletters and social channels about your company, what makes it a great place to work and examples of your mission in action, and lead candidates to your blog or company culture landing page to get more information and continue to engage with your brand.
4. Drive Action
Once you have potential candidates engaging with your content, share your job openings with them and invite them to join your team by submitting an application. Take a look at your application process during this stage—it’s important that it’s quick and easy to apply. A complicated or cumbersome process might lead candidates to drop out before submitting an application.
All in all, by taking a slightly different approach and investing a little extra money in your talent recruitment, you could see big gains by giving recruitment marketing a try. Want help crafting a recruitment marketing strategy or honing your brand message? We can help. Reach out to our team today to start a conversation.