Do your job opportunities often get lost in the sea of online job boards and social media noise? Finding top talent can feel like aimlessly navigating a labyrinth without effective recruitment tactics. Recruitment marketing is all about precision in targeting the right candidates. It’s crucial to reach the right talent at the right time especially when time is of the essence.

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This article will explore everything you need to know about broadcasting open roles and letting your employer branding shine so you entice the right talent. Let’s begin!

Article Roadmap

• What Is Recruitment Marketing?
• Importance
• Recruitment Marketing Funnel
• How To Build a Strategy
• Best Practices
• FAQs
• Next Steps

What Is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the process of attracting potential hires to apply for job openings by strategically using marketing techniques. The method includes vital marketing principles like employer branding, communication and value proposition to potential hires. The goal is to create awareness, interest and engagement in the talent market to ultimately acquire and retain talent.

Importance

Times are changing, and the same old recruitment route no longer works. Gone are the days of listing job opportunities across job boards and expecting top talent to walk through the door.

The modern talent market is evolving. Their expectations from potential employers, job search methods and motivations are changing too. Recruitment efforts need to be strategic and precise for the following:

Modern job seekers are taking to the internet for opportunities. A typical online job search entails looking for vacancies using the right search terms. If you’re not using the proper channels, you’ll likely lose excellent candidates to your competition.

Reactive recruiting is a thing of the past. Failing to proactively talent search in this shrunken talent market is a massive mistake. Managing elements you can control, like your branding, company culture and social media channels, is key to crafting an excellent long-term authority in the talent market.

Job seekers looking for work parallel consumers buying a product or service. A younger generation is taking over the talent market, and they’re the most value-driven demographic yet. Modern job seekers weigh their options and prioritize employers and workplaces that align with their goals.

Your reputation matters. Potential hires are likely to scrutinize your brand and look for clues to determine whether what your company showcases matches reality. In other words, does your organization talk the talk and walk the walk?

In a nutshell, strategically broadcasting your company’s values and opportunities is vital for the following reasons:

• Talent and job searches are online processes. Outreach tactics help you adapt to a dynamic job market.
• Your company’s ability to attract top talent depends on your authority in the job market.
• Job seekers act like consumers before buying a product, making it vital to use marketing principles.
• Social media channels and online reviews influence the decision to apply for or accept a job.

Using marketing tactics helps craft a recruiting strategy by managing elements you can control: providing excellent candidate experiences, ensuring a smooth application process and communicating transparently throughout the candidate journey.

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Recruitment Marketing Funnel

When you think like a marketer throughout the talent acquisition process, you learn to leverage your company’s culture and values to attract suitable candidates. That personal touch of engaging potential hires as potential buyers is necessary to entice top talent.

Job seekers go through a similar journey as consumers. The funnel or candidate journey is the pipeline through which candidates go from finding a job opportunity to becoming an applicant. It’s similar to a traditional marketing funnel but specifically tailored for the recruitment process.

1. Awareness: This is the stage where potential candidates find job vacancies through various channels like job boards, career websites or social media. The focus is on attracting the right candidates by building your employer brand.
2. Interest: This is when job seekers engage more deeply with your campaigns. They may read the job description and requirements and learn about your company’s culture and values. To ensure positive interactions, developing suitable content and creating targeted messages to pique interest is vital.
3. Decision: At this stage, candidates evaluate the pros and cons of applying to your organization. Top considerations include salary, perks, company culture, career growth opportunities and work-life balance. So it’s vital to communicate the compelling reasons for choosing your organization.
4. Application: Certain candidates will complete the application process once you generate interest. This stage involves submitting resumes, cover letters and completing online forms. Ensuring the candidate experience is smooth and hassle-free encourages candidates to take this final step and avoid opting out.

Recruitment marketing handles the first half of the recruitment process when the goal is to spread the word, engage candidates and encourage more people to apply.

How To Build a Strategy

Although we revealed a typical candidate journey, it’s often not linear. Candidates will enter or exit at different stages depending on their journeys.

Following are the steps to create a successful strategy that considers all candidate types and communication tactics to encourage them to apply regardless of the stage:

1. Set Goals

Starting on the right foot is critical to making impactful hires. So, the first step is to define clear, specific and achievable goals that align with your overall talent acquisition strategy.

Hiring goals can vary from business to business, so it’s important to understand your talent needs first and then identify what it takes to achieve those requirements.

For example, your goals might include attracting a certain number of qualified candidates, reducing time-to-hire or improving candidate quality. Identifying recruitment metrics to measure, these recruitment KPIs act like the yellow brick road to follow.

2. Assemble Your Team

The right team brings a range of skills, perspectives and expertise to the table, helping you execute your plans effectively. Identify the key people to take charge of different aspects of the recruiting efforts.

A well-rounded team includes recruiters, HR professionals and hiring managers. Define roles and responsibilities, establish communication channels and equip everyone with the right tools and resources to drive your strategy forward.

3. Define Your Talent Pool

Like how traditional marketing involves creating a buyer persona, recruiting the right talent requires defining your ideal candidate. Knowing the characteristics, skills and values to look for helps you target candidates you want to reach and resonate with them effectively.

Understand your target candidates’ demographics, interests, experience levels, work preferences and motivations and the critical requirements for the role.

Analyze your target segments, like fresh graduates, seasoned professionals or passive candidates. These nuanced characteristics help you develop communication campaigns that effectively reach and resonate with your preferred candidates.

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4. Select Recruitment Channels

Recruitment channels are the vehicles you need to reach your ideal candidates effectively. Start by identifying where your potential hires spend their time. Prioritize high-traffic channels where your target audience is most active.

Here are the most common options:

• Job Boards: Utilize popular job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor and Monster to advertise job openings.
• Company Career Websites: Display open roles and job opportunities on a dedicated company career website. Display active jobs with the necessary details and encourage interested candidates to apply by adding links to online forms.
• Social Media Platforms: Social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are excellent tools to showcase your employer brand, share your company’s journey and announce job opportunities.
• Employee Referrals: Encourage existing employees to tap into their social circles and recommend potential hires.
• Career Fairs: Access talent communities by building and nurturing candidate relationships via campus events, industry associations and webinars.
• Email Marketing: Send targeted emails to candidates to promote job openings or upcoming events. Email campaigns and newsletters are effective ways to reconnect with past candidates who didn’t make the cut last time or passive candidates who might not be actively looking for a job.

Recruitment isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. Different candidates interact with your company differently. Choosing the right recruitment channels depends on how well you know your candidate pool.

For example, to bring fresh perspectives into your organization and have entry-level positions available, consider joining university events to identify young talent.

Yet, the same approach isn’t feasible for an intermediate role. Difficult positions require focused efforts and keeping tabs on potential hires who might not be actively looking for jobs.

5. Calculate Your Budget

In your quest to hire top talent, you’ll want to maintain financial stability throughout the process. Allocating a budget bridges what’s required and what’s possible.

Ensuring that the return on investment of your chosen talent-sourcing channels outweighs the costs is the key to keeping everyone involved happy, stakeholders and shareholders.

Once you’re clear about your recruitment goals, ideal candidates and selected channels, consider the expenses of getting your communication tactics up and running. Create a detailed budget that includes all necessary expenses and then review and adjust as needed.

Common costs include job postings, social media ads, referral bonuses, content creation tools, and recruiting tech.

6. Develop a Content Calendar

A content calendar is your blueprint for effectively planning and organizing your recruitment channels, communication campaigns and job postings. A calendar ensures you have a relevant content strategy.

Start by outlining the different content materials, like topics and formats, and the distribution channels for these initiatives. Align your content with your target candidates’ preferences, candidate journey stages and recruitment goals.

Develop a schedule and workflow to map out the content creation, approval and publishing stages to ensure a consistent and timely stream of live ads, posts and campaigns.

Tools to use:

• Spreadsheets: Shareable spreadsheets like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel are ideal for creating a calendar from scratch. Rename rows and columns appropriately and use dropdown features to add formats, outlines, topics and themes.
• Task Management Software: If you have existing collaboration software like Trello or Wrike, leverage the built-in calendar management feature to organize tasks and assign tasks.
• Project Management Tools: Check with your project management vendor for existing content calendar templates.

7. Test and Refine Your Strategy

The last step is fine-tuning your strategy over time to maximize success. Use data analytics to track your goals, check what’s working and identify weak links.

Monitor and measure performance using the predetermined key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with your goals. Continuous evaluation and adjustment ensure that your strategy fits your target audience’s needs and preferences, helping you achieve desired outcomes.

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Best Practices

Building and managing a strategy is an ongoing learning process. And while only trying and testing certain practices helps ascertain what works and what doesn’t, here are a few good habits to cultivate early on to start on the right foot:

1. Mix Up Paid and Organic Campaigns

Your goal might be to reach a wider audience. But when hiring for a specific job, not just anyone will do. With generic content and vague job ads, you’re dooming your recruiting team to a fate of neverending mismatched submissions and an ever-increasing list of disgruntled candidates who didn’t know what they were getting into.

So, you need to find ways to attract and access a specific target audience. The solution: Handpick talent sources to include a mix of paid campaigns and organic content.

As you establish credibility in your industry by actively posting about your company values, wins and culture, paid job campaigns give your job postings an extra boost. So, when inquisitive job seekers come across your job posting and decide to do a little digging, they’ll find all the right information when they check your social media or company website for more information.

2. Optimize Your Owned Channels

Your owned channels are like a window into your company. So when potential hires come looking, you want to ensure your company looks spick and span. Start with the basics:

• Ensure your career site is user-friendly, visually appealing and up-to-date with job openings and company news. Your company’s career website must be easy to navigate with intuitive features and accessible buttons and menus to avoid candidate drop-offs.
• Improve your mobile recruiting efforts. Google favors mobile-friendly career sites. Take the mobile-friendly test to assess your website’s design and ability to rank high in organic searches.
• The communication chasm between job seekers and employers is closing thanks to social media. According to data from Jobvite, 39% of candidates use social media sites to search for job opportunities. Update your social media profiles to stand out and create a strong employer brand.

3. Adopt a Storytelling Approach

Storytelling is a powerful way to connect with candidates and show them what makes your company unique. Share stories about your culture, values and company news to attract candidates with the same values on a deeper level.

Create content that showcases your employer brand and engages your target audience. This can include the following methods:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Newsletters
• Youtube videos

4. Manage Your Employer Brand on Review Sites

Review sites are a double-edged sword. They can make or break your reputation as an employer. A recent study by CareerPlug found poor experiences can have heavy implications. Negative candidate experiences compelled 28% of candidates to post negative reviews online, discouraging future candidates from applying.

Yet, the same study found that 57% of candidates left positive reviews after having a positive experience.

By managing your presence on review sites and responding to reviews, you can show candidates you care about their experience.

Manage your presence on review sites by responding to reviews and highlighting positive feedback to build a solid reputation.

5. Focus on Accessibility and Diversity

Inclusion isn’t just a buzzword. It’s essential for creating a diverse and healthy workplace. The benefits of supporting diverse and underrepresented candidates ripple across your organization and impact your company’s bottom line.

Optimizing your outreach efforts involves using inclusive language in job postings, partnering with diversity-focused organizations, adopting equitable hiring practices and providing accommodations for candidates with disabilities.

Your present and future employees want to work at a company that values their well-being and celebrates diversity. Infusing DEI efforts into your communication tactics attract a wide range of talent, helping you develop quality candidate pools that focus on what matters most: skills and expertise.

6. Use the Right Tools

Now for the final puzzle piece: recruitment software. You can have the most compelling job posts and a competent recruitment team, but your efforts will fall flat without the proper tools. Here are some software options to help streamline your recruitment marketing process:

• Recruitment Software: Automate time-consuming tasks like job postings, applicant tracking and resume parsing. This can save your recruitment team significant time, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities like candidate outreach and relationship-building.
• Recruitment CRM: Keep tabs on past applicants who left an impression and potential applicants with tools to manage candidate databases more effectively. Nurture different candidates and personalize communications to build stronger relationships.
• Candidate Relationship Management Tools: Manage interactions with candidates across various channels like email, social media and messaging platforms and identify effective talent sources. Gain a comprehensive view of communication history and provide timely responses and personalized follow-ups.
• AI-Based Analytics: Use machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyze recruitment data, candidate behavior, demographics and application sources. Identify patterns and insights to make informed decisions and improve your strategy’s effectiveness.

The right software helps you optimize your recruitment marketing process, save time and provide better candidate experiences. So, research and invest in the software that fits your recruitment needs.

Our comparison matrix is a good starting point. All you need to do is add your software requirements and let the framework generate your top options.

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FAQs

You’re ready to create a tailored strategy and achieve your recruitment goals. But first, let’s dive into some common questions about recruitment marketing that summarizes all the information and sets you off in the right direction:

1. What are the categories of recruitment marketing?

The essential elements to consider are:

• Recruitment Advertising: Utilizing various talent sourcing channels to promote job openings and employment opportunities strategically.
• Candidate Engagement: Strategies to attract and engage active and passive candidates and encourage them to consider applying at your organization.
• Employer Branding: Potential candidates notice when you take steps to build a positive and appealing company image. Job seekers prioritize workplaces that align with their values and provide the benefits they seek.
• Candidate Experience: Enhancing the candidate journey throughout the recruitment process by providing the right information, offering a smooth application process and using candidate relationship management to nurture and support potential hires at various stages.
• Talent Pipeline Management: Developing a talent pipeline based on different roles helps streamline candidate journeys when applications start pouring in and guide your team with clear next steps to engage with applicants.

2. Are recruitment and recruitment marketing similar?

The recruitment and marketing processes intertwine and closely relate but aren’t the same. The strategic focus of recruitment marketing is the first half of the recruitment phase: awareness, interest, decision making and application or action. In comparison, recruitment includes the talent evaluation stages.

3. What is the ROI of recruitment marketing?

The following are the top benefits of implementing outreach efforts:

1. Increased Quality of Hires: Attract top talent who are a good fit for your organization with a higher chance of long-term success.
2. Reduced Time-To-Fill: Shorten the time it takes to fill job openings by proactively engaging with candidates and building a talent pipeline.
3. Optimized Costs: Optimize advertising budgets and resources by targeting the right channels and audience.
4. Enhanced Employer Brand: Cultivate a positive employer brand, improving employee retention and engagement.
5. Improved Talent Acquisition: Build a sustainable long-term talent acquisition strategy focusing on long-term candidate engagement and relationship building.

4. What are the best recruitment marketing channels?

Common candidate outreach channels are:

• Social media platforms
• Paid job boards
• Company career website
• Employee referrals programs
• University or campus events
• Email Campaigns and newsletters

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Next Steps

It’s a dynamic talent market, and taking control of your engagement tactics is vital to connect with potential hires. Upgrading your recruitment marketing tactics lets you personalize touchpoints and use a multi-channel approach to nurture all candidate types.

Now that you’re ready to develop a strategy, consider how well your existing tech can support your team to do what they do best. Use our requirements template to determine which software requirements matter most to your company.

Did we miss any steps to create an effective strategy? Which recruiting channel is most important to your business? Let us know in the comments!