Tips for Adopting a Recruitment Marketing Mindset

Recruiting leaders need to think more like marketers.

Similar to marketing a product or service, today’s recruiting teams must focus on specific ad campaigns to reach the most qualified candidate audience by using a multi-channel job marketing approach. After all, every other employer is fighting for the same talent so how will your company stand out?

Your focus should be on attracting, engaging, and developing candidates who haven’t yet applied to a job, using your unique employer value proposition to turn them into applicants. This type of conversion is inherently not a skillset most recruiting teams have, therefore you need to bring in more marketing experts to fill out your staff. We’d recommend hiring a Recruitment Marketing Manager and perhaps even a copywriter to help craft your messaging.

Their first order of business should be defining your target personas. Personas are a blueprint designed to help you understand your ideal candidates. These identities, once you have them down on paper, will help you develop relevant and useful recruitment marketing content designed for that target audience.

You’ll probably require several personas – one for entry-level candidates, another for management, and still more for specific jobs like customer service, engineer or developer. Think of them as a reverse job description.

All of the personas you develop should include elements of top talent, but it will be helpful if you have those which focus on your hiring managers’ experience and skills wish list for their team members.

Include information about who these candidates are in real life. Include passive candidates in these personas and show where they go for development, community, and social networking. Ask your team what types of TV shows and entertainment do they consume? What types of schools or trade licenses would they have? Where do they tend to hang out in real life and online?

The answers to those questions will help you better target those individuals.

Planning Your Recruitment Marketing Campaign

Once you’ve found your top candidate, you should focus on these areas when building your recruitment marketing campaigns:

• Job Descriptions.  Start to think of your JD’s as landing pages. That is how a marketer sees them. Are they optimized for converting clicks into applies? Do they make it easy for the seeker to apply quickly? The best way to optimize is by allowing them to apply right on the page, or at the very least start the apply process by entering a name and email. You might even add in text reminders that will send them a link to the job so they can apply later. If you are going to pay for traffic to these pages it is imperative you optimize them for conversions.

• Use Tech to Target. Targeted outreach via social media as well as programmatic job ad offerings will help you optimize your ad spend. After finding where your top choices spend their time, you can target them through Social media. For instance we’ve heard Twitter is good for advertising to sales people. While Facebook is better for blue collar and entry level workers. One way to make your ad campaign successful is to highlight the training and development programs your company offers to employees. Remind them what makes working for you different/special.

• A/B test your campaigns. Marketers always test to determine which messages and pages are working best. Measure to determine which ads work best, as well as the best email messages and subject lines for candidate outreach and social messages. Then, rinse and repeat for each campaign. Let data be your guide.

• Leverage the press. PR outreach through press releases, interviews, awards, and other milestones is a great way to improve your recruitment marketing efforts. If you aren’t ready to hire in-house PR staff or a marketer dedicated to working on outreach, assign an HR team member the job of maintaining and building media contact lists and communicating with them regularly.Your company PR should reach out to job seekers, recruiters, career experts, and HR influencers. Share the work your company has been doing with others who are interested in hearing about new career sites and successful strategies to attract talent. There are lots of great career and recruiting podcasts out there, those shows can be great for spreading your hiring message!

• Use your career site to provide helpful information about life at your firm. Your career site is a key part of branding and attracting candidates to your job postings. It’s a place to shape your message. So it should be more than just a page with job listings. It should be designed to move candidates into your recruitment funnel. Add content such as employee stores, FAQs and include LOTS of images and video. The career site should be mainly a visual experience.

• Graphics/imagery. Having a graphic designer on staff or on loan from your marketing department will be extremely useful. Use video testimonials, custom images, and real world pics of your employees in action. Use header images and profile photos on social media and make accounts available to employees and recruiters for increased branding.

Wrap It Up

If you haven’t spent much time or resources on defining your employer brand, you’ better get started. Your employer brand messaging (which includes job postings) shouldn’t cover what your company is most proud of; rather, it should be targeted towards the candidate in terms of ‘what’s in it for them’ if they come to work for you.

Additionally, there should be frequent measurements of your employer brand strength, including its impact on job applications, and your efforts adapted for continuous improvement.

Implementing a recruiting marketing approach for recruitment will bring about changes in your employer branding, prospect attrition, and scale of candidate outreach. A successful recruitment marketing approach will result in a reduction in your low impact recruiting tasks, allowing your company to focus on recruiting top quality hires and innovators that may not respond to standard hiring methods.

Focusing on data-driven decision making tools, such as KPIs and A/B testing, that provides you with the ability to make decisions based on hard data regarding employer branding, recruitment advertising and job posting placement.