Finding top talent and attracting the best workers for open job positions can be a common challenge many organizations still face today.
Yup! Even when people are looking for new opportunities, it’s easy for your company to get lost in the noise.
Certainly, you can throw a few social media posts out there and include your open positions on a job board and get tons of applications.
The problem is: what is the quality of these candidates? How do you ensure a strong ongoing talent pipeline and that your ideal candidates are finding your company and interested in applying?
That’s where recruitment marketing comes in.
Recruitment Marketing Benefits
Recruitment marketing includes various communications that your company will utilize to engage potential hires.
It includes leveraging technology and marketing techniques to build a solid employer brand, organically attract top talent, and create a more ideal candidate experience.
What are all the benefits of recruitment marketing?
- Better alignment on hiring goals and helps create a strategy
- Builds a better and more engaged pipeline of top candidates
- Tighter employer brand that people gravitate towards
- Lowers overall hiring costs and time to hire a candidate
- Grows enthusiasm and engagement from the start of the hiring process
- More brand awareness that can drive “word of mouth hiring”
- Increases reach and diversity of qualified candidates
Much of recruitment marketing may fall on the marketing team to help, but pending your company size, it should definitely include: employer branding roles, recruiters, talent acquisition, and anyone else in HR that may play a pivotal role in the hiring process.
The challenge is that many teams only use traditional playbooks to attract candidates. Instead, there are some unique recruitment marketing tips that your company must consider implementing to gain a competitive advantage.
But before I get into some of those tips, I want to share some stats around recruitment marketing.
Recruitment Marketing Statistics
- Talent shortages in the United States have risen to historical levels with 69% of employers having difficulty filling jobs – the highest in more than a decade. (ManpowerGroup’s Talent Shortage survey)
- Employee referrals have the highest applicant to hire conversion rate – only 7% of applicants are via employees, but this accounts for 40% of all new hires. (Jobvite)
- 1 in 10 hires in today’s job market came directly from content, engagement, or interaction between a recruiter and candidate on social media. (Aspiration Marketing)
- 30.9% of employers said receiving too many irrelevant applicants was their number one challenge when recruiting through an online job board, website, or community, while 22.6% cited receiving too many under qualified applicants. (iHire)
- 86% of HR professionals agree that recruitment is becoming more like marketing. (iCIMS)
- Companies that use Recruitment Marketing are 13% more likely to have a higher percentage of employees who rate themselves as highly engaged. (Aberdeen)
- The use of social media for recruitment has grown 54% in the past 5 years. (SHRM)
Recruitment Marketing Tips To Boost Pipeline
If you are on this post then you probably know a few things about your current hiring status:
- You realize your company needs to do a better job
- You are ready to build a better talent pipeline ASAP
- Your recruiting efforts right now might be broken
- You recognize it’s time to implement new ideas
The below recruitment marketing tips will get you started on the right path.
Remember, your talent pipeline won’t magically improve overnight. But the sooner you strategize and begin implementing changes, you’ll start to see steady results that can then rapidly accelerate over time.
1. Create better content around the employee experience
According to some research, today’s current job market is 90% candidate-driven. Guess what that means? Your company is no longer in control of choosing the talent. Instead, the talent decides if they want to pick you!
That means, the employee experience needs to improve and entice people to want to work for your company.
A great way to do that is to stack your employer brand and use content to drive home what you might experience not only working for the company, but during your interview phases.
Showcase the work culture, create content on the blog or social related to your hiring process, interview current employees about their experience in hiring, give audiences a sense of who the recruiters they might be talking to will be.
You can use this content as a dedicated hiring page on your website or just across various channels as you build up your employer brand.
2. Activate employees to expand your recruiting efforts
Marketing and sales teams have been utilizing an employee advocacy strategy for a few years now, but you might not realize the impact it has on recruiting, too.
A major way to get more top talent is through the networks of current employees. Think about it this way, we found the average employee has 1,000 connections conservatively.
Let’s say you have 200 employees helping share recruiting content, creating content about their work culture, and sharing open job opportunities. That’s an additional reach of 200,000!
And the data already shows us how valuable social media is to recruiting:
- 79% of job applicants use social media in their job search. (Glassdoor)
- Job seekers rank social media and professional networks as the most useful job search resource compared to job boards, job ads, recruiting agencies, and recruiting events. (CareerArc)
- When asked which employee-shared content consumers found most relevant, recruiting rose to the top: 30% of consumers find job posting useful. (EveryoneSocial)
That’s where the EveryoneSocial platform can help as it keeps everything organized, easy to share, and tracks how the content is doing. Plus, it’s a great way to share important information to employees and celebrate new hires.
Don’t forget the power of employee-generated content, too! While it’s great to have employees sharing job positions and content curated by your company, ensure they can create authentic content themselves, which others can also share.
3. Incorporate more employee stories
Activating employees on social media and to help create content is a huge driver of building the talent pipeline. And another recruitment marketing tip that goes with this well is incorporating more employee stories in everything you do.
According to LinkedIn, “candidates trust the company’s employees 3x more than the company to provide credible information on what it’s like to work there.” So let employees be the face of the brand for culture and hiring needs. They are the most trusted resources for potential candidates to learn about what it’s really like working at the company.
Showcase them as they talk about their work, hobbies, life at your company and make that visible on the website, social media, emails, recruiter pages, etc.
And besides helping build credibility, it humanizes your company more and shows that you genuinely want to highlight members of the organization.
Now you can’t force employees to want to be a market of recruitment marketing materials, but give them reasons so they can’t say no! That means work on the work culture, provide career growth, highlight employees often, and recognize their value, etc.
All these things will make it easier for employees to genuinely want to talk about their work and how much they enjoy their job. It’s no easy feat, but employee stories are critical to boost your talent pool.
4. Use an interactive quiz to engage potential hires
The idea of using quizzes for website and visitor engagement is not new, but have you considered using it in your hiring process?
If you are focused on building a strong recruiting process, quizzes can be a great way to:
- Educate potential candidates on the company
- Help candidates explore and understand the company values
- Find out if they are a good fit for the company and culture
- Answer questions that may suggest the right roles for them
- Show off some company personality and transparency
Typically, the hiring process can be pretty mundane and can also be stressful to those looking for their new gig.
Break up the bland and traditional corporate approach and mix in things that make the process less intimidating, more interesting, and the candidate more pumped about potential opportunities.
Quizzes won’t solve everything, but if you make it simple, engaging, and interesting — it can certainly help drum up more excitement and creatively share information to help candidates navigate the recruiting process.
5. Create educational content about opportunities for career development
I mentioned earlier about the value of content marketing, social media, and getting more social engagement from employees — but your content efforts do not end there.
Besides the content about employees and culture, you’ll want to develop material that shows how employees can grow professionally.
Candidates want more opportunities to grow within the organization, develop their knowledge, and be recognized for their great work. Make it super obvious how your company works to empower career development and showcase that in your content.
Interview employees about their professional growth, and talk to executives about the career development opportunities the company offers. Drive home the value of learning and skill growth in your organization.
Videos and blog posts are great ways to get this information out and will be more discoverable as people search about the company.
You want to make it as easy as possible to get people excited about the opportunities your company offers beyond just a salary and benefits package.
Recruitment Marketing Examples
Okay, so you got some recruitment marketing tips and hopefully they trigger some creative ideas to attract talent.
But even then, you might still be wondering what to do next or need some inspiration.
Below, I pulled some recruitment marketing examples from companies that have mastered the art of attracting the best candidates.
Beyond the links to their career pages, take a look at their social media accounts and content to get an idea of how they approach recruiting.
You’ll see lots of information, cool content, and employees helping spread the awareness of working for the company.
