How to Create Value With a Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Since 2020, the Brolik team has received a surge in requests from clients to help promote open job positions with recruitment marketing. Now, many of our clients have prioritized recruiting and having an evergreen recruitment marketing strategy so that they have sufficient qualified staff to field leads coming in and reap the rewards of their marketing efforts. When marketing pays off and clients begin to struggle with managing the flow of customers, getting quality team members hired and onboarded quickly becomes a crucial initiative. 

With a recruitment marketing strategy, companies can speed up the hiring process. Taking the time to build a strategy that aligns with your core values and resonates with your ideal employees can help you find better candidates and fill your open positions.

What is recruitment marketing?

Just as you promote your product or service on paid platforms like Facebook or Google Ads, you can leverage paid advertising to attract potential employees. With the help of paid placements, you can advertise your open positions to a specific audience who are more likely to meet your qualifications. Recruitment marketing goes beyond filling a select few openings and it brings in lots of applications with a steady flow of quality candidates. 

As you define your audience and craft your messaging to speak to them, you’ll also need to think about how your company nurtures applicants from an initial resume submission to a final round interviewee — how do you move people through the recruitment marketing funnel? Just like the product marketing funnel, understanding your recruitment marketing funnel allows you to dig into ways to see candidates all the way through from attracting, engaging, and delighting potential employees to help you achieve your recruitment goals. 

How can recruiting as a marketing initiative help me?

Recruiting has become more competitive than ever as job seekers become more discerning about where they will apply their skills. The labor market has also become more competitive since 2020 as employees make career changes and certain industries are in need of workers. Employers can no longer post an opening and have applicants flock to them. Being thoughtful about how you present yourself and what you have to offer can level the playing field. If you’re struggling to fill open positions, consider recruitment marketing to help with:

Reaching more qualified candidates: 

With paid promotion, you can get in front of more people than if you rely on organic efforts, but you can also reach the right candidates faster when you leverage advertising platforms’ algorithms to match you with the right audience.

Encouraging candidates to complete the recruitment process: 

If you notice that many of your prospective candidates drop out of the recruitment process, effective recruitment marketing can help nurture them to the final rounds of the hiring process.

Improving your employee retention: 

Hiring the right employee who aligns with your company values and the skills you need makes you more likely to retain them, unlike a mediocre candidate who may not stick it out with you.

Decreasing overall hiring costs: 

While creating a recruitment marketing strategy takes time and resources, it will pay off in the long run when you can reliably hire and retain new employees who align with your company values and the skills you need.

Growing your company: 

The legwork you need to create a solid recruitment campaign will serve you for years to come and help you maintain a solid recruitment pipeline.

Hiring quickly:

With a solid recruitment pipeline, you can fill positions much faster since you will already have a wide offering of applicants instead of needing to start from scratch.

Building your reputation: 

Nobody wants to work with a company with a tortuous hiring process, and taking a holistic look at your recruitment process can help you solidify what makes your company unique while providing a positive experience for applicants.

How to Start Recruitment Marketing

1. Understand your goals

As with any marketing campaign, the best results come from thorough and strategic planning. You need to start with understanding your goals so you can tailor your campaigns to your desired outcome. Are you looking to fill a specific role? Do you want to build up your pipeline of potential candidates across departments? Knowing your goals will help you ensure you design the right campaign. 

2. Know your audience

It’s crucial to deeply understand the kind of candidates you want to attract. Think about the qualities your top employees have and which skills employees will need to excel at the jobs you’re recruiting for. You can start by talking to your current employees to get a sense of what soft skills the job requires outside of the job description or what qualities an ideal coworker would have. 

Talk to supervisors and hiring managers to get details about who they’re looking to hire, outside of the usual qualifications like years of experience or track record in a specific industry. Being specific about what you’re looking for in a candidate will save you time later in the hiring process because you’ll have a clear picture of the qualities you need for an applicant to be worth your time.

3. Find what makes you unique

Knowing what your company has to offer, and understanding why your employees value your company, can help you attract the right candidates. Recruiting is more than explaining a job description — you need to sell your company as well. Talking with your current employees can help you determine what they value about your company culture and what to highlight in job descriptions to attract the best employees. 

No matter what makes you appealing to potential employees, you need to be able to get specific about those selling points. If you work with a great roster of clients, be specific about who they are and how you help them. If you emphasize work-life balance, talk about how that shows in your policies or workplace culture.

4. Create employee personas

Once you determine who you’re trying to reach and what you can offer as an employer, you’ll want to take your work a step further and create employee personas. Like customer personas for your products, you should have a thorough understanding of top candidates’ skills, qualities, and attributes. Not only will it help you identify your ideal candidate when their resume comes along, but it will determine the best way to speak to them. 

You don’t want to waste all your prep work by not knowing what appeals to your ideal employee. With employee personas, you can understand who you’re trying to attract so you can pick the right advertising platform, media type, and messaging to appeal to them. Again, employee interviews are a great tool. If you can understand what makes your star employees so great at their job, then you have better chances at reaching people like them with your recruitment marketing efforts.

5. Craft your job description

All of the above steps lead to creating the perfect job description that communicates the job responsibilities, clearly positions your company values and perks, and speaks directly to your ideal employee. Starting with the meat of the posting, you need a clear description of the hard and soft skills that will qualify a candidate, as well as the daily responsibilities. 

Be sure to do some keyword research around job titles and skills to make sure you’re using the right terms, since there is always an element of search engine optimization to any job description. If you speak about the role in the same way a candidate searches for it, you will drastically increase discoverability.

Beyond that, it’s crucial to work in messaging about why people would want to work with your company and highlight specific perks you offer. The best job descriptions, like this one from Zappos, explain responsibilities and show off the company culture, so that applicants have a clear understanding both of the position and the environment. 

You’ll want to highlight your company culture and the benefits of the role in a way that appeals to your target applicant. Remember to be specific about the perks, and testimonials are a great way to do that. Showcase stories from your employees that highlight what they do, what your company is like, and how teams collaborate to solve problems. “Day in the life” content works great for this, and any other way you can get personal testimonials from your team.

It’s important to keep in mind that people value different things — what you consider a perk may not be a perk to applicants. Be sure to think about your employee personas and what would appeal to them. For example, if you’re looking to fill an entry level position, focusing on the independence a role offers may come off as a lack of support for someone just starting their career, so highlighting a collaborative team may be the better option.   

Creating a Recruitment Marketing Strategy

One of the most important things to remember when planning recruitment advertising is that you’re trying to encourage a specific audience to take a desired action, as with any product advertisement. So, you should build your campaign strategy as if you were selling a product, meaning you craft campaign goals and messaging with your audience and product (your job opening) in mind. To be successful with your recruitment advertising efforts, there are a few considerations.

1. Decide on your key metrics

Decide what secondary goals will be important to you so you have a way to measure success outside of roles filled. A recruitment marketing strategy can help you build your hiring pipeline, so you need smaller goals besides the desired number of new hires. Your first campaign may not be successful in terms of roles filled, and that’s ok. You just need some way to evaluate your learnings and the smaller goals you achieved along the way so you can improve for your next campaign.

2. Review your application process

Recruiting isn’t just about getting candidates in the door, but helping them through the process until you find the right team member. Make it as easy as possible to complete the recruiting process and remove any barriers to entry. Think about the time commitment of your interviewing process and whether you can cut that down with virtual interviews. 

Another opportunity to streamline is in the number of interview rounds you hold. Multiple rounds of interviews put a lot of pressure on the candidate in addition to dragging out your hiring process. Try to limit the number of interview rounds you require for candidates, by combining multiple interviews into one and making sure that each interview is getting you the information you need to make the right decision. We recommend reviewing the process after each hire to understand what could be changed or improved.

3. Find the right platforms

You want to meet your target audience where they live. Different people will use different social media platforms or job search sites, so you don’t want to completely miss the mark by choosing the wrong platform. Consider the age of your audience, where they’re likely to spend their free time, and what point of their career they’re in. Do some research on the major demographics of big platforms and what their users might be looking for. Don’t overlook niche platforms either. Take time to research relevant job boards, industry sites, or local platforms that you can take advantage of to reach people in your industry or city. 

To tailor your campaigns to your employee personas, think about where they spend their time and whether boosting an opening on LinkedIn or appearing in Google ads will be more effective. Chipotle found success with advertising open entry level positions on TikTok, but for an executive director role, LinkedIn may serve you better — it’s all about your audience. Knowing your platform also helps you determine messaging since you won’t use the same dry, professional tone for a LinkedIn posting as an Instagram hiring ad.

4. Implement tracking

Tracking enables you to know where candidates are coming from and which campaigns are successful. Tracking is one of the most helpful tools for marketers as it shows what ads on which platforms lead to quality conversions, in this case quality resumes. Knowing which ads appealed to your audience can help you improve your testing plans and learn what to emphasize in future campaigns. 

5. Have a testing plan

Testing is important because it gives you opportunities to optimize your messaging and creative. Rarely does any marketer hit the nail on the head with the first ad they create because it will always be more of an art than a science. Give yourself the best chance at reaching and addressing your target audience with some audience testing and creative testing.

6. Leverage your employees’ networks

An effective way to spread the word that you’re hiring is through your current employees. Having them post about job openings on social media can help broaden the net you cast, plus you get more trustworthy referrals. Consider encouraging employees to share that you’re hiring with referral bonuses, asking them to share job postings, or having employees reach out to potential candidates in their networks. 

Even if you promote your openings with paid posts, getting the word out can still make your ads more effective. Maybe someone in your employees’ networks sees your ad and passes the first time around, but after seeing that someone they know works for you will encourage them to send their resume in this time.

How to Move Forward With Your Learnings

Once you launch your campaigns, it’s important to analyze, test, and optimize as they run so you can get the most out of your ads. But, many people forget to go back and evaluate performance after the campaigns end. Taking the time to assess your campaigns can help you decide if recruitment advertising is the right fit for you. 

Return to the initial KPIs you established and see how your campaigns performed. Think about whether recruitment advertising helped you reach your goals, or showed promising ROI. Take a critical look at the platforms you used, the creative you ran, and the quality of your candidates. Think about how you can improve upon your efforts, nurture applicants throughout the funnel, and continue to hone your messaging to attract qualified candidates.  

The biggest benefit of a recruitment marketing strategy is building a pipeline that you can tap into when roles open up. Your strategy should be ongoing, whether you constantly run ads or have organic efforts in the background. Recruiters can help with this, or you can build up your reputation on sites like Glassdoor. Remember, like with any marketing, there’s a learning curve before you nail down what works for your company and your audience, so don’t let one mediocre campaign prevent you from tapping into valuable recruitment marketing.

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While smaller companies with limited resources and budgets may be hesitant to invest in recruitment advertising, there is a lot of value to be mined when you approach it strategically. Especially since there are endless job postings online, paid promotion is a must if you want to be seen these days. If you’re serious about finding the right candidates for your open positions, recruitment marketing can help you be seen and reach your ideal candidates. 

If you’d like to partner with us to define your recruitment strategy and execute on it to fill your funnel with qualified candidates, drop us a line today.