In today’s job market, it is not enough to simply post a job opening and wait for the applications to come rolling in. With employers competing for top talent, you need to put in the extra effort to make your company stand out. That’s why employers need to apply for recruitment marketing.
What Is a Recruitment Marketing All About?
Recruitment marketing refers to the process of building and communicating one organization’s employer brand and value proposition. Simply put, it is all about promoting your company as an “employer of choice” to potential candidates in order to attract, engage, and retain them.
Recruitment marketing plans are designed to serve just that purpose – they lay out different strategies and tactics to help employers cultivate brand awareness as well as visibility on the job market. A successful recruitment marketing plan will take into account your target audience, budget, and organizational goals. It will also consider the various stages of the candidate journey – from awareness all the way to conversion.
10 Innovative Recruitment Marketing Strategies That Work for Any Organization
Recruitment marketing strategies play a pivotal role in talent acquisition as they transform the way companies and organizations do recruitment in an efficient manner, as well as how they are perceived in the job market. When done right, recruitment marketing can bring a range of benefits to your organization. And the master plan of efficient recruitment marketing must be incorporated with the right strategies and tactics.
Optimize Your Website & Career Page
According to the Jobvite Recruiter Nation Report, 60% of employers are investing in website career pages. For organic visitors, your career page is the starting point of the whole candidate journey. Your website is the first port of call for many candidates who are looking for more information about your company. That’s why it’s important to make sure that your website career page is up-to-date, informative, and easy to navigate. Spend some time reviewing your website content and assess how well it communicates your employer’s brand and value proposition. Also, take a look at the overall design and user experience of your career page. Is it mobile-friendly? Does it reflect your brand identity? Is the application process straightforward? Make sure to address any pain points you identify to improve the candidate experience on your website.
Use Employee Advocacy to Promote Your Employer’s Brand
Employee advocacy is when your employees promote your employer’s brand on their personal social media channels. It’s a cost-effective way to amplify your reach and improve your chances of being found by top talent. According to the Hootsuite study, 52% of employers say that employee advocacy is either “somewhat effective” or “very effective” in improving employer branding. Employers can encourage their staff to share their experience as an employee as well as the company’s activities, updates, blog posts, etc., on their personal social media channels as a way to spread the spirit and culture of their organization. This provides prospective candidates with an insightful glimpse of what it is like when working for you, and it may somehow inspire them to learn more about your company.
Make Use of Employee Referral Programs
The employee referral program is one of the most populous methods to attract and acquire talent with 70% of employers using them to source candidates. Employee referral programs work by incentivizing your employees to refer friends and acquaintances who they think would be a good fit for your organization. Not only are referred candidates more likely to be hired, but they are also more likely to stay with the company for longer. By implementing employee referral programs, you can shorten the time-to-hire as well as save resources spent on recruitment activities and advertising.
Polish Your Brand Image on Social Media
No other better place to bring your brand closer to the potential candidates better than social media channels. Almost 90% of job seekers leverage social media in their job search. So, if you want to be visible to top talent, then you need to make sure that your social media presence is strong enough. Start by creating social media profiles for your company on the most popular platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Use these channels to share your positive workplace culture and updates about your company and job openings, as well as blog posts and articles that might be relevant to your target audience. You can also use social media to run targeted ads and promote your employer brand.
Be Mindful of Candidate Experience
Perhaps you do not know that 60% of job seekers acknowledge they have experienced a negative candidate experience when looking for jobs, and 72% of them decided to speak up publicly about their dissatisfaction. This means the experience you put the candidates through during the recruitment process partially reflects your corporate culture. And more crucially, the candidate’s experience may make or break the perception of job seekers about an employer. Unfortunately, a majority of employers are either a little bit too confident or too overworked to review their hiring process to identify what’s wrong with it or not. Over time, the unsolved issues may lead to more severe consequences, damaging the experience you offer your job applicants. Therefore, the HR department should incorporate candidate experience surveys as a necessary component of their full recruiting life cycle to constantly review and upgrade it per every candidate. You can utilize available software tools to simply design and customize easily as you want. Try bravoSURVEYS – the simplest yet most practical tool for creating surveys of all types.
Manage Company Reviews
Most companies care much more about what customers write about them than what their employees do, and they tend to ignore the feedback from current or former staff, both positive and negative. Based on the ReviewTrackers data, 94% of customers have avoided purchasing products or using services of a company due to its negative reviews. In the context of recruitment, things go in the same way. Nevertheless, your future employees are mindful of the public opinions about your company more than you thought.
Do not look at employees’ reviews in a pessimistic way or take them personally. Instead, be receptive and assess the reviews about your company – even if they aren’t easy to hear – in order to figure out what the problems are and come up with pragmatic solutions. Acting upon the employees’ reviews does not necessarily mean compromise; it means you are an open-minded and value-oriented employer. This is what the magnetic energy top talent definitely looks for in their future employer, and you are the one. So, don’t leave the company reviews unattended. Manage them in a proactive way to make sure your employees are heard and the right things must be done to improve the workplace.
Implement SEO-Friendly Job Postings
To ensure that your job postings are seen by the right candidates at the right time, employers should pay more attention to search engine optimization. This way, you can make sure that your jobs appear as high as possible in the search results when potential candidates are looking for relevant keywords. Start by using the right keywords in your job titles and descriptions. Use relevant industry-specific keywords as well as location-based keywords to make sure that your jobs appear in the search results of potential candidates who are located in your target area.
Leverage the Power of Video Marketing
You must have heard “Content is king,” and you can make use of various forms of “the king” for recruitment marketing to gain the best results. Perhaps written content does not work for a folder of audiences, but video content will. Video content marketing is one of the most effective approaches to reaching and engaging the targeted audience in the long term, especially when people nowadays are consuming more and more video content than ever before. YouTube, TikTok, Facebook videos, and Instagram reels are where you can position your company image and promote your brand, of course, with interesting and engaging content.
Employers can use videos to tell their brand story and highlight what makes your company a great workplace, as well as give the audience, especially the potential candidates, a glimpse of amazing things and moments that they don’t see every day from your organization. Regarding video marketing, it is crucial to focus on quality over quantity. Instead of trying to produce a large volume of content, the concentration should be on creating content that is high-quality and relevant to your target audience. You should also make sure that your videos are well-produced and offer value to potential candidates.
Participate in Job Fairs and Career Events
Attending job fairs and career events is a great way to connect with potential candidates face-to-face. Through job fairs or career events, you can approach the talent more directly and bring your brand value closer to the labor market. Also, through such activities, you are able to market your current open positions and collect resumes and contact information from potential candidates. However, taking part in job fairs or career events may be costly, and it also requires quite a lot of preparation, such as designing and printing marketing materials, researching the attendees, and so on. Therefore, make sure that you prepare everything carefully and plan ahead to make the most out of such an investment.
