Recruitment Marketing

No matter your business, as recruiters you’re in the business of people. People are key to the growth and success of any company, and building a team of diverse yet complementary personalities, passions, and skill sets is one of the most challenging aspects of any business.
The process of finding great candidates and convincing them to apply is complex, especially with the advent of Covid-19 reducing or eliminating opportunities to meet potential candidates at trade shows or events or enticing them to work at your organization without meeting the team in person. 
With these additional challenges, it requires a team-wide effort more than ever before. And this effort is actually quite similar to how marketers attract and convert clients. That’s where recruitment marketing comes into play.

I. What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the process of utilizing marketing strategies to promote your employer brand across the recruitment life cycle in order to attract, engage, and nurture relationships with qualified talent.
Recruitment marketing has slowly become both a strategy used by marketing professionals, human resources, and talent acquisition and an exciting career opportunity for many specialists. It's supported by a set of skills, practices, and technologies that have become essential for employers to compete for the best talent.
Implementing recruitment marketing automation software can simplify the whole process by building positive relationships with the candidates that fall into a specific talent pool. Recruiters can also save time by scheduling automated emails that allow candidates to see open job requisitions that are relevant to them.

II. Stages of Recruitment Marketing

Breaking down in easy bits, there are four stages in the recruitment marketing funnel:
1. Increase Awareness
Top talent can be found all over the world. The majority of applicants in the job market today, however, are passive, which means they aren't actively seeking employment.
Companies must promote their organization as a possible employer on sites where passive candidates hang out in order to attract exceptional candidates to an available position.
Above all else, it's critical to produce excellent content that will genuinely pique candidates' interest and position your business as an attractive job.
Given that there are now significantly fewer in-person trade conferences and events since the pandemic hit, content is increasingly becoming a key tool for reaching potential prospects.
2. Generate Interest
Now that you have their attention, you should give potential employees information that will spark their curiosity in your business. Your workplace branding strategy must be intimately related to and aligned with your content game plan.
Losing candidates because they have forgotten about your business or because they don't relate to your content is the last thing you want to happen.
In addition to ensuring that your story is being communicated thoughtfully, creating a robust content calendar with deadlines is a certain method to consistently spark interest among both passive and active applicants.
3. Nurture the Decision
Your net is cast, now it’s time to reel ‘em in. Candidates have repeatedly expressed interest in your business, but what sets your opportunity apart from that of the competition? You'll want to give more particular information about your business as a possible employer at this stage of the funnel.
It's time to advertise your vacant positions, perks, benefits, pay, and whatever else an applicant needs to know before deciding whether or not to apply.
According to a Gallup study report, giving employees the option to work remotely permanently rather than just during Covid-19 is a benefit that resonates highly with American workers.
4. Drive Action
Candidates may seriously contemplate working for your organization as their next career step, but there are a number of barriers that keep them from applying.
To begin with, it takes a lot of effort for candidates to develop position-specific resumes, cover letters, and portfolios for jobs that might never be evaluated. The application and selection process could be made simpler as one solution. Remove any pointless eligibility and application criteria, and provide them with all the juicy specifics of your offer, including compensation information.
Even if a candidate gets this far and applies but decides not to go through with an interview, keep going. Add them to your list of potential hires. They might become interested in your company in the future, as it may not have been the ideal moment or situation for them to pursue it.
If you are making your opportunities available to remote workers across the country and the world, your candidate pool also expands exponentially.

III. Benefits of Recruitment Marketing

Following are some of the key benefits of adopting recruitment marketing:

1. Encouraging employee engagement
   Recruitment marketing helps engage the HR department and the entire workforce. Marketing a company's brand allows everyone, especially in HR teams, to contribute their thoughts. Employees can also share their experiences to help prospective candidates understand the reasons to join the organization. Often, the potential candidates are particularly interested in learning about work life and the possibilities of career advancement when they seek new opportunities.
2. Getting feedback
   An effective recruitment marketing strategy includes gathering candidates' feedback by allowing feedback on various job postings or by utilizing emails asking for feedback. The comments may help identify valuable information, such as the components of the job listing which attracted them to apply and part of the hiring process they found of lesser relevance. This can help identify the key areas to improve, which may enhance the hiring process in the future.
3. Monitoring effectiveness
   HR professionals usually gather extensive information about prospective candidates regularly. They also monitor the success of different hiring techniques in attracting suitable candidates. Analyzing the cost and duration, along with the success rate of the hiring process, can also help evaluate if the hiring strategy is successful. An effective recruitment marketing strategy helps with both monitoring the cost and efficiency of the recruitment process.
4. Identifying effective medium
   The organization can test different recruitment pitches on job boards to target qualified candidates. Various analytics tools can help find what sections of the job listing candidates read, how many of them did so and for how long. This data helps identify the most effective mediums for ideal job applications, along with areas for improvement in the recruitment process.
5. Creating diversity
   A diverse team often contributes to the success of an organization, as they can collaborate and resolve unique problems collectively whenever required to meet company goals consistently. Recruitment marketing techniques enable an employer to target certain types of individuals. For example, one can design content and sponsor events that directly target the desired group of candidates.
   When a company has to recruit candidates for a role, it is two-way traffic as the candidate needs to be impressed by the company just as the company needs to find the perfect individual.

A prospective candidate is a customer of the recruiting company and it helps to provide them with a positive candidate experience. Good recruitment marketing can generate a talented pool of candidates to choose from and expedite the recruitment process.
The social media handle can be used to raise awareness about the brand and advertise job vacancies when they are looking to fill a role. Posting videos about corporate culture or candid interviews with employees would also help prospective candidates get an idea about the company.

IV. Why Is Recruitment Marketing Important?

It’s safe to say that recruitment marketing is not a fad.
Not only are businesses across the globe getting huge benefits from successful recruitment marketing, but it’s contributed to significant improvements for candidates, specifically around their experience engaging with your company.
We have outlined the main reasons why recruitment marketing is such a hot topic, but here we are digging into some of the main benefits that your company can expect if you embark on a recruitment marketing strategy.

1. Strategic Alignment
   Recruitment marketing helps you play the long game. There’s a big strategic component — you’re searching for candidates that could make a ‘10x’ impact on your organization, not just the ones that are immediately available. There’s an increased focus on passive candidates and success relies on carefully building personas of the kinds of people that would be a good fit for your company.
   These candidates could end up being hired in the future, but equally, they might not. Either way, they should be of a sufficiently high quality that your company will benefit from building relationships with them regardless.
2. Acceleration
   Talent Acquisition teams are often evaluated by a few key metrics including the most common recruiting KPI, time to hire. So it’s important to be able to fill roles fast.
   Once recruitment marketing programs are set up and running efficiently, and you’ve started to build a pipeline of candidates that are a good fit for your company, you should expect to see accelerated hiring processes across the board.
   For example, once you have a talent pipeline (and a process to continue adding new talent to the pipeline), your team will never have to start new searches from scratch — there will always be a pool of engaged candidates that they can contact regarding new opportunities, as a result of your recruitment marketing efforts.
3. Better Candidate Experience
   The relationship between your company and a candidate doesn’t start when they apply — it begins the very first time they encounter or interact with your business. At this ‘pre-applicant’ stage, the candidate experience is incredibly important. This is the time when people are evaluating your company and this first impression will likely help them decide whether to apply or not.
   Recruitment marketing gives you the ability to personalize the content and communication that people receive at this stage of the process. Every touchpoint can be customized based on who the candidate is, their level of engagement and their relationship with your organization. For companies concerned about the candidate experience, recruitment marketing is a no-brainer.
4. Stronger Employer Branding
   People don’t apply to companies, people apply to brands. They’re looking for a commonality — some idea or sense of mission that they share with your organization. The way that you project and market your brand is critically important. You need to publish the right content on your careers site, the right nurture campaigns, and the right kind of messaging about your EVP (employer value proposition) to be successful. To do this at scale, and do it in a way that is measurable, you need a well thought out recruitment marketing strategy.
5. Reduced Hiring Costs
   How much of the money that you currently spend on talent attraction is wasted? We’re not just talking about how much you spend on job boards or agencies — think about events, graduate programs, your careers site, anything you’ve had a designer create to help build brand awareness and generate applications.
   Not only will the right recruitment marketing platform help you track the effectiveness of different campaigns on generating talent pipeline, it will help you prioritize the best investments of your time and resources.We also shouldn’t forget that merely having a pipeline or a pool of talent that you can dip into will alleviate many costs — if you can find relevant candidates in your database, you don’t need agencies or ads.
6. Improved Candidate Quality
   When it comes to talent acquisition (just like many other things), you should go for quality over quantity.
   The problem that many organizations are currently facing though, is that the high quality candidates who actually visit their website and browse their jobs don’t end up applying. These people aren’t necessarily ready to jump through the hoops of an application process — they might be willing to learn more about your company, but they’re not ‘ready to apply.’
7. Increased Diversity
   There’s a lot of data out there to support the fact that diverse teams are more effective and produce higher-quality work. McKinsey research indicates that gender diverse teams are 25% more likely to outperform, while ethnically diverse teams are 36% more effective.
   The challenge that companies face is attracting people who meet their diversity requirements. Recruitment marketing helps organizations become a lot more proactive about the candidate personas that they’re going after. Whether it’s through events, content or talent networks, recruiters have the tools they need to engage the right candidates more effectively with recruitment marketing.

Setting up a Talent Network to convert some of these candidates into leads can be a huge win for your organization. It shouldn’t be overestimated how difficult it is to get people to come to your website. There’s no guarantee that they’ll be back, so you need to do everything you can to convert them while they’re there.
For this strategy to really work though, you have to think carefully about what happens next. How do you nurture these candidates and move them through your funnel to an application? If you can crack this code, then you’ll see some pretty impressive results.

V. Recruitment Marketing Strategy

How to do recruitment marketing? How to use recruitment marketing? What strategies should I employ in the process of recruitment marketing?  Which are the areas to focus on when employing a recruitment marketing strategy?  These are some of the questions that every employer searches for answers to. In the next section, we will explore this aspect elaborately.

How to do recruitment marketing?

Establishing a recruitment marketing strategy aids talent acquisition teams and recruiters in understanding their objectives and the activities necessary to achieve them.
Think of your plan as a road map for luring top talent, building your employer brand, and offering a satisfying application process to job seekers. Long-term marketing recruitment is made considerably simpler by establishing your approach upfront. These three methods will get you going.

1. Set recruitment marketing goals
You may find it easier to choose the most effective marketing recruitment channels and strategies if you have goals that are well documented.
For instance, you might place a high priority on customizing your career site to include chatbots if one of your key objectives is to boost candidate interaction with your employer brand. You may also wish to increase the quantity of job applications you receive online. In those circumstances, social media marketing may take precedence over other strategies. 
Whatever your goals are, document measurable goals and set a time period within which you would like to achieve them. Share your goals with your team so everyone understands what you are working toward. 

2. Define your audience and build personas
Building personas and identifying your target market are essential components of any recruitment marketing plan. Personas are the ideal target populations that marketers refer to. Personas allow you to give a fictitious individual a name and traits that resemble those of your ideal job candidate. This enables you to communicate with them and draw them to your employer brand.
Create a persona for each ideal job applicant you have. If you’re recruiting for a technology company, for instance, the persona for an engineering candidate will likely differ greatly from the persona for a marketing role.
Your different personas will include information, like:

• Behavior: Where does this persona turn for information about a company? What websites and blogs do they read? Who do they engage with on social media?
• Psychographics: What does this persona believe about themselves? What are the short and long-term goals? What values drive them? What are their challenges and pain points? 
• Geographics: Where are they located? What are their geographic preferences?

3. Select your marketing channels
When thinking about which marketing channels to use, first think about where your personas go online to seek information about jobs and employers. It’s likely there are generational differences across your personas, so keep that in mind when seeking diverse talent.
There are four highly-effective channels talent marketers rely on to optimize their candidate funnel and build their employer brand:
- Career sites for job seekers and employees
- Social media marketing for recruitment
- SMS marketing recruitment
- Email marketing for recruitment

VI. Recruitment Marketing Ideas

A strong recruitment marketing strategy will highlight the organization's distinctiveness and allow for tailored appeals. Here are some recommendations for achieving the same.

1. Use both organic and paid advertising: Determine the social media channels where the targeted candidates frequently post. For instance, Gen X and millennial candidates frequently utilize Instagram for search purposes. LinkedIn might be a better option for connecting with professionals across all demographics, whereas niche-specific Slack channels might be more efficient.
   Organizations should post both organic advertising (free postings) and paid advertising on the top social media platforms after they have been chosen.
2. Rev up the power of company-owned channels: Websites, blogs, career pages, YouTube channels, and newsletters are all effective platforms for promoting the company brand and attracting applicants. Use information on current topics and movements like work from home, hybrid work, and digital nomads to promote the advantages of working for the company and highlight job openings.
3. Use email and newsletters to engage candidates: Rethink the organization's email and newsletter strategies to create engaging content and offers for job searchers after the first contact is made. These should be designed to continue the conversation beyond the first search hit or viewing of a job opening.
4. Repurpose Content: For the purpose of creating an employer brand and gaining the trust of candidates, message consistency across channels and departments is crucial. Repurposing the same information across mediums is one method to guarantee consistency. For instance, the content created for the company blog's recruiting marketing can be utilized for podcasts, webinars, newsletters, and videos. Repurposing can increase the effectiveness of recruitment marketing content while lowering the cost of production.

VII. Recruitment Marketing Tools

Platforms for recruitment marketing assist internal recruiting teams in attracting and locating job seekers who will apply. Platforms for recruitment marketing provide a range of services, such as social recruiting tools, job distribution features, and candidate relationship management (CRM) capabilities, to support recruiting marketing activities. 
These features share a lot of similarities with those that help marketing departments' inbound marketing initiatives. Platforms for recruitment marketing are used by organizations to promote job openings, interact with individuals, pique their interest, and promote application submission.
The best recruitment marketing tools available are listed below:
1. LinkedIn Recruitment Marketing
LinkedIn recruitment marketing products allow you to connect with people throughout their professional journey.
2. Zoho Recruit
A system for tracking applicants called Zoho Recruit helps recruiters overcome a variety of difficulties. Zoho Recruit assists you in finding, tracking, and hiring the top prospects without the need to switch between various media. It offers comprehensive solutions for both in-house recruiters and employment agencies. 
3. Greenhouse
Greenhouse offers a comprehensive solution to assist businesses in hiring for the future. Greenhouse Recruiting products encourage great candidate experiences at all contact points, reduce administrative work, and maintain team engagement.
4. Lever
Lever is a top talent acquisition suite that enables talent teams to quickly meet their hiring objectives and link businesses with top talent. Lever is the only platform that offers LeverTRM, a single package with comprehensive ATS and sophisticated CRM capabilities for all talent acquisition leaders. 
5. Workable
Best-in-class recruitment tools, procedures, and automation are all provided by Workable in a single integrated system. Workable's scalable tools, expertise, and support help you in making the hires that make your business great, whether you're adding 200 new employees or 1 employee.
Workable customers employ automated and AI-powered solutions that discover and propose prospects, expedite decision-making, and accelerate the hiring process to get from requisition to offer letter more quickly.
6. Freshteam
With Freshteam, you can recruit, hire, and onboard new employees, offboard departing workers, manage employee data, and take advantage of time off – all in one location. Through a variety of channels, including an easily configurable career site, connection with numerous free and premium job boards, and social media platforms, Freshteam aids in attracting and sourcing top talent. 
7. Breezy HR
A cutting-edge, simple end-to-end recruiting product that you and your team will like using, Breezy HR automates tedious chores like posting jobs, advertising on job boards, arranging interviews, and follow-ups, streamlining the entire hiring process and allowing you more time to interact with candidates. 
Their distinctive, visual approach to pipeline management will provide your hiring process a productivity boost. Anyone on your team can get up and running quickly with a simple drag-and-drop interface, and Breezy Tasks make sure nothing gets missed.
8. Jobvite
The Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite from Jobvite is a comprehensive solution that addresses your hiring needs now while expanding with you to meet future needs. The flagship product of Jobvite covers every stage of the TA lifecycle, including employer branding, recruitment marketing, application management, onboarding, employee referrals, and internal mobility.
9. Bullhorn
Bullhorn is the global leader in CRM and operations software for the staffing industry. More than 10,000 staffing companies rely on Bullhorn's cloud-based platform to drive sales, build relationships, and power their recruitment processes from end to end.
10. SAP SuccessFactors
By increasing the link between HR and business operations, SAP SuccessFactors solutions are revolutionizing the workplace and assisting enterprises in building long-lasting workforces and successful businesses. The SAP SuccessFactors Human Experience Management (HXM) suite helps both individuals and businesses achieve their best by spanning core HR/payroll, talent management, HR analytics/workforce planning, and tailored employee experiences.

The right recruitment marketing strategy can make finding and attracting top talent a much easier feat. It all comes down to identifying the right mix of tactics, recruiting managers(or other recruiting personnel), and recruitment marketing platforms like the ones given above to make your recruitment marketing a success. A recruitment marketing partner can not only identify the right strategies to help you reach your recruitment goals, but they can also take care of running and optimizing your campaigns, so you can focus on getting the right talent through the door and allocate them to their perfect roles.

VIII. Other Articles Related to Recruitment Marketing

• What is recruitment marketing and how to use it?
• 10 Fool-Proof Recruitment Marketing Strategies for 2023
• Best Recruitment Marketing Software to Level up your Game in 2023
• Areas to Focus on when Employing a Recruitment Marketing Strategy
• Top 5 Recruitment Marketing Tools
• Recruitment Marketing Specialists: Unlocking Their Role in Talent Acquisition
   

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