With the number of businesses in your niche constantly growing, top talent now have more job opportunities to choose from. For internal talent teams, this means that finding and hiring qualified candidates is now more difficult than ever.
In today’s candidate-driven job market, it’s not companies that choose candidates anymore – It’s the candidates who get to pick. And, to gain their trust and inspire them to choose you over your competitors, you need to ensure that your marketing and recruitment efforts work together.
The market is saturated with employers trying to grab candidates’ attention and the best candidates aren’t engaging with the traditional tactics of job posting and simple, generic messaging. Candidates want to feel connected to your brand and sense that employers understand them as individuals.
So how can employers stand out from the crowd?
Employers must be proactive in their approach to attracting candidates, and recruitment marketing is the solution.
Recruitment marketing defines and communicates the business’ mission, purpose, and culture, and spreads it through all the channels where your target talent exists. This can help to create awareness for talent who meet role requirements and share the company’s vision and values, resulting in an all round better fit for the company and job. Because of this alignment and match, retention becomes easier as these hires are more likely to remain with you as company ambassadors, long-term.
What elements need to be considered when building a strong recruitment marketing strategy?
Recruitment marketing is the combination of tools, strategies, and activities used to help define and communicate an organisation’s employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) in order to attract, engage, hire, and retain best-fit talent.
Recruitment marketing strategy must take into account marketing principles and best practices while creating candidate personas, building valuable content that revolves around your EVP, and engaging in targeted distribution of that content. Other strategies it can leverage from marketing include SEO, PPC, engagement through personalised content and tech-enabled automation, social media advertising, nurturing and retargeting with CRM, and analytics.
You’ll often hear recruitment marketing described as the “pre-applicant phase” of talent acquisition, but it also considerably influences the bottom of the funnel. After all, candidates who’ve fully grasped your EVP are much more likely to accept your offer when it comes in.
By communicating your employer brand, showcasing the value of working for your company, and promoting yourself as an employer of choice, recruitment marketing drives awareness and interest in your organisation, building followers, referrals, and ultimately converting passive talent into active candidates in your pipeline.
Key benefits of strategic recruitment marketing include:
- Increased awareness of, and interest in, employer brand
- Cohesive brand voice with a clear and consistent company story
- Ready and active talent pipeline for when roles open
- More informed candidate experiences
- Decreased time-to-hire and cost-of-hire
- Improved candidate quality
- Better-fit hires
- Increased retention
In some larger companies, specialised talent acquisition roles have been created that focus on things like brand awareness, competitive positioning, social engagement, reputation management, amplifying employee ambassadors, career website management, and event management. However, in 2021, every recruiter and talent team should be employing elements of recruitment marketing in their talent strategies. This will help on their journey to becoming talent advisors.
As with all marketing, understanding your target audience is of extreme importance. The more knowledge and insights you can access and examine, the greater the likelihood of connecting with and meeting the desires of them.
Tools like LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Stack Overflow, and TA.Guru can give you access to key knowledge and valuable insights which will form the basis of your strategy.
There has been a mindset change and today’s candidates discover and consider employers in the same way that consumers make major purchasing decisions. It is up to companies to adjust to this and start creating recruitment marketing strategies that attract them.
We hope that this article highlights the importance of having a focused and strategic recruitment marketing strategy in place, and can be used as a starting point to help you find best fit candidates, quicker.
