· 7 min read
Recruiters need to make open roles sound so appealing that candidates can’t help but click on the job description. And if they find that the position sounds fun, challenging, interesting, and rewarding, it’ll be really hard for them to resist submitting their resume.
Sure, talent teams and recruiters can learn a lot from sales, but they might stand to learn even more from Recruitment Marketing.
That’s because recruitment is all about promoting your company and the roles you are trying to fill. Recruiters need to make open roles sound so appealing that candidates can’t help but click on the job description. And if they find that the position sounds fun, challenging, interesting, and rewarding, it’ll be really hard for them to resist submitting their resume or scheduling that 15-minute intro call.
Now, that’s not to say that recruitment marketing is as easy as writing a great job description. But with the right strategies and mindset, marketing can become the fuel for your recruitment engine. Here are some effective recruitment marketing ideas for your team to get a leg up.
Marketing is a long game. While growth hacks can get quick wins, most marketing strategies take months, if not years, to hit their stride. Like marketers, recruiters need to think long-term, with the aim of becoming 1% better each day. Following through on this goal can have a compounding effect on your marketing. By improving every cold outreach message, recruiting event, job posting, and follow-up message, you are boosting your chances of starting and maintaining your recruitment flywheel.
So take those baby steps. Focus first on making your company’s vision consistent. Enlist the help of your company’s CEO/Founder. Because of their intimate knowledge of the product, they’ll be able to make your messaging jump off the page. Next, hone in on follow-ups, fairness, and professionalism. No candidate should be left wondering what happens next in the cycle, or if they moved on to the next round. Outlining next steps 一 even for candidates who are no longer moving forward 一 is a courtesy you need to extend to all applicants. As time goes on, don’t forget to be human. Infuse a little personality into your campaigns to show off your culture.
All marketers know that nothing beats good copy. No matter whether you’re writing a job description, blog post, or social media caption, keep it short, sweet, and on-brand. Send a consistent message about what your company does and what each team within the company does. And if anything changes, update across all your marketing channels.
Not many companies are taking advantage of candidate-related content, so be one of the first to do it. Develop a pipeline of content about your employees, your open roles, and even your customers to share across relevant platforms. Publishing consistently will help you become a thought leader in the space. Of course, not everyone who reads your content will be looking for a job, but they might be more inclined to remember you and reach out when they are ready for their next adventure.
Today, LinkedIn is the most popular and effective social media for recruiting. But don’t be shy of utilizing other platforms like Twitter or TikTok to reach the right people. Social media recruiting is slowly becoming one of the most dominant ways high growth companies reach candidates. Strong content in the form of Twitter threads or LinkedIn surveys can be a great tool to help source.
Early on, your recruitment marketing should be all about cold outreach. It’s important to cast a wide net to keep a healthy top of the funnel, but don’t make recipients feel like they are part of a massive copy/paste email campaign. If that sounds hard to do, that’s because it is. Using a tool like Talent CRM can help you personalize at scale by linking your email provider, ATS, and CRM. Because you have a finger on the pulse of all outbound messages, you don’t have to worry about spamming candidates, and you have the opportunity to customize messages before they’re sent.
After you’ve got a solid content strategy, you’ve had some press, and done a fair amount of outbounding, people will start to recognize your company’s name, and you’ll start to get inbound job applications. At this stage, it’s crucial to make your job descriptions crystal clear and your interview process iron-clad. This will ensure that only suitable candidates advance to the next phase of the hiring funnel.
Be sure to measure the time candidates spend in each stage and the average time to move from initial application to final offer. Any major gaps could indicate a communication breakdown and may hinder your recruitment marketing efforts into the future.
In an era of automation and AI, the written word remains king. Even the most bleeding edge AI systems still cannot pass the Turing test.
Writing is the most fundamental form of human communication. Doing it well can feel a bit like a super power – particularly in the context of recruiting.
Having your team take time to learn the mechanics of clean, powerful writing will pay higher dividends than almost any other professional training out there. Take a look at courses like Copywriting for Recruiters and consider developing internal style guides for how your talent acquisition team is communicating both directly (cold emails, LinkedIn InMail) and indirectly (social media posts, advertisements) with prospective candidates.
Today’s top marketing teams rely on troves of data to make decisions. Marketing has become more science than art over the last decade and has turned into one of the most lucrative fields for budding data analysts. Teams are now able to precisely calculate the ROI of a recent digital advertising campaign or pick the best of two outbound marketing campaigns based on A/B test statistics.
Simple practices like monitoring changes in traffic to career sites, A/B testing outbound sourcing strategies, or measuring response rates can lead to quantum leaps in effectiveness of your teams overall recruiting strategies. Thankfully today’s recruiting tools have started to catch up to those used by your marketing counterparts over the last decade. A/B testing sourcing campaigns in a tool like Talent CRM allows your team to pick out the best cadence and copy for increasing positive response rates. Similarly, simple tasks like analyzing Google Analytics traffic on your career site can give you basic insights into viewer demographics. A quick analysis of page view demographics versus those who appear in your inbound applicant pool might indicate you need to re-evaluate the wording in your job descriptions.
Start by focusing on the basic data points necessary to understand if your sourcing and recruiting efforts are working. Coordinate with marketing or engineering teams to get setup with basic tracking analytics and look for tools that offer rich analytics out of the box to help give your team the leg up they need to succeed in this current War for Talent.
We’ll leave you with this: marketers are always conscious of brand no matter what content or campaign they’re working on. Recruiters should follow suit. Killer branding separates your company from other startups and expands the level of talent you can attract. A strong tactic to keep in mind throughout the process is that of the Recruitment Flywheel.
A great brand takes 20 years to build, but only 5 seconds to destroy.
From the copy on your company website, to the format of your job descriptions, to your interview process, your company’s recruitment marketing effort must never stop. Recruitment marketing starts with the initial vision from leadership and ends with the details of your hiring process. The experience must be thoughtful and well structured around what it means to become a part of your company.
**Every job posting, sponsored event, cold email, and interview question reflects on the brand of your organization. **One misstep can destroy it all. As you dial-in this process, the recruitment marketing flywheel begins to take hold. As word gets out that your growing company has a clear vision and runs a fair, highly selective process, great candidates will start knocking at your door.
