What Is Recruitment Marketing?

The Recruitment Marketing Flywheel is the concept that a company’s hiring processes and consistency are the long term drivers of inbound sourcing and recruiting success. By placing a heavy emphasis on the company’s public presence as a top place to work, with rigorous and fair interview practices, the Recruitment Marketing Flywheel will accelerate candidate interest.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the process of attracting and engaging candidates to your company, using words, images and video that draw them in. When it comes to recruitment, the focus is on attracting candidates that are a good fit for your company and its culture. The goal of recruitment marketing is to convince the best candidates to apply for your jobs.

Recruitment marketing uses different tools, such as job boards and social media platforms (like LinkedIn), to find potential employees who have the skills required for each position that needs filling.

Your recruitment marketing message must be re-enforced consistently in your website copy, in your job descriptions and throughout your interview process. Just as your leadership must present a unified vision for why each candidate should desire to join, your hiring presentation and process must be unified and well structured.

Every job posting, sponsored event, email outreach, and interview question reflects the brand of your organization. One misstep can destroy it all. As you dial in this process, the flywheel begins to take hold. As word gets out that your growing company has a clear vision and runs a fair and selective process, great candidates will start knocking at your door.

How to Excel in Recruitment Marketing

Play the long game

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.

Boost Your Content and Social Presence

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.

Optimize Your Funnel

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 Chatkick 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. This will ensure that only suitable candidates advance to the next phase of the hiring funnel.

Brand Comes First

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.

Recruitment Marketing is About Building Relationships

Recruitment marketing is about building relationships with candidates and creating an employer brand that stands out in their minds as a place they’d like to work. It’s not just about advertising; it’s also about knowing your audience, segmenting them effectively and engaging with them in ways that resonate with each segment.