Recruitment marketing is essential for talent acquisition.
In the guide provided below, I present an overview of everything related to recruitment marketing. You will discover suggestions including:
If you aim to engage more applicants and enhance the visibility of your employer brand, you’ll appreciate this.
What is Recruitment Marketing?
The concept of recruitment marketing refers to the application of marketing tactics to attract candidates.
The objective of recruitment marketing is to identify, draw in, and connect with higher-quality candidates using various digital marketing methods.
You can regard it as akin to conventional marketing, but rather than targeting consumers, you focus on candidates.
The Hiring Funnel and Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing occurs at the initial phase of the hiring funnel.
This is where you draw in and connect with candidates.
Here’s a funnel for you to visualize the recruitment marketing process within the hiring funnel.
Awareness
The initial stage of the funnel is awareness.
Candidates must be informed that you could be a prospective employer before anything else.
This involves understanding where (job boards, social media, etc.) your candidates are active online AND promoting on those platforms!
It’s also crucial to monitor passive candidates and where they dedicate their time.
The current job market varies from what it used to be.
Many candidates are passive (i.e., not actively seeking jobs or currently employed) yet might show interest if they come across something intriguing.
How do you capture their attention?
Create exceptional content that:
- candidates are eager to engage with.
- positions your company as an employer of choice.
- reflects your employer brand.
- features your employees.
Facebook Recruitment Marketing Post Examples
Interest & Consideration
Once a candidate clicks on your advertisement, link, or post, they have entered the interest and consideration phases.
This is the point where they land on the pages of your post.
It’s essential to optimize these landing pages.
Here are suggestions for elements to consider for your landing page:
- Content tailored to the job posting the candidate clicked on (i.e., a recruiting post for engineers leads to a page focused on your company’s engineering positions, benefits, perks, etc.)
- Engaging videos and/or images
- Awards as an employer of choice (if applicable)
- Employee value proposition (EVP)
- Clear calls-to-action
Calls-to-action are crucial at this stage as they represent the next step in converting the candidate.
Here are some calls-to-action to consider for your landing pages:
- Explore Jobs: Provide them the option to view job pages for specific roles. This should direct them to your job search page.
- Join Talent Community: Candidates may not apply, but they opt-in with their email to receive job notifications and additional recruitment marketing materials.
- Tip: Ensure to email candidates relevant job alerts and content tailored to the position or department they are interested in. They will quickly unsubscribe if you send them emails that aren’t pertinent.
- Submit Application: Since they’ve navigated to your page, they are interested. It’s wise to include an apply button in case they’re ready to move forward. Some companies prefer to avoid a general application; they’d like the candidate to take an additional step and apply once they’ve arrived at a specific job or department.
For instance, take a look at Dell’s career landing page (below).
Observe the prominent “Explore Jobs” call-to-action (above the fold) and the “Join Talent Network” call-to-action (at the bottom of the page).
If you scroll down to the bottom of the career page, you will see a clear “Join Talent Network” call-to-action.
Recruitment Marketing Techniques
In this segment, I will emphasize a few high-traffic areas on your career site.
These sections are where you should apply recruitment marketing strategies to enhance your career site’s efficiency.
Company Career Page
This one is significant.
It serves as the main landing page aimed at candidates on your corporate site.
And it often ranks among the top Google search results for “[company name] careers”.
The most effective company career pages include:
- A compelling headline
- Videos and images
- Employee testimonials
- Benefits and perks
- Information on values and culture
Here are a few examples of company career pages we admire:
Note: Click on the image to see the complete career page.
Virta Career Page Example
Ellation Career Page Sample
Lending Tree Career Page Sample
Here are additional resources if you’re seeking inspiration for company career pages:
Job Advertisements
Job advertisements represent a vital resource for employers, but regrettably, they are frequently produced by applicant tracking system (ATS) software.
The majority of ATS-generated job pages are primarily text-driven with minimal to no branding. Keep in mind:
“Applicant tracking systems were never intended to be visually appealing (external), they were designed to assist with workflow management (internal)”.
– James Ellis, The Talent Cast
Some time ago, I published an article titled Enhance Your ‘Digital’ Candidate Experience with Job Page Overlays.
I characterized a job page overlay in this way:
Job page overlays empower you to take charge of your job pages and effortlessly add:
- Multimedia content
- Recruitment widgets
- Bespoke design
- Brand representation
- Recruitment information
Recruitment marketing platforms such as Ongig, Talentbrew, PhenomPeople, and Smashfly will assist you in crafting and executing job page overlays.
Diversity & Inclusion Statement
D&I statements have become crucial text for you to formulate.
More companies are allocating resources into text analytics for their job postings and D&I statements to more effectively express their corporate values and culture.
We developed this graphic to offer insights on what to include in your Diversity & Inclusion Statement:
Explore these remarkable diversity statement examples. We reviewed the Fortune 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity list and selected 20 that we believe exhibit excellence overall or at least have ideas worth considering.
Diversity & Inclusion Page
For many organizations, merely having a D&I statement is insufficient.
These organizations are raising the bar and establishing an entire page devoted to D&I that collects all of their diversity material.
Last year we discussed diversity pages and their significance, here are some advantages we noted in that article:
One of my favorite diversity page illustrations comes from AT&T as it includes:
- Job Search Feature: Positioned at the top of the page, making it easy for candidates to begin their job search immediately.
- Diversity Recognition: They effectively highlight these prominently. Candidates need to be aware that you are a preferred employer, especially in terms of diversity and inclusion.
- Diversity Officer Commentary: Quotes from leadership always add a nice touch.
- Workforce Diversity Statistics: One of my favored components on AT&T’s diversity recruitment page. It offers candidates clarity. They even disclose the percentage of their budget reserved for D&I initiatives!
- Other sections encompass: Diversity report, employee groups, diversity and inclusion blog content.
Email marketing remains a leading digital marketing approach and is continually adapting in recruitment. You can utilize email at every phase of the recruitment funnel, whether you’re contacting a new candidate or engaging one from the past. Additionally, there appear to be some discrepancies in reporting related to bulk verification and email verifiers.
You can employ email at every stage of the recruitment funnel, whether you are reaching out to a new candidate or engaging one from previous interactions.
Here are some email lists you should focus on developing (note the three distinct segments):
- Applicants
- Talent community Opt-Ins
- Potential candidates
Some suggestions for recruitment marketing emails:
- Personalize the communication
- Avoid just using first and last names. Explore further and include educational background, interests beyond work, and technologies or projects they’ve engaged in, etc.
- Always incorporate a call-to-action.
- Utilize distinct messages and calls-to-action for various segments.
- Optimize your emails for mobile devices.
- Include content that candidates are interested in reading about:
- Benefits & perks
- Awards for being an employer of choice
- Compensation details
- Current job openings
Here’s a recruitment marketing email template for a former applicant or subscriber of the talent community:
Social Media Recruiting
Social media can serve as one of the most significant platforms for your recruitment marketing messages.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are where…
Candidates are socializing.
These platforms additionally provide the finest targeting alternatives for advertising.
It’s remarkable how detailed you can be when selecting targeting features.
Here’s an illustration for targeting on Facebook:
Here are some pointers for your social media recruitment advertisements and posts:
- Develop detailed candidate personas
- Utilize compelling videos and images
- You’ll leverage these media to engage and attract the attention of candidates.
- Design landing pages aimed at conversion
- Content aligns with the topic or message of the post or ad.
- Enhance with appropriate calls-to-action (search jobs, talent community, apply)
- Measure your outcomes (likes, comments, shares, impressions, clicks, conversions)
- The outcomes will indicate whether the ad was successful or not. If it is, implement the strategy for other campaigns. If not, modify it and retry.
Recruitment Marketing Platforms in 2021
What constitutes a recruitment marketing platform?
A recruitment marketing platform is software that aids organizations in:
- Showcasing their employer brand via their career site (i.e., career page and job advertisements).
- Connecting with candidates and potential hires (i.e., email campaigns, talent community).
- Utilizing social media platforms (i.e., recruitment advertising, recruiting content).
- Evaluating the efficacy of recruiting efforts.
Earlier this year, we published 15 Examples of Recruitment Marketing Platforms [Used by 500 Top Employers] that provided a valuable overview of the recruiting software landscape along with concise descriptions of each recruitment marketing platform.
Here’s a summary of some of the leading recruitment marketing platforms available today.
Advantages of Recruitment Marketing
Here are three of the primary advantages you’ll gain from recruitment marketing:
Candidate Experience
Recruitment marketing enhances your candidate experience by personalizing it more.
The Beamery discusses the influence of recruitment marketing on candidate experience in this excerpt:
Employer Brand
Recruitment marketing aims to emphasize employer branding.
Executing social media campaigns, maintaining an active presence on social media platforms, engaging in programmatic advertising, and personalizing outreach and communication are all strategies that will cultivate a stronger employer brand with the objective of enhancing awareness and visibility.
Undercover Recruiter featured a great quote from Jared Nypen, VP of Talent @ Great Clips:
Candidate Targeting & Quality
Another advantage of recruitment marketing is empowering employers to create highly targeted ad campaigns.
Here’s a clarification and compilation of the advantages of targeting recruitment campaigns from Appcast:
Why I Composed This
Ongig is a recruitment marketing platform centered on job pages and job description text.
Our Career Site Builder is a recruitment marketing solution that optimizes job pages with videos, images, recruiting widgets, and other recruiting content to engage and convert candidates. Our text analyzer refines job description text by removing gender, racial, age, and other biases.