Does your company offer world-class benefits, like paid maternal and paternal leave and generous vacation time? Is your company headquartered at an incredible downtown building with easy access to urban amenities? What about remote work options and flexible schedules to support work-life balance? Your company may offer any or all of these enticing workplace benefits, but if there’s no way for candidates to discover them, they’re merely a skipped-over footnote in an application that was never filled out.
Recruitment marketing is the key to showing candidates the unique aspects of your employer brand. Through engaging content that highlights your brand proposition, candidates can get a sense for the tone, personality, and perks extended to employees.
Of course, in order for compelling content to be effective, it needs to reach its intended audience. That’s where tried-and-true techniques from your marketing team come into play. By acting like a marketer, recruiters can attract a wide range of candidates with highly targeted messages.
If you’re ready to take your recruitment marketing game to the next level, start incorporating these hacks into your workflow:
1. Utilize branding assets
Recruitment marketing software makes it easier than ever to share branded content with candidates. So it’s important that any recruiting emails, websites, and videos maintain a professional and consistent aesthetic so that candidates have a clear understanding of your brand.
Fortunately, any corporate marketing team should have a treasure trove of easy-to-access guidelines that can help standardize your content’s messaging and design. Start with the company’s branding assets, which should include a style guide illustrating the specific fonts, colors, and logos you should use for external communications. If you need additional help, reach out to the marketing team directly — they may not be able to meet every individual request, but they may be able to provide suggestions or templates.
2. Create and share compelling video content
From Netflix to Snapchat, video has become one of the most popular ways to consume content online. It’s also one of the most engaging ways to capture candidates’ attention: 70% of marketing professionals report that video converts higher than any other medium, including a 200-300% increase in click-through rates when videos are included in emails.
Brands that don’t include videos in their recruitment marketing content are leaving candidates on the table. These don’t have to be Hollywood-style epics — short and simple videos highlighting employees, work culture, and stories about what it’s like to be a part of an organization are easy ways to capture an audience’s attention.
3. Use the data at your fingertips
Recruiters spend plenty of energy reaching out to new candidates, but engaging your existing talent pipeline is a surefire way to find familiar faces who might be open to a new opportunity. Use candidate relationship management software to keep a database of active and passive candidates, and reach out when the time is right.
Identify the right candidates by filtering your talent pipeline based on specific criteria. Segmenting your recruitment marketing by audience can boost candidate engagement and help you find the right fit faster. By targeting a few relevant data points, like college major or GPA, you could create a segment for high-performing new grads and start engaging them with more personal, relevant email marketing content.
4. Follow email marketing best practices
If you’re trying to cast a wide net for candidates, email marketing remains a recruiter’s best option. The 2019 Yello Recruiting Survey found that across major communication methods, email marketing remains the most popular across all generations. And sending an email is easy — but capturing a candidate’s attention and encouraging action is something else.
To keep candidates engaged, be sure to follow email marketing best practices. Optimizing emails for delivery, like determining the right subject line or images, can help boost click-through rates. Don’t forget to test your emails before sending to make sure your messages don’t take too long to download, aren’t formatted properly, or contain spelling errors.
5. Optimize your social media strategy
Social media is a great way to share your company’s story on platforms where your candidates already spend their time. But using social media as a recruitment tool requires a strategic plan. Blindly posting random content to LinkedIn or Facebook isn’t a strategy — it’s an easy way to get buried beneath the avalanche of posts in a social media feed, or worse, lose followers.
Take time to develop a thoughtful social media recruitment strategy. For instance, should you share open positions to your company’s Facebook page or are you better off creating a separate Twitter account for job updates? Whether you’re publicizing new job openings or sharing relevant recruitment marketing content, your posts need to be optimized with a specific goal in mind.
Recruitment marketing can feel like another full-time job. But by incorporating one or more of these hacks into your strategy, you’ll build a stronger employer brand, attract more candidates and in the long run, fill more open roles.
