What is recruitment marketing?

In short, recruitment marketing is the process of building and communicating a company’s employer brand and employee value proposition to attract and hire top talent. It has nothing to do with promoting your company’s products or services.

A key element of talent acquisition is to create an inward stream of job applicants who are highly aligned with your company’s brand and value proposition. The idea is to market your company in such a way that you highlight what makes you great so that you attract prospective employees.

At its core, recruiting is simply putting out job vacancies, getting applications, selecting the most appropriate candidate(s) from the applications received, and then hiring that person. It’s pretty straightforward but in no way guarantees that you will recruit deserving candidates.

When you combine the process of recruitment with recruitment marketing, you are able to grab the attention of the talent who will work in harmony with the mission and vision of your company.

There are three key elements of recruiter marketing:

Awareness

A big issue with trying to find talent for your company is not having enough applicants, and a major reason for this is that people don’t know enough about you or what you do. Generating awareness about your brand helps gather recognition. So the next time you put out a job opening, people will instantly know you and be more than eager to provide their names for consideration.

Consideration

This is the stage where the job-seeker knows about you but needs more insights to consider you as their future. People’s careers depend on the kind of work your company does and the type of environment that is your workplace. You need to make sure you give people enough marketing content so that they can understand the ins and outs and advance one step further towards taking action.

Interest

Once the job-seeker has learned about you from various channels, including your website, your LinkedIn profile, Glassdoor, Indeed, and more, they finally show a heightened interest in you and know that you can be a great place to further their aspirations. This is the phase of active decision-making where the candidate finds more pros than cons and finally decides to become a candidate.

How can you drive a strong recruitment marketing strategy?

While recruitment marketing takes a little more effort than human resources do traditionally, it actually isn’t that tricky. You simply need to keep some strategies in mind.

Employer branding

The idea is to establish a brand for the firm that showcases the business’s mission, vision, and culture. The best way is by creating testimonials or videos using your current employees. Ask them to shed light on their journey with your company so far. You could also get them to share how long they’ve been associated with your company and briefly discuss their career path.

This gives candidates a true review of the company and allows them to gain some behind-the-scenes action even before they apply for the position.

Prepare target audience profiles and capture leads accordingly

Just like a sales or marketing team prepares buyer personas to capture targeted leads, prepare target audience profiles for job openings. Check what channels work best for each kind of vacancy and capture leads accordingly.

Some like to read about your company on the careers page of your website, while others prefer getting hard facts about the responsibilities and compensation in a clear and concise job description.

Specific and targeted job descriptions

Explain clearly and concisely what the job entails, who the candidate’s manager will be, what their day-to-day activities will look like, and the range of compensation you’re offering. By providing a few real day-to-day scenarios as examples the person in the role will have to deal with, applicants can easily figure out for themselves whether or not your company will be a good fit for them.

Sources:

[1] What is Recruitment Marketing?. Jobvite. Retrieved from - https://www.jobvite.com/sourcing-and-nurturing/what-is-recruitment-marketing/

[2] What is Recruitment Marketing and How Do the Best Employers Use it?. HR Technologist. Retrieved from - https://www.hrtechnologist.com/articles/recruitment-onboarding/what-is-recruitment-marketing-and-how-do-best-employers-use-it/

[3] Recruitment marketing. Search HR Software. Retrieved from - https://searchhrsoftware.techtarget.com/definition/recruitment-marketing

[4] What is Recruitment Marketing?. Talent Lyft. Retrieved from - https://www.talentlyft.com/en/resources/what-is-recruitment-marketing