The link between recruiting and marketing is nothing new; the importance of recruitment marketing initiatives, such as employer brand development, has increased significantly over the past few years, with companies fighting to attract the best talent.
Additionally, with more organisations adopting careers sites and taking to social media to advertise their vacancies, there are natural overlaps with marketing-related tasks.
However, it’s important to not just view ‘recruitment marketing’ as a buzzword or a task that can be fulfilled by scheduling a few Tweets. As with all types of marketing, there should be a clear strategy in place.
But what are the key takeaways your HR department can learn from their marketing peers to help influence this strategy?
1. Understand your candidate personas
Understanding your buyers lies at the heart of any good marketing strategy; your recruitment strategy should be no different. For each role you recruit for, you need to have an in-depth understanding of the types of candidates you are looking to attract.
This isn’t just thinking about the skills and experience they need to have. Delve a bit deeper. Where might they look for jobs? What’s their background? What publications do they read? What are their daily struggles? What might make a new job appeal to them?
Once you’ve built up this picture of your candidate, you can then start to craft your recruitment campaign to suit them. Keep this persona at the forefront of your mind when writing your job adverts, selecting your job boards and engaging with them via phone and email.
2. Recognise the importance of brand
There’s a difference between corporate branding and employer branding. Your corporate brand is your identity; your logo, company colours and values. Your employer brand, on the other hand, is your culture, your team and most importantly, how you treat your employees.
However, although these are two different areas of branding, they should be inherently linked. Your employer brand should be an extension of your corporate brand. For example, if your corporate brand is serious and formal but your recruitment campaigns contain jokes and colloquial language, there’s a clear disconnect.
Communicating your employer brand effectively is important; just as a customer would decide if they want to work with your company based on their values and ethos, a candidate will likely do the same when looking at your employer brand.
Read more: 4 Ways HR and Marketing Can Work Together to Build a Great Employer Brand
3. Attract applicants with great content
Many marketers adopting an inbound methodology will know the importance of strong, relevant content. You can follow this by producing great recruitment content to catch the eye of both active and passive jobseekers.
This isn’t just your job advert; it’s also about crafting content that speaks to your audience – remember those candidate personas we talked about earlier? Consider writing recruitment blogs, creating Instagram stories with quick-fire interviews with your current employees or even a setting up a virtual office tour on your careers site.
4. Nurture your candidates like leads
Marketers generate leads and then nurture them until they’re sales-ready. Treat your candidates the same way your Marketing team would treat a potential customer; nurture them!
Keep in contact via email, serve up relevant jobs (job alerts are a great way of doing this) and win them over with your unique recruitment content.
5. Sell at each stage of the process
If you were a marketer, you would take every opportunity to sell your product or service. As a recruiter, you should do the same with your vacancies.
At each point of contact with a candidate, you should be selling; from your job advert and your first telephone discussion to the candidate’s first trip to your office for their interview and their follow-up email…you need to sell the opportunity to work at your company.
Just as great customer experiences lead to evangelists and customer referrals, great candidate and employee experiences can also lead to candidate referrals, meaning that you can reduce your costs and increase your chance of attracting brilliant talent.
Looking to improve your recruitment marketing? Book a demo of Webrecruit ATS and our integrated careers sites.
