How to Create a Recruitment Marketing Strategy that Works

By design, recruitment marketing should lead to a more straightforward process of onboarding new hires for big and small companies. It goes beyond specifying details about vacant positions, focusing on projecting a more positive brand image.

But many recruiters don't know what recruitment marketing is, how it works, and how to infuse it into their hiring processes. This article explains what recruitment marketing is and explains how to create effective strategies for your human resource function.

What Is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing refers to strategies and tools organizations use to project a positive image as the best places to work to potential employees. Its purpose is to engage, attract, recruit, and retain the best talents in the industry.

Besides showing candidates why they should work for an organization, recruitment marketing is intended to promote employer branding and project corporate culture in a positive light. Recruitment marketing using digital tools is more targeted and can yield the best results.

How to Get Started with Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment marketing isn’t that difficult – it begins with setting recruitment marketing goals. For example, a typical goal would be to create an attractive employer brand to attract high-quality talent. As a result of each goal, you should also specify the metrics to determine its achievement.

But it is not enough to set goals. Your overall recruitment marketing strategy should involve measures on how you will achieve the goals. In that case, you would need to take the following five steps:

1. Identify the positions that most affect business success.
2. Narrow down to the critical talent segments and their respective personas.
3. Get enough resources and support for an effective marketing strategy.
4. Carry out extensive market research to understand the needs and motivations of your audience.
5. Use technology to automate a great candidate experience and encourage proactive recruitment.

What Is the Right Content to Use in Recruitment Marketing?

To attract and recruit the right talent, you need well-crafted content about the company’s culture. Here’s a tip –  you should answer your prospective candidates’ questions to clear obstacles to them becoming employees.

At the core of recruitment marketing is the creation of content that removes any doubts a candidate might have about working for a company. There should be more content about the company than the specific vacancy on a 4:1 ratio. After all, the purpose of recruitment marketing is to sell the company to the candidate, not the other way around.

The content should include information about the company:

• Culture and employee experience of existing employees,
• Values to show the real actions of current employees,
• Impact through its products and individual roles,
• Policy and practice on diversity, inclusion, and social injustice,
• And mechanisms to provide a great candidate experience in terms of hiring and onboarding.

Ideas to Test Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Testing your recruitment marketing strategy before implementing it fully is necessary to determine if it will work. You can measure the success of a marketing strategy by looking at the number of social shares, the number of candidates, or your website traffic.

If you’re just starting out, proven tools like promoted social posts can help you gauge how well your strategy is working. Remember, promoted posts have a high chance of reaching a wide audience. If it generates a social media buzz, it will indicate how effective your strategy is.

Recruitment Marketing Tools

Several marketing recruitment tools can help you reach out to and attract potential candidates to work with your company. They include the following:

1. Social Media Platforms

By taking the social media route, you’ll be joining the over 90 percent of recruiters using it to attract high-quality candidates. Examples of trendy social media sites include TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc.

Whichever is your favorite platform, social media is great for showcasing your brand to potential employees. You can also use it to collect information about your company’s reputation.

But social media requires a lot of work, including planning, creating, and sharing compelling content. And it requires utmost authenticity. You can achieve that through employee stories, commentary on industry news, and other interesting updates.

2. Talent Networks

Talent communities are very effective at attracting top-class candidates. Companies can use the communities to promote open positions and connect more closely with candidates. Besides reducing advertising costs, talent networks can help companies recruit runner-up candidates from previous interviews.

3. Career Microsites

Career microsites help companies showcase their unique value proposition and effectively capture the interest of candidates. Since they display minimal content, they can entice candidates better with straightforward calls to action like ‘Apply Now.’

Companies can create microsites for different areas of expertise, geographic locations, or interests. Thus, each candidate only needs to visit a microsite representing their interests and intentions.

4. Employee Referrals

Companies can establish employee referral programs to attract, recruit, and retain the best talents. Word of mouth referrals can make your recruitment marketing strategy so powerful by:

• Reducing time-to-hire,
• Cutting sourcing costs,
• Improving time-to-productivity.

Plus, the candidates you recruit through referrals tend to adapt to the company culture easily. They are also within reach and easily accessible.

How to Develop a Recruitment Marketing Plan

An effective recruitment marketing plan enables recruiters to define their goals and outline steps to reach them. The marketing plan is part of the larger strategy to attract the best candidates for vacant positions.

Here is how to effectively develop a recruitment marketing plan:

1. Setting Your Recruitment Marketing Goals

Document your goals to identify the best marketing recruitment channels to use to achieve them.

Examples of recruitment marketing goals include:

• Increasing candidate engagement and experience on the recruitment platform,
• Growing the job applicant pool,
• Increasing the number of complete job applications,
• Increasing traffic to your career website,
• Improving job acceptance rates from successful candidates,
• And increasing your brand awareness among potential applicants,

2. Defining Your Audience and Building Personas

A persona is a description of your ideal target audience in terms of the characteristics of your ideal job applicant. Besides general characteristics, persona also depends on the role. For example, a marketer should have a different persona than an engineer.

Essentially, you must define the persona using an individual's demographics, behavior, beliefs about themselves, goals, values, challenges, and location.

3. Selecting Marketing Channels and Tactics

Select a marketing channel that perfectly matches your persona's online presence. They should ideally be the platforms they go to regularly. Remember, channel preferences are different across generations.

The following are highly effective recruitment marketing channels for building an employer brand and optimizing the candidate funnel:

• Professional career site
• Social media
• Email marketing
• SMS/texting

Puck’s customers use all of these platforms in their recruitment marketing campaigns. From career sites to job pages, to custom audio and video content that can be posted and shared via social media, to onboarding and interview guides, Puck helps brands create great employer branding content. Check out how SKIMS and Motus use Puck in the section below!

4. Measuring Success: A Critical Step in Assessing Your Approach

Finally, you need to determine your success in recruitment marketing using the right metrics. For instance, you need to determine your largest source of hires, social engagement, cost per hire, and time to acceptance. While at it, don’t forget to measure the impact of employee referrals.

Recruitment Marketing Examples

1. Dell

Dell, an American computer company, created a social media campaign to create brand awareness by focusing on localized content. As a result, they were able to attract high engagement through their social media posts.

In one story, ‘Vets at Dell,’ the company showcased how employees transition from life in the military to working for the company. Ultimately, they could identify what works and what doesn’t work for each segment.

2. L’Oreal

L’Oreal, a global cosmetics firm, aimed to demonstrate what working at their company is like by posting original content. It wanted to attract more job applicants from the United States by letting people know who they were and why people should consider working for them.

In the ‘Life at L’Oreal’ campaign, the company sought to promote the work-life balance and interests of 16 of its current employees. They filmed the 16 people and shared the videos on social media to rave reviews.

3. SKIMS

SKIMS, an American shapewear and clothing brand, leaned heavily into influencer marketing and focused on collaborations to make their brand personable and promote diversity. When it came time to hire new employees, they turned to Puck to launch a series of engaging mini podcasts that offered exclusive audio insight into life at SKIMS.

Puck helped SKIMS provide their candidates with innovative and informative ways to learn about the SKIMS culture, values, and various opportunities. 

4. Motus

Motus, a mobile workforce solution organization committed to workplace agility, turned to Puck to help them create content for their open roles. Part of their recruitment marketing strategy included creating content centered around promoting their teams so that applicants could learn more about their culture – check out their BDR content here!