Inbound Recruitment Marketing

The results of inbound marketing practices speak for themselves across a wide range of industries. It proves that networking, when done out of the recruitment scope, can yield more results later on when talent acquisition is needed. It’s more about piquing candidates’ interest in the company as a whole, rather than focusing on the currently open positions.

Inbound recruitment marketing as an approach is essentially a series of activities aimed at building relationships with talent even before they are available for recruitment, and even before any positions are open on the company’s end. By adopting this technique, companies become much more proactive in their hiring process and are able to better classify prospective candidates based on their engagement levels.

Benefits of inbound recruitment marketing

This approach takes recruitment back from a reactive recruitment process to a more proactive one all while filtering out the noise generated by the market’s difficulties and challenges. With an overabundance of data bombarding modern talent, this approach breaks the norm and sets your company’s recruitment for long term success.

Given the sharp rise of digital job-seeking over the years, recruiters (in-house or otherwise) are more crucial than ever. Think of all the messages, invitations, and offers you receive through LinkedIn or job portals. In order to break through this particularly loud aspect of the market and establish your company’s value for potential talent, it’s important to understand your target’s individual behavioral and demographic characteristics. Marketing departments have made the transition from the direct outbound strategy over the past decade, adopting an approach focused around pulling their target audience towards the company/product rather than the other way around.

It’s becoming more and more evident that recruitment is comparable to the modern sales process, where marketing plays a central role, and marketing activities must be designed around the candidate’s specific interests.

However, if we take a closer look at recruitment marketing and employer branding campaigns, it turns out that almost all content is focused on the company itself. Content of this nature is irrelevant to talent that is unfamiliar with the company and pertains only to those already interested in the brand. Simply put, these efforts are created to attract global talent but end up reaching a small portion of the target audience, a portion whose interest has already been established.

Establishing small scale inbound recruitment marketing methods can aid recruiters and hiring managers in sourcing talent with a genuine interest in working for their companies.

Candidate profiles & talent market research

A relevant message generates candidate interest.

Creating well-defined candidate profiles goes a long way in ensuring your content and message aren’t just another irrelevant attempt at capturing attention. Conducting in-depth talent market research ahead of any marketing efforts allows you to work around this common mistake, and target your talent through the very issues, difficulties, and solutions that pique their interest.

Candidate profiles can be especially useful if you choose 1-5 of the most important talent groups for your industry and describe each of them in great detail, going as far as to determine who and where these people are. There are many candidate profile templates available online that can be used to frame your initial efforts while you work to pinpoint exactly who it is you’re trying to reach through your inbound recruitment marketing campaign.

The “how to”

Once you’ve performed enough market research to understand and profile your target audience, content is the next big thing on your checklist. The goal is to create original and relevant content that builds itself around the candidate profiles you’ve created.

For an effective inbound recruitment marketing campaign, the candidate journey needs to be given due importance. This journey refers to the steps or stages a candidate goes through before they’re even contacted by a recruiter or enticed by an application, all the way to onboarding. It’s important to determine when throughout their journey candidates should be contacted.  For the launch of an initial campaign, the focus should be on raising candidate awareness throughout the relevant talent market.

At the starting point, all content that is created for recruitment marketing efforts needs to cater specifically to the immediate interests of your target audience, as defined by the candidate profiles you’ve created. The content in question isn’t created to promote open jobs or display how good an employer your company would be. It’s about generating content in the form of blog posts and social media posts that the candidates can directly relate to. The objective here is to acquire contact information from people interested in your content. In addition to blog posts and social media posts, you can add contact forms to get that information. Alternatively, Manatal users can leverage the social media enrichment feature to acquire even more information about the candidates as the inbound marketing efforts begin to yield results. This allows them to gain a better perspective of who the candidates are on a more profound level than industry and role.

Once the candidate’s contact information has been acquired, their focus would eventually move towards employer branding and authenticity, which play a very important role. At this point, you can follow up with candidates by presenting additional content through newsletters, LinkedIn, or social media messaging, etc.

‍Launching the campaign

‍Regardless of the company size or operations, it’s best to begin these campaigns on a smaller scale. It’s a very effective way to accurately define your candidate profiles and eventually yield better results.

But preparation is key, as it’s extremely important to research and understand the inbound marketing strategy before implementing its activities.

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