10 Ways to Create a Recruitment Marketing Strategy That Stands Out

Recruiters face many challenges from building a compelling employer brand to ensuring a seamless candidate experience. That’s where recruitment marketing becomes an important part of talent acquisition. In this article, we’ll explore five best practices that address these common pain points. By focusing on these strategies, recruiters can improve their marketing efforts, attract top talent, and ensure a smooth hiring process. Discover how to elevate your recruitment marketing game and make your organization a magnet for high-quality candidates.

What Is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is a strategic approach that applies marketing principles to the recruitment process. It involves promoting your employer brand to attract, engage, and nurture relationships with potential candidates before they even apply for a job. If done well, recruitment marketing can give you many advantages over competitors -  from better candidate engagement, a pleasant and complete candidate experience, access to a wider talent pool, and more.

Key Differences Between Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing

The terms “recruiting” and “recruitment marketing” are often used interchangeably, but they represent distinct processes with unique objectives and strategies.

Recruiting

Recruiting is the process of identifying, attracting, interviewing, and hiring candidates for specific job openings within an organization. It is often driven by immediate needs and short-term goals, with the primary objective of filling vacancies quickly and effectively. That being said, recruiting is a reactive approach that typically begins when a vacancy arises and focuses on filling that position as efficiently as possible.

Recruitment Marketing

Meanwhile, recruitment marketing is a proactive and strategic approach that focuses on building and promoting an employer brand to attract potential candidates, even before specific job openings arise. It involves creating and implementing marketing strategies to engage both active and passive job seekers. In other words, it’s a strategy to create a positive perception of the company in the job market, making it easier to attract high-quality candidates when positions become available. Basically, recruitment marketing is a long-term strategy that focuses on building a strong employer brand and fostering ongoing engagement with potential candidates.

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10 Ways to Develop a Recruitment Marketing Plan

A well-structured recruitment marketing plan will help you clearly define your recruitment goals, understand your target audience, and create strategies to reach and engage potential candidates. Here’s how to develop your plan:

1. Define Recruitment Goals

Start by establishing clear and measurable recruitment goals. Consider what you want to achieve with your recruitment efforts, such as filling specific roles, reducing time-to-hire, improving candidate quality, or increasing brand awareness among potential candidates. Setting SMART objectives (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) will provide a solid foundation for your recruitment marketing plan.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Identify the key characteristics of your ideal candidates, including their demographics, skills, experience, and motivations. Understanding your target audience will enable you to tailor your messaging and marketing tactics effectively. Conducting surveys or interviews with current employees can provide valuable insights into what attracts talent to your organization.

3. Conduct Market Research

Analyze your competitors and the industry landscape to understand recruitment trends and how other organizations attract talent. Investigate what successful companies in your field are doing in terms of employer branding, recruitment channels, and engagement strategies. This research can inform your tactics and help you identify gaps in your own recruitment marketing efforts.

4. Develop an Employer Value Proposition (EVP)

Your Employer Value Proposition is a critical part of your recruitment marketing plan. It articulates what makes your organization an attractive place to work, including company culture, benefits, career development opportunities, and work-life balance. Clearly communicating your EVP in all recruitment materials will help attract candidates who align with your organization’s values and mission.

5. Choose Marketing Channels

Determine the most effective channels to reach your target audience. Popular channels include:

• Career Websites: Optimize and update your careers page to reflect your EVP and make it easy for candidates to apply.
• Social Media: Utilize platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to engage with potential candidates through posts, videos, and ads showcasing your company culture and job openings.
• Job Boards: Leverage industry-specific job boards and general websites like Indeed and Glassdoor to expand your reach.
• Email Marketing: Use targeted email campaigns to nurture relationships with past applicants and passive candidates.

6. Create Engaging Content

Develop compelling content that showcases your brand and engages potential candidates. This may include employee testimonials, behind-the-scenes videos, blog posts about company culture or industry trends, and engaging infographics about the hiring process. Visual content tends to perform well in recruitment marketing, so be sure to utilize multimedia formats to capture attention.

7. Implement Recruitment Campaigns

Launch targeted recruitment marketing campaigns based on your defined goals and audience. Use a mix of tactics such as promotional videos, online webinars, or virtual recruitment events to attract attention. Monitor the campaigns' performance using key metrics like application rates and engagement levels, and adjust your strategy based on the results.

8. Leverage Employee Advocacy

Employees can be powerful ambassadors for your brand. Encourage them to share job openings and engage with your recruitment content on social media. You might consider implementing an employee referral program to incentivize them to refer potential candidates from their networks.

9. Use Data Analytics

Track and analyze data from your recruitment marketing initiatives to gauge effectiveness. Utilize tracking tools and analytics dashboards to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as click-through rates, application completion rates, and source of hire. Evaluating this data will help refine your strategies and understand which channels and messages resonate with candidates.

10. Continuous Improvement

Recruitment marketing is an ongoing process that requires regular evaluation and adjustments. Gather feedback from candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters to identify areas for improvement. Continually learn about industry trends and emerging technologies to keep your recruitment marketing efforts relevant and effective.

By following these steps and maintaining a candidate-centric approach, you can develop a clear and robust recruitment marketing plan that successfully attracts and engages top talent in your industry.

Your Reasons to Implement Recruitment Marketing as Employers

Recruitment marketing is an important strategy for employers looking to attract and retain top talent. These are the reasons for you to implement recruitment marketing in your hiring process:

1. Enhanced Employer Branding: When an employer communicates what makes their company unique, they can build a strong and positive employer brand that resonates with job seekers. This strategy not only attracts potential employees but also fosters loyalty among current employees, enhancing the overall workforce.
2. Attracting the Right Talent: You can use various channels like social media, job boards, and industry-specific platforms to reach a wider qualified talent pool. You can take a step further by targeting specific candidate profiles that align with your business needs. This way, you can attract candidates with the right skills, experience, and cultural fit.
3. Increased Engagement: Through strategic content marketing, social media engagement, and personalized communication, employers can create a positive candidate experience. This engagement helps candidates feel valued and informed, ultimately leading to a stronger connection with the organization.
4. Talent Pipeline Development: Recruitment marketing is not just about filling current openings but also about building a talent pipeline for future needs. By actively promoting your brand and sharing insights into company culture, values, and career opportunities, you can cultivate relationships with potential candidates long before they are needed. This proactive approach enables quicker fills for future positions and reduces the time-to-hire.
5. Utilization of Data and Analytics: By using insights gained from tracking engagement and conversion rates, employers can refine their strategies to optimize their recruitment efforts. This data-driven approach allows businesses to make informed decisions about job postings, candidate outreach, and advertising spending.
6. Leveraging Employee Advocacy: Employees can serve as powerful brand ambassadors. You can encourage your current workforce to share their experiences with the company on social media, participate in referral programs, and contribute to company branding initiatives. This authentic advocacy can significantly enhance the organization's reach and credibility.
7. Adaptation to Market Changes: By monitoring trends in candidate preferences, work cultures, and job market dynamics, you can adapt your strategies to meet changing demands. This agility ensures that organizations remain competitive in attracting talent.
8. Cost Efficiency: Improved hiring efficiencies and reduced costs per hire are the results of recruitment marketing. By employing focused marketing strategies, such as targeted social media ads and content marketing campaigns, you can reach a larger pool of candidates which can save time and resources.
9. Improved Quality of Hires: By leveraging recruitment marketing tactics, you can ensure that you attract candidates who are not only qualified but also genuinely interested in the specific roles and the organization itself. This alignment often leads to improved job performance, lower turnover rates, and greater overall satisfaction for both employees and employers.
10. Long-term Recruitment Strategy: Recruitment marketing encourages a long-term mindset towards hiring. By continuously marketing the organization as a great place to work, you can foster interest and engagement from potential candidates even when there are no immediate vacancies. This ensures a consistent influx of interested talent and prepares the organization for future growth and expansion.

Recruitment Marketing Best Practices

Now let’s dive into the best practices to make sure you have a successful recruitment marketing campaign.

1. Establish a Strong Brand Image to Attract Talents

Establishing a strong employer’s brand image is a long-term strategy that focuses on bringing value to the target audience. This practice is very important as the majority of active job seekers research companies’ online presence before deciding to apply for open positions.

For instance, your employer value proposition (EVP) could be the chance to work in a diverse, multicultural environment, where cross-functional opportunities are plenty for those who wish to build a career in your industry. For candidates with a strong growth mindset, a proposition such as this would be attractive.

Warren CAT, a large heavy-duty equipment dealer, created a career page that leads its visitors to current job openings and pages that promote its employee training programs as well as employee benefits.

Manatal gives users the ability to create a customizable career page that represents the essence of your organization and inspires potential candidates to become your employee. This is an essential step, especially for small businesses or startups that are building their employer brand.

2. Improve Candidate Experience

Candidate experience is crucial for job applicants, with over 83% stating that negative experiences affect their perception of employers[2]. To create a positive experience, provide clear job descriptions to avoid misunderstandings.

Answer frequently asked questions by creating a comprehensive FAQ page and using chatbots for instant feedback. Philips exemplifies this with its detailed FAQ section on its career page.

Consistent and timely communication is also key. Keep candidates informed throughout the recruitment process. Tools like Manatal can help by centralizing communication and allowing customized email templates, ensuring candidates stay updated without the need for multiple tabs.

3. Strengthen Relationships with Candidates Through Social Media

Today, social media has become one of our everyday essentials. Currently, over 4.62 billion people across the globe access social media, with an average time of two hours and 27 minutes spent on platforms[3]. It is no surprise that the potential candidates are waiting to be found through social media.

First of all, you need to choose the right social media channels to reach out to candidates and promote your brand. LinkedIn, for example, is a go-to platform for professionals across multiple industries around the world, while Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram enable you to connect with potential candidates on a deeper level as these channels allow you to see more of candidates’ personal sides.

Your social recruitment can be even more efficient by integrating an Applicant Tracking System (ATS.) Manatal ATS allows you to publish job ads across multiple social media sites at once. Strengthen relationships with candidates in a few clicks.

At the same time, Manatal also enables you to get to know candidates better with its social media enrichment feature that extracts relevant and important candidates’ information from their social media profiles and consolidates them in a single platform.

4. How About Hosting an Awesome Recruitment Event?

Whether it's a physical or virtual event, both ways are excellent for showcasing your company and engaging with a broader talent pool beyond just CVs.

To plan an effective recruitment event, set your goals and choose an event type that fits your organization. Small businesses might prefer informal events to build friendly relationships, while larger companies in fields like engineering or IT might opt for job fairs, requiring detailed planning and promotional materials.

Create an event page on social media, send email invitations, and consistently advertise across all platforms. After the event, analyze the results to assess success in raising brand awareness and attracting applicants, helping you refine future events.

5. Go After Both Passive and Active Job Seekers

Using social media to attract active job seekers is a strategy that would give you results. As for passive job seekers, an appealing employer brand that speaks to their aspirations is a huge factor that convinces them to consider your company. To do it effectively, understand what these candidates in your industry might be looking for and craft your content to resonate with them.

Just keep in mind that the process of turning passive job seekers into applicants doesn’t happen overnight. It takes multiple attempts. So, be patient. Each time you publish content, tell more stories about your organization. Add variation to your content. This will help keep your social media timeline fresh and interesting while consistently drawing attention from both passive and active job seekers.

Conclusion

Carrying out recruitment marketing is one of the best ways to approach both active and passive seekers. Building a solid employer brand while sparking interest with informative and exciting content and providing candidates with the best experience can produce a greater impact. However, doing all of that without a powerful tool could mean a waste of your time and effort. Manatal’s simple and robust AI-powered applicant tracking system and CRM can help guide you toward successful recruitment marketing within a few clicks. With Manatal, you can strengthen your brand image with a customizable career page and get to know candidates better with social media enrichment while offering them a satisfactory experience with the mass emailing capability.

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Citations

1. Mastering Recruitment Marketing: What You Need to Know in 2024
2. 7 Recruitment Trends for 2020
3. Global Social Media Statistics Research Summary May 2024