Wondering how to attract promising job candidates?
Today we are going to share seven recruitment marketing strategies that can help you with that…
What is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is a popular approach to recruitment that revolves around using marketing strategies and tactics to attract promising candidates.
How to Build an Employer Brand
One of the most important recruitment marketing concepts is building an employer brand designed to attract your dream candidates.
Here’s what that means in practice:
Protecting Your Brand’s Reputation
If your company is constantly involved in scandals, people who are serious about their careers will not want to work there.
The easiest way to avoid PR nightmares is to create a healthy company culture, treat people with respect and refuse to tolerate bad behavior in the workplace.
Sure, you will probably still have to deal with an occasional disgruntled employee, that’s just part and parcel of running a company.
But that shouldn’t cause serious problems if these are isolated one-off incidents that aren’t indicative of systemic issues within your organization.
In fact, if the vast majority of your employees are happy with the way you treat them, then they might even speak out in your defense should your company ever come under fire!
Being Consistent When it Comes to Your Brand’s Values
You want to get clear about your company’s values, broadcast those values to the world, and make sure that they are reflected in the way you run your business.
Say, if family values are a part of your brand, then you need to make sure that your company offers a family-friendly work environment.
In practice, that might mean a 40-hour work week with a regular 9 to 5 schedule and no expectation of doing overtime, generous maternity and paternity leaves, and unpaid time off in case your employees need to attend to family-related matters (e.g. take care of a sick child that caught the flu).
All that will help you attract people with kids who are looking for stable employment in a company that offers the work-life balance that they need.
However, if you preach family values but then expect your employees to work 60 hours a week, only provide the bare minimum maternity and paternity leaves, and show zero understanding when someone needs to take time off to attend to family-related matters, you are going to come across as a hypocrite.
Moreover, if you attract people with kids by preaching family values but then your company turns out to not be family-friendly at all, you’ll have a high employee turnover because new hires will keep quitting once they realize that you pulled a bait-and-switch on them.
Finally, you’ll probably eventually end up attracting negative media coverage because the general public hates hypocrisy and loves to see brands that don’t practice what they preach get exposed. This is a serious reputational risk!
And just to be clear, this was just an example, we aren’t saying that your company should adopt family values.
The point is that whatever your brand values are, they need to be reflected in your messaging, company culture, and day-to-day operations!
Offering Competitive Compensation Packages
Top performers have a ton of options, so if you want to attract them to your company, you need to offer competitive compensation packages.
Of course, there are other factors that influence people’s career decisions, such as believing in the company’s mission, opportunities to work on interesting problems, work-life balance, and so on.
But these factors aren’t as important as business owners tend to believe. Ultimately, people need to support their families, pay their mortgages, and save for retirement. And all that costs money.
Your competitors are probably paying their employees as little as they can get away with because that’s the default way of running a business.
This presents an opportunity for you: if you adopt a strategy of paying more than the industry average, you will have a much easier time attracting promising candidates.
So do the math to see how much you can afford to pay for each job role while still maintaining healthy profit margins and start offering competitive compensation packages!
Recruitment Marketing Strategy #1: Blogging
You can use your company blog to bolster your employer brand.
Here are some ideas:
- Have a monthly feature dedicated to showcasing the perks of working at your company. It can include employee interviews, interesting company news, company retreat recaps, etc.
- If the focus of your blog is business-related topics, you can use your company as an example to illustrate the principles that you are talking about. It’s an opportunity to broadcast your values.
- When you have a job opening, post the job ad on your blog. This will allow you to tap into your own audience first before expanding your search. Given that these people are already reading your blog, they are more likely to share your values than the average job seeker.
Also, if you as a business owner have a personal blog where you share your insights about entrepreneurship, you can discuss the way you run your company there.
That will provide value to your audience of fellow entrepreneurs while also strengthening your employer brand.
Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit, does this well on his personal blog. Check out his article “Profit Sharing For Bootstrapped Startups” if you want to see an example of what we are talking about.
Recruitment Marketing Strategy #2: Jobs Newsletter
Consider having a dedicated jobs newsletter that people can sign up for in order to get notified about new job openings. Add opt-in forms to your “Careers” page and to relevant blog posts.
This can help you build an email list of people who are interested in working at your company so that you could reach out to them whenever you are hiring.
Social media marketing is another great way to bolster your employer brand.
LinkedIn is the biggest professional social network in the world so it’s the obvious place to start if you want to attract promising candidates.
In fact, you can use it specifically for that purpose instead of trying to appeal to potential customers like you would on other platforms.
Here are some ideas on what to share on LinkedIn:
- Industry news, the latest trends, and comments on important developments.
- Advice on how to build a career in your industry. What would you advise a friend or a family member that wants to succeed in it?
- Advice on how to stand out when applying for jobs. As a business owner, you understand the hiring process from the employer’s perspective so your insights can be really valuable to job seekers.
- Content that showcases the perks of working at your company This can mean employee interviews, “Day in the Life Of” style vlogs, photos and videos from company retreats, etc.
- Job ads for open positions.
You’ll probably start getting connection requests and cold direct messages from people interested in working at your company.
If they seem like a good fit for a current job opening, encourage them to apply for that position.
Alternatively, invite them to sign up for your jobs newsletter and ask them if they want to be added to your candidate database (more on that later).
Also, if you notice someone interacting with your content a lot, you can send them a direct message to say hi and learn more about them.
They might be interested in working for your company or might know someone else who is. It’s always good to make new connections!
As for the other platforms, we recommend incorporating some recruitment content in your overall social media marketing strategy so that it would make up around 5% of your total social media output outside of LinkedIn.
You can also run social media ads to drive traffic directly to your job application page.
Again, LinkedIn is probably the best place to start because it makes it easy to target potential candidates who have the education, experience and skills required for that particular role.
Moreover, since it’s a professional social network, people are already thinking about their careers when they are using it so they are likely to be more receptive to ads related to that.
In other words, it’s easier to get the potential candidate’s attention when they are browsing LinkedIn looking for career advancement opportunities than it is to get their attention when they are scrolling Facebook looking for cat videos and memes.
That being said, LinkedIn seems to be less popular among blue-collar workers so if you are hiring for a blue-collar role, running ads on Facebook might make more sense.
Recruitment Marketing Strategy #5: Podcast Advertising
It seems that these days you can find a podcast about pretty much any subject imaginable.
This means that regardless of what job role you are hiring for, you can probably find a podcast that caters to people in that occupation.
Consider doing some research, identifying podcasts that potential candidates might be listening to, and then reaching out to the host(s) to see if you can work out an advertising deal where they read out your job ad at the beginning of the show.
If you get high-quality applications that way, you can start running ads on those podcasts whenever you have a job opening.
Just make sure to create a unique link for each podcast so that you can track how many applicants they are sending your way.
Otherwise, if you ask all hosts to share the same link with their listeners, it may be difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of these advertising campaigns.
Recruitment Marketing Strategy #6: Posting Ads on Job Boards
You can also post ads on job boards whenever you have a new job opening.
Ideally, you want to target specialized boards because they tend to attract more qualified applicants.
For example, if you are looking to hire a writer, consider posting ads on the ProBlogger job board, the Best Writing job board, and Freelance Writing Jobs.
Writers from all around the world are checking these websites daily so you will probably get a ton of applications.
(We’ll discuss how to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of job applications later in this article).
You can also post ads on general freelance job boards such as Upwork, remote work job boards like Dynamite Jobs and RemoteOK, and even on Craiglist.
Use the same process for all job openings: see if there are any specialized job boards, post ads there, and then also post some ads on more general job boards to cast a wider net.
Recruitment Marketing Strategy #7: Cold Outreach
Finally, you can use cold outreach to contact potential candidates and invite them to apply for the job.
LinkedIn is probably the best place for this because people are used to getting messages like that on this platform.
Moreover, if you have mutual connections with the person you are reaching out to, that can serve as social proof and give you some credibility in their eyes.
Plus, if they aren’t looking for a new job at the moment, you can still add them to your network and stay in touch in case something changes in the future.
You can also use direct messages to do cold outreach on other social media platforms but you need to be more cautious because what’s appropriate on LinkedIn may not always be appropriate on Facebook or Instagram.
If someone is using social media for personal purposes, then it’s probably not a good idea to contact them there. See if you can find their email address and send them an email instead.
But if they have a professional social media presence, then sending them a direct message is probably okay.
Also, if you are casually browsing the web and come across someone who does good work, find their email address and reach out to them.
Say hi, introduce yourself, and tell them that you like their work. Everyone loves compliments so a message like that will probably be received positively.
It doesn’t cost you anything and it can help you make new connections. Who knows, maybe the next time that person is looking for a job, they will remember your email and reach out to you!
Our Top 3 Recruitment Marketing Pro Tips
Ask Domain Experts to Review Your Job Ads
Typically, job ads are created by the HR team since they are the ones responsible for recruitment.
But here’s the problem with that: HR people usually aren’t that familiar with the job roles that they are hiring for.
Sure, they have a general understanding of what each role entails but they probably don’t know the details.
This can lead to them creating job ads with requirements that are ludicrous.
For example, tech workers often joke about job ads that require five years of experience in working with a technology that only came out three years ago.
Needless to say, you want to avoid blunders like that because they are embarrassing, make your company look bad, and drive away competent candidates.
Of course, you can’t expect someone who works in HR to know what year a particular programming framework became available.
That’s why it makes sense to ask domain experts to review job ads before posting them.
Say, if you want to hire a junior developer, let the HR team write the ad but then ask a senior developer to review it.
Include an Obstacle in Your Job Ad
Anyone who has ever posted a job ad on one of the popular job boards knows that you immediately get flooded with applications by people who clearly haven’t even read your ad.
Sifting through all those low-quality applications to find suitable candidates can be incredibly time-consuming.
That’s why we recommend including an obstacle in your job ad so that you can reduce the application quantity and increase their quality.
For example, if the candidates are applying via email, you can ask them to include some random words such as “pineapple” in the subject line.
Alternatively, you can ask them to film a short video explaining why they are a good candidate for this job, upload it to a video hosting platform, and include a link to it in their application.
Then you can start sifting through applications by immediately filtering out everyone that failed to include that random word in the subject line or make a video and link to it.
By the way, if the job that you are hiring for doesn’t require being on camera then it might be best to not watch the videos that the candidates submitted. Why?
Because if someone is awkward on camera it might make you biased against them without you even realizing it.
But does it really matter if a person who is applying for a software engineering role is mumbling in their application video? Probably not.
What matters is that they cared about their application enough to submit that video in the first place. You presented an obstacle, they overcame that obstacle. Now you can look at their application to see if they are qualified for the job!
Build a Candidate Database
Finally, if you are investing resources in attracting high-quality candidates, it makes sense to build a candidate database that you can then tap into in the future.
If you are a small business owner and you are handling recruitment yourself, then it probably doesn’t need to be a formal thing.
You can just keep a list of promising candidates in a note-taking app and reach out to them the next time you are hiring.
But if someone else is handling the recruitment process, you need to think carefully about how you approach building a candidate database, especially when it comes to legal considerations.
You will probably need an opt-in process, an opt-out process, and a privacy policy for your database that complies with the laws of the jurisdiction that your business is operating in.
It doesn’t have to be complicated but it does have to be legal!
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