5 Solid Approaches to Recruitment Marketing

It is becoming increasingly challenging for recruiters to find the right candidates. Just look at the statistics. A staggering 73% of recruiters struggle to search for candidates who fit their job criteria. What does that tell you? One, that there’s probably only a small talent pool with the skills you need. Two, that you should work harder to beat the competition and attract some of these limited qualified candidates to your company. This is where recruitment marketing comes in.

Recruitment marketing refers to the strategies employers use to find, attract, and engage potential candidates. Ultimately, recruitment marketing strategies ensure companies employ well-skilled personnel and achieve business success. In this blog post, you’ll learn five effective recruitment marketing strategies to help you land the ideal candidate in your next recruitment cycle. Let’s get started.

Employer branding is a long-term strategy that entails projecting the correct image of your brand to potential employees. This is vital to recruitment success. Some 75% of job seekers research the employer’s brand and reputation before applying for a job. The thing is, HR can’t ensure successful employer branding on its own. The department can post as many marketing materials portraying the company as a good employer as it wants. But if the existing or former employees disprove these, then all that company marketing will be for nothing. You’ll still struggle to attract and recruit a skilled workforce.

So, to ensure good employer branding as part of your recruitment marketing, you need to be a good employer in the first place. The opinions and reviews of your employees matter. If they don’t like you, they’ll likely spread the bad word about you. If they like you, they’ll paint you in a good light to potential applicants. That holds true even if some of your employees decide to leave at one point. Work with your current personnel to ensure you’ve created a suitable working environment. Among other things, that means you should offer good compensation, nice perks, and ensure a good work-life balance. 

But those are just the basics. To be a good employer, you need to pay attention to employee feedback about other matters as well. For instance, if you notice several negative reviews from your hourly employees around ineffective work scheduling, you should make a conscious effort to improve in this area. An employee shift scheduling app can help you solve this issue, letting you organize your work and workers better. Or, if some employees say the existing workflow makes them unproductive, you can meet with them and discuss how to improve things then act on valid suggestions. This will make them feel like you value what they have to say.

But how do you get these reviews in the first place? A simple survey will do. Just make it short and simple. Then send the survey to your employees’ email addresses. You don’t have them? Don’t worry. There are tools that make it easy for you to find email addresses. Once you have all the relevant emails, just send your survey en masse to save time.

Pay close attention to your website. Job applicants who visit your site will want to find information about your company quickly. They also would like to locate job opportunities without difficulty and submit their application on your website without unnecessary complications. So, make sure your site is discoverable in the first place. For this, it should be optimized for SEO. Ensure your site loads quickly. You can do this by compressing your images using tools such as TinyPNG and by choosing a good web hosting. Overall, the recommended page loading time is three seconds. 

As part of your search engine optimization, make sure the site is also mobile-friendly. Google follows mobile-first indexing best practices. That means it uses the mobile version to index and rank websites. Besides, this is what people, including potential applicants, want. A whopping 55% of all web traffic comes from mobile devices. To ensure your site is mobile-friendly, use a responsive layout. Make your font readable and your call-to-action buttons large. There should be ample space between links as well.

Now to ensure potential job applicants easily find what they need on your site, choose a website design that has clearcut sections about recruitment. Coca-Cola, for instance, has a Careers Page potential applicants can easily access to view job opportunities:

In this relevant section, outline what sets you apart from other organizations. This will help entice your website visitors–in this case, your potential employees—to submit their applications if they’re looking for a job. Your employer value proposition can be in the form of videos, photos, or written testimonials from past and present employees. You also have to consider the fact that some people might submit their applications via your website. So, it should be GDPR-compliant.  

As a final tip, keep your website updated with the latest company news. These pages won’t just help potential recruits find all the information they need about your company. They also show transparency and the intentionality of your brand to maintain a healthy company culture. 

A LinkedIn survey found that 49% of candidates follow brands on social media to remain updated about their recruitment process. That means a vibrant social media presence and a well-thought-out social media strategy can boost your recruitment marketing efforts.

When using social media for recruitment marketing, you can post your recruitment-related content on the same social media accounts you use to reach your customers. Another option is to do what Salesforce did: create a separate social account for recruitment-related matters. The good thing about this strategy is that potential applicants can easily find job openings and information about the company and its employees. They don’t have to read through social media posts promoting the company’s products, for example. Whether you choose to create a different social account for your recruitment marketing or not, develop a creative content marketing strategy. 

Your content should showcase your employer brand. So, you can share employee features, company events, and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. You can also post relevant resources about your brand’s core values and causes. These types of content can also help you boost social engagement. You can easily get more likes on Instagram, followers on Tiktok, comments on Facebook, and shares on Twitter (X). As a result, you grow your social media presence and boost your overall employer brand.

Don’t forget to maximize the use of social media platforms by running ads promoting job openings to new audiences. Use audience targeting to specify the education level, location, interests, and job titles of the candidates you aim to attract. 

Posting open positions on job boards is one of the best recruitment marketing strategies to reach your target audience. Job boards like Indeed and LocaliQ are a great way to increase brand exposure for your company. After all, practically anyone, even people who’ve never heard about your company, can access job boards. And they do this because these platforms make it easy to conduct job searches and look for potential employers. Applicants can filter jobs by title, location, niche, and even requirements. Job seekers can also look for openings from specific companies.

Don’t believe me? Here’s a case study worth-noting. To reach potential employees in Lubbock and Amarillo, Brownfield Regional Medical Center published ads on a job board. The result? The ads yielded a staggering 2,000 views. The medical center also managed to fill a new position almost every month.

You can choose between free and paid job boards. But if you have a budget for it, opt for the paid options instead. They give you additional features like remarketing to candidates who viewed your post but didn’t take action. They also offer advanced branding and candidate tracking options. 

In addition to this, your post will be placed in a strategic position on the board. This will help your target candidates see it first, increasing your chances of getting the best people for the job. 

Set up an employee referral program as part of your recruitment marketing. A whopping 88% of employers rate employee referrals as the most reliable source of qualified candidates. Therefore, employee referral programs don’t just help you acquire incredible talent. They help you reduce the cost per hire as well. 

Plus, employee referral programs are a great strategy to gauge employee satisfaction. If a current employee can recommend you to their friends or family, they probably like working for your company. If they don’t recommend you, well, that just means there are issues you need to address in your workplace.

To set up your employee referral program, offer a reward to current employees for every successful referral. Your reward can be monetary or non-monetary. You can even offer, not just one, but various incentives. Make your referral criteria clear to employees. Also, don’t make it difficult for current employees to participate. Use employee referral software such as Referral Rock and Teamable to manage your program.

Recruitment marketing strategies help companies show potential employees the benefits of working with them. That’s why they’re key to a company’s success. Recruitment marketing helps you get the top talent you need to achieve business goals. You learned five solid approaches to recruitment marketing in this article. Make sure you’re a good employer in the first place. Also, optimize your website, especially the careers pages, to ensure candidates can find what they need and apply on your site with ease. Use social channels to reach potential candidates and showcase your employer brand.

Don’t forget to amplify your organization’s presence on job boards. Finally, implement employee referral programs to save on recruitment costs. Apply these five approaches to recruitment marketing and you’ll get excellent results in your next hiring cycle.

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