Back to Blog Home Page
With the labor market in flux, now is the perfect time to reassess how you build awareness with active and passive job seekers and nurture candidates of interest through your funnel with targeted recruitment marketing campaigns. Specifically, ones that help you and your recruiting org:
- Tap into both new and existing talent communities that yield the “ideal” candidates
- Turn your careers page into a high-converting channel for your sourcing strategy
- Convince “on-the-fence” prospects to apply for jobs on your careers site and via job ads
- At the end of the day, bolster your talent pool and fill open positions quickly and efficiently
If you need help refining your recruitment marketing efforts, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide, we’ll discuss:
- Improving your recruitment marketing approach
- Top recruitment marketing strategies that attract talent
Improving your recruitment marketing approach
The goal for recruitment marketing teams at enterprises today is to fill critical job openings intelligently and expeditiously. A well-built recruitment marketing campaign that leads to a stellar candidate experience for prospective hires, facilitating faster and higher-quality hiring for your talent team.
Successful recruitment marketing campaigns result when talent teams approach candidate engagement holistically, resulting in a flow of top-notch candidates to apply for their vacancies. It involves:
- Personalizing communication to individual job seekers
- Nurturing those individuals through their respective recruitment journeys
- Encouraging candidate conversion at each step of the way
Arguably, the most important element of a successful recruitment marketing campaign, though, is to execute a nuanced approach to converting top talent, not simply casting a wide net and hoping for the best. To that end, we recommend utilizing a unified applicant tracking system (ATS) from which you execute most (if not all) recruitment marketing activities. With a comprehensive tool like Jobvite, you can also monitor your progress with them and assess your results, enabling you to make data-driven adjustments to your recruiting approach.
As you read the strategies below, consider how they work together to present a unified recruitment roadmap that encourages candidates to engage with your employer brand and apply for a job at your organization.
Top recruitment marketing strategies that attract talent
1. Define your target audience
As a recruiter, you know that attracting an entry-level hourly worker is much different than attracting a senior executive. Incorporate Targeted Audience Planning (TAP) into your recruitment marketing strategy to achieve the best results for your hiring needs. This is how it works:
- Identify which roles your company needs most
- Learn about the candidate types who’ll succeed in each role
- Group the candidates into specific audiences to easily build personalized content
- Communicate this content through the candidate’s preferred channels
Integrate this TAP concept to really understand who your audiences are and to ask questions like “How are these roles prioritized?” and “What is their importance to our organization’s success?“ to align with your corporate goals.
2. Optimize your careers page
While there’s value to posting open roles to job boards like Indeed and platforms like LinkedIn, most postings like these direct the viewer back to your company’s website, where they can explore your business’s values, culture, benefits, career development opportunities, and more.
Provide a great candidate experience by optimizing your careers page. Start by making it easy for visitors to find by adding a link to it in your navigation header or footer. Larger organizations may find it easier to create a subdomain for their careers, so potential candidates can navigate through all career-related information in one place.
Ideally, your career page should have a search function, so any interested visitors can find roles they’d be interested in applying for based on job category and location. Additionally, ensure your site is mobile-optimized so candidates can view listings even while on the go.
3. Enable social sharing on job postings
Adding social sharing capabilities to job postings serves two purposes. First, your recruitment marketing team can easily promote new jobs by directly sharing the listing on social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn, boosting your reach and increasing applications for that role. If any individuals are interested in working at your company and follow your recruitment team on these platforms, they’ll jump at the opportunity to apply.
Second, it makes it easy for individuals browsing your careers page to share your postings with their peers. If they have friends or family who are job searching, they might be inclined to share postings relevant to their peers’ skills and interests to help them with their search. Social sharing makes it easier for them to do that and gets more potential applicants to view your postings—it’s a win-win.
4. Create an employee referral program
Your employees are another great resource for spreading the word about your job listings. To encourage their help, create a dedicated employee referral program that incentivizes them to share your open jobs with their social circles. Usually, when applicants are referred to a job listing and apply, they’ll add the name of the person who referred them in a dedicated field on the application. The employee who referred that person will then receive a reward, such as a bonus or extra vacation days.
5. Continuously engage candidates
Continuous candidate engagement is about applying a candidate-centric approach to attract top talent. It’s also about a mindset: embracing a new way to have ongoing conversations with candidates, in real-time and across all channels. To that end, you should:
- Support continuous engagement with tools that facilitate communication
- Ensure all engagement is seamless from hiring to onboarding
- Take engagement mobile so candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers can connect anywhere
With a candidate-centric approach, you’ll be making a shift that drives immediate and long-term value around operational efficiency and candidate engagement, while steadily impacting your ability to reduce time to fill for that precious talent.
For best results, leverage the data in your ATS and candidate relationship management (CRM) system. Keep top talent warm by sending personalized messages after recruiting events, inviting them to apply to roles they might be interested in. Check in every few months with a list of new open roles. Once they’ve applied, you can send them materials about your company’s values, culture, and more to demonstrate why your organization is worth working for.
6. Showcase your employer brand in all messaging
Every company knows the importance of consistent branding across messaging to present a professional and trustworthy image to its audiences. The same principle applies to employer branding and recruitment marketing messages.
Your employer branding should align with your organization’s brand as a whole, but also speak to what working at your organization would look like. Key aspects of it include:
- Company values
- Work culture
- Employee value proposition
- Work-life balance
- Career development
- Employee satisfaction
Consider how you can let these elements shine through in your recruitment marketing. For example, you might share your culture and values directly on your career page. Additionally, as part of your candidate-nurturing campaigns, you could send emails discussing your employee value proposition and work culture.
Incorporate other branding best practices, such as consistently applying visual and verbal preferences to your messaging. For example, if your employer brand is irreverent and fun, posting a very professional-looking social media post might confuse potential applicants about your workplace culture.
7. Incorporate employee stories into your strategy
Social proof is a powerful tool. For job hunters who are seeking the right fit, knowing that other individuals enjoy working at your business can be the difference between them sending in an application or choosing to apply elsewhere.
Incorporating employee stories into recruitment marketing is an easy way for you to demonstrate social proof and show that you’re a great employer for which people are excited to work. Here are a few ways you can do that:
- Video testimonials from existing staff members
- Employee highlight blog posts and social media posts
- Photos of your employees collaborating with one another
- Social media takeovers or “a day in the life of an employee” content
- Case studies of employee career growth
Highlight your highest-performing and most loyal employees for the best results. As a bonus, this can be a great way to show appreciation to your existing employees!
8. Monitor your recruitment campaign’s progress
Use your ATS to take note of your campaign’s outcomes, monitor your KPIs, and make adjustments as needed. The talent acquisition industry is constantly changing, and your efforts to reach candidates should adapt with it.
In particular, take note of the following metrics:
- Applicant conversion rate
- Time-to-hire
- Cost-per-hire
- Quality of hire
- Source of hire
- Candidate engagement rate
- Employer brand perception
- Candidate experience satisfaction
- Application abandonment rate
- Offer acceptance rate
Using this data, you can identify your recruiting bottlenecks. Is the hiring manager taking a long time to get back to candidates? Are you not getting enough applicants applying? Have you created a seamless mobile experience?
With this knowledge, you can develop a game plan for tackling obstacles and improving your overall recruitment marketing results.
Next steps: Implementing new recruitment marketing strategies
Revamping your recruitment approach requires time and effort, but the benefits you reap are well worth it. With the right recruitment marketing strategies, you’ll improve efficiency in sourcing and maximize hiring results while reducing costs and manual effort.
Make sure that your tech stack is up for the challenge! With Jobvite’s recruitment marketing features, you can effortlessly publish your job postings to 20+ job boards, including boards dedicated to specific audiences and industries. Plus, pull candidate information from multiple resume databases into a single candidate record for a holistic view of every applicant, allowing you to send personalized messages that keep candidates warm.
