What is Recruitment Marketing and how do I get started?

Recruitment marketing lets you attract, engage, nurture, and convert great candidates. It enables companies to optimise their marketing strategies like job advertisements, social media, careers sites, employee-generated content, proactive outreach, and targeted communication to attract top talent.

Ultimately, recruitment marketing takes your existing talent attraction activities and makes them more effective, connecting the dots to create a personalised and engaging candidate experience.

Over 70% of professionals are passive candidates – they aren’t actively seeking a new role, but they’re open to opportunities. Recruiters are approaching individuals more than ever, and with the help of recruitment marketing, they’re seeing better results.

Some common recruitment marketing tactics include:

• Search engine optimisation
• Employee-generated content
• Compelling site content
• Social media marketing
• Targeted recruitment campaigns
• Leveraging analytics to determine sourcing channel performance and improve approaches
• Proactive sourcing

We’re in the midst of a national skills shortage that’s predicted to grow to 29 million skills in deficit by 2030

66% of CIOs believe there’s a talent “crisis”

40% of CFOs say skills shortages are the main obstacle to achieving their company’s goals

Recruitment marketing improves the candidate experience to help you win the best talent

High-performing organisations use recruitment marketing to offer more personalised candidate experiences

In this ebook, we’ll cover the following considerations and strategies:

1. Why you should use recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing forms the backbone of an effective sourcing strategy. Amplify your content and employer brand and reach the right candidates at scale.

2. Getting started: a step-by-step approach

Setting out clear goals that align with your recruitment strategy is key. Discover some areas to focus on and learn how to build a business case for recruitment marketing.

3. Strategies to employ

It’s time to bring your goals to life. Develop recruitment marketing strategies including creating content, choosing the right channel, and getting in front of candidates.

4. How technology can help

Technology is your secret weapon. Use it to automate personalised communications, learn what type of content candidates engage with, and nurture talent pools behind the scenes.

5. Measuring and metrics

Tracking data and metrics can be overwhelming. Identify which metrics to measure and you’ll be able to see where you’re performing well, and where you can improve.

Competition for talent is more intense than ever. Recruitment marketing ensures your company is attractive to active jobseekers and passive candidates you want to recruit. It can help you:

• Develop an influential employer brand – not just one with mass-market appeal
• Segment candidates into talent networks with tailored campaigns and communication
• Reach your audience at scale, and understand what content they engage with
• Optimise your careers site to capture and convert quality candidates
• Amplify employee advocacy with employee-generated content
• Nurture talent pools to keep them warm all year round

Perhaps most importantly, recruitment marketing doesn’t just give you more candidates – it gives you the right candidates. And by sharing engaging content that’s tailored to your ideal hire, candidates can then decide if you’re the right fit for them.

Reach the right candidates

When you produce high-quality, valuable content, candidates will engage and share it

with their networks – putting your employer brand in front of more people. But a ‘spray and pray’ approach to content production won’t drive results. 

You need to consider your target audience, what their interests and pain points are, and how your employee value proposition will shine through in each piece.

Recruitment marketing can help, by segmenting candidates into groups that you can target with tailored content. Recruitment tools powered by AI and machine learning can even curate relevant content for each visitor to your careers site based on their browsing history.

“You want more of the right candidates self-selecting into your recruitment processes. You want engaging content that educates talent on your company’s core values, your culture, and your work environment. People who disagree with this will self-select out, and this is a great way for you to elevate your candidate quality.”

– Margie Kwan, Employer Brand Coach

Now we’ve discussed what recruitment marketing is and why it’s so important, let’s take a deep dive into how you can apply these approaches in your own organisation. 

Goals

Before you implement recruitment marketing approaches, it’s important to set out clear and measurable goals that align with your overall recruitment strategy. This helps you to focus on what’s important to the business, and makes sure you have the desired impact.

Common goals include:

• Create a compelling employer brand that attracts high-quality talent
• Nurture candidates by automating recruitment workflow and communications
• Build rich talent pipelines in targeted talent segments
• Drive internal mobility by increasing the number of internal hires
• Engage former employees for future hiring
• Deliver on your diversity and inclusion initiatives
• Reduce time to present to hiring managers for hard-to-fill roles
• Reduce recruitment agency spend

Once you’ve outlined these goals, develop the recruitment marketing tactics – including the metrics that demonstrate you’re delivering to these outcomes. For example, if your goal is to find more candidates for hard-to-fill IT roles, your recruitment marketing goals may be to add 100+ leads to your IT talent pipeline.

Focus areas

With your goals and tactics set, it’s time to think about how you’re going to achieve them. When starting out, focus on a few key areas rather than trying to do everything at once. We recommend planning the workforce you need now, and in the future. These five steps should help:

1. Identify which positions are critical to success

Get your key stakeholders onboard for input. Having buy-in from the beginning will help to successfully implement any new recruitment marketing processes. Together, you must identify which positions are most critical to your success. Large organisations – such as telecommunications companies – can have as many as 32 different talent segments across over 20 countries. It’s important to get a clear idea of how you’re communicating to each talent segment.

2. Focus on these talent segments 

Hone in on the talent segments that are most critical to your future business and focus your efforts here. To identify these key talent segments, ask yourself:

• Which roles are hardest to fill?
• Which talent segments are most critical to our business?
• Which talent segments do we do the most hiring in?
• Which talent segments are the hardest to retain?
• Which talent segments take the most time to hire?

Establish personas for each segment that speak to the kind of candidates you’re trying to attract. This will inform your content strategy later on.

3. Build a cross-company working group

Bring together a small, cross company working group to identify what you’re currently doing to attract, engage, and retain your key talent segments. Are your approaches enough to deliver a great candidate experience that allows you to compete in the future? If the answer’s ‘no’, you’ll need enough data to create a case for implementing recruitment marketing. Speak to your executive team to secure support, resources and investment to develop a strategy.

4. Conduct market research

Undertake market research on your key talent segments to understand your audience’s needs and motivations, and develop an approach informed by actionable insights. If you don’t have the budget for this, leverage those specific talent segments from within your organisation – they’re a captive audience that usually isn’t tapped. Surveys, focus groups, or even human-centred design sessions with these employees are ideal. Start with a couple of the most critical talent segments, learn from the process, then move onto the next and incorporate any improvements.

5. Shift from reactive to proactive recruitment

Turn to technology and automation. Successful recruitment marketing relies on candidate personalisation, drip-fed content, high-touch communication, and sophisticated analytics to track what’s working and what isn’t. But you can’t achieve this manually. Technology can automate a great candidate experience at scale, taking the reliance off human effort and freeing up recruiters for value-added, strategic activities – helping you shift from reactive to proactive recruitment.

Once you’ve identified your key talent segments, you’ll need to engage them with tailored content. Here are some recruitment marketing strategies you can employ to get started:

Create content catered to each candidate segment

Great content showcases your EVP, introduces jobseekers to your culture, and helps people decide whether or not they want to work at your organisation. But great content marketing doesn’t start with the content: it starts with your business and talent objectives.

Think about who you’re trying to engage, the type of content that will resonate with them, and what channels you’ll use to distribute it.

Many organisations follow a one-size-fits-all approach, but this has limited effectiveness. Without defined audiences and insights on what makes them unique, these organisations are creating generalised content that doesn’t speak to people’s real pain points or motivators.

Refer back to the talent segments you identified earlier. Each persona will have different needs, goals, and motivators. Your content should showcase your value proposition in a way that:

• addresses these different perspectives
• gives each persona the information they need to progress down the candidate funnel
• is authentic, and showcases what it’s really like to work at your company

The most important consideration when creating content is making it authentic. Research shows that 61% of candidates are more sceptical of what employers say about themselves since the pandemic, especially regarding work-life balance, flexibility, and benefits.

Employee-generated content such as testimonials, videos, and day-in-the life insights are 200% more effective at engaging jobseekers than regular content. Why? Because jobseekers want to hear from real people. To harness this, there are tools available that help you build a team of brand ambassadors and empower them to share content, giving talent teams the power to create and share authentic content at scale, with minimal effort.

So you’ve started to create authentic, personalised content that speaks to your target talent segments. The next step is delivering that content via the right channels.

Choose the right channel: go where the talent is

What channels and networks do your target candidate segments spend time on? Which are they likely to use for social sharing, and which are used to cultivate professional networks? Gathering these insights before you begin forms the basis of a successful long-term employer brand strategy. Your employer brand then does the heavy lifting by attracting the talent you need to build the workforce of the future.

If done properly, your organisation can experience amazing benefits and cost savings. A great employer brand attracts more of the right people, faster.

One company was focused on creating content and publishing to Facebook and Instagram to attract candidates, but the audiences they wanted to attract were more senior roles in R&D and supply chain logistics. These candidates don’t typically spend much time on those social channels, so their content campaigns weren’t giving them the ROI they needed. Even if you have the best content and a huge advertising budget, if it’s not being delivered via the right channels, it won’t be seen by the right people – and won’t deliver the results you’re after.

Get in front of passive candidates with proactive attraction

It’s not just jobseekers that you need to target. Remember, 70% of professionals are passive candidates who are often perfectly happy in their roles. With proactive attraction strategies, you can ensure you’re front of mind when that’s no longer the case.

But most organisations are still stuck in a reactive recruitment mindset: filling roles as they arise with the applicants they have on hand. That’s not how you find the best people for your organisation, and traditional recruitment and sourcing tactics are becoming less effective in getting a response from in-demand talent.

Transitioning from reactive recruitment to proactive attraction requires a marketing mindset to get in front of passive talent, tap them on the shoulder, and entice them to work for your organisation.

In the candidate funnel, organisations market themselves to potential talent to build awareness and consideration. This passive talent can then be converted into an applicant when the right role arises.

Growing the awareness of your company as an employer of choice will widen the top of the funnel, allowing a greater flow of talent through each hiring stage. Ultimately, this increases the number of qualified and suitable candidates at the bottom of the funnel. As a result, your recruitment teams can fill roles with the best talent in the marketplace, and in less time too, allowing them to focus on providing the best possible experience to candidates and hiring managers.

“A good recruitment marketing strategy establishes and nurtures relationships with talent even before they’re looking for their next role. You’re building awareness and trust in your brand, and this is the first step to get on the radar of passive talent. Candidates make career decisions in the same way they make other buying decisions – this means they’re hungry to educate themselves on your organisation and they’ll spend time researching your company, the products, services, and the role, so they can decide whether you’re a good fit.”

– Margie Kwan, Employer Brand Coach 

Target your ideal candidate at every stage of the journey

Your ideal candidate is probably working for someone else right now. They’re a highly skilled, in-demand person who starts the year happy in their job and isn’t considering a move. Perhaps by mid year, they get an itch, or the transformation happening in their company makes them feel less secure in their role. Towards the end of the year, they begin to look for new opportunities and sign up for job alerts. If you haven’t maintained regular touchpoints with them throughout this time, you’ll likely miss out on this talent again.

This person is a viable target for employers at any point on this journey. The idea is to engage with them at all stages of the consideration cycle, so that when they’re open to a move, you’re their preferred employer – or at least an option they’ll consider.

Think about it from a content perspective. If, at the start of the year, you share an ad or a social media post about a specific job, there’s a high chance this ideal candidate would scroll straight past it. But if you share an article about the awesome things your company is doing in AI (or a relevant topic within their industry), there’s a much higher chance that person will click on your ad or post.

To be most effective, you need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right message at each stage of the candidate funnel. For example, to build your approach for the ‘attraction/marketing’ stages, create segment-based go-to-market plans that move key audiences along the consideration journey and down the funnel.

Since launching our easy-to-manage Recruitment Marketing tool, Which? has experienced some extremely positive results:

• Return visitors to their careers site increased from 9.2% to 16%
• Average website page views per session increased from 1.89 to 2.2 pages
• Visitors converted to potential candidates increased from 2.82% to over 16%
• Potential candidates converted to completed applications now sits at 61%

Which? was also pleased to share the positive impact our Employee Connections tool had had on their employer brand. Their employees embrace the opportunity to be brand ambassadors, engaging with candidates and responding to questions on projects, characteristics of top performers, and how they can strengthen their application. In fact, since this implementation, Which?’s careers site has had over 10,000 views, with a feedback score of 100% for candidate engagement.

This power to have authentic, real-time interactivity with jobseekers is described by Which? as a ‘game changer’, enabling them to get right to the heart of what jobseekers are looking for. And with more hires being made through the platform, it’s safeguarding their ability to source talent directly without using costly third parties. 

It’s great to see Which?’s leadership team fully onboard with our service following a significant return on investment. Our client success team will continue to be responsive to their needs, and committed to forging a long-term collaborative relationship.

“Our initial goal was to have a more interactive platform with which? to engage with candidates, and the solution has absolutely helped us to achieve that.” 

– Julian Harris, Head of Resourcing, Which?

The above strategies are high-touch in their personalised communications. This provides a great candidate experience, but also requires huge amounts of manual effort to create nurture streams, follow-ups, and targeted content. Here’s where recruitment marketing technology plays a starring role: automating candidate communication and candidate care, empowering employees to tell authentic stories, serving-up curated and tailored content, tracking what’s working and what can be optimised – while freeing up recruiters to focus on strategic decision making.

Data is the key to successful recruitment marketing. With it, you can see which of your marketing activities is working, and which isn’t – then measure and maximise your ROI. More importantly, it can help you understand candidate behaviours to inform where you should invest your time and money.

Without insights from recruitment marketing technology, you can’t be clear on your candidate marketing objectives, which means they may not be benefiting your attraction efforts at all.

Recruitment marketing technology can deliver these insights through analytics, then help you to address them. For example, PageUp Recruitment Marketing allows HR teams to manage the content on their careers site pages without going to IT. Using AI and cookies, PageUp Recruitment Marketing learns what content each candidate that visits your careers site is interested in, and serves up that tailored content to create a personalised visitor experience. 

• Creating content at scale with technology

Technology also helps resource-strapped talent teams create compelling content on a budget. Often, when recruiters are told they need to create engaging, authentic content that speaks to multiple talent audiences, many don’t know where to begin. The solution? Employee-generated content tools.

Employee-generated content (EGC) is content created by employees about your culture, employer brand, benefits and more. It can include live-chat Q&A, video testimonials, blogs, social posts, photos, and more. First, create a team of employee ambassadors. Then, give them EGC tools like Employee Connections to easily connect with jobseekers.

Reporting and knowing what data and metrics to track can be overwhelming. The key is to keep it simple; look at your overall recruitment strategy and the problems you’re trying to solve. Ultimately, you should track the journey from first visitor interaction to hired, and understand what the candidate interacts with on that journey.

Start by clarifying your talent attraction and retention challenges, then define your marketing goals. Depending on what they are, you’ll need to identify how your recruitment marketing activities (content, emails, social media, ads, events) will address these challenges. 

Do you want to drive passive audiences to your careers website to increase consideration of your company as an employer? Or perhaps you want to build awareness of your organisation within a particular talent segment. Putting metrics in the context of your objectives and goals allows for effective interpretation and decision making.

Next, work out what you need to measure. Many metrics can be used, so it’s important to know which approach will allow for meaningful reporting. Make sure your goals are specific and measurable, and always start with a baseline figure.

Some of the most useful metrics to track are:

Recruitment funnel conversion metrics

Conversion of a lead into signing up for alerts, joining a talent network, or applying for a job.

• Hired-to-website visitor ratio
• Hired-to-visitor ratio by content type (tracking the number of visitors that convert to hires from blogs, video content, etc.)
• Interaction score – the number of touch points and types of content applicants
• Interact with per hire (by talent segment, geography, gender)

Engagement metrics

Conversion of a lead into signing up for alerts, joining a talent network, or applying for a job.

• Number of visitors that register to your talent community
• Diversity split – such as the ratio of male versus female visitors at each level of the recruitment marketing funnel
• Candidate experience and reach – this can be tracked by capturing visitor behaviour such as keyword search, time spent on page, type of content viewed, email open ratio, returning visitors

Cost & recruitment efficiencies

• Sourcing attribution efficiency: More than one channel may be required to reach your target audience. Sourcing attribution efficiency tells you which channels aren’t effective, which channels applicants first heard about you, and the sources they used to return
• Higher return from your sourcing dollar
• Speed to present candidates to hiring manager
• Time to hire
• Reduction in recruitment agency spend

You don’t need to track all these metrics at once, just pick the ones that can demonstrate to the business how your team is attracting the best talent in the most cost-effective manner. Then, use this information to monitor and tweak your marketing efforts, adjusting as necessary until you get the results you’re after.

Recruitment marketing is a must-have for hiring teams that want to gain a competitive advantage. With candidate expectations higher than ever, to capture top talent, organisations need to put their best foot forward with tailored content, personalised communications, and a seamless journey from application, to onboarding, and beyond.

For more information on eArcu, or to schedule a demo, get in touch today.