Recruitment Marketing is the new buzz in hiring circles and a rapidly rising HR trend. However, many employers are having a difficult time wrapping their heads around the concept; particularly when trying to determine how it works and how it will help their business attract qualified candidates.
Recruitment Marketing a revolutionary HR discipline at the frontier of recruitment- and when utilized effectively it will promote your business as an employer of choice and keep your name at the forefront of the minds of top tier talent.
Recruitment marketing defined
Recruitment marketing uses marketing tactics to attract, engage, and nurture candidates who haven’t yet applied to a job and converting them into applicants by communicating your employer brand and value.
This involves building awareness, trust, and engagement in your brand targeted towards a specific pool of talent. It incorporates the same strategies that marketers utilize to identify and foster relationships with ideal customers.
It incorporates digital marketing strategies in attracting and engaging qualified candidates through: career sites, job boards social media, images, blogs, email nurturing, and any public-facing content that consistently and authentically conveys your company’s culture, mission, and benefits.
The Necessity of Recruitment Marketing
Modern candidates and millennials discover and consider employers the same way consumers research products, services, hotels, and restaurants, by searching online, reading reviews, scrolling social media, and reading reviews. What they learn about your company’s culture may influence their perception and/or decision to apply for a job.
Because of platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, close similarities between consumer and candidate behavior have developed; therefore creating a need for parallels to exist between recruitment and marketing fundamentals.
Recruitment Marketing Fundamentals
The most important fundamental is to think like a marketer. Start the process by defining your candidate persona by asking these questions: Who are my ideal candidates? What are their motivations and goals? What kind of content would they like? How do I connect with them (which social channels and platforms are they most likely utilizing)? This will inform how and where you engage with them.
After you have answered those key questions, tailor, and implement the following steps:
- Tell your brand story: curate content to generate brand awareness for potential candidates
- Determine channels to recruit
- Cultivate interest among those candidates for both the company in general, and a specific job
- Engage with potential candidates
- Elicit responses for a specific job from candidates
- Generate a pipeline of qualified leads
- Convert leads to candidates by encouraging them to apply to a specific job
- Interview and hire the candidate
Recruitment Marketing is a valid method to discover and attract candidates in today’s modernized, competitive job market. Candidates have become more digital, mobile, and social in how they search for potential employers, therefore HR practices must evolve to become strategic and nuanced as B2C marketing. This can be achieved if you are adept at sharing your company’s story as a great place to work by determining the right messaging and channels to reach your target audiences.
