Technology has transformed the way employees make career moves, with candidates acting much like shoppers purchasing a product. They research potential employers with the same depth that they do while looking for a home, an automobile, or any other significant purchase. They have a plethora of resources available to learn everything they can about your company before they apply. Recruitment marketing is what helps get the ideal information in front of them.
Learn more about recruitment marketing, why it’s so important in today’s competitive labor market, and examples of how to use it to attract stellar candidates.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing is a strategy employers use to publicize job openings, build brand awareness, and persuade candidates to apply for positions.
A company’s recruiting and marketing departments once worked separately. Now, because the battle to attract and retain talent is more challenging than ever, professional recruiters and internal human resources departments alike are implementing recruitment marketing strategies.
Just as it is a seller’s market in the real estate industry because the inventory of homes for sale is less than the volume of prospective buyers, the job market favors prospective talent since there are millions of positions employers are looking to fill. Considering this, it makes sense that employers have to work harder to reach quality prospects.
Recruitment marketing provides a blueprint for employers to build and showcase their employer brand and enhance brand awareness. Just as businesses need to elevate brand awareness for consumers, promoting the brand to prospective team members is equally vital. This is why recruitment marketing strategies are created to reach and interest individuals who are actively searching for opportunities, as well as experienced talent who are currently employed.
Related: How to Elevate Your Employer Branding to Attract Top Talent
The Difference Between Recruiting and Recruitment Marketing
While recruiting and recruitment marketing aim to achieve a similar goal–filling a company’s open positions–they are two distinct processes that require distinct strategies.
Recruitment is the systematic process of identifying, attracting, and hiring qualified candidates for vacant positions within an organization. It involves activities like sourcing candidates, screening resumes, conducting interviews, verifying credentials, and making job offers. Recruitment is typically conducted as quickly and efficiently as possible to get a strong candidate up and running in an open role.
Recruitment marketing comprises all the marketing-related efforts that make recruiting easier, faster, and better for a company. It includes activities like increasing employer brand awareness, building positive public perception, and generating interest among prospective candidates. Recruitment marketing doesn’t have an “end” point. Instead, it’s conducted continuously to maintain a regular stream of talented applicants for a company’s jobs.
To use a military analogy, recruitment is what happens when a prospective soldier visits a recruiting office. Recruitment marketing is the ‘Army Strong’ commercial, the famous ‘I Want YOU’ poster of Uncle Sam, and all the other materials that help get the prospective soldier in the door.
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Why Does Recruitment Marketing Matter?
Traditional recruiting tactics alone are no longer effective. Today’s job seekers are just as interested in the culture and mission of the organization they will join–if not more so–than what’s offered for compensation and benefits. Salaries and benefits are relevant, of course, but in a competitive marketplace, it is becoming more critical for organizations to implement and communicate a meaningful purpose. Simply put, candidates want to know why a company is in business beyond the purpose of making money.
Recruitment marketing also has practical purposes, helping you maximize the visibility of your job listings and get the most out of every dollar you’ve allocated to talent acquisition. Here are a few key benefits of recruitment marketing.
Reach more candidates
If you want to get your listing in front of as many qualified candidates as possible, you can’t rely on simply posting the position to your website and some job boards. You need to actively promote your openings where the right candidates spend time, like on select social media channels. Recruitment marketing can help you determine what those platforms are and where to spend money to expand your reach when it makes sense.
Establish trust in your organization
Today’s top candidates are highly selective. They consider more than just money when deciding where to work; they heavily weigh things like an organization’s culture and values. Recruitment marketing helps you convey these important aspects of your company to candidates, so working for you is a no-brainer when it’s time to accept an offer.
Convert customers into applicants
Earlier, we touched on how modern candidates think more like shoppers when making a purchase. It’s a well-known principle of commerce that it takes multiple touchpoints with a customer before they make a decision to buy. Recruitment marketing helps you make these all-important touchpoints with candidates, inching them closer to buying–or, in this case, applying–with each new interaction.
Steps in the Recruitment Marketing Funnel
Just as sales and marketing have multi-stage funnels, recruitment marketing has a funnel of its own. This funnel is what turns completely unaware strangers into interested job applicants and, hopefully, employees.
The steps in a recruitment marketing funnel can vary, but here are the most critical ones.
Awareness
Think of this step as the top of the metaphorical funnel. Every candidate in the world is floating around outside of the funnel, and the goal is to draw the best people into it. During this stage, potential candidates become aware of the company and its services. This existing awareness is beneficial when the candidate starts looking for a job or learns of an opening with the company.
Consideration
During the consideration step, sometimes called the ‘interest’ phase, candidates begin to examine employment with the company more closely. They may browse the organization’s website, look up listings on job boards, follow the company on social media, or reach out to people in their network to learn more.
Application
At this stage–you guessed it–the candidate makes the pivotal decision to apply for a job. From here, they’re officially part of the company’s recruitment process and subject to all of the aspects of the candidate experience, like the job application, the interview process, and the company’s communications throughout.
Selection
In this case, we’re talking about the candidate’s choice to accept a job with the company rather than the company’s decision to offer the job. Why? As you’ll remember, recruitment marketing focuses on perception and generating the desire to work for the company. To speak in marketing terms, accepting a job with the organization is akin to buying the product. It’s the final and most important conversion.
How to Develop a Recruitment Marketing Plan
When determining a recruitment marketing strategy, think about your own preferences as a consumer. The internet is an integral part of nearly everyone’s lives, and there is stiff competition for your attention and time. What happens when you visit a site that does not captivate your interest? Chances are, you venture to another site. Perhaps you peruse Facebook, check your favorite sports blog, or click on a YouTube video.
Job seekers have the same mentality. If your recruitment marketing is subpar, you will likely lose visitors’ interest, and an ideal candidate for your open position may end up on another company’s team. This is why investing not only in surface-level recruitment marketing but also in implementing an exhilarating recruitment marketing strategy that keeps prospects interested throughout every stage is essential.
Follow these steps to develop an effective, engaging recruitment marketing plan.
1. Outline your goals
Though the broad goal of recruitment marketing is to attract and hire excellent candidates, there are other, more nuanced goals your recruitment marketing will be working to achieve. You may have trouble filling niche roles, so you must connect with more specialized candidates. Maybe you’re under new ownership and need to build awareness of the change in your company values. Whatever your particular goals are, they should inform all of your recruitment marketing decisions.
You should also quantify your goals as much as possible; this enables you to measure your progress. So, if you’re looking to attract more specialized candidates, your goal might be to generate a certain number of applications. If you want to change the reputation of your employer brand, you might set targets using net promoter score or some other indicator of public perception.
2. Establish your target audience
Use candidate personas to define the audience for your recruitment marketing campaigns. A candidate persona is an in-depth description of your ideal candidate. In addition to professional qualifications like skills and experience, a candidate persona also defines personality traits and likely demographic characteristics like living in an urban area or being within a certain age range. Candidate personas are an effective tool for helping you develop highly tailored recruitment messaging.
3. Define the best channels
These are the places where you’ll execute your recruitment marketing campaigns, and they should be places where your target audience is most likely to be. Select your channels based on the candidate personas you defined in step two.
Here are just a few of the many recruitment marketing channels to consider:
- Tik Tok
- X/Twitter
- YouTube
- Radio
- Television
- Streaming
- Direct mail
- Blog posts
- Events
- Product packaging
- Outdoor advertising
Note that many recruitment marketing activities can be repurposed across multiple channels. For example, a testimonial video you shoot for your website can be broken into smaller snippets for use on social media or turned into still images with quotes for a print campaign.
4. Set a budget
Assess the financial resources available to you. Your recruiting budget will be a defining factor in the campaigns you create. Consider not only direct costs, like advertising and event fees, but other costs, like labor and third-party contractors.
5. Brainstorm campaigns
Now comes the fun part: actually coming up with the tactics and campaigns you’ll use to achieve your recruitment marketing goals. To generate creative, engaging ideas, involve various team members from recruiting and marketing. It can even be helpful to bring in people from other departments for a fresh perspective,
Here are a few ways you can generate captivating recruitment marketing strategies:
- Define your biggest recruiting challenges and look for ways to overcome them, similar to what inventors do when coming up with ideas for new products
- Consider the style, tone, and format of content that tends to resonate best with your target audience
- Think interactively, like puzzles, games, and skill tests
- Borrow inspiration from other brands and industries–we showcase a few shining examples below
6. Schedule and execute
Use a content calendar or project management app to map out the steps required to execute your campaigns. For each step, assign the responsible team member and define a deadline.
7. Assess your progress
Monitor your campaign performance and periodically check results against your initial goals. Many of the same platforms used to manage marketing analytics, like Hubspot, Semrush, and Google Analytics, can be useful here, along with the reporting capabilities in your ATS. Optimize and refine your recruitment marketing plan over time based on your progress.
3 Examples of Successful Recruitment Marketing
Volkswagen’s “Inside Job” guerilla campaign
Poaching talent from the competition is a strategy as old as time. Volkswagen Group France pulled it off with a flourishing campaign to hire 1,000 new mechanics. The automaker hid job offers inside vehicles needing service, then sent those cars off to competing shops. When mechanics successfully diagnosed the problem under the hood, they’d also find a message like this one: ‘Yes, the exhaust pipe needs to be replaced. Speaking of change, how about coming to work for us?’ It’s so clever you almost can’t be mad at it, even if you were one of the target competitors.
“Overheard at Northrop Grumman” video series
Most recruitment marketing in the aerospace and defense industry looks similar and predictable–jets doing dazzling loops in the sky, fighter pilots strapping on helmets, and dramatic music. Industry giant Northrop Grumman took an innovative turn by creating a recruitment marketing campaign totaling 180 from the Top Gun aesthetic.
In the ‘Overheard at Northrop Grumman’ video series, we’re a fly on the wall to punchy snippets of offbeat conversations amongst engineers. It’s a mix of humor and humanization we don’t usually get in this straight-laced field, making the company more approachable for non-traditional candidates. The company successfully leveraged the series to gain consideration from an untapped pool of candidates and hire more tech talent.
Deloitte Zombie recruiter
“Are you hungry for a new opportunity?” asks a pale and bloodied zombie in a business suit at the start of this recruiting ad. The spot follows the undead recruiter as she encourages viewers with the “juiciest brains” to consider a career at financial services firm Deloitte. The unconventional take on recruitment marketing ran during the season finale of the hit show The Walking Dead, helping the company reach a young, educated talent pool and highlight its creativity.
We Can Help Build Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy
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We offer staffing solutions for businesses of all sizes – from startups to SMBs and large corporations throughout the United States. Our knowledge and passion for what we do, and our flexible terms and conditions, set us apart in the world of headhunting and recruiting.
We welcome the opportunity to connect if you need help identifying the right candidates for your vacancies! We’re on standby to help you transform your workforce and find the ideal candidate today!
