As the world steadily moves away from traditional roots in favor of digital technologies, brands need to manage this shift at a similar pace. While successful brands are already implementing digital marketing strategies to accelerate brand awareness, engagement, and conversions, they also need to adopt similar recruitment marketing strategies to bring in new talent.
Recruitment marketing is the process of promoting your brand in order to attract potential candidates to your organization. After 47 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in 2021, brands are realizing that traditional recruitment efforts generated by well-intentioned but severely overwhelmed HR departments can no longer find and yield the best candidates. Instead, more and more brands are building partnerships between HR managers and media agencies to efficiently reach the best-fit candidates. This partnership merges recruitment needs with marketing practices and, concisely, allows brands to creatively pitch themselves to potential candidates, much like they already pitch themselves to potential consumers.
How to Leverage Recruitment Marketing to Attract New Hires
Companies that incorporate recruitment marketing into their hiring strategy can generate three times more applicant leads, 10 percent greater revenue and a 100 percent higher close rate. Just like creating a solid marketing strategy, a successful recruitment marketing strategy requires clear and measurable goals. Here’s how partnering with a media agency like LEAP Amp can help create or improve your brand’s recruiting marketing strategy.
1. Understand your target audience.
Before you can market to your potential candidates, you need to understand their behavior. While top-notch candidates could actively seek out and apply to your brand’s job openings, a jolting 73% of candidates are actually passive job searchers. Passive searchers may be open to opportunities while they are still employed, but they aren’t actively searching for new roles. This means that, instead of waiting for great candidates to find you and apply, you need to widen your recruitment marketing efforts on both active and passive job seekers. In practice, this might look like creating video, blog or social media content that appeals to all potential candidates and then marketing it across social platforms and job search channels to increase awareness of your organization’s job openings.
Another candidate behavior to consider is application abandonment. While many highly qualified candidates may start the job application process, they are often discouraged and turned away by time-consuming online forms, ATS requirements, or repeated failed attempts to upload their cover letters and résumés to outdated systems. Consider how your brand might remove as many of these frustrating barriers as possible so that candidates can easily share their job histories, upload any necessary documents, and complete your application process.
2. Invest in targeted copywriting.
Just like marketers understand how to generate copy that connects with consumers, your recruitment marketing copy needs to grab the attention of qualified candidates. Job descriptions can truly make or break a candidate’s decision to apply, so consider hiring copywriters who specialize in recruitment marketing. These subject matter experts are fantastic resources and understand how to create branded advertising that connects with candidates and pulls them into your application process. Copywriters will not only be able to accurately communicate the job’s benefits, responsibilities and overall work culture, but they can also help you convey your brand’s voice, vision, and values.
Copywriters are also extremely useful for increasing diversity in your recruitment marketing strategy. For example, a copywriter could help your brand generate more inclusive job descriptions that avoid bias and language that might deter candidates from applying. Hiring a professional copywriter to provide bias guidance can ensure that your job descriptions are free of any racism, sexism, nationalism, ageism, ableism, or religious biases.
3. Leverage Organic & Paid Advertising
The most efficient recruitment marketing utilizes both organic and paid advertising to help find the right candidates for the job. While some highly skilled candidates may already follow your brand on a social or job search platform, incorporating paid search into your recruiting strategy can broaden your reach, expose different talents to your brand and ultimately enable you to find the right candidates. LEAP Amp can help leverage paid and organic strategies like capitalizing on LinkedIn recruitment marketing, which offers both organic and paid options, as well as Indeed and ZipRecruiter. Research and keep in mind where your candidates spend their time online, and then target those platforms.
Lastly, organic and paid advertising are most effective when informed by great copywriting, so don’t be afraid to leverage the copywriter you’ve hired to inform content on your brand’s website, email newsletters, and other social media platforms. These online spaces are prime real estate for organic and paid advertising opportunities.
Modern job searchers expect modern recruitment efforts, so if your brand needs a more effective and efficient method of finding and attracting top-notch candidates to fill job openings, implementing a strategic recruitment marketing plan could enable you to attract, engage and nurture top talent. At LEAP Amp, we consistently create amazing content that amplifies our clients’ media and optimizes it for the right channels—and that includes recruitment marketing content that delivers high-caliber candidates to job postings. If you’re looking for a partner to amplify your brand, reach out today to see how LEAP Amp can level up your recruitment marketing efforts.