What Does Your Recruitment Marketing Strategy Look Like?
If you want to generate quality applicants for your organization and keep your hiring funnel full, well-rounded recruitment marketing is a must-have. You need to balance creativity with strategy, and human touches with automation.
But figuring out new strategies for candidate acquisition can be challenging. With low unemployment rates and high market saturation, the competition for talent has never been more tough.
How can you attract new talent, while making sure you keep your strategy competitive, scalable, and fresh?
Keep reading for four recruitment marketing ideas to help you get quality applicants.
Recruitment Marketing Ideas to Get Quality Applicants
- Encourage employee reviews and referrals
- Use social media to your advantage
- Re-engage past candidates
- Execute targeted recruitment advertising
1. Encourage employee referrals
When it comes to hiring, your employees can be a major driver of new talent.
Their networks, both personal and professional, extend far beyond the four walls of the company, and their influence stretches further than just anonymous reviews on Glassdoor.
On average, your employee’s social posts generate eight times more engagement than your company’s. Let that (and the untapped potential to get in front of new potential candidates) sink in for a moment.
Your employees, after your customers and clients, are your organization’s biggest advocates. Their perspective is invaluable to job seekers who are looking to learn more about your organization as an employer, the culture, and the types of people that you employ.
But just sharing their perspectives on social media isn’t enough – you need to enable your employees to actively refer new talent to your recruiting team.
Ensure your referral process is seamless and easy to use, and encourage your employees to share their network by implementing rewards, like a cash bonus for hired referrals, as incentives. This will make your employees more confident that you value their referrals, thus making them more likely to share their networks with you.
2. Use social media to your advantage
While your employees may have more engagement on their own social platforms, that doesn’t mean that you as a company should stop using social media. Rather, when it comes to looking for quality applicants, social media can be a great way to drive awareness about your brand and your open roles.
Social media is a great way to build up your organization’s employer brand. Job seekers want to know who you are, what you believe in as a company, and what your mission is. Today, what you say and who you are matters more than ever. Using social media is a great way to build up that employer brand and establish a rapport with potential job seekers.
Having a presence on social gives your brand direct access to potential new customers and job seekers alike. Think about each social platform individually for the value it can add to your recruitment marketing.
LinkedIn, of course, is the main platform recruiters think of when it comes to social. It’s where candidates can build up their professional profiles, follow and connect with brands, and search for new career opportunities. It’s also where recruiters can proactively reach out to passive candidates they think would be a great fit for their organization.
Twitter gives recruiters a way to interact with people who are already fans of their company’s brand, and engage one-on-one via replies or direct messages. It allows you to give a human voice to your brand, and showcase the work, values, and beliefs of your organization.
Nowadays, pretty much everyone has a Facebook. Your brand should be no exception. With a Facebook business page, your company can share updates, develop a refined social strategy, engage with followers, and even post jobs using Facebook’s Job Marketplace.
Finally, Instagram. Though the platform isn’t as useful for hiring as LinkedIn, it’s an invaluable asset to your employer branding strategy. You can share photos of company events, videos of your office space, and encourage followers to get to know your brand on a more personal level.
3. Re-engage past candidates
Think about the last time you applied for a job…and never heard back. Sound familiar? Too often when a candidate doesn’t fit the requirements of a role, instead of getting a personalized note explaining the decision not to move forward with their candidacy, they get radio silence.
Not only is this contributing to a poor candidate experience, but it also puts your organization at a disadvantage for re-engaging past candidates.
Just because someone wasn’t a fit for a particular role in the past doesn’t mean they aren’t a better fit somewhere else in your organization. Keep your talent pool warm by continuing to engage with past candidates via email.
Encourage them to sign up to hear about future career opportunities, or start a monthly recruiting newsletter that highlights your organization’s culture, recent achievements, and newly open roles.
By doing so, you can stay connected with candidates who were previously interested in working for your company, and keep the door open to help them apply for another role.
Execute targeted recruitment advertising
As much as building up an employer branding strategy, having your employees refer talent, and engaging past candidates can drive pipeline, there are even more benefits to adding a targeted recruitment advertising strategy to your toolset.
Recruitment advertising is a great component to add to your recruitment marketing strategy because it can expand your organization’s reach even further. Plus, the benefits of a targeted (vs open) strategy are twofold.
First, you can more accurately target prospective candidates based on criteria you set as must-haves for each role, and second, you can better monitor your budget and ad spend by only recruiting for specific roles in specific regions.
Targeted recruitment advertising allows you to drive applicants to your jobs while focusing on quality over quantity, saving you valuable budget.
