Because of the reach and popularity of the online space, recruitment marketing has justified itself as a genuine candidate attraction tool, as well as a safe space to build your employer brand.
And in what is a highly competitive market to find the best talent, recruitment marketing becomes more and more important for businesses who don’t want to use a staffing agency to help them find candidates.
So in a mission to help you put your marketing hat on, we’ve put together the 4 most important steps to getting started with recruitment marketing.
1. Know your market
As a marketer, one of the first things you do when want to market a certain service or product is to do your research on your audience. You ask yourself questions such as:
- What gender are they?
- What age are they?
- What generation are they from?
- What ethnicity are they?
- What level of education do they need?
Those are just the basics. Everyone has their own audience in mind and the questions you have to ask yourself when doing the research will vary. Taking the time to research these areas will help you begin to shape a profile for your target audience, and will lead to you the next stage; Candidate personas!
2. Develop candidate personas
Candidate personas are a representation of your ideal hire for a specific role and require a high level of research. Creating a candidate persona usually includes specifics such as:
- Skills
- Qualities
- Personalities
- Goals
- Background
- Experience
Personas help you create more relevant job content, including job titles, descriptions, as well as the content you provide on your company careers site and other social channels.
To create candidate personas, you need to go big on data. And maybe you have a few top performers at your company and you want more of them? Then we recommend you analyze these employees based on all the different persona attributes we listed beforehand so you can create the ideal employee for your business. So once you have defined your candidate personas, you can move on to the next stage!
3. Constructing your employee value proposition
Your employee value proposition EVP is the messaging you put out as a company that effectively communicates what is unique about working for your company. It represents your organization’s most important values and represents your organization’s culture.
To construct it, Link humans report that “organizations need to understand the needs that drive talent outcomes and what is right for their workforce”. Additionally, you need to make sure your EVP is differentiating your company from your competitors.
Check out this quick video on the best practices you need to consider when constructing your EVP, by the Top Employers Institute:
Once done, test your EVP internally and with a sample group externally. This is a very important step as you need to see if your EVP accurately represents why a candidate would want to work for you!
4. Create an inbound content strategy
This is the fun part. And the multiplicity of social platforms at your disposal makes it somewhat easy! Don’t just stick to one platform.
Create content that showcases your values and culture. Share things like employee testimonials on your career page, company events on Instagram, employee blog posts on LinkedIn and more! There’s so much you can do. Get creative with it.
The more channels of distribution you use, the greater the odds you will find relevant candidates.
Want to learn more about recruitment marketing? Here are the 9 Critical Components of Recruitment Marketing.
