Long gone are the days when prospects used to keep track of recruitment drives through newspaper ads and personal recommendations. With the increasing outreach of both employers and employees, it’s now necessary to fight for the best talents in the domain to surpass your competition.

But, if the traditional recruitment drives don’t work anymore, what should be the next best possible line of action to recruit the best candidate? Recruitment and marketing. 

But how? Let’s discuss.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is a marketing strategy that brings and nurtures prospects for your company. 70% of the employees tend to be passive—actively seeking jobs while being employed. Keep an eye for talented leads and make them understand the opportunities that your company offers. It makes a huge difference in terms of recruitment. 

Most of the top talents look for opportunities to switch jobs of higher interest. If you can leverage recruitment marketing, you can easily secure prospects before your competitors.                                                                                                                                                

Building Employer Brand

The first step towards an effective recruitment marketing strategy is letting interested prospects know about your drive. Most of the companies keep hiring throughout the year and have already made a name for themselves. You need to do the same. 

Recruitment tracking software can help you manage the process efficiently. The software platform helps manage adverts, engage with candidates using social media, and analyze the effectiveness of your approaches. 

Recruitment is a two-way process, where you market yourself to the top prospects, and the prospects decide if they are willing to join your company as an employee. Building an employer brand lets prospects have faith in your organization and apply for a job.

Creating Brand Awareness

Brand awareness has a direct impact on recruitment. Valuable talents are only going to apply for the open job positions if your company holds value to them and the employee culture is well established. No one likes to work for a company where they aren’t relevant. 

You can increase brand awareness through social media and other online platforms with help of recruiting agency software, but having testimonials from previous and current employees are the best resources that you can have. Even some easy-going negative reviews about your company might help create a better brand.

Generating Interest

After you’ve built yourself as an employer and created brand awareness, likely, some of the top talents are already following you. You need to rule them in your recruitment drives by making them more interested in your company. 

The salary structure, perks, job profile, employee retention rates, office environment are effective elements to talk about when trying to intrigue the prospects. If you have employees that are well valued in the company and they have stories to tell, don’t hold back. Even encourage them to speak up about the good things they have experienced throughout their tenure. 

Curating Content and Stories

Creating content is the best way to get noticed. Recruitment marketing calls for a different kind of content than product marketing. You can’t go around talking about your products and services when trying to lure talents in. Your content needs to hinge on the fact that your employees are valued and enjoy better perks than your competition. 

Stories are the best content that you can leverage. If your company has great employee traditions, yearly events, employee appreciation policies, don’t shy away from using those in your content. 

Managing Special Events

Special events are very effective when you are trying to select the best possible candidate. These events offer a fresh engagement between the companies and candidates. The applicants learn how the company works and what the environment is like, the recruiters understand the candidates on a personal level. 

Some of the popular recruitment events are:

• Conferences
• Weekend tours
• Hackathon
• Recruitment fairs

Investing in Paid Ads

Paid recruitment ads directly appeal to talents who are seeking new opportunities. Although it’s the best way to reach your target employee base, paid ads won’t be as effective in attracting the best prospects if your brand lacks recognition. 

Paid ads should only be utilized after you’ve made sure that the best talents for the job know about your company and the culture. 

Expanding on Opportunities

You’ve built a database and know who the best leads are. Now, it’s time to expand on the opportunities that you offer. Customize your approach for different prospects and let them know why they should join your company. Be transparent on the job roles and what is expected from your employees, let them know about the benefits, packages, investments that you are offering.

You have to be very careful on this part and not offer something that you may regret later. Curate the profiles very carefully and design your approach beforehand. Know where to stop and try not to lowball your offer. 

Call to Action

Start calling in the prospects for interviews. It’s the last step into your recruitment process and you’ll soon find out that most of the applicants will abandon the drive due to various reasons.

To decrease the abandonment volume, make the application process as smooth as possible. Don’t make prospects wait for three months before you can decide. Try not to arrange interviews every week with the same applicants to find the best one. 

Simplify the contact forms; make relevant information accessible. Use recruitment solutions and conduct interviews that are short and effective. As you’re trying to lure the prospects in, other companies are too. The applicants won’t wait for your decision if they have other better offers in spare. 

Nurturing Valuable Employees

After you’ve recruited the best candidate, nurture them. As they’ve switched to your company, they can switch to other ones too. Having a high attrition rate is what you don’t want to appear on your employer profile.

If you can’t value your employees and most of them seem to quit in the first year itself, it raises a red flag in the employee community. You’ll soon find yourself getting trash-talked into online forums, and you’ll lose all the value you’ve gained through the campaigns. 

The Bottom Line

Recruitment marketing can be quite beneficial if you can leverage the strategies well. Follow this step by step recruitment marketing guide to make the most out of your campaign in 2022.

Build your brand, make the candidates aware of your existence, generate interest, design content around your employees, arrange events, and nurture your employees to get the best return on investment.