We specialise in recruitment marketing campaigns. Whether it’s helping scaling companies raise their employer brand amongst tech candidates or using social media and digital platforms to generate leads, recruitment marketing is one of the things we do best.
Candidates, whatever the industry, are likely to spend a lot of time online. Let’s face it, we all do. Therefore, it makes sense to reach out to them in the spaces that they’re spending time and use creative marketing tactics to connect with top talent. It doesn’t matter if you’re a scaling business making your first initial hires or a global enterprise looking to scale, using recruitment marketing is a cost-effective way to raise your profile amongst relevant candidates. It will help you become an employer of choice and ensure that you remain top of mind for leading talent.
However, the world of recruitment marketing can be a bit of a minefield, and when the talent market is so competitive, it takes a lot to stand out from the crowd.
Here are some of the questions that we are often asked about our approach to talent marketing. We wanted to share our insights with you in one place so that you have a greater understanding when thinking about reaching out to top talent in the future.
What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing is the earliest stage of talent acquisition. It’s defined as the process of attracting talent to your organisation and nurturing them until they eventually apply for relevant roles.
In traditional marketing, you promote a service or product to your target audience. Recruitment marketing or talent marketing is very similar, except that you’re promoting yourself as an employer rather than promoting the consumer elements of your business.
This can mean creating employer brand awareness to make candidates aware of your values, culture and mission, and advertising specific roles directly on marketing platforms.
1. Why do I need recruitment marketing?
To be frank, candidates won’t apply if they don’t know who you are. Recruitment marketing helps employers to raise their employer brand awareness. For huge enterprises, recruitment marketing is less significant because the company can rely on reputation and awareness of their consumer brand to attract talent. However, scaling businesses need to make a name for themselves amongst their talent pool if they hope to succeed in talent acquisition.
Good recruitment marketing campaigns can also reduce the time to hire and cost per hire. Digital marketing platforms are incredibly cheap compared to more traditional marketing tactics, and you can do a lot with lower budgets. Plus, by taking advantage of detailed targeting capabilities on these digital platforms, you can ensure that no budget is wasted.
2. What platforms should I use for recruitment marketing?
If you’re looking to conduct talent marketing campaigns on social media and digital platforms, then Google – to find applicants who directly search for keywords – and LinkedIn – a platform made for networking and job hunting – are the obvious options. However, to raise brand awareness and connect with passive talent, you can try other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, as well as networks like Spotify, Quora and Mashable.
The key is to know your audience. There’s no point in showing your ads in places where your audience are unlikely to be spending time. Therefore, research and planning are critical elements to any talent marketing campaign.
3. What types of recruitment marketing campaign can I run?
There are many different kinds of campaign you can run when talent marketing.
Firstly, employer brand awareness campaigns are a great way to share content, videos and get your name out there. These are more generic campaigns and can have a larger audience as your primary focus is building your reputation as an employer and potentially building a pipeline of talent.
You can then run campaigns that promote direct roles on all platforms. Whether you create lead gen forms on social media or direct them to a careers page or job ad is entirely up to you. These talent marketing campaigns will have a more narrow audience as you’ll only want to reach specific, qualified individuals so as not to waste your budget.
4. How can I ensure suitable candidates see my ads?
Digital marketing is excellent for targeting specific audiences, it’s what makes it so cost-effective and successful. By creating criteria that your audience must meet, you can limit who sees your adverts on social media, ensuring that they’re only shown to individuals in the correct location or with the right skills, background and interests. While some platforms have better targeting capabilities than others. For example, LinkedIn means you can delve much deeper into an individuals experience and career history. In contrast, TikTok has a very generic list of interests; each platform serves its own purpose. Google also will only show search ads to people that search for specific terms and keywords, so this means only engaged audiences will see your ads.
5. How do I know who to target?
Research is key to ensuring you know your audience and understand the criteria for the targeting you create. You can’t expect a campaign to be effective if you have no insight to back it up unless, of course, you’re running more of a generic, employer brand awareness campaign. Likewise, market research for recruitment will help you to identify where talent is, where they’re graduating from and what they look for in an employer.
Look into your job descriptions to find keywords or skills that could be targeted, consider the educational background or experience required and even look to your competition to identify the background of people successfully working in similar roles. If you’re hiring, you must have an idea of the ideal candidate, so build personas around them. Also, consider if location is a factor if you can hire remotely as this can directly impact targeting.
For Google ads, plan your keywords by putting yourself in your ideal candidates’ shoes. What would they be searching for? Plus, you can also include a few skills and key terms from your job descriptions here.
6. How can my recruitment marketing messaging stand out?
There are a few ways you can make your messaging stand out in a world of online advertising, and let’s face it, we see a lot of adverts every day. Firstly get some captivating creative ideas. To stand out when candidates are scrolling, you need some striking visuals to really capture their attention.
Think of the type of ad you’re creating too. For example, video advertisements tend to get more traction and engagement than statics. However, you can also use tools like InMails to talk to candidates directly.
Then, it would help if you had headlines that can connect. This is where research can come in handy as by speaking to focus groups, you can understand what’s important to candidates and use it to inform your messaging. This means you’ll create messaging that really resonates with the candidates you’re looking to appeal to, whether they’re tech candidates, creative talent, graduates, or leadership executive hires.
7. Do I need a careers site for recruitment marketing campaigns?
This depends on the type of campaign you’re running. If you’re looking to appeal to candidates for specific roles, we would advise at least a landing page where candidates can apply directly for a better candidate experience. This means you can collect your CVs yourself rather than use third-party sites and really cut down the length of the application.
However, careers sites are also great for employer brand awareness. You can use blogs, videos and website pages to show why you’re a great employer and convince candidates that you’re the best employer for them. These websites act as a showcase page for your company culture, values and objectives as a workplace, keeping it as separate as possible from your consumer brand and helping the candidate experience.
8. Does recruitment marketing have to be digital?
No! We’ve seen the most success with digital campaigns because it’s where most people are spending their time and is a very cost-effective way of advertising. Most importantly, you can directly track the results, so you know if your recruitment marketing campaign is effective. However, we’ve also run employer brand awareness campaigns on billboards and radio, amongst other traditional advertising channels. It depends entirely on the talent you’re trying to reach, the objective of your campaign and the overall budget.
9. How can I measure the success of my talent marketing?
The great thing about digital marketing platforms is their ability to report success. You’ll be able to get so much data about the reach of your ads, the number of clicks and video views, to name a few. You can also track when people have come from your ads to your website and monitor their activity while they’re engaging with your content. Digital marketing is the easiest platform for measuring success and reporting this back to people.
However, ultimately as with any recruitment project, the ultimate measure of success lies in the number of applicants and quality of hires. If you’re finding you’re getting a higher quantity of applications from relevant, qualified candidates, then it’s likely that your recruitment marketing is a huge success. Likewise, if more people are aware of your brand and you’re creating a significant pipeline of talent for when you’re ready to hire, this is also a positive sign. Plus, if your hires have the required skill set, stay with you for a long time, and become invaluable to your scaling business, this would be the ultimate sign your recruitment marketing campaign has paid off.
Talent Works are an RPO agency with offices in Manchester and Northampton, and Boston in the US, giving us truly global reach. We help tech businesses of all sizes to surround themselves with talent and are experts in creating engaging talent marketing campaigns to cut through the noise. If you’d like to learn more about our insight-led approach to recruitment marketing and how it can work for your business, get in touch with our team and start your conversation.
