Creative recruitment often refers to the recruiting of creative professionals. It can, however, refer to recruitment that is creative in its nature, or the use of creative advertising campaigns in recruitment. This blog will explore the meanings of all three and how each of them relates to a company’s recruitment efforts.
The use of advertising creative campaigns in recruitment
Marketing is a significant piece of the recruitment puzzle, therefore, using creative assets to improve the appeal of your efforts is vital. There are different types of creative assets and a range of ways to use them. The following list outlines some of the more commonly used types:
Examples of creative assets:
- Video
- Images
- Infographics
- Animations
- Logos
- Style guides
- Brand books
- Adverts
- Whitepapers
Creative teams produce assets such as brand books and style guides to help companies maintain consistency in their marketing. These tools give your team what they need to market your products or services within the guidelines of your brand. By not relying on external providers to do this, you can therefore, reduce cost, delivery time and gain some flexibility.
This SearchEngineJournal article covers various types of content that generate the most engagement and links. Many of the best performing content types are highly credible. They link to reliable sources, go into detail on the topic at hand and provide specialized knowledge. Other types include original research pieces – these can take many forms including whitepapers, case studies and interviews. The one thing they share, however, is unique information that you cannot find anywhere else.
Creating unique, engaging content and using different formats and platforms, should help position your company as a thought leader. A well-recognised brand with frequently updated, useful content will obviously be more visible to those searching online than one without. This means you’re positioning yourself as an authority in the industry, making it more likely that people will see your presence and perhaps even hear about you from others.
Creatives are unquestionably the ones who bring brands to life. They build brands from scratch, relying on little more than a brief. They often create the look, feel and ‘tone’ of a business. This can be a difficult task – colour schemes, logos, illustrations etc. all contribute to the look and feel, and any content on the website needs to match those. This is where a good creative team can make all the difference.
Recruiting creative professionals
This is what most online content for ‘creative recruitment’ online refers to. Numerous roles are considered ‘creative’. These include; graphic designers, video editors, copywriters, animators and digital producers amongst others.
The people who fill these roles are responsible for significant areas of your marketing. They design and build all of your digital assets, so they’re often involved in many stages of projects. This is because creatives need a thorough understanding of the business to guide their creative process and ensure their work aligns with the voice of the business and properly articulates the company’s goals.
Creative professionals often work on a freelance basis (around 32% of the creative industries workforce were self-employed between Oct 2019 – Sept 2020, double that of the UK workforce as a whole). Companies with an internal creative team have an especially valuable resource – they can turn projects around quicker and save themselves money.
If you’re looking to recruit creative professionals, being more creative in your recruitment process can be a way of attracting people. There are many stages where you can try and be more attractive to your target audience, including advertising the vacancy. You’ll need to consider where these people are likely to be searching for opportunities – social media is now a very common tool in advertising, and also a place that creatives are likely to see content.
Using current staff to help find creative professionals (or any other talent) can be a great way of using your existing resources. Many working people have LinkedIn profiles or other social media accounts, and the more people share vacancies, the more visible they will be. Having employees sharing job opportunities from a company may also look to potential candidates as though those employees endorse the company.
Recruitment that is creative in its nature
There are many creative aspects of modern recruitment; Websites, landing pages, adverts, brand books, reports and more, are all creative assets that are used to help a company’s recruitment efforts. To create these assets, teams have to first take the time to understand the business. For this reason, they must find out what the goals, culture and aims of the company are and create concepts for assets that reflect those.
Creatives generally have a good understanding of what people are attracted to and how to make assets enticing. Businesses rely on them to create simple, accessible assets that are easy for everyone to use. Recruitment often requires a range of easy-to-use assets such as landing pages and application forms, therefore, these need to work for people of all abilities. There are many people to take into consideration when designing assets such as these. Users who aren’t computer-literate, people with visual impairments, dyslexia or other similar conditions may struggle with ‘typical’ content. By taking these people into consideration, you can make your recruitment marketing more accessible. As a result, you’ll increase the pool of talent you have to choose from, which is beneficial to recruitment agencies.
Recruitment is an industry that needs to be creative. Competition for both candidates and opportunities means you have to stand out and use your creativity to be seen/heard.
Talent Works prides itself on its ability to develop stand-out employer brands for our clients. We’ve created employer brands for companies across numerous industries and our creativity helps set us apart from others. We make sure that businesses get what they need to be able to attract and retain the best talent. If you’d like to see how we develop an employer brand, read our blog on developing Duck Creek’s employer brand.