Recruitment Marketing 101: How to Build a Winning Strategy?

August 16, 2023

“A business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs” ~Peter Drucker

While Peter Drucker, also known as the father of Business Consulting, said this with respect to business growth, it also holds true for the recruitment space today. This is the inherent nature of competition after all – it brings out the need for organizations to communicate what sets them apart. As there is no growth without people, recruiters and businesses strive hard to attract rich talent, which we also refer to as recruitment marketing.

76% of recruiters say attracting quality candidates is their biggest challenge. Building a talent pool with excellent skill sets, diverse backgrounds and passions – has never been this trickier.

Add up to that the fierce growth rate that modern businesses are almost forced to chase. Acquiring top talent is every organization’s goal now, but the efforts required are not only around sourcing and hiring. Amidst the rapidly evolving mindset of job seekers, recruiters are struggling with fulfilling the demand for talent.

Standing out among the competition is the need of the hour. The only way through? Start positioning yourself as an employer of choice and putting in efforts to reach a large number of people with the same positive reputation. Recruitment marketing has become a vital aspect of modern-day businesses, with the primary intent of attracting and converting candidates through a funnel.

So what does recruitment marketing cover? How do you get started? What are the top strategies that will ensure long-term outcomes? We discuss the answers to all of these questions and more, in this blog. Stick around for a detailed guide on recruitment marketing and what it has to offer for your business, let’s get started.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

The practice of attracting, engaging and nurturing talented candidates for your company with marketing methodologies is referred to as recruitment marketing. The idea is to organically drive target candidates to apply for your organization’s available roles.

The transactional mode of hiring doesn’t quite work well now. Similar to consumer behaviour, candidate behaviour has changed now too. Job discovery and consideration are now digitally- driven. Potential candidates find you through Google search, social media or LinkedIn profile. Once aware, they read your reviews, scroll through your people pages and further decide if they want to apply for an opportunity or not.

The major difference in recruiting today is its candidate-centric nature. Your prospective candidates are not only interested in the company’s mission and vision statement, but are more aligned towards the value they can extract from you as an employer. What’s going to be their role? What makes you stand out in the competition? How’s your brand reputation? All of these factors influence their decision.

Much like marketing and growth, this practice also involves branding, messaging, content creation, distribution, social media strategy, SEO, PPC, lead nurturing, automated campaigns, email marketing, CRM and AI-based analytics.

If planned strategically and executed efficiently, recruitment marketing can help you enhance your employer brand, boost your reach, generate leads, ace your candidate engagement and deliver a great candidate experience.

Recruitment marketing forms the topmost part of the talent acquisition funnel. Now, it can be further divided into four parts: awareness, consideration, interest and action. Let’s take a look at what each of these covers.

Breaking Down Recruitment Marketing

Stage 1: Boost Awareness

The recruitment system was traditionally designed to cater to active candidates, which means candidates who are actively looking for opportunities and applying to various roles. However, today – passive candidates form 73% of the total workforce. So only one-fourth of the total workforce will apply to jobs and that’s obviously not going to be enough for all businesses. Focusing on the passive candidates, brands now need to closely monitor their online presence and engage to increase brand awareness.

The best way to do this is by creating valuable and engaging content that candidates would like to consume. To position your organization as a great place to work, the content that you create and share plays a vital role in growing your network and boosting awareness.

Stage 2: Stimulate Interest

You have established a great awareness, and now it’s time to draw their interest toward your organization. Consistent and persuasive content that adheres to your employer brand voice can help you in drawing the valuable interest of your target candidates. Your candidates forgetting about the opportunities or your brand would halt your recruitment, but more than that – it would be disheartening for you and the team. A well-planned and dynamic content calendar for continuous value-addition and engagement with your candidates would optimally present your brand story. Generate interest by portraying your brand in a way you want your target audience to view it.

Stage 3: Engage and Nurture them

Now that you have laid down a firm foundation of awareness, and got hold of their interest – it’s time to give them strong reasons to work with you. Highlight your USP as an employer, share what makes you stand out among the huge pool of organizations and dive deep into the job details.

The most optimal approach for engaging at this stage is to share information surrounding the currently available opportunities, perks that you offer, benefits of working with you, work culture highlights, diversity in your workforce and all the other factors that matter for your candidates before they decide to apply for your open roles.

Stage 4: Trigger Action

After all the hard work in the previous three stages, you need to now drive those efforts to meaningful action - make them apply to your open positions. Identify the factors that make candidates apply for a job at the first glance. It can be a remote work policy, unlimited leaves or any other major advantages that they would get when working with you. Analyze what’s stopping them from applying and rectify your recruitment process based on the outcomes. More often than not, candidates skip application processes in between due to lengthy and complicated steps. Asking your candidates to re-enter all the details already mentioned in their CVs makes no sense.

You need to eliminate all the irrelevant application steps and simplify the process to make it as short as possible. Additionally, if in case a candidate gets qualified based on the CV but doesn’t show up in the interview, keep them in your talent pool to source from later on.

Why is Recruitment Marketing Important?

While numerous benefits of recruitment marketing exist, let’s first discuss the most impactful ones. Could you recall what are the most critical factors contributing to the application decision for any candidate? The offer, value proposition of the brand and recruitment experience – well, recruitment marketing closely works around communicating and executing these as directly and clearly as possible.

Here are the top benefits of recruitment marketing:

Activation of Passive Candidates

87% of the candidates in the overall workforce are open to learning about new opportunities. That’s a huge chunk, right? It clarifies - passive candidates aren’t uninterested. An effective recruitment marketing approach enables you to exponentially scale up your awareness and reach a large number of passive candidates. So that you can ensure adding qualified talent to your pipeline. Both passive candidates and on-the-fence candidates need to be engaged with constant social content.

Get Ahead of Competition with Your USP

The primary approach of recruitment marketing is presenting your employer brand by highlighting its unique selling proposition so that you position yourself as the employer of choice in the market. This becomes even more vital in today’s candidate-driven scenario, where there’s a huge gap between demand and supply of talent. One of the biggest challenges organizations are facing today is acquiring and retaining talent.

Additionally, the workforce today seeks diversity and inclusion in the workspace, showcasing your organization’s internal diversity as a part of recruitment marketing would definitely give you an upper hand.

No matter if you are hiring currently or not, having a pipeline filled with qualified talent would always be helpful in the long term while scaling up.

Deliver Prolific Candidate Experience

Over 80% of candidates say the kind of recruitment experience they have will define their decision of whether they will choose to work with the company or not. Recruitment marketing is centred around keeping the candidates informed and engaged with the organization. Additionally, by making the recruitment process simpler and smoother – at the top of the funnel, you communicate each and every small aspect of the role and the organization. That leaves no stones unturned, the candidates have a great recruitment experience and your chances of successfully making them apply to the role are further amplified.

8 Steps to Create a Succesful Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Predefining a recruitment marketing strategy enables talent acquisition teams to understand, analyze and work on their goals. Just like your brand marketing, recruitment marketing also needs a blueprint before execution. Remember, the top-level goals of every recruitment marketing strategy revolve around:

Attract qualified talent
Build a credible employer brand
Serve a positive candidate experience

Let’s get started with the step-by-step approach to building a winning recruitment marketing strategy.

Define Recruitment Marketing Goals

It is always recommended to have your recruitment marketing goals documented before beginning the execution. You can then analyze the target channels, the relevant content strategy and the forms of content to be prepared.

Some popular and common recruitment marketing goals for numerous organizations include:

Maximizing inbound applications
Growing the number of complete applications
Boost employer brand awareness
Enhance the quality of hire
Improve diversity in the workforce

For each of your goals, set up a detailed description along with the timelines.

Suppose your goal is to attract as many eyes as possible to your recruitment, try doing something unique that’s incredibly creative or has the potential to blow up on social media(a.k.a. go viral).

One of the best examples of this approach includes a campaign by Huddle. They launched their recruitment marketing campaign with trucks driving around multiple moving billboards just outside the Microsoft office. The idea was to catch Microsoft employees’ attention on their way in and out of work.

‍

Establish Your Employer Brand and Maintain it Consistently

If you haven’t already, you need to build your employer brand before starting with your recruitment marketing campaigns. Establishing an employer brand is not a destination, it’s a continuous journey for your organization, just like your customer-facing brand. 75% of candidates research an organization’s employer brand and reputation before considering any opportunity.

Your employer brand is dependent on various factors – corporate identity, your company culture, company mission, values and the inclusive benefits and perks you offer to your employees.

Create a Candidate Persona

Without identifying and understanding your target audience, you won’t be able to create an effective recruitment marketing strategy. Create separate candidate personas for each open role. Define the hard skills, soft skills, personality type and other characteristics of your ideal candidate. Back your experience and analysis with data. Creating a clear and accurate candidate persona would help you optimize recruitment marketing campaigns.

Create Engaging Content and Distribute it

The core driver of your recruitment marketing is the content that you create to engage the target audience. Based on the role you are considering and the candidate persona, create platform-specific content that persuades the readers. Additionally, focus on publishing content consistently on all the different channels - LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and others. Be it blogs, carousel posts, original posts (with employee photos), byte-sized videos, long videos or informational posts, ensure you engage with the users through your content and not just post for the sake of it.

For example – If you’re hiring a graphic designer – Instagram is the best platform.

Revamp Your Website Career Page and Job Board Pages

Your website career page should not highlight the same years-old information if you want to hire quality talent. It should be updated from time to time and ideally represent the company mission, values, testimonials, employee profiles, work culture description, latest achievements and more. Additionally, your job board profiles should be revamped every few months too. Suppose your company raised funding, every candidate touchpoint should cover that update.

Some organizations also present employee stories on their website career pages, and that’s a great practice to follow.

Capitalize on Social Media and Communities

Engage with communities on social media and prepare dedicated social campaigns for recruitment. Keep posting what is happening in the company, especially in the workplace. Create unique hashtags and promote them to hype up your campaigns and distribute them across different channels. You can also try influencer marketing on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram to boost your reach.

A perfect example of social recruiting is MasterCard Canada’s #internswanted campaign. Using the hashtag, Mastercard Canada presented an opportunity to college students of competing for an internship on social media. Interested applicants needed to share a task, an idea for a product, app, or methodology to help the company progress towards creating a cashless future. Applicants were judged on the number of likes and retweets their ideas got. The campaign generated 532 qualified candidates and MasterCard extended their program to hire an additional intern due to the talent quality.

Capture Candidate Leads

For generating leads, you can leverage gated content, free tools, newsletters, Forums, communities and more channels. Make sure you add them to your pipeline and stay in touch even if they don’t attend the interview. Capturing leads and adding them to your database is a long-term practice that ends up in compounding results.

Nurture Generated Leads

One of the most effective ways of converting your leads is to add them to your engagement and nurture email sequences. This is the most critical part of recruitment. Encourage them to have discussions with you, reply to your emails and engage with your profile on social channels.

Boost Your Talent Sourcing with NurtureBox’s Automation

While you concentrate on recruitment marketing, candidate leads get generated at a faster pace and you need to manage your entire talent pipeline effectively for seamless recruitment. Doing it all manually while also evaluating the candidates is just not possible. You need to automate the mundane tasks of the recruiting journey.

NurtureBox helps you automate your candidate pipeline management, multi-channel talent engagement and track your entire recruitment in one place. We take care of the repeatable tasks that take a majority of your time and effort. Our Chrome extension enables recruitment teams to source candidates and manage their talent pipeline in a hassle-free way.

Sourcing passive candidates to keep your talent pipeline filled and to recruit the best possible individuals is not a cakewalk. Nurturebox fits in your existing technology stack by integrating all the necessary tools to manage and engage your sourced candidates. Here’s how our platform makes hiring the ‘creamy layer’ simpler and more organized for you:

Once you find relevant candidates, use our integrations like Signalhire to extract contact details from LinkedIn.
With just a single click, you can add them to ATS integration using – Recruitee.

Automate your engagement through WhatsApp or Emails using curated templates.

Monitor your recruitment with a single-window track engagement analytics to know what’s working better.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

‍

Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

‍

Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.