Top 8 Recruitment Marketing Strategies for Attracting the Best Talent

August 16, 2023

If you have been in the recruitment space for more than a year, you would know acquiring talent needs sales and marketing aspects now. Top candidates are hard to spot, the demand for quality talent is huge and the people you hire define your organization’s trajectory. Over 69% of employers are having difficulty in filling jobs, the highest in two decades. Attracting talent through recruitment marketing strategies and employer brand is clearly the way forward.

Modern-day recruitment is primarily candidate-centric. Engaging candidates effectively and staying at the top of the competition through employer brand is what organizations need now. Identifying, attracting and pulling qualified candidates towards the bottom of the recruitment funnel is not a destination, but a continuous journey driven by a strategic marketing approach.

Let’s be honest – there’s no industry without severe competition today. Businesses have grown exponentially after the technology boom and this has allowed candidates to choose between a flood of companies to work in. Add up to that the access to brief information about every organization - its work culture, employee benefits, interview processes and more on job sites, and social media.

What makes you stand out as an employer today? Brownie points for getting it right – employer brand. But how to build and maintain a solid employer brand? How to ‘sell’ your roles effectively to the best candidates in the workforce? How to attract and acquire top talent with recruitment marketing? If you have all these questions in mind – you’re at the right place. We will cover the top 8 recruitment marketing strategies to help you hire the best candidates out there, and trigger your growth.

What is Recruitment Marketing? A Recall

Employers use marketing tactics to promote their job openings, establish brand awareness and attract candidates to apply for their open roles. This practice is referred to as recruitment marketing. While earlier, this was all about management – posting jobs to various job boards and distributing the information across offline and online channels– it has now become a full-fledged function of persuasion and marketing. The advent of technology and social media in the past two decades has transformed the recruitment landscape no one anticipated.

Just like brands aim to target the right consumers with their campaigns – recruiters in the job market strive to reach a large number of good candidates and hire the best among them. Now unlike the consumer market where demand is continuous and supply is in control, the recruitment space doesn’t have any control over the supply. The demand is rapidly increasing and supply is significantly lagging behind.

So, recruiters today have to work exceptionally hard to acquire great talent. Here’s where recruitment marketing and employer brand come into the picture.

Recruitment marketing strategies are aimed at establishing the structure of your employer's brand and boosting brand awareness. It also plays an important role in retaining talent for companies, which is often less talked about – but is vital for growth. Additionally, recruitment marketing should not only help you find people who are searching for jobs. The global workforce consists of only 30% of active candidates. That should clearly show you why attracting and engaging passive candidates – almost three-fourths of the workforce is crucial too.

For a detailed overview of what recruiter marketing is and why it is vital today: Also read Recruiter Marketing 101.

Now that you are aware of what recruitment marketing is, and why is it vital in the talent acquisition space today, let’s dive straight into the strategies you can utilize for hiring top talent.

The 8 Best Strategies for Effective Recruitment Marketing

To establish a successful recruitment marketing strategy, you need to take care of numerous dynamics. From different distribution channels, and forms of content to balance between organic and paid campaigns – it needs more analysis than you would think. However, regardless of your industry and hiring requirements, here’s a list of the top 8 recruitment marketing strategies that will help you attract, engage and acquire top talent.

#1 Website Career Page with SEO

Your website is the primary destination of all the visitors of your business, no matter if they’re customers or candidates. For job searchers, your website should be concisely able to convey what you do, your company mission, the problem you’re solving, who you serve to, work culture and more relevant information.

A dedicated landing page for careers doesn’t only act as a centralized space for all your candidates but also gives you an opportunity to work on SEO. How? Well, your website career page can be leveraged to attract high traffic by optimizing it for keywords related to employment in your industry. Once you rank among the top few results for specific keywords, candidates searching for jobs would know you’re hiring and hence, you will have more applicants.

#2 Build Your Employer Brand on Social Media

58.4% of the world's population uses social media. The average daily usage is 2 hours and 27 minutes. Now you know why social media platforms should be the priority in your go-to strategy for recruitment marketing and building a prolific employer brand. It’s the preferred place for candidates to learn more about your organization’s hiring updates, work culture, employee stories, accomplishments, news updates, internal opportunities, events and more.

Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook have proven to be effective in attracting employees. Over 57% of job seekers search for opportunities on LinkedIn. Especially when it comes to engaging passive candidates , nothing is more effective than organic social media marketing.

#3 Maintain Positive Brand on Review Sites

Glassdoor, a popular job review site has over 50 million reviews and insights for over 1 million companies. It’s evident that modern job seekers do their research and due diligence before taking up any job. Additionally, 75% of them are likely to apply for a job if the employer actively manages their employer brand.

As a recruiter, you need to manage your reviews and insights on review sites effectively. A complete profile listing, and active response to reviews on various job listings and social media help in building a positive employer brand.

#4 Maximize Your Reach with Facebook Ads

Facebook is undoubtedly the most powerful platform for paid campaigns. Regardless of your aim to run ads, Facebook helps you reach many people and make them aware of your offering. In the case of recruitment, as a large chunk of candidates hangs out daily on Facebook and Instagram – this can be a great strategy to boost awareness of your recruitment by reaching fresh new audiences.

Performing paid campaigns by targeting job seekers based on their location, current professional role, experience, education and interests – enable precise targeting and helps you connect with professionals fitting well in your ideal candidate persona.

#5 Leverage Email Marketing to Amplify Your Engagement

Why leave any marketing stones unturned when recruitment has become the driving force of your company? After collecting candidate information, you can directly add them to your email marketing campaign so that they keep hearing from you. Email marketing being 1:1 communication is a fantastic way to convey your message to candidates.

To decide on your email marketing – identify and analyze what your candidates would be interested in. It can be your company formation or the founder’s story, your brand’s differentiator, achievements so far or growth stories. Once you establish a consistent and continuous email marketing system – prospective candidates would be willing to hear from you and the candidate experience metric will surely improve.

#6 Run Google PPC Ads

A fascinating 70% of job searches start on Google. SEO is a long-term game. However, hiring requirements sometimes cannot wait for months. But you can still meet your candidates where they are. The best alternative for organic search engine traffic is Google PPC ads. They are fast as well as efficient because you don’t really need to work hard on developing a long-term SEO strategy to establish a brand presence and attract leads for your recruitment marketing.

Especially when you look at it from an ROI perspective, Google PPC ads are cost-efficient and there are high chances that you would get qualified leads through these campaigns. Additionally, it’s not something many employers are practising right now, so it can well prove to be a unique approach attracting numerous eyes.

#7 Video Marketing to Engage Audience

We are well aware of the superiority of video content in today’s world. In fact, video makes up almost 82% of the overall internet traffic - which clearly tells you why your recruitment marketing should incorporate video too. The best way to convey your marketing message is through video, because of the deep connection that is established. When it comes to execution, you can present your organization's culture, what your company does, behind the scenes of working in your company, and more. The objective is to show your prospective candidates what would it be like while working with you.

#8 Advertise on Job Boards

When people search for certain jobs on job sites, you can make your name show up at the top, in many websites. Promoting your open positions on job boards will help you attract a high number of qualified leads. While posting jobs is free on most sites, a majority of them do offer options to run paid ads on their platforms. Ensure you target the right keywords for your job posts as they will also be found directly through search engines.

Best Recruitment Marketing Examples

We discussed a great variety of recruitment marketing strategies. From video to social media and emails, one thing that brands always need while marketing is creativity. For you to get inspired, we handpicked 4 recruitment marketing campaigns that stood out globally. Let’s take a look.

1. Google’s Iconic Cryptic Billboard

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Google is immensely popular for its complex problem-solving recruiting assessments and interviews. This campaign was carried out in 2004 in Silicon Valley and was aimed at directing qualified candidates who could solve this to www.7427466391.com, where they were presented with another challenge. The completion note on this website was:

“Nice work. Well done. Mazel tov. You’ve made it to Google Labs and we’re glad you’re here. One thing we learned while building Google is that it’s easier to find what you’re looking for if it comes looking for you. What we’re looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.”

It’s just mind-blowing how Google led this campaign to filter potential candidates even before they contacted them directly. The brand is also known for attracting exceptional problem solvers – this campaign highlighted this aspect amazingly.

2. IKEA’s Surprise Hidden in Furniture Boxes

IKEA Australia performed the unimaginable in their recruitment campaign placing secret job descriptions inside every pack of furniture sold. While employers keep worrying about ROI and think it’s necessary to invest for better recruitment, this campaign literally didn’t cost anything. And the results? 4285 applications and 280 new hires in just a few months.

3. Social Media Competition by MasterCard Canada

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MasterCard Canada wanted to hire interns, and they decided to go social with this recruitment campaign. They boosted a hashtag - #internswanted among the primary target audience which was college students. The application process needed an idea for a product, app or any other solution toward a cashless future. Applicants had to post their ideas on social media and the reactions, and retweets generated were part of the final consideration. The campaign received 532 qualified candidates, and MasterCard further continued this campaign even after the initial hiring plans were accomplished.

4. Oglivy Found the World’s Greatest Salesperson

The global renown advertisement agency - Ogilvy decided to break the bar with a recruitment marketing campaign no one anticipated. Oglivyone launched this campaign to find out the ‘World’s Greatest Salesperson’. They used a separate YouTube channel for inviting applicants to sell a brick! The campaign was promoted massively on social media to attract potential candidates. And if that wasn't enough – the standout contestants were given the opportunity to attend and pitch at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

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Boost Your Talent Sourcing with Recruitment Automation

When it comes to sourcing candidates and engaging with them – manual operations could stop you from scaling up and hence, driving growth for your company. Recruitment involves numerous mundane tasks such as continuously managing the talent pipeline, tracking candidate engagement status and monitoring progress analytics. Modern-day recruitment needs critical analysis and these repeated tasks only harm your productivity.

‍Nurturebox solves your talent sourcing and engagement problem and helps you automate and scale multichannel outreach. It’s now easier than ever to recruit your dream candidate as all the mundane tasks of candidate sourcing management including engagement and progress tracking are covered by our Chrome extension. Get started now to scale your recruiting pipeline while maintaining quality talent sourcing with a personalized approach for candidates.

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.

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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.

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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.