Ask a Recruiter: What is recruitment marketing and why should it be part of your recruiting strategy?
Recruitment marketing is how we tell your company`s culture story through content and messaging to reach top talent. It can include our blogs, video messages, social media, images—any public-facing content that builds our and your brand among candidates.
In marketing, if you try to be all things to all people and you don’t know who your ideal customer is, you risk creating messaging that doesn’t resonate with anyone. The same is true for recruitment marketing. To do it effectively, we think like a marketer and ask ourselves: Who is my ideal candidate? What kind of content do they like? And how do I reach them?
We believe recruitment marketing is critical for any company of any size. Internally, you might know your company’s cultural values and what makes your employees great—but candidates don’t know that just by visiting your website. Here are ways we can create a recruitment marketing strategy that we use:
- Create a candidate persona. We took a look at our top performers and researched what made them choose to work at a certain company. We asked questions like, what does this person need to do their job well? What motivates them? What makes them love work? What makes them frustrated at work? Using this information, we developed a persona of the ideal person who’d thrive at certain companies. Not everyone will fit in that persona, but by doing this exercise, we at least have some direction for the story we telling through our recruitment marketing content.
- Research, define and over-communicate your culture internally. Our founders say one thing they wish they had done even earlier was to think about culture. Culture doesn’t need to be defined from the top down, but it needs buy-in and feedback at all levels. We spend time researching all work culture. Our conversations with your top performers will help us figure out what makes candidates happy.
Try this! Get a focus group of 10 or so people together, and get coffee with one person each week. Ask them:
- Why did you choose to work here?
- Why do you still work here?
- What’s your favorite thing about working here?
- What’s your favorite way to work?
Your best people are going to say two or three of the same things, and you can use these attributes to define your culture. This will help you talk about your culture when you interview candidates.
Once you’ve got it all down, make it a point to communicate your culture to your employees. Talk about what you value and the kind of people whowork best with you. Make sure you ask for feedback.
Our recruitment marketing is working. In the past year and a half, we can really see that candidates come into companies much more familiar with their culture than they did a few years ago. Our content is reaching brand new talent who hadn’t considered certain companies and helping interested candidates down the funnel. This is great because it helps recruiters like us by making sure candidates are most suitable for your company.