As we often tell you at Talent finder, the recruitment landscape has changed. The days of candidates falling into the arms of companies are over… You need a clear Recruitment Marketing strategy.
If companies want to attract top talents 🚀, they can no longer confine themselves to publishing a one-off job ad – which, by the way, often looks like an exhaustive list of their expectations without offering anything exceptional to the candidate.
However, that’s no excuse for not publishing job ads. On the contrary! This is where the strategy really comes into its own.
Belgian job boards receive an average of 5 million hits a month. Recruitment marketing means taking advantage of this visibility, but then continuing your efforts to convince candidates that you’re the right employer for them.
Employers must increasingly behave with candidates as they do with prospects, which entails building a strong Employer Brand and communicating it the good way. How do you, as an employer, differentiate yourself from the competition and how can you communicate this to potential candidates in a most engaging way?
What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment Marketing is a discipline that combines elements of employer branding, digital marketing, and candidate relationship management.
It aims to apply marketing tactics and strategies to the recruitment process, treating candidates as potential customers and focusing on building relationships and engaging them throughout the candidate journey.
Why build a recruitment marketing strategy?
The main goal of recruitment marketing is to drive individuals to apply for the open positions your company has available.
And beyond receiving more applications, the aim is also (and above all) to find high-quality, thoroughly motivated candidates. Active jobseekers are already in the right mindset. They have decided to change jobs voluntarily and have already taken action to do so. This makes it more likely that they will remain committed to the process and sign the contract at the end. It also says a lot about their personality: they take charge of their career and give it the direction they want.
Therefore, it will potentially accelerate your recruitment processes and make them even more qualitative.
But do you know that recruitment marketing should also be considered by companies that have no particular recruitment needs?
People love to see people. Social media posts featuring people create a lot of engagement. Reinforce your employer brand, introduce your employees, talk about the atmosphere, show informal moments together. This type of content has the greatest potential to go viral and thus increase your brand awareness.
Employer branding is a particularly useful marketing strategy for small businesses who have difficulty in making themselves known. Social media is crowded with new brands, and getting a foothold isn’t easy. In addition, marketing campaigns can be quite expensive. So instead of hiring models and actors for your advertising campaigns, call on the real stars ⭐: your employees. By building a brand that is deeply authentic, with concrete values and where people feel good, you’ll earn the trust of consumers who’ll be more inclined to use your services/products. “The fastest way to get customers to love your brand is to get employees to love their jobs” – Tiffani Bova
How to build a recruitment marketing strategy
As any marketing strategy, you should follow some steps.
1. Set your objectives
- Increase brand awareness and the visibility of your company
- Improve the apply rate for a specific job offer
- Increase the number of candidates joining your talent pool
- Attracting specific candidates (in terms of seniority, function, education,…) to your company
- …
2. Define your target audience
The way you will communicate will be different if you are a digital communication agency or a large engineering company. You should always ask yourself who you want to talk to.
Depending on their position, seniority, age and training, candidates will have different career expectations and social media habits. So you need to adapt your strategy and find the one they’ll be receptive to.
3. Refine your Employee Value Proposition
Recruitment marketing is deeply related to your Employee Value Proposition. Your EVP is the foundation of the content you will develop for your recruitment marketing strategy.
There are 6 pillars you should define and work on to build an Employee Value Proposition that resonates with your target audience and gets you chosen.
By building a strong EVP, you’ll be able to position as a unique employer, who stands out from the competition.
EVP should not be confused with Employer branding. You have the entire control of your EVP, it is the identity you shape for your company whereas you only have a partial control on your employer brand. The way you display your EVP will impact your employer brand but there’s a whole other side of the coin you can’t totally control: the way candidates see your company.
4. Implement actions
Let’s get down to business! You now have to define concrete actions that will help you communicate about your company and its culture, values, atmosphere, mission and vision to positively impact your employer brand.
✅ Create your company pages on relevant social networks
Based on your target audience, you should know which channels they’re on and where you should be too. Hootsuite has planned for you and developed the 2022 Digital Trends Report on social network usage in 2022. This document will give you all the keys you need to select your communication channels.
Of course, the way you will communicate will be different according to the social media.
While LinkedIn remains more professional, editorial and focused on the life of the company, Instagram is very visual and more promotional with the possibility of making purchases directly on the platform. Another example is Tik Tok, a more informal network with spontaneous, less “worked” content, focused on videos, enabling you to talk about your employees in a fun, light-hearted way.
✅ Optimize your career page
Your career page is a critical touchpoint with potential candidates. This should present in a nutshell why you are a good employer and why they should apply for a job with you.
Talk about your values, your social responsibility, your mission as well as your specific promise to your employees. But keep it short and sweet. Be concrete, with photos, videos and testimonials. Don’t talk too much, just tell the facts.
To avoid losing visitors on the career page without them having visited your job offers, place a link to your job ads at the top of your page.
There are many ways you can communicate about your employees and introduce them to your audience. You can share photos and videos of team events, testimonials, interviews, … However you choose to do so, make sure it’s a reflection of your company’s tone of voice.
✅ Engage in email marketing
Email marketing will help you nurture your talent pool. It means that once you have received the contact information from your candidates, you’ll be able to maintain the relationship overtime.
Proactive jobseekers want to be regularly informed about your new vacancies. With job alerts, your potential candidates are always up to date with your latest job offers matching their profile and interests. Technically, job alerts are super easy to set up on Talent finder.
You can also send a monthly newsletter to your talent pool gathering your latest job offers, news, articles or social media posts.
✅ Keep an eye on your reputation on employes’ review websites
Just as customers leave reviews for restaurants, employees and candidates in turn leave reviews for companies. Glassdoor, Indeed and Goole are just a few examples of sites where you can receive reviews. Whether these returns are justified or not, it’s important to take them into account and keep an eye on them.
In the case of false allegations, respond constructively and calmly. However, it’s important to be objective. If a complaint is voiced repeatedly, it may be time to question yourself and put corrective actions in place.
And if you have more than 4 stars, display it on your career page!
✅ Ensure a good candidate experience
Throughout the recruitment process, you’ll potentially be interacting with a large number of candidates. Of these, only one will be selected, and the others will unfortunately be rejected. So it’s essential to provide them with the best possible candidate experience.
What does this mean in practice?
✅ Optimize and promote your job ads
As you may have understood, job offers are a critical part of your recruitment marketing. With the abundance of open positions available today, it’s become difficult to capture the attention of candidates.
The first step is to be visible. To do this, you need to optimize your ad in terms of SEO and find a title that will speak to candidates. What would the ideal candidate search for? What are the keywords that are relevant to this job ad? Once you’ve made your choice, you need to ensure that the title is repeated at least 3 times but also that your main keywords are all incorporated : diploma, technologies, region, city, sector, …
The second key to visibility is promoting your job ad. You can publish it on job boards such as Stepstone, Indeed, Monster, LinkedIn, and so on. They are the go-to websites for jobseekers. And if you’ve chosen your keywords carefully, you’ll appear at the top of these sites’ results pages.
OK, if you’ve followed our advice, candidates are now reading your job ad. How do you make sure they keep reading, and even better, that they apply? Many companies still limit themselves to neutral, thirteen-in-a-dozen job ads, promising nothing to employees.
Would you ever think of making an ad for your customers, mentioning only the price without mentioning your product and the benefits it offers? Definitely not, and it’s the same with your candidates.
Think about your EVP, all the nice things you propose, all the reasons why you are a great employer and why your company is such a nice place to work. Your job advertisements should display those elements, through the presentation of your company, the job description, the profile you’re looking for and of course… the offer in itself.
As part of our service Talent boost, we optimize your job ad and we publish it on all relevant Belgian job boards at the best price (+ you have a free access to our ATS Talent finder).
✅ And the most important: Be a nice employer (and seller)
Because all those actions you’re going to implement are pointless if they don’t tell the real story. Ok, you will attract candidates that will eventually get hired. But the internal reality will come out soon enough, causing new recruits to leave after a short time, once the varnish has cracked.
There’s nothing more authentic and powerful than word of mouth. Your employees spend 40 hours a week on your premises. Work is a subject they inevitably discuss with their friends and family.
Your ambassadors are ones of your biggest strengths, as an employer. We all know at some point of our lives someone that’s looking for a new challenge and you may want to receive referrals from your employees.
In the same way, you should provide the best customer experience, because your customers might one day be potential candidates for your vacancies. If you have a lousy experience in a store, chances are you’ll keep an extremely negative image for a long time. You’ll probably say to yourself, “I’ll never set foot in that place again”, let alone work there, right?
And above all, this opinion will spread, because we all tend to talk more about our negative experiences than our positive ones.
5. Measure results
It is essential to collect data on all your actions so you know where you need to put more focus on. This again depends on the objectives you have set, but ultimately the quality of candidates you attract is the most important goal.
In recruitment, quality comes before quantity. To put it plainly, receiving a huge number of CVs is all well and good, but what’s more important is how many candidates are shortlisted from those CVs.
And then, you’ll want to know which source these shortlisted candidates come from. This is possible with Talent finder. Our ATS offers you customizable reports with various variables and, above all, statistics on your communication channels.
Recruitment marketing helps you get chosen
As you can see, recruitment marketing is not only a buzzword from the HR world but above all, a strategy that can help you differentiate yourself as an employer and therefore positively impact your employer brand in the long run.
You should not consider recruitment marketing as separate actions but as a whole, that in the end, will get you chosen by the best candidates. Recruitment marketing should help you be visible, but also convince the candidate to join you.
🚨 Start your recruitment marketing efforts right now with our special offer : order 5 Talent boosts (= optimization and publication of 5 job offers) and receive a 1-year Talent finder license ! To take advantage of this offer, contact me on chloe@profilegroup.com.