Marketing is often associated with selling products or services and advertising them. Marketing campaigns are most often aimed at attracting customers’ attention and encouraging them to make a purchase.
However, we hear more and more often about recruitment marketing and the transfer of sales activities and tools to the world of employer branding.
In this article, you will learn what recruitment marketing is and why you should give it a go.
What is recruitment marketing?
In short, we can say that recruitment marketing is coordinated marketing activities aimed at reaching job candidates and involving them in the recruitment process. During its implementation, we can use a number of tools, such as:
- shaping the image of the employer and employer branding campaigns,
- advertisements and job descriptions,
- communication strategy with candidates,
- company website and career tab,
- various channels to reach candidates and a place to publish advertisements,
- activity on social media and activities on the employer’s profiles,
- educating candidates and providing informative materials,
- engaging employees as brand ambassadors,
- building a positive candidate experience, including research on the opinions of candidates,
- corporate identity, e.g. graphic design of advertisements, forms and messages,
- gadgets and gifts for candidates, distributed e.g. during job fairs,
- onboarding policy, i.e. proper greeting of a new employee.
The benefits of recruitment marketing
Marketing activities used in recruitment and employer branding can bring a number of benefits. Starting from building the employer’s brand, through the possibility of reaching a wider target group with messages, to acquiring more and better quality applications. Recruitment marketing allows you to:
- create positive experiences of candidates,
- broaden the employer’s brand awareness,
- better reach the target group of potential candidates,
- have a wider communication of EVP and recruitment content,
- increase the number of applications for promoted job offers,
- collect data about the target group,
- potentially lower promotion costs based on the possibility of using free tools, e.g. organic reach in social media,
- expect quick results.
3 stages of recruitment marketing
According to the article “A Review of the Role of Marketing in Recruitment and Talent Acquisition“, strategically conducted recruitment marketing should take place in three stages. The main goal of this approach is for the candidate to apply as soon as possible for a specific position.
STAGE I – Awareness
In the first stage of the recruitment funnel, we build the employer’s brand awareness. This is most often the moment when the potential candidate does not know much about the enterprise. Oftentimes, he does not even actively look for a job and does not consider our company as a potential employer. Therefore, in the first place, before we even start encouraging him to apply for our job offers, we should become a good employer in his awareness. We can use online tools for this, e.g. paid advertising campaigns on social media or Google Ads, and offline tools, such as outdoor campaigns or promotion of the company during conferences and job fairs.
STAGE II – Consideration
At this stage, the candidate is already initially interested in changing the current job. Our role is therefore to adapt marketing communication to his needs so as to convince him to apply. Messages should appear more often, allowing the company to exist more deeply in the mind of the recipient. It is worth having more detailed, specific information in them. We use remarketing campaigns and materials to promote our organizational culture and the atmosphere in the company.
STAGE III – Interest
This is the last stage at which the candidate is already interested in our job offer. It is worth providing him with a wide range of information that will dispel any doubts that might appear. This is a good time to direct him to a specific job offer and provide access to a detailed description of the next stages of the recruitment process.
Measuring the effectiveness of recruitment marketing
The main task of recruitment marketing activities is to spark the interest of potential candidates in our company. In order to test the effectiveness of the activities, it is worth using a few basic indicators. When promoting an offer using with recruitment marketing, we can focus on the four most important ones:
- Pipeline generation – this is the basic activity following the start of recruitment marketing, determining the number of people who have entered the recruitment funnel of the promoted offer.
- The quality of candidates in the funnel – the quality of the application is defined by matching the competencies of applying candidates to the profile of a given job.
- Conversion – this is the number of candidates who, after seeing the employer’s advertisement, e.g. in the form of a banner on social media, clicked the apply button and submitted their documents.
- Source of application – that is, determining which of the contact points with the brand triggered a reaction in the candidate, prompting him to take action, i.e. to apply for the offer.
It often seems that recruitment marketing is designed exclusively for big players in the labor market and that marketing campaigns consume a large part of the planned budget. However, this is a wrong impression. Especially if we represent a company employing a small number of employees, we should remember to consistently build the position of our brand among the competition, using marketing tools at the same time.
Before starting to plan the activities, it is worth considering what distinguishes our organization. What is its greatest asset? Perhaps it is a family atmosphere, exceptional care for the employee and care for the candidates’ experience in the recruitment process or opportunities for competence and career development.
Then we will be able to properly present and address all these advantages, attract the best talent and welcome new candidates to our organization.
If you are looking for committed IT specialists to join your team and you want to work with an effective recruitment agency – contact us.