Recruitment marketing is a proactive recruitment method used to attract and recruit top candidates. The strategy behind Recruitment Marketing is based on the use of marketing to sell both the employer and the job vacancy - in order to facilitate future recruitment. But in order to succeed with your Recruitment Marketing efforts, it is crucial to have a smart strategy. In this post, we will go through 5 steps required to create a winning Recruitment Marketing strategy.
1. Adapt your strategy to recruitment needs
The first step to building a winning recruitment marketing strategy is to first identify your recruitment plans. By finding out how many recruitments you plan to make and in which areas or departments, you can more easily choose the type of Recruitment Marketing strategy that suits your needs. A common misconception is that Recruitment Marketing always needs to be a big project, or something that needs to be worked on continuously to see results - but this doesn't have to be the case. A good feature of Recruitment Marketing is the ability to adapt the level based on how many employees you plan to recruit or how hard-to-recruit skills you want to reach. We therefore tend to divide the Recruitment Marketing strategy into three different levels:
- Level 1 - Ongoing advertising: If you plan to recruit frequently or heavily in the coming year, you can choose to work with Recruitment Marketing on an ongoing basis. This is to continuously ensure that you attract and recruit the top candidates within your target group.
- Level 2 - Preparatory advertising: If you make only a few recruitments per year, it may not be cost-effective to do recruitment marketing all year round. Instead, a better option would be to do recruitment marketing just before or during your recruitments - for a few weeks or months.
- Level 3 - Parallel advertising: A final option is to simply work with Recruitment Marketing only after a vacancy has been advertised .
2. Build an attractive offer
Once you have chosen the type of recruitment marketing you want to work with, it is time to create an attractive offer to the candidates you want to attract. The most important thing to succeed in creating an attractive candidate offer is that you know what the candidates actually care about, what strengths you have as an employer and how you distinguish yourself from other employers. Here there are several different types of data you can use - for example, employee surveys, in-depth interviews, market reports, advertising data or competitor analysis.
Start by answering questions such as:
- What is important when choosing a job for this type of candidate?
- What is the best thing about working with us?
- What do other employers offer to the same target group?
- How do we differentiate ourselves as an employer?
In the second stage, it is common to be unsure of what attracts the target group you want to reach. This is where We Select can help with data and insights to ensure that you build the most attractive offer possible.
3. Choose the right channels
Once you have chosen your strategy and reviewed your offer, it's time to choose the right channels to reach out. To ensure that you reach as many relevant candidates as possible, it is important to first understand that not all potential top candidates are actively looking for jobs. Instead, it is common to divide the candidate market into active and passive candidates. Active candidates are those candidates who are actively looking for a new job - for example by Googling or searching on job sites. Passive candidates, on the other hand, are candidates who are not actively looking for a new job but would be open to the right offer. So, to ensure that you reach as many relevant candidates as possible, it is important that you use a combination of marketing channels that allows you to reach both active and passive candidates.
To reach active candidates, you can choose to advertise on selected job boards (e.g. Indeed and LinkedIn) or on search engines (e.g. Google or Bing). However, to reach passive candidates, it works differently. This type of candidate needs to be either informed about what you are looking for or even informed about why they should choose to work with you. So it's all about reaching out where the passive candidates are often and a lot.
This is where social media comes into play as a very effective channel. In fact, 95% of Swedish internet users aged 16-65 use social media every week. According to the report "Svenskarna och Internet" by the Internet Foundation, the biggest channels are: Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat, TikTok, LinkedIn, X (formerly known as Twitter), Reddit & Pinterest. However, the most popular channels vary greatly based on age, gender and interests. Therefore, depending on who your primary target group is, it will be important to adapt the choice of channels based on where they actually are.
A further aspect that makes social media advertising effective is that you can use data to reach out to candidates who have visited your career site, shown interest in specific jobs or who are similar to previous top candidates.
4. Create engaging content
Once you've chosen the channels, the candidates you want to reach and reviewed your offer, it's time to create content that makes candidates want to apply. Content is a broad term that is often used to refer to a number of different things, but when it comes to Recruitment Marketing, we have chosen to divide it into four different components:
- Career or campaign page
- Job advertisement or unsolicited application
- Video ads
- Image ads
Career or campaign page
This is where you collect your job vacancies and information about a career with you. This page should be easy to find on your website and may include, for example:
- Image or video banner
- Information about the company
- Key figures about the company
- Benefits or other things you want to highlight
- Quotes from employees
- Your job vacancies
"One tip is to customize the career page based on candidates who are more or less interested in working with you. Make it easy for interested candidates to find your vacancies but also make the page sellable to less interested candidates."
- Love Hagald, Senior Graphic Designer at We Select
Job ad or open application
Then there is the job advert, which is there to inform potential candidates about the vacancy and encourage them to apply. Here we recommend highlighting, for example:
- Short pitch about the job
- About the company
- Who are you?
- What will you get to do?
- What is offered to you?
- The application process
- Other
Video and image advertisements
Last but not least, you need content for advertising. Here you can choose to work with advertising in one, two or three steps - depending on how much you plan to recruit. To successfully sell you as an employer, we usually work with video ads in the first two stages of advertising and then finish with converting image ads. Curious about what that might look like? Watch the recording of our Webinar: How to get started with Recruitment Marketing.
5. Reach the right candidates, on the right channels, with the right message
Now that you have a clear goal for what you want to achieve through recruitment marketing, an attractive candidate offer, an overview of where your top candidates are and content that creates engagement - you are ready to activate your winning Recruitment Marketing strategy. By clearly defining your recruitment needs, you can easily adjust the level of your marketing efforts according to how often or how much you plan to recruit. All in order to attract the best candidates as effectively as possible.
Do you want help attracting and recruiting top candidates through Recruitment Marketing? At We Select, we help small, medium and large companies with their recruitment marketing on a daily basis. Book a consultation with one of our Recruitment Marketing specialists and get started today!
