What is recruitment marketing?
Recruitment marketing is the practice of promoting and “selling” job opportunities. Selling job opportunities refers to making open positions desirable to job seekers by offering competitive salaries, providing key benefits, illustrating an admirable company culture, and acquainting them with what the full job experience looks like.
The best and most sustainable way to sell a job position is to say it like it is and describe the positive aspects of the full job experience. Being as descriptive as possible will attract the right candidates who know exactly what they’re in for. And remember, every good hire will drive your team forward and bring you a step forward toward your organization’s goals.
This is part of an extensive series of guides about employer branding.
Benefits of recruitment marketing
While the idea of hiring the right candidate for every open position does sound appealing, it’s important to note how exactly recruitment marketing plays its role in this. There are multiple goals and functions of recruitment marketing. Each makes it significantly easier for you to promote and sell job positions to the right candidates.
Letting the candidates know what they’re in for
The most essential step to any successful recruitment marketing campaign is the job description. Recruiters need to make sure that the job description:
- Is easily digestible
- Is professionally written
- Is relevant to the position only
- Mentions what is rewarding about the job
- Fully clarifies what is expected of the employee
With the ideal job description, the candidates you are looking for — the candidates that will drive your team forward, will be all the more likely to apply to your position. Why? Because you are letting the candidates know exactly what they’re in for. Unlike product offerings, career choices are not something that can be decided all willy-nilly, it’s a long-term commitment people make to their lives, and the more uncertainty that is eliminated from this decision, the better.
Expanding your reach in the job market
After having perfectly written out exactly what you are offering to job seekers, it’s time to get the message out there. This portion of recruitment marketing is better known as job distribution.
Job distribution refers to the promotion and advertisement of your job opportunities. While there are different traditional and modern ways to distribute jobs, the most common job distribution channels include:
- Job boards
- Social media
- Career websites
- Candidate sourcing
- Employee referral programs
- Career fairs
With the proper job distribution channels set up, employers can expand their reach in the job market, and get a lot more views and applications on their job postings. Creating a sustainable recruitment process that generates reliable traffic to job opportunities will make it all the more likely that the ideal candidate will come knocking at your door.
Honing your employer’s brand
Expanding your reach in the job market with job distribution campaigns is great. But what about creating passive traffic to your job opportunities, by becoming an employer people want to work for? That is the goal of employer branding.
Just in the regular sense, how companies build a brand for their products, and generate a consumer base, an employer brand hopes to achieve the same. The common theme that can be noticed here is that recruitment marketing is not that far off from marketing. Employers want to be known as reputable employers in their space, and the largest organizations with big hiring volumes thrive off the interest they get from passive candidates.
Here are some examples of truly undefeatable employer brands:
- In-N-Out has famously been the best fast food chain to work at for a while now. Initially gaining an appeal with its competitive salaries that outperformed its competitors, it has grown to be known for many other positive aspects, such as flexible working hours, employee recognition, and much more. It even ranked number four in Glassdoor’s reviews, ahead of companies like Google and Microsoft.
- Hubspot also tops the list of best workplaces in the US. With the company bringing immense value to its clients, it does not disappoint with its employment opportunities. Ranked the second best place of work in 2022, Hubspot owes much of its employer brand to its commitment to employees’ well-being and its active recruitment marketing efforts in showing off its good track record.
- But perhaps the most impressive employer brand is that of Google. It’s almost every engineer’s dream workplace. The stats speak for themselves; Google receives over 3 million applicants annually, which is a ridiculous number of applications considering that it hires roughly 20 thousand people a year.
Overall, employer branding is a huge benefit for employers. By securing constant passive interests from job seekers, you have truly made yourself a big player in the job market and will reap the rewards of securing some of the best talent the job market has to offer.
How recruitment marketing works
How then, can we tap into our business’ potential and reap the benefits of recruitment marketing? Well, even though it may at first seem a steep battle, recruitment marketing is an effort that truly pays off both in the long run and in immediate effect. Here are some of the things to take into account before embarking on your recruitment marketing journey.
Realizing your employee value proposition
To first embark on this journey, you first have to ask yourself this question? Why would people want to work for me? The answer to this question will then be placed into all your job descriptions, which will then in effect be used to distribute your jobs. What you are after is an employee value proposition (EVP).
To realize your employee value proposition, what you need is to communicate with your staff. That’s right, no employee engagement surveys. You would truly need to sit down and conduct interviews with your staff, to get to the bottom of what about the work they like. If the answers you get reveal an uncomfortable truth that all that is rewarding about your workplace is the basic monetary compensation it provides, then you need to get to work and create a minimum viable product (MVP) of sorts for your job opportunities, just as you do with the product you are selling.
Once you get to the answer, once you discover your EVP, you know that there is truly something about your rewarding job opportunities. Your job opportunities truly are competitive and valuable, and with the right course of action can secure the best talent the job market has to offer.
Marketing your EVP
The EVP then needs to be ingrained into all of your recruitment marketing practices. These are the list of recruitment practices that need to be adopted into your hiring process:
- Mastering your job descriptions. We had previously talked about the importance of having the perfect job descriptions for your recruitment marketing campaigns. Now that you know your EVP, communicate it in your job descriptions to increase the efficiency of your recruitment marketing campaigns and attract the ideal candidates you are looking for.
- Leveraging job distribution channels. We had listed the several job distribution channels that any recruitment marketing campaign should be leveraging. You should be active on these channels and seamlessly integrate these channels into your hiring process.
- Make content. Content is king. This content can range from anything from pictures, and videos to even articles. This content becomes a means of communicating your EVP to the job market and creating a solid employer brand with a base of passive candidates seeking employment opportunities in your company.
How Hirebee facilitates your recruitment marketing
Why we are so passionate about recruitment marketing and hiring in general, is because it is our mission to help make employment easier for all. We are a software company that services recruitment software to businesses that are looking to facilitate their hiring processes, as well as adopt contemporary hiring solutions into their recruitment process.
This extends to recruitment marketing, and our product offerings include a range of features that can help you facilitate your recruitment marketing. These include:
- A fully customizable career page. Create appealing career pages that contain all of your employer-branded content, including photos, videos, articles, and employee testimonials. Linking to your job postings will have the candidate enter a page that is truly built to maximize the candidate experience and convert any candidate who’s on the fence about applying to your company.
- Job distribution management. Our software makes it easy for you to manage your job distribution. With integrations to all the most important job boards and social media, you can share your job posting to multiple platforms with a single click of a button after setup. Best of all, you receive all your applications in one place, keeping the process nice and tidy.
- Job posting. You can create a full job posting process with job requisitions, job description fields, and buttons to share your job post. Save your job postings and repost them once you need to hire for the same position again.
- Recruitment marketing analytics. Hirebee gives you full insight into the performance of your recruitment marketing. With analytics such as visibility and source metrics, you can track the performance of your job ads and the efficiency of your sourcing channels.
See how our solutions can service your recruitment marketing needs in greater detail >> Recruitment Marketing – Hirebee
