Recruiting Marketing Strategy 101: Examples, Templates & Content Ideas
Forrester Research suggests it takes up to eight touchpoints for a brand to influence a consumer decision. People rarely arrive at a company’s website ready to buy or apply immediately.
Good recruiters know they need a recruitment marketing strategy. They need to market their company to candidates long before they’re ready to fill out an application. But even with the best intentions, it’s not easy to know where to start planning your first campaign.
How do you first reach out to candidates? What is an appropriate first test for your marketing muscles? How much (or how little) should you write, send, or post? The answers are completely different from one company to another, but we put together a few templates and examples that should apply to most cases, and can help you get started.
A plug-and-play campaign to start
You just imported a large list of potential candidates, cleaned it, updated and tagged it in your database… all you need is to start engaging with the candidates.
Where do you start?
1. The opening email
One great way to open the lines of communication is to share an update about the company that’s relevant to all types of talent. It can be about a new round of funding, a diversity initiative, or a fun video of your team that shows candidates what it’s like to work for your company.
In your future campaigns, you can tailor your content to specific audiences, or react to their recent actions on your website. For example, if you have tagged candidates by personas, you can use that information in your message.
We have a guide on the anatomy of a perfect recruiting email, and you can try these recruiting email strategies if you need more advanced ideas later, but for now, let’s keep it simple. For this example, once you establish that first touchpoint with candidates, you’re ready to invite them to an event.
2. The event page
First, create a custom page for your (virtual or in-person) event. Include a few pictures of your team members who will be attending and of past editions of the event. If you can include videos, that’s even better.
Be explicit but to-the-point in your event description: no need to explain exactly what your company does for example, but do briefly explain what your event is about, and how it relates to your industry, your mission, or your employees. Make sure to include information on the program and logistics of the event.
As your team gets more comfortable developing and implementing recruiting campaigns, you will be able to build a proper recruiting events strategy.
The success of recruitment events as a talent acquisition channel comes in large part from their integration with the overall talent strategy. Recruiting events can be a full-time workstream on their own, but it takes time to build up to that level. And before you dive in too deep, it’s worth doing a quick run-through of the team’s event options:
- Campus events, job fairs, or company briefings, where you invite an audience (likely students) to a talk about your company.
- Networking events, either on site at the company, or in venues of your choice. These could be co-hosted with other companies, or done via meetups.
- Sponsored events, where you may not be the main organizer, but where you associate your employer brand with a cause, a community, or a set of values.
- Educational events, such as workshops, classes, or competitions.
- Other events, such as wine tastings or VIP dinners after industry conferences.
Note that sponsored events might be more appropriate if the event organizer has an agenda that has a low risk of reflecting badly on the employers, such as diversity events, or campus events. When choosing who to sponsor, it’s a good idea to meet with the organizers and review their plan in advance.
When it’s time for your team to dive deeper into the design and launch of a recruiting events strategy, they might find our Recruiting Events Playbook useful to see how their ideas and plans stack up.
3. The Talent Network
First, a quick definition:
Talent network: An opt-in online community where the candidate can interact with recruiters and peers about career opportunities at a specific company.
Talent networks, or talent communities, are an important channel to keep your company top-of-mind for potential candidates. Talent communities can be simple online forums with conversation threads, social media groups, or dedicated landing pages where candidates can fill out a form and request to be added to the talent community.
It’s rare for a candidate to decide to apply to a company right after their first couple of interactions. They might come to the careers site, read a few job descriptions, even click on an application link, but they might leave, making a mental note to come back later.
The role of the talent community is to remind them to do that, in a sense. It gives them regular updates about the company, a space to learn more about it from peers or directly from recruiters, and gives them the opportunity to ask thoughtful questions and stay engaged.
But a talent network needs members to be effective. That is why your next step, after setting it up, is sending an invitation to join the talent community to your mailing list.
For example, you can send the invitation as a follow-up to your event for the attendees. Make it conversational and fun. Leave room for personalization based on attributes like the recipient’s name, city, professional area, or even their hobbies.
4. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
By now, you already have a few touchpoints with your candidate database under your belt. Your Facebook page, Twitter feed, or Instagram account provides an opportunity to add more depth to the overall employer brand, and to grow your audience on social media.
These social channels are far less formal than a traditional recruiting platform like LinkedIn. They can give a more human, more authentic dimension to your brand that career sites and LinkedIn profiles simply don’t have, so use that to your advantage!
If you haven’t already, your next move is to email your database, inviting them to follow the company pages on social media and share them with others as well.
5. The Sharing Game
Gamifying social sharing is not a new trick, but it works when it’s done in a relevant and non-pushy way.
Set up a competition on your social media accounts where each candidate receives a unique URL to join the talent network. For example, you can offer a company visit or a meeting with the Head of Digital Marketing to the top five sharers. A competition like this would be especially relevant to marketing candidates.
You can make the game relevant to other groups depending on what industry you’re in, and who you’re trying to recruit: a quiz on famous geological formations for geological engineers in Oil and Gas, a photo contest for jobs in the Travel and Hospitality business, or an open vote for names of a new plant or office building. (Just be open to the possibility of unusual suggestions — social media never ceases to amaze in that regard.)
6. The Job Ad
The previous step sets you up perfectly for this last one: the ’sharing game’ was a great way to identify engaged and motivated candidates who have interacted with your brand multiple times, and have a positive attitude towards your company. If you have an open job ad in the area of their interest, now is the perfect time to mention it.
Send them an email explaining why you think they would be a good fit for your company, and invite them to look at a few open roles.
If you don’t have an opening that matches their skills at that time, but you know you will in the future, then just let them know you’d love to keep in touch for future opportunities. Everybody likes to be appreciated.
Recruitment marketing strategy: a few content ideas
You can build multiple variations on this first example campaign simply by varying the content contained in each one. Here are some ideas of different types of content to share on different recruitment marketing channels.
On the careers page:
Share current social responsibility initiatives that the company is involved in, and why they matter to employees. Sharing your company’s diversity statistics is a good idea here as well.
In your newsletter:
Either write your own content, share thought leadership pieces written by other teams in the company, or curate content from outside sources based on your candidates’ interests. You can then share the content with candidates in your talent network, for example. A newsletter is also a good place to announce upcoming projects with high impact on the public that the company will begin soon.
On Facebook:
Consider sending invitations to participate in a competition on social media, or give them the opportunity to answer a poll to decide the name of a new business location or company initiative.
On Instagram:
This is one of the best places to share pictures of your team representing the company at a trade show or conference (or even pictures of your employees just hanging out in the office).
There are lots of possibilities for short posts, but do stay “on brand”: keep in mind that these touchpoints must come together to form a unified image of your company. Be consistent, and inject some of your culture and values throughout your content. You can also vary the content you share depending on where the candidates are in their recruiting journey (awareness, consideration, or decision).
What makes recruiting content successful?
Success drivers are different from channel to channel. What makes an email campaign successful is very different from what makes a LinkedIn page attractive to candidates. Good content always helps, of course, but there are other drivers to consider.
Frequency
More is not always better. Interactions with the audience on social media usually stays on the page in the form of likes, comments, shares or retweets, so make sure that you don’t leave the page looking suspiciously bare, or overwhelmingly cluttered. For example, a Twitter page needs at least one to two tweets a day to feel alive to candidates, while a Facebook page is often engaging enough with just one or two posts per week.
As for email, we’ve put together our best tips about when it’s best to send them to candidates, but it’s still worth experimenting with different times and email types to see what works best your your audience.
Multichannel
Think about every touchpoint the candidate is seeing — do they follow your social media pages or subscribe to your newsletter? Are they going to meetings or visiting your talent community page? Make sure that the whole experience is coordinated and feels cohesive.
Time of day
Test and see what works best for you, but in most cases, around lunch is the best time to get a response on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.
Type of content
In general, videos increase engagement, but you should consider what’s best for each individual channel. 30-second videos with subtitles are well adapted to Facebook or Instagram feeds, where people are inclined to quickly scroll with the sound off. Twitter is better suited to GIFs or static images.
Size and dimensions
There are recommended sizes that can make your content better suited to a given channel. Research each channel’s requirements before sending out creative or design briefs. For images specifically, Hootsuite put together a list of ideal dimensions for a bunch of social media channels. Ideally, you’ll want to develop specifications adapted for each type of content, depending on what you usually use: short videos, live streams, infographics or images.
Great recruiting content is relevant to the candidate, and brings them information that they’re interested in. It could be an inside look into a cutting edge technology in their field, an early bird ticket to an event, or just a quick note asking them how they have been and if they have time to catch up over a quick call.
We’ve published a bunch of articles about the building blocks of a good recruitment marketing strategy: how to write the best LinkedIn message, the perfect cold email, or the ideal subject line, for example. Those resources, coupled with this quick step-by-step template, should get you started with your recruitment marketing strategy.