Utilizing creative content marketing can make the process of hiring the best candidates easier. Here are some ideas you can adopt in your recruitment strategy.

The hiring process can be challenging. There’s a well-documented shortage of skilled workers, which makes the hiring landscape very competitive. How do you rise above the noise to attract the best candidates? You have to adopt a creative content marketing strategy.

Recruiters must use a variety of methods and platforms to effectively reach candidates, and social media channels are arenas that should be capitalized on in the hiring process. They offer a potential wealth of information about job seekers, which can be used to create specific personas of ideal candidates. Having a targeted audience will add precision and effectiveness to your recruitment marketing efforts and ensure that your audience will be receptive to your messaging.

Once you have your audience in mind, you can start to brainstorm some ideas for your recruiting material. Below we’ve listed five great content marketing ideas that are guaranteed to bolster your hiring efforts.

1. Blog Posts

Digital advertising still has a large part to play in the recruitment process, but internet users are now more wary of ads than they used to be. If you want to reach your candidate pool, you need to try something different. Leverage the power of the internet and users’ need for education and entertainment (or edutainment) by hosting a blog on your website.

Blogs are a great tool for putting a spotlight on what goes on behind the scenes at your company, sharing industry information, and announcing events. And it’s a powerful platform for establishing yourself as an expert in your field and developing a strong employer brand.

Posts can be authored by various stakeholders in your business, from the CEO to designers, software engineers, and more. Anyone in the company with an interest in writing can contribute to your blog. If done well, the end result will be a forum with a diverse cross-section of perspectives and insights.

Pro tip: be sure to use multimedia visuals when creating posts to make your brand personality come alive.

2. Brochures

Though print media has lost a lot of traction in the hiring process, brochures continue to be a great resource to attract job seekers. Brochures can accommodate a wealth of marketing content within a self-contained space. 

All the salient points about your company—your mission, values, and the specifics of the roles you are hiring for—can be included in brochures. They are the perfect non-digital accompaniment to any company’s blog.

If you don’t have access to a graphic designer, it can be difficult to make one from scratch. Fortunately, online tools with brochure templates make it easier to create high quality brochures quickly and efficiently, like the example below.

And the great thing about the digital sphere is that you no longer need to print brochures to distribute. You can include a downloadable PDF on your website or with job postings that your applicants can easily access.

3. Infographics

Infographics are incredibly useful resources for recruitment marketing—they combine the power of words, data, and visuals. Infographics make it easier to share relevant information in an easily digestible and attractive manner. Additionally, like brochures, infographics can easily be created using online templates. 

As a visual asset, they’re also versatile. They can be used on your company’s career site, blog, social media channels, in email newsletters, and digital advertisements.

4. Podcasts

According to the 2019 Infinite Dial Study by Edison Research and Triton Digital, among the U.S. population ages 12 and older, the total number of people who have ever listened to a podcast recently passed 50% for the first time. 

Podcasts have become an excellent way to share company news and views with a large audience. They make brands appear more personable and give them a voice that job seekers can relate to. You can feature a wide array of employees on the podcast to discuss their roles, organizational goals, and company culture.

There are tons of online resources to help businesses get started with podcasting. You’ll just need to set aside some time to learn the basics, a small amount of money for equipment, and before long you’ll be evangelizing your brand to a whole new audience.

5. Videos

Data from Cisco shows that by 2022, video traffic will account for 82% of all global IP traffic. Videos are essential to any content marketing mix and, therefore, should be prioritized by recruiters and talent acquisition professionals. 

There are a few great options when it comes to video. Behind-the-scenes videos of your company are always a good choice because they offer candidates a sneak peak into your company culture and can easily be posted across all of your social channels.

If you don’t have the resources to invest in video production, you can also host live video sessions on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube with nearly any smartphone camera. Many live streaming services on these platforms allow for viewers to engage the hosts, thus creating the perfect opportunity for job seekers to become better acquainted with your organization. 

Conclusion

There are a host of content marketing ideas for recruiters to tap into to strengthen the hiring process. And, as mentioned, many of them can be easily be created using free online resources. The most important thing to remember is that the outcome of your efforts should be authentic, true to brand, and an accurate portrayal of your company.

The candidate experience is traditionally split into pre and post application, but does that really makes sense for how TA leaders work in the real world?

Today, there are tech solutions to enable every workflow under the sun, and most likely not just one – many! Want to track vacation days, plan work trips, onboard new employees, or even organize a gift exchange? There’s an app for that. In fact, the Human Capital Management market as a whole was valued at 14.50 billion last year, and it’s projected to grow by nearly 30 percent by 2022 to $21.51 billion.

This is great news in terms of innovation, but for talent acquisition leaders already trying to stretch 24 hours into 25, it means a deluge of SaaS decisions. That’s why we are answering one of the most pressing questions – ‘When do I go with a blanket solution and when do I specialize?’ and applying it to candidate relationship management (CRM).

CRM has become an imperative consideration in the current climate of talent scarcity. Unemployment in the US is at a 17-year low of 3.9 percent in May of this year, there is a predicted worker shortage of 8.2 million people from 2017-2027, with an increasing number of employers already reporting a lack of qualified candidates across multiple industries. Organizations with their sights set on growth will need to distinguish themselves as A+ employers at every point of contact.

Think of CRM as “keeping in touch at scale”. One of the top candidate complaints in the hiring process is a lack of communication, which is where CRM solutions step in. Without getting too technical, CRM helps nurture potential candidates, including passive ones, so that an organization has ready access to top-talent ahead of demand. That means resurfacing formerly rejected candidates as well as finding new connections. With the right system in place, recruiters become recruitment marketers thanks to features like branded landing pages, targeted email campaigns, messaging templates, and custom reporting and analytics.

Learn the difference between ATS and CRM here!

Back to our original question: when it comes to CRM, is it better to bundle your CRM with an ATS for an all-in-one solution,  or to specialize with a third-party CRM?

The argument in favor of native CRM solutions is rooted in data quality and ease of use while specialization makes sense if the solution will significantly increase the quality of experience and work produced.

The deciding factor between native and non-native CRM is whether the candidate journey should be split up into pre and post application or not. Which makes for a better experience?

A non-native CRM breaks the candidate flow into two distinct parts— pre-application and post-application while the non-native CRM covers the pre-application phase through a nurturing system. Once the candidate has applied, their data is transferred to the ATS and funneled through the recruiting process.

This workflow would make sense if the candidate journey was linear. Unfortunately, that typically isn’t the case. Let’s say a sourcer nurtures a candidate in the CRM, processes them through the ATS, but doesn’t make the candidate an offer. Does the relationship end there? It shouldn’t. At this point, the candidate’s information must be transferred back to the third-party CRM.

Anytime there is more than one software solution as part of a recruiting workflow there must be an exchange of data, which can lead to data duplication or misplacement. This effort is worthwhile if you are siloing distinct workflows while providing a better candidate experience, but in this case, the cost outweighs the benefits.

In a general context, when and where a company decides to split the systems has to reflect the workflow or the candidate journey. This is where non-native CRM becomes problematic. The reality is that separating the nurturing process from the application process is a huge headache for recruiters and sourcers, not to mention for candidates as well.

Larger companies may have sourcers working with a CRM and recruiters/hiring managers working with an  ATS, which means sourcers may not know what has happened with candidates that pass into the ATS, causing them to neglect rejected applicants when the demand for future hires arises. For smaller companies, sourcers and recruiters are required to constantly toggle between systems,  and be unable to provide a consistent flow for the candidates as they move through the hiring process.

With native CRM is fully integrated with the applicant tracking system so there is one data flow. That means candidates have a universal profile as they move through the candidate lifecycle, which makes for consistent, updated candidate data for all parties. In addition, sourcers and recruiters can use the marketing tools of the CRM like branded landing pages in the latter half of the hiring process, for great brand consistency.

For recruiters, a quality CRM solution balances effective functionality with strong design that delivers impactful communication and consistent employer branding. While there are multiple third-party CRM solutions available on the market, a native CRM offers seamless integration with your existing workflows that doesn’t compromise candidate experience.

Learn more about SmartCRM with our VP of Product, Rebecca Carr.

Nina Mufleh really wanted to work for AirBnB. And I mean really wanted to. However, after nearly a year of trying to snag her dream job, she hadn’t reached her goals. Instead of despairing like most people would, she remained proactive and decided to pool all of her experience and skills into making sure she was noticed.

Having headed up marketing and social media campaigns for Fortune 500 companies — and even the Queen of Jordan — Nina knew she had the skills necessary to make a splash at AirBnb, and even improve their business. Armed with this, she created an in-depth report looking into the capabilities of AirBnB and how they could move further into the current underexploited Middle Eastern market.

Her campaign proved to be massive success. Initially it generated some traction among her peers and contacts, before finally becoming truly viral — eventually grabbing the attention of the mainstream media and the company she wanted to work for.

Following this success, Nina worked with Upwork, where she used her unique expertise to help millions of talented freelancers better sell themselves in a constantly changing and competitive environment.

Nina recently spoke at SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success 18 conference where she headed up a speaking session discussing her experiences with the nina4airbnb campaign and how she applied it to her future success. Here is a taster of a few insights we gathered from Nina Mufleh.

What was it about Airbnb’s employer brand that attracted you to the company?

Most importantly, I believe in their mission to create a world where we can all feel a greater sense of belonging. What attracted me to their employer brand was working with and learning from a world class team.

Where did the idea for nina4airbnb.com come from?

After nearly a year of making little to no progress in trying to find a job here, I realized that I would have to change my approach drastically to start seeing results. I put on my marketing hat, thought of myself as a product and began thinking of different strategies I could employ to generate demand around hiring me.

What kind of response did you expect, and how did this compare to reality?

I designed the campaign for success, and expected it to generate quite a bit of chatter, but I have been completely blown away by how much it continues to spread. Nearly 3 years later, I still receive messages of support from around the world — especially from people who are facing similar challenges.

How did you help to generate so much buzz around nina4airbnb.com?

I tapped into my personal and professional network and asked them to share their reactions to the report on Twitter with the aim of creating some social-proof around the conversations. The timing, choice of platform and details were all integral to starting the initial conversation and then it grew exponentially when mainstream media caught wind of the story.

What advice would you give a candidate desperate for a role with a particular company?

I would advise candidates who are focused on one company – or even a handful of companies – to invest some time in understanding what that company’s priorities are, what problems they’re trying to solve, and then tailor their messaging in a way that shows how they can be useful to solving those challenges.

Where on a CEO’s list of priorities should be “recruitment”?

I’m a strong believer that your products and company are as strong as your team and that recruitment and company culture should always be at the top of a CEO’s priority list.

Who was/is your biggest professional influence and why?

My co-founders at The Online Project. The personal and professional growth that we experienced alongside each other helped us push our careers in a completely new direction.

In my last column, I shared 5 Ways to Recruit Like a Marketer and highlighted content marketing as a key deliverable. We know research shows that 69% of candidates wouldn’t accept a job with an organization with a bad reputation and as employers are getting more creative with their hiring strategies, content marketing will play a primary role in building brand awareness. Focusing more specifically on content marketing, here’s how leading organizations and talent acquisition professionals are recruiting like marketers:

1. They have strategy. Anyone can produce content but to succeed it has to tell a story that begins with your company’s culture. Getting it right is no mean feat. To quote Deloitte, ‘company culture can be your competitive advantage or your Achilles’ heel’. Define your message with HR and develop a content marketing strategy based on your audience persona that sets the tone for everything you post.
2. They tell a story. Prospective hires want to know why working for your company is meaningful, interesting and aligns with their aspirations. People want to work for a business whose values they believe in. Use behind-the-scenes insights into a typical day in the office to highlight the benefits of working for your organization. Include updates on what’s important to today’s job seekers, such as, community initiatives, career development opportunities, employee recognition and flexible working.
3. They have a blog. A regular blog must offer solutions, add value and resonate with your readers. Create credibility in your sector with topics relevant to your target audience with ‘tips to’ or ‘how-to’s’. Demonstrate your authority by tapping into current trends. Keep it well-structured with bullet points and conclude with a call-to-action to encourage visitors to comment, subscribe to regular updates or find out more about your organization. Be consistent, decide how often you’re going to publish, whether once or twice a week (ideal), once a fortnight or even once a month. Once you’ve made your decision, stick to your schedule.
4. They are social. Share content on your LinkedIn company pages and social media feeds with links back to your careers site. First impressions count. Passive talent must encounter a consistent brand message and regular flow of content. Encourage employee buy-in to share content too, the more engaged and involved they are the more eager they’ll be to promote your cause. One word of warning – avoid job post overkill. A perpetual stream of vacancies yells ‘desperate’ and is guaranteed to send qualified candidates elsewhere.
5. They reuse, repurpose and repost. If you generally create articles, think about how the content can be adapted and repurposed to fit other formats. For example, take the information in your blog post to create slide presentations, videos, infographics, a series of tweets or invite your audience to discuss your content in a webinar. So-called ‘evergreen’ content with a longer shelf life containing useful tips and advice can be reposted over a longer period of time. Your blog statistics will identify your most popular posts.
6. They create talent communities. Develop targeted campaigns on social media that are interesting, relevant and timely to attract candidates with the skills and qualifications your company needs. Curate your content into a weekly – or bi-weekly – e-mail or newsletter with your latest blog, notifications of upcoming webinars and sharing relevant company stories to engage talent and create a community tailored to your business needs. With a readily engaged audience, it will be much easier to recruit the next time you have a specific need.
7. They track success. Tracking your engagement, audience reach and growth through metrics will help to build a more effective content campaign. Content marketing in recruitment, like any other strategy, needs to be regularly reviewed and adjusted to ensure a steady flow of qualified candidates into your pipeline. Get it right and your content strategy will attract passive talent to your brand, help to build trust and enhance your employer brand.

What content marketing strategies are the most effective for attracting qualified candidates to your pipeline?

Meet Talent Zoo! A great source for talent in advertising, marketing, creative, design, new media and digital industries.

General Information

Founded: 1996

Service (offered): Online job board & e-zine

CEO: Rick Myers

Twitter: @TalentZoo

Facebook: /TalentZoo

Employees (# of): 10

SmartRecruiters wants to know: How do you make hiring easier? Amy Hoover, President & Partner, had this to say.

1. Tell us a little about the history of Talent Zoo.

Talent Zoo was founded in 1996 as an executive search firm catering to the advertising industry. As we grew and technology advanced, we launched the job board in 2001 to provide a lower-cost recruiting tool to our customers. We also began expanding into the general marketing and public relations industries at that time, continuing to grow our footprint into the tech and digital sectors as those recruiting needs grew for our customers.

2. How does Talent Zoo work?

We offer job postings as well as subscription-based access to a resume and portfolio database. It is then our responsibility to our clients to get as many relevant eyeballs on those job descriptions and as many top-notch candidates in our database as possible.

3. What are Talent Zoo market differentiators?

Not only do we offer job seekers the best job listings in one place, we also publish unique content daily on topics ranging from career advice to the newest trends in digital marketing. We have over 70,000 Twitter followers and nearly 10,000 Facebook fans and we use social media to push our content out to the masses and attract those hard-to-find passive job seekers. We deliver an audience of engaged industry pro’s to our clients’ job postings, not just active job seekers.

4. Why should hiring businesses use the service of Talent Zoo?

You can save time and money! We push all the job listings on our site out to major job aggregators and pay to sponsor them as well. There’s no need to post your job in multiple places or manage a complicated CPC campaign. We help both companies and individuals become more successful by making the hiring process fun and easy.

5. What’s a fact we may not know about Talent Zoo?

We once had an intern who watered the fake plants in the office every week, and our office dog Noodle would follow him around and drink the water that spilled out the bottom. It was so funny we never told him to stop.

Have you used Talent Zoo before? Comment below.  You can post jobs to Talent Zoo through SmartRecruiters.

When it comes to making recruitment a science, Carl Sweet, Marketo‘s Director of Talent Acquisition, does everything but break out the beakers. His company provides powerful marketing automation software for fast-growing small companies and global enterprises, and its’ talent acquisition practices align with a marketers’ dream for big data precision.

“It all started when managers and executives kept asking me, ‘How many people do I have to interview for this job?'” said Sweet.

He dug into the history of hiring. By storing the information of all past hires, Sweet learned the average of number of candidates and interviews required to make each hire. Then, he considered the performance of those hires to measure if Marketo sourced and interviewed the optimal number of candidates. Through years of recruiting and research, Sweet developed the company ratio of 80 candidates: 8 interviews: 1 hire.

“It’s about having just enough resumes; not too many and not too few.The ratio helps me decide which recruiting channels to open up. I need the best talent, but I don’t want to create any extra work for the recruiter.”

The implications of an inefficient recruitment process seep into the budgets of every department within an organization.

“The ratio allows me to have a good influx of people,” explained Sweet. “At the same time, interviewing’s expensive. If you average 10 interviews instead of 8, think about those extra two hours of lost productivity across the entirety of an organization.”

Sweet proceeded to rattle off the astronomical number of potentially lost man hours at organizations larger than his own, ad-lib, before settling back in to the concrete effects at each one of his departments. Sweet also unveiled a picture of the Silicon Valley labor market by explaining how function changes the ratio; “for finance positions, the ratio is 120 candidates: 15 interviews: 1 hire; and for engineers the ratio is 20 candidates: 5 interviews: 1 hire.”

Sweet is building out a ratio of candidates to interview to hire for every function and experience level. When Sweet thinks recruiting, he thinks science, and Marketo is better off for it.

“I have to decide what recruiting channels to open up, and the ratio is where I start.”

80 candidates: 8 interviews,: 1 hire represents a tech company’s necessity to win the war for talent. As Sweet says, “It’s always very data driven.”

Carl Sweet is Director of Staffing at Marketo, provider of powerful marketing automation software for fast-growing small companies and global enterprises

SmartRecruiters is the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates, generate reports, and make the right hire.

When you interview a SEO/SEM marketing manager, evaluate for best practices, failing fast, and data driven. Ask:

• What do you like about marketing?

An open ended question gets the interview going. Talk for a few minutes about the industry. Do they get that marketing is about getting the goods in hands of customers who would benefit from them (whether the customers know this yet or not). A SEO/SEM marketing manager must know the industry standards and have that I’m-a-step-ahead-of-the-competition mindset. Will the candidate find reward in doing his or her job well? Observe the enthusiasm in which the candidate talks about marketing tasks and accomplishments. You want people that love what they do.

• Where do you see room for improvement on our website?  

Now, don’t expect a full SEOmoz analysis, but do expect a couple observations. For a talented SEO candidate, it doesn’t take much time on a website to notice the website is not perfect. A prepared candidate should have at least spent some time on your website before the interview. Listen to their suggestions. If you know much about your website, you may hear some things you know, such as there are no meta tags on the “About Page,” but hopefully you’ll hear a suggestion you haven’t considered. Does this new suggestion make sense with the best practices you already know? The explanation  and ensuing conversation will not only test the candidate’s knowledge of best practices, but it will also test the potential SEO/SEM marketing manager’s ability to work with the new team on an SEO strategy.

[EDITOR’S UPDATE: As the IrishRecruiter has pointed out in the comments section, you don’t want to scare the candidate away, or expect to form an action plan off the conversation from this question. The goal is to learn about the candidate’s bility to form impressions of websites and branding.  A safer version of this question is: “Where do you see room for improvement at www.AnyOtherCompany’s.com?” It’s best to pick a website you know a bit about, so you can weigh their understanding / perspective on Internet growth.]

• How have you successfully reached CPA targets in the past (for paid search)? And when have you failed to do so?

A SEM marketing manager must always be thinking about the cost per acquisition (CPA). Obviously, you want someone that has successfully acquired the right type of people (at the right price) to the website. With search engine marketing, you want someone who has pushed the limits. Someone who has tried new things, measured results, and continuously optimized.  Fail fast, fail cheap. Hearing a SEM marketing manager talk about why an ad/s failed, will give you a feel for how they will adapt when a marketing campaign does not work out as planned.

When interviewing an SEO/SEM marketing manager, remember that this person should eat and sleep results. You want someone that has the ability to recognize the variables and accurately measure the variations in outcomes For SEO, you want someone who has the vision to see what quality terms can be improved upon in Google rankings. For SEM, you want someone who is data-driven, thinking in terms of A/B testing, and finding reward in running multiple tests in order to find the optimal advertisement or landing page. Make a job offer to a marketer who loves keeping up with the evolution of Google’s search engine.

For more interviewing help read:

• How to Interview a Salesperson

• How to Interview a Project Manager

• How to Interview a Consulting Partner

• Or consider sharing your knowledge of How to Interview for another postion.