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.

Both concepts are candidate-facing, but your company won’t reach top talent unless you integrate them with your overall TA strategy.

Today’s job seekers have more employment options that ever before, empowering them to choose the right company based on fit. In response, businesses are moving away from traditional methods of candidate attraction (public job boards, cold outreach) in favor of more employer brand-focused efforts that target talent before they apply. With this shift, two key elements—employer branding and recruitment marketing—work to achieve a common goal: attract and hire the best possible candidates.

Companies that don’t understand the difference between employer branding and recruitment marketing risk misrepresentation and brand inconsistency, which in turn creates a poor candidate experience. Creating a positive, candidate-facing company image means your company is primed to attract the 75 percent of job seekers who consider an employer’s brand before even applying for a job.

What is Employer Branding?

More than just a marketing tool, employer branding is the external image that attracts active candidates and converts passive candidates, as well as the internal image that retains employees. Employer branding also encompasses your company’s impact on customers, employees, and society at large.

To define your company’s employer branding, you need to look at the core elements of the company’s mission, values, and vision. From there, you can define other important factors such as your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and candidate personas, which are essential to answering the question of what makes your company a great employer.

The best employer brands are consistent across all communication channels—social media, word of mouth, company pages, and job descriptions. These brands find ways to take the internal narrative of satisfied employees and turn it into the external narrative that attracts candidates. With 52 percent of today’s job seekers combing through company websites and social media pages to find out more about an employer, a positive and clearly defined employer brand is your company’s “first impression”.

For companies, a strong employer brand has a positive, bottom-line impact on three major recruiting metrics: time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, and quality-of-hire. According to LinkedIn, companies with great employer branding see 50 percent more qualified applicants, hire at a rate of 1–2x faster, and reduce cost per hire by 50 percent.

It’s important to note that employer branding serves as the foundation upon which an effective recruitment marketing strategy can be built.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is employer branding in action, most commonly via social media campaigns and intelligent advertising spending. These methods are specific and targeted promotion designed to get your company message in front of the right candidate at the right time.

Being proactive in the pre-application phase of the recruitment process allows recruiters and hiring managers to build an inbound pipeline of qualified applicants, rather than the “spray and pray” method used with conventional job board postings.

Much like employer branding, great communication is essential to a recruitment marketing strategy. It’s important to think about how a candidate interacts with your brand—through paid media (job advertising); SEO traffic and company reviews (Glassdoor); and internal channels (company career sites, blog posts, live events, social media). A strong talent acquisition suite gives companies access to post on a variety of job boards, and allows recruiters to make data-driven decisions about where ad spend yields the highest ROI.

Another recruitment marketing strategy that goes largely underused is employee referrals. Compared to previous years, hires resulting from employee referrals is declining, thanks in part to the rise of recruiter marketing, but that doesn’t mean organizations should abandon their referral strategies, which still account for 27 percent of all company hires.

For most companies, their own employees are their biggest advocates, and tapping into your existing employee’s social networks to make and track referrals expands your sourcing efforts without any additional work. A robust talent acquisition suite leverages your company’s internal network to discover talent within your organization that may be the right fit for an open role.

Know the Difference and How to Use Both When Recruiting

As we’ve seen, competition among organizations to attract and hire top talent is fierce, and maintaining an edge over competitors means taking a proactive and forward-thinking approach to recruiting. Establishing employer brand across all channels should be your company’s first priority, as your company’s reputation as an employer should remain consistent over time while the tactics and methods of recruiter marketing should be adapted in response to industry trends. While both employer branding and recruiter marketing rely on each other to work optimally, recruitment marketing cannot work without an established employer brand. Once your organization has a strong understanding of what makes each of these concepts different, you can use them to ensure the right talent discovers your company before discovering your competitors.