Recruitment marketing is the practice of letting someone know why you're an awesome place to work (or at least don't suck that badly) in order to recruit them to work at your company. Fairly simple concept, but way harder to pull off well.
Here's what we know: Marketing works!
We know marketing works because we buy stuff we don't need all the time because someone marketed to us and we thought, "Oh, golly gee, my life would be so much better if I had a robot vacuum!" (Tim side note: Yes, I bought a robot vacuum, and yes, it's still in the box!)
Most of us got into Talent Acquisition and HR because we didn't want to sell and we weren't smart enough to be doctors and lawyers and engineers, right? That means most of us probably aren't that good at selling stuff. The main outcome of great marketing is someone is buying whatever it is you're selling. We (you and I) are selling jobs!
Besides our lack of marketing expertise, the other major issue most of us have is that it takes money to do great marketing. We can still do good marketing on a limited budget, but I want to make sure we don't go into this thinking "free". Here's how we can use low-cost recruitment marketing to get more candidates interested in our jobs!
Sackett Recruitment Marketing Ideas for TA Teams on a Budget!
Stop Playing Hide and Seek with Your Jobs!
Your career site isn't as popular as you think it is. Get over yourself. Very few people are coming directly to your career site looking for a job. They are going on Google, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, etc. The vast majority of job searches start with a Google search that goes something like this: "Warehouse jobs near me".
If you 'Google' to try and find your jobs, does your career site come up or another site? How far down the search results until your career site comes up? This is what your potential candidates are finding! I've had clients search for their jobs and their company name, and the competitor jobs came up because the competitor was smart enough to buy some Google Ads or just have better SEO!
It is super important that we make sure our jobs are out in the wild. Candidates should be able to find and apply for your jobs on Google for Jobs and Indeed at the very least! Not on there? Talk to your ATS provider. ZipRecruiter is a super cheap option to test, and many times it's highly effective. Testing some programmatic job ads is also an option you should research.
Employee Ambassador Programs!
One of the cheapest, highest ROI recruitment marketing programs you can do is to build an employee ambassador program. We all already know that most of your employee referrals are coming from the same small percentage of employees. These employees are your real ambassadors. An ambassador program is basically you leveraging employees who love working for your company and want to tell others about it.
How does it work? It can be as easy as having a number (I suggest you start small, like ten employees who opt in to do this, and hand-selected by you) of employees share your jobs on their social networks. Or it can grow into them sharing company content, creating content, and even running meetups and work tours. It's taking these "fans" of your brand and letting them just be fans in a much easier way.
The key is to make it easy. It starts with a meeting to explain the concept and get some buy-in to what and how you'll share content outside the company. "Hey, each Monday I'm going to send you an email with a couple of links to our hottest jobs, and maybe some verbiage or another piece of content, and then you'll share it to LinkedIn, Facebook, IG, Twitter, etc." As you get more comfortable with it, you can add to the team or complexity of what you want to do.
Hyper-Personalization for Candidates!
Do you know what we all hate? Being treated like a number. Like we are just like everyone else. I want to be special! I want to be treated like a princess! I want it all! (he said in his best Violet voice from Willy Wonka!)
Mass email and text messages are great ways to automate getting the word out quickly to a lot of people all at once. I love that technology, but it doesn't work for everyone. Sometimes the approach of less is more works way better! Hard-to-fill jobs usually don't respond well to the marketing automation machine! Those jobs need high personalization. Those candidates expect you spent at least twelve seconds looking at their profile before you fired off that email.
If you did spend a little time on a candidate you would have the ability to personalize that message, personalize the subject line. By the way, "Hi Mary," is not personalization, it's spam! Having a subject line that says, "My favorite show is The Bachelor as well!" is a great subject line if you just saw her talking about last night's episode on her social feeds.
Candidates don't want a job or your job. They want a job that is designed for them. Record a quick video from the hiring manager specifically talking about their background and how it's the perfect fit, or create a micro-site with a job description written just for them. All of this is work, but it's doable and has a huge impact on getting those really difficult-to-find candidates!
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