When you think about it, recruitment and dating have a lot in common. 20 years ago, convincing your crush that you were worthy of their time was all the rage. Similarly, job seekers had to persuade prospective employers of the same thing.
As we forge ahead in the 2020s, the poles have flipped. Prospects are asking employers: What makes your company worth my time?
To attract top talent, you must stand out in ways you haven’t before. Marketing is now an initiative directed not only toward consumers but also potential candidates who will steer your business into the future. And your content is the one voice that can reach those people anytime, anywhere.
So what’s a brand to do to attract, engage and convert fierce talent in a competitive employer climate?
Using Content Marketing to Attract, Engage and Convert Candidates
We’re no longer just picking the bones for customer loyalty: We’re vying with other businesses for limited resources, too. But it’s not as simple as sending out invitations.
If your business was a person, your recruitment content strategy would shape how it establishes eye contact, contributes to the conversation and injects value into the relationship each time it meets someone new.
Content marketing magnetizes the right talent, engages passive candidates in discussion, and converts qualified prospects into motivated team members. Here’s how:
- Employer branding: Content is the face of your brand. Well-preened and executed recruitment assets help potential employees understand what it’s like to work with you. Highlight your corporate training options and professional development opportunities, as these are increasingly important factors for top talent evaluating potential employers. The more you tailor your message to your ideal employee profiles, the more likely you’ll present yourself as exactly what they’re looking for. It’s not entirely different from marketing to clients in this respect.
- Attracting top candidates: The central theme here is: Don’t ask, don’t get. Everyone is online these days. Positioning a polished employer brand into the nooks and crannies of the wild web means you can spark conversations with potential employees wherever they hang out. It can even help you draw in prospects that don’t technically classify as job seekers. Recruitment content marketing gives you a leg up in the pool of happily employed candidates, which brings me to the third point.
- Engaging passive candidates: 70% of the global workforce are not actively job seeking. Among this passive talent pool, 87% would be open to taking up a better opportunity. Your recruitment content marketing puts the offer on the table.
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5 Effective Content Types for Recruitment
Let’s zoom in and take a look at some of the content types you can use to attract potential candidates:
1. Job Posts
75% of candidates report that the look and feel of a job post influenced their decision to apply. Recruitment websites are competitive spaces for employer brands and your prospects are asking: What’s in it for me? So tell them.
Rather than reducing job posts to the dry details of roles and responsibilities, put your brand’s personality out there to describe what makes the offering attractive. Bonus points if you include an employee-generated video (more on that below).
2. Social Media Recruitment
Remember the passive talent pool I mentioned earlier? Those guys are hanging out on the socials. A whopping 98% of recruitment marketing, talent acquisition and employer branding teams use social media — so if you’re not one of them, you might be missing out.
Share day-in-the-life posts, company updates and employee profiles to show what’s happening behind the scenes. Videos, images, infographics and blog posts are clickable and shareable. Plus, social media metrics allow you to analyse your campaigns and adjust if necessary. Just don’t forget to add a compelling CTA with a link to your recruitment pages.
3. Blog Posts
We couldn’t address content marketing for a hiring platform without discussing the king of digital marketing: Blogs. They’re a creative way to dive deep into your employer branding initiatives by creating awareness and credibility — and with a touch of SEO, they’re likely to reach a highly targeted crowd. Build a library of articles that cover:
- How to get into the jobs you offer.
- Interview tips for the jobs you’re posting.
- “Cup of tea with …” articles to show insights from employees and upper management.
Valuable content can empower and educate your audience while establishing yourself as a top-notch employer brand. What’s more, blogs have a longer shelf-life than social media, so you’ll see greater ROI over the long term by diving into a few long forms.
4. Video Content
Video content is taking over the socials. It showcases your brand personality. You can make an employee-generated recruitment video with low overheads. Oh, and 87% of consumers say videos positively impact their trust in a brand. As an employer, this is a big green flag to bump video up the to-do list.
Ultimately, you’ve got two options. The first is to go pro and make a highly branded video to show potential candidates what they can expect from your workplace. The second is to take the in-house route and showcase your employees discussing their roles and why they like working for the company. Either way, a picture paints a thousand words and there are roughly 2,880 pictures in a 2-minute video.
5. White Papers and eBooks
White papers and eBooks provide valuable insights about career trajectories and how to overcome common challenges within company positions. The right segmentation will help you target not only those looking for career opportunities now but also younger job seekers planning their career paths.
By whipping up an eBook or white paper, you can:
- Create more shareable content for your socials.
- Build awareness around your employer brand.
- Offer an authentic and transparent look into your company values, culture and employee experience.
- Promote major career opportunities.
- Prepare prospective employees for the day-to-day.
- Funnel targeted traffic to your recruitment pages.
A lot of eBook material is evergreen, meaning it won’t wash out through the years. Once you’ve got the details down, eBooks are easily updated for annual market shifts and company openings, giving you another long-term resource to strengthen your recruitment marketing strategy.
Use Your Voice to Attract Job Candidates
How you use your brand voice in recruitment content conveys your business personality to future employees. Do you want to be perceived as — and attract — the forward-thinking, pie-in-the-sky type? Or are you more conservative and stable?
It may sound like I’m spelling out the obvious here, but posting “Your role will be to coordinate and administer the deliverables of all creative departments and you will be expected to …” for an actual creative job probably won’t pull the hero you’re looking for. Here are a few concepts to address:
- Company Culture: These are an abstract set of shared values, attitudes and standards that describe how your workplace spins. I’ve used the word abstract here because while you’ve got your values scribbled down somewhere, there’s also a set of unwritten beliefs and a sense of purpose each employee brings to the table. These elements feed into and feed off your company culture. Capturing this will attract those who resonate with your ethos.
- Day-to-Day Life: Covering the more practical aspects of habitual or routine activity, day-to-day life insights show prospects what to expect. Employees are your business’s most important asset, so engage them in your content initiatives. Use daily pursuits to expand on distinct roles and show how the team’s skills contribute to the workplace. Think about what makes your company unique such as meeting banter, work-from-home opportunities or the free snack bar.
- Business Impact: Whether you’re actively confronting global warming, supporting other businesses’ growth or battling on the frontline of social change, address your impact across recruitment marketing content. Why? Because you’ll draw candidates who are intrinsically motivated toward the same goals. Intrinsic motivation and aligned values are a recipe for strong retention and mutually productive business relationships.
Recruitment-Specific Content Strategies and Ideas
Content loves nothing more than a strategic plan to get the party started. Consider the resources available for your recruiting initiatives and create a calendar to ensure consistent and relevant posting. Integrate blogs, company videos and job posts into your social media strategy to build community and highlight shareable assets. Leveraging an applicant tracking system can help ensure that your recruitment content effectively reaches and manages interactions with the right candidates.
The overarching goal in content marketing for recruitment is to target the right people. Build a series of personas you want onboard by assessing current employees and knowledge gaps and address them directly through a tailored, data-driven approach. Consider using the Maverick personality test, interactive quizzes, polls and videos to engage with younger audiences and behavioral assessments to evaluate potential candidates and determine their suitability for roles within the organization.
In addition, offering resume writing services can provide candidates with the tools they need to present themselves more effectively, ensuring that the right people are attracted to your organization.
Social media, YouTube and Google all have arenas of optimization capabilities to help you reach your ideal candidates. Use a range of hashtags in your social posts and embed targeted keywords in video descriptions and blogs to get your content directly in front of the talent you need.
Lastly, ask your employees for a hand. Authenticity and impactful lifestyle content can go a long way with job seekers.
Harnessing Content Marketing to Elevate Your Recruitment Efforts
Employees are now known as the most important stakeholders in a business’s success. Bad hires are a reality that most companies cannot afford. Engaging content creation is a recruitment marketing strategy that’ll boost your employer brand and attract eligible, qualified candidates — even those who aren’t actively looking.
Herald your voice into a strategic bundle of winning content solutions for recruiters to solicit and retain pioneering talent over the long term. HR — and your future recruits — can thank you later.
