Recruitment marketing has been a hot topic for years. But what exactly does it cover? A clear definition is hard to find. Ask ChatGPT and you get the following answers.
“Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing techniques to attract and engage talent by promoting an employer brand and vacancies, with the aim of guiding potential candidates through the recruitment funnel towards an application”.
Or
“Recruitment marketing combines marketing strategies and recruitment to attract the right candidates by strengthening the employer brand and using targeted communication, aimed at creating interest and encouraging applications from potential candidates”.
Although there is no universal definition, we can sum it up as all the strategies and activities aimed at strengthening the employer brand and attracting talent. This article contains 5 tips for putting recruitment marketing to work effectively.
1. Funnel marketing
Successfully combining different marketing channels increases the effectiveness of your recruitment strategy. Funnel marketing helps you capture your audience’s attention and guide them through the application process. Here are a few concise tips:
- Choose your audience: Focus your campaign on specific disciplines or job families and build landing pages for them. This improves the relevance of your content
- Story and content: Develop a coherent story about your brand, your field and your working culture, among other things. Connect it to relevant vacancies through several targeted pages
- Set goals: Go beyond applications alone; aim to build long-term relationships
- Multichannel approach: Combine different channels, such as social media and job boards, to create a variety of touchpoints
- Analysis and optimisation: Measure your campaign’s results and adjust for continuous improvement
2. Marketing automation in recruitment
Marketing automation changes the playing field within recruitment by automating time-intensive tasks and increasing the effectiveness of recruitment campaigns. A few key points for a more effective approach:
- Limit the number of tools: Focus on a handful of tools, or better still a platform technology, that can streamline several recruitment marketing processes, so you reduce excessive manual work and the need for extensive knowledge
- Automate where you can: Use the power of technology to automate tasks such as advertising vacancies. That frees up room for your team to focus on more strategic work
- Benefits: Smart use of marketing automation leads to more efficient use of resources, cost savings and better results in your recruitment strategy
By following these guidelines you can make the most of marketing automation, which contributes to a more successful and more efficient recruitment marketing approach.
3. Diversity in conversion: building relationships
In a competitive labour market it is essential to look beyond applications alone as your conversion. Think long term and focus on building relationships with your audience too. A few core strategies:
- Combine short- and long-term goals. Build on direct applications by developing relationships with candidates for future opportunities
- Encourage passive conversions: Encourage actions such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading content, which require no direct interaction but do build engagement
- Enable interactive conversions: Organise events or conversations that allow personal interaction, such as networking events, informal coffee chats or career conversations
This approach helps strengthen your employer brand and build a durable talent pool.
4. Insight into recruitment data
A deep understanding of data is crucial in recruitment marketing. Use Google Analytics or similar software to measure and optimise the performance of your recruitment website and your recruitment marketing activities. Here are a few tips:
- Use data layers: This enriches your website with specific vacancy data such as job title, vacancy number and discipline, which leads to better insight into the performance of vacancies, linked to channel and device for example. Implement the data layer in the source of the vacancy page, the application page and the application thank-you page
- Analyse touchpoints: Go beyond ‘last click’ conversions, which amounts to measuring the channel that delivers the last click before a conversion. Create more insight into the touchpoints of a conversion. Explore the possibilities of applying Google’s data-driven model or models supplied by other systems, including a position-based model. In that model the first and last click carry the most value and the clicks in between carry less
- Measure every conversion: Make sure every conversion, large or small, is measurable. Use tools such as Google Looker Studio for a clear visualisation of data, which reduces the dependence on deep knowledge of analytics software
These approaches help you evaluate and improve the impact of your recruitment marketing efforts accurately.
5. Focus on quality, not quantity
Striving for quality over quantity in applications is crucial, but often underused. Here are a few steps for measuring and improving quality effectively
- Integrate systems for deeper insight: Consider using your ATS, Google Analytics or another recruitment marketing system to get a complete picture of candidate quality. Although integration can present challenges, it centralises valuable information. Check whether your ATS can also handle data from your website and online channels, including cost data. If not, choose a recruitment marketing system
- Define status transitions in your ATS: Focus on the important moments in your application process, such as application in progress, rejection, first interview and placement. Not every status transition matters equally for measuring success and ‘measuring through to placement’
- Use dashboards for an overview: Combine data from different sources in one dashboard. This helps make a candidate’s progress towards placement visible. Connect the cost data from your online channels, including job boards and social media, so you also gain insight into ‘cost per hire’.
If building this knowledge in-house proves difficult, consider working with specialist agencies or recruitment marketing platforms.