Recruitment marketing: The key to applicants knocking down your door

February 15, 2024, by Stephanie Messier | Recruitment

Why work here? This is maybe the most important question (after Is my office on fire?) to answer as an employer in need of more hires, and it’s one that recruitment marketing can help you answer.

But it’s not only a matter of answering this question; you then have to take your answer and make it crystal clear to the people you want to hire. You might be the best place to work in the world, but if it’s not clear to candidates why, it doesn’t matter.

Keep reading to learn how to use recruitment marketing to unearth what sets your workplace apart, let your candidates know, and make your company a more desirable place to work.

Key takeaways

• Recruitment marketing refers to an employer’s efforts to activate and/or market their employer brand and employee value proposition.

• To get candidates to choose you over your competitors, you can’t expect them to know how great you are; you need to make it crystal clear through recruitment marketing.

• Recruiting deals with attracting candidates to jobs, and recruitment marketing deals with attracting candidates to employers.

• Regularly audit your recruitment marketing efforts to make sure they accurately reflect what it’s like to work for you

• Don’t measure recruitment marketing as you would paid job ads; measure it instead by brand reach, engagement, and reputation.

• It’s easy to have many data sources when tracking recruitment marketing efforts; use tools like Looker Studio to combine it all for easier and clearer analysis.

What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing refers to an employer’s efforts to activate and/or market their employer brand and employee value proposition.

Some quick definitions to help break this down:

• Employer brand: The overall perception and reputation of a business as an employer (ex. innovative).

• Employee value proposition (EVP): What makes a business a unique place to work for its employees (ex. competitive salary or above average financial aid for training or education).

Why does recruitment marketing matter to employers?

Recruitment marketing matters because it helps you take control of your narrative as an employer, which—when done right—helps attract exactly the kind of talent you want.

It serves the same purpose as regular marketing does for regular businesses: it packages your product (company) in a way that makes your customers (candidates) want to buy it from (work for) you.

Imagine an engineering candidate looking at two job postings. Objectively, they both offer the same thing: competitive compensation, challenging problems, the latest tech, and an existing top-notch team.

But this isn’t clear to the candidate; from what she can tell, only one employer seems to offer this—and that’s because it’s marketed clearly in their job posting, website, and Glassdoor profiles. The other employer, even though they offer the same thing, offers no evidence that they do.

The takeaway? To get candidates to choose you over your competitors, you can’t expect them to know how great you are; you need to make it crystal clear through recruitment marketing.

The differences between recruiting and recruitment marketing

Recruiting and recruitment marketing often overlap, but their respective goals differ.

Generally, recruiting deals with attracting candidates to jobs, and recruitment marketing deals with attracting candidates to employers.

Both generate applicants, but through different paths and timelines: recruitment more directly in the short term and recruitment marketing more passively in the long term.

With this in mind, you’ll often see the following division of responsibilities between the two:

• Recruitment

  • Posting jobs

  • Sourcing candidates

  • Interviewing candidates

  • Presenting candidate profiles to hiring managers

  • Communicating with candidates throughout the hiring process

• Recruitment marketing

  • Develop content

  • Create employer awareness

  • Improve employer reputation

  • Grow social media followers

  • Encourage employee referrals

  • Capture leads (get names, emails, and other relevant info you can use to build a following of prospective talent)

  • Build a talent network (a following of people who aren’t interested in applying now but potentially later)

  • Nurture leads (communicate with these people over time with the intention of eventually getting them to apply)

Examples of recruitment marketing

There are places where recruitment marketing can take place and there are forms that recruitment marketing can take. Let’s look at both.

Where recruitment marketing takes place

Recruitment marketing can and should take place anywhere a candidate might come into contact with or visit to research your brand, including:

• Job posting sites

• Employer review sites

• Social media

• Careers site

• Email

• Recruitment events

• Employee networks

• Forums

Interestingly, the best places to post recruitment marketing content don’t always line up with the best places to post jobs . They can line up, but candidates often refer to employer review sites, forums, social media, and other unaffiliated places online when doing their research.

What recruitment marketing looks like

In these places, your recruitment marketing content might take the form of:

• Blogs

• Social media posts/comments

• Talent newsletters

• Videos

• Banners/printed material

• Job titles/descriptions

• Employee testimonials

• Employee referrals

• Employer awards

• Press releases

• Podcasts

• Ebooks

• Progress reports (ex. on stated values or missions)

These are more common forms of recruitment marketing, but by no means an exhaustive list.

Connecting these: recruitment marketing examples

• A series of employee day-in-the-life videos edited and repurposed for different channels (i.e. longer-form video on LinkedIn, written form with screenshots for careers blog, shorter form with faster editing on TikTok, etc.)

• A podcast series that explores topics related to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Features discussions with employees, industry leaders, and diversity advocates. Focus on stories that highlight the company's commitment to fostering an inclusive work environment.

• Reviews of your company by employees posted to your careers site, social media, and job posts. These reviews are updated on a regular basis as new reviews come in.

The beautiful thing about recruitment marketing is that there really isn’t any limit on where or how it can happen; you’re limited only by your creativity.

Real-life examples of recruitment marketing

For inspiration, here’s what recruitment marketing looks like in the wild.

Labcorp

Insert: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7132744468910247936/

This video from LabCorp details how the company treats its employees when times are tough, speaking, as the description reads, “volumes about the company culture and the character of leadership”.

MongoDB

Insert: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1awfcI_kCGsg_YaiKmI7BtIz9Eqfm1VoZ/view?usp=share_link

Alt: A black rectangle with white text in it that reads “MongoDB is changing the way we hire veterans: Learn how”.

One of MongDB’s core company values is “Embrace the Power of Differences”. This blog post on their careers site explains how MongoDB’s Veterans Employee Resource Group (ERG) enforces this value by empowering recruiters to more effectively assess and hire candidates with military backgrounds.

TikTok

Insert: https://www.tiktok.com/@lifeattiktok/video/7273266209427131666?embed_source=121355059%2C121351166%2C121331973%2C120811592%2C120810756%3Bnull%3Bembed_masking&refer=embed&referer_url=rallyrecruitmentmarketing.com%2F2020%2F11%2Ftiktok-to-boost-employer-brand%2F&referer_video_id=6830333715005099266

On its Life at TikTok page, TikTok regularly features employees from a wide array of departments, roles, specialties, seniority levels, and backgrounds. This one focuses on an employee named Lisa, who talks about her four-year journey to becoming a Music Partnerships Manager at TikTok. A blog post also accompanies her post.

Top tips for improving your recruitment marketing strategy

Whether you’re drafting a recruitment marketing strategy from scratch or looking to improve an existing one, these tips will help you save time, money, and stress along the way (not to mention avoid some of the most common recruiting mistakes ).

• Audit your current employer brand and EVP
  • Create questions

    • Why do you choose to work here? What do you think we do better than other companies in our space?

  • Interview employees

  • Interview leaders

  • Look at online reviews, social media pages, and any other places where people are leaving feedback about you

• With your findings in hand, look at your existing recruitment marketing efforts (if there are any)

  • Is there a disconnect? Are you trying to market yourself as something you’re not? What needs to be corrected?

• Look at your competitors who are winning candidates and see how they’re marketing themselves

  • This will help you understand what you’re up against. From this, you can decide where you can compete, where you can’t, and how to market yourself to stand out from the crowd.

• Consider ways to segment your recruitment marketing efforts (if you have the budget/time)

  • For example, an emphasis on innovation when marketing to engineering candidates or career growth opportunities when marketing to early careers talent

• Loop in everyone involved

  • Do your recruiters know your company’s EVP? Do they know what they should emphasise with which candidates? Is it easy to find the right content to share with candidates they’re interviewing?

  • Create a digestible resource they can refer to with all the answers

• Activate new or updated employer brand and EVP in places your target audience will actually see it (and formats they’ll actually digest)

  • What sites are your candidates on? Social media platforms? How do they prefer to consume their media?

  • When thinking about where to direct your recruitment marketing efforts, as yourself, what does my candidate journey look like? Where are candidates doing their research and forming their impressions of us?

  • Let your findings also guide which kinds of content you focus on first (if you find most candidates are on TikTok, consider starting with or focusing mainly on TikTok content)

• Plan and schedule content ahead of time

  • Save yourself from constantly having to start from scratch

  • More easily coordinate with other teams

  • Don’t forget to plan content with repurposing in mind. For example, you might be able to repurpose a five-minute YouTube video into shorter social media clips, a blog post, and images for Instagram, and other social media. You owe it to yourself to squeeze every ounce of potential from each piece of content you create.

• Invest in some way to build a talent network

  • Once someone is following you, you don’t have to invest in finding and attracting them again. You just have to nurture them, which is often more affordable and effective at getting people to apply (eventually)

  • Followers on social media are a great start (especially LinkedIn), but email subscribers are often more loyal, easier to stay connected with, and allow for more targeted segmentation

• Make your recruitment marketing as employee-led as possible

  • This means testimonials, day-in-the-life content, quotes, Q&As, and anything else focused on (and ideally made by) your employees

  • General, corporate marketing materials aren’t usually as authentic and influential as employee-led content

  • Place yourself in an IT candidate’s shoes, would you be more convinced hearing from an existing technician or the CEO? Likely an existing engineer.

• Create an employee referral program

  • This gains you access to your employees’ networks, which you wouldn’t otherwise have access to

  • A referral from a friend is often more effective at getting someone to check out an employer than, say, getting contacted by a recruiter

  • If you have the budget for it, offer a cash incentive to employees who refer someone who gets hired.

• Routinise employer brand research

  • On an ongoing basis (every few months, once a year, whatever you decide) repeat the auditing process outlined in the first bullet point of this list.

  • As time passes, changes can happen in your workforce (and in the market). To make sure your recruitment marketing efforts are accurately reflecting how things really are at your company, you need to stay on top of these changes.

What tools are used to do recruitment marketing

What does a recruitment marketer’s toolkit look like? Often like this:

• CRM (email or SMS software): Build talent networks and nurture prospective candidates.

• Social media manager: Schedule posts ahead of time and monitor growth of your social profiles.

• Social media monitor (sometimes included in social media managers): Track what people are saying about you (and how often).

• Google Analytics: Learn about your users, including who they are, how they found you, and how they interact with your website.

• Google Search Console: Monitor your website's performance generally and in search engine results.

• Google Sheets: Dump and track your data.

• Job post analytics:

• Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio): Create data-driven reports and dashboards.

• Survey tools: Poll your workforce for information you can use to improve your employer brand.

• Employer review platforms: Monitor and address feedback from employees.

• Employee advocacy platform: Give your employees the platform, instructions, resources, and permission they need to create content portraying their experience at your company.

• Heat signature tools: Learn how visitors are interacting with your job posts, site pages, and landing pages (i.e. where are they hovering their mouse the longest?) This can provide insights on how to Increase job application rates , for example.

For those on a budget, all of the Google tools in this list are completely free to set up and use. Most other tools on this list have free versions (or at least trials) you can use.

How do I measure the success of my recruitment marketing plan?

Remember, the main focus of recruitment marketing is attracting talent to employers, not jobs—that’s recruitment.

Think about a company you respect; perhaps there was a time (maybe still) when you’d drop everything to work for them.

This, in essence, is the result of successful recruitment marketing, when a company’s reputation is enough to make people want to work for them, regardless of the specific roles they offer.

With this in mind, recruitment marketing success is best measured by tracking:

• Reach: The number of people that know about your company.

• Engagement: The number of people engaging with your company.

• Reputation: The number of people talking about your company.

Here’s how you might measure these buckets across different marketing channels:

• Reach

  • Careers site, landing pages: new users and repeat users

  • Social media: followers and number of brand hashtag followers

  • Talent network, job alerts: sign-ups (opt-in)

  • Events: sign-ups and attendees who visit booth

  • Online company profiles: views and impressions

• Engagement

  • Social channels: clicks, reactions, shares, and comments

  • Email: opens, clicks, click-through rate, click-to-open ratio, and replies

  • SMS: reads, replies, and clicks

  • Web: time spent on site and average pages per session

• Reputation

  • External: employer reviews, comments on social media, mentions on industry sites or forums, and industry awards

  • Internal: exit interviews and recurring feedback sessions

You’ll likely find that most metrics in the reach and engagement buckets are tracked automatically; all you need to do is regularly look at the data (i.e. weekly, biweekly, monthly, or whichever else cadence makes sense for your goals).

Where you’ll probably have to manually track is in the reputation bucket. Some parts can be automated, such as being notified whenever you get a new employer review, comment, or even exit interview, but you’ll still have to go in and manually read the feedback.

Combining all of your data to make it useful

Rather than try to track everything separately, it’s better to combine everything into one central source of data.

This makes it easier to see at a glance what’s working and what’s not, changes that need to be made, and other insights you might miss when flipping between different sources.

One way to do this is with Looker Studio , which allows you to plug multiple data sources into one dashboard and automatically create reports on an ongoing basis. With over 600 partner connectors (supported data sources), you can connect just about anything, including:

• Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console

• CSV files (i.e. data from Google Sheets or Excel)

• CRMs

• Social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, and others

If you’re only tracking a handful of metrics or your efforts are contained to one channel (i.e. careers site), you might even be able to get away with a single Google spreadsheet.

For example, if you were focusing your recruitment marketing efforts only on email, your tracking might look something like this (the red or green fill indicates growth or decline compared to the previous week).

Insert: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ymbppIszNcXR1g-01d8_ImE7drIMvV7g/view?usp=share_link

Alt: An excel sheet with “reach”, “engagement”, and “reputation” in descending order the first column, and ascending weeks in the first row. The purpose is to show weekly growth or decline in these three areas .

Note: Depending on which email software you use, you might have more useful tracking right within the software. This Google Sheet example is only meant to show you how simple tracking can be. This format can also be used for tracking on social media, your careers site, and other channels as well; keep the “Reach”, “Engage”, and “Reputation” headings, just replace the metrics with metrics more relevant to whichever channel you’re tracking.

For more help measuring your recruitment marketing efforts, and getting answers from your raw data, check out this Recruitment Marketing Measurement Kit .

Recruitment marketing FAQs

What is a recruitment marketing plan?

A recruitment marketing plan outlines what will be accomplished, where it will be accomplished, by whom it will be accomplished, when it will be accomplished, how much it will cost, and how the plan contributes to greater business goals or priorities.

What role does employee advocacy play in recruitment marketing?

Employee advocacy is integral to recruitment marketing. The more of your recruitment marketing that is led by your employees, the more real it will seem, which will make it more influential to candidates. Examples of employee advocacy are podcasts featuring (or even hosted) by employees, day-in-the-life videos, social media takeovers, and live Q&As.

Is recruitment marketing for small and medium-sized businesses?

Absolutely, both small and medium-sized businesses can benefit greatly from recruitment marketing. In fact, it can be a way to get a leg over your larger competitors. By focusing on targeting, authenticity, and consistency, you can often do a better job at communicating why you’re a great place to work better than employers who just throw money at the problem.

Closing thoughts

Recruitment marketing may have “recruitment” in it, but, as you can see, it’s a very different field with a related but different purpose.

Whether you’re new to the field or have been around the block a couple of times, we hope you were able to pick up something useful to test out in your next recruitment marketing campaign.

If you’re experiencing other recruiting challenges—ones that could use a professional’s touch—please contact us about our

fractional recruiting services

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