What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing focuses on the awareness, consideration and interest phases of potential candidates.

86% of recruiters and 62% of employers feel the labor market is now candidate-driven.

This newer term in the HR & recruiting space borrows the sales pipeline approach we’ve seen used with customers for years to attract talent long before they apply to your website. Here are the top three trends to adopt to attract top talent in your organization.

Top Trends To Attract Leading Talent

Inbound Recruiting

With 42% of employers fearing they won’t be able to find the talent they need, modern marketers are now adopting a customer inbound marketing approach to recruiting. Inbound recruiting is the the ability to proactively and continually attract, convert and engage candidates.

To implement inbound recruiting, you’ll need to:

  • Craft compelling content across your website
  • Engage with your potential candidates across platforms (social, website, review sites, etc.)
  • Display your culture and brand

Employer Branding

Building your brand expands beyond your customers, investors and current employees. Marketers need to include the candidate experience as part of their overall brand to get the full picture. Everything – from a candidate interacting with your brand on mobile, researching your website on their laptop and checking out your social channels to the first outreach from your recruiters, the communication and responsiveness throughout the interview process and the actual interview experience (work environment, culture, screeners) – are all being weighted heavily by candidates.

  • 91% of candidates seek out at least one online or offline resource to evaluate an employer’s brand before applying for a job.
  • Women are 25% more likely to visit employer review sites when vetting a potential employer.
  • Female employees were 15% more likely to consider quitting their job after witnessing poor client, candidate, and employee treatment.

A positive candidate experience, even if they don’t accept the job, can still lead to referrals, positive online reviews and brand/customer loyalty. A negative candidate experience can cost your business millions every year.

Implement a candidate relationship management tool to nurture, communicate and track the talent pool at hand.

Social Recruiting

Social media channels are trending larger than ever when recruiting new candidates.

  •  94% of recruiters use or plan to use social media in their recruitment efforts.
  • 78% of recruiters have made a hire through social media.

Social can range from posting jobs on channels like LinkedIn to sharing open positions on blogs and popular recruiting sites like Glassdoor. LinkedIn remains the top recruiting platform across the world with more than 300 million users with almost half of all visitors using the site primarily on their mobile devices. If you don’t have a social media marketing strategy in place, create one now.

Marketing is ever-evolving and to compete for top talent, you’ll have to shift your recruiting strategy and tactics to focus on inbound recruiting, placing importance on building your brand with potential and future candidates. Ensure you’re creating positive candidate experiences and leverage social media to increase your visibility, reach and influence.