Recruitment Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

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Nick Misa

Marketing Specialist at Ongig

Ongig's job description platform that helps you attract the best talent faster. Ongig supercharges your job descriptions through video, images, and other media along with live chat, social sharing, and careers microsite creation. Early clients of Ongig include Yelp, GoDaddy, Verizon Digital and Autodesk.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

The definition of recruitment marketing is the use of marketing strategies to recruit candidates.

The goal of recruitment marketing is to find, attract and engage higher quality candidates through such digital marketing strategies.

You can think about it as just like traditional marketing, but instead of marketing to consumers, you market to candidates.

The Recruiting Funnel and Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment marketing takes place at the top of the recruiting funnel.

That’s where you attract and engage candidates.

Here’s a funnel so you can visualize the recruitment marketing process within the recruiting funnel.

Awareness

The first step of the funnel is awareness.

Candidates need to know that you’re a potential employer before anything.

This means you need to know where (job boards, social media, etc.) your candidates are hanging online AND market on those platforms!

It’s also important to keep track of passive candidates and where they’re spending their time.

Today’s job market is different than the past.

A lot of candidates are passive (i.e. aren’t actively looking for jobs or already employed) but will express interest if they see something that catches their eye.

How do you catch their eye?

Generate awesome content that:

candidates want to consume.
articulates your company as an employer of choice.
expresses your employer brand.
includes your employees.

Facebook Recruitment Marketing Posts Examples

Interest & Consideration

Once a candidate has clicked your ad, link or post, they’ve entered the interest and consideration stages.

This is where they hit the landing pages of your post.

It’s crucial to optimize these landing pages.

Here are examples of things for you to consider for your landing page:

Content based on the job posting the candidate clicked from (i.e. recruiting post for engineers clicks through to a page focused on your company’s engineering jobs, benefits, perks, etc.)
Engaging videos and/or images
Employer of choice awards (if any)
Employee value proposition (EVP)
Clear calls-to-action

Calls-to-action are important at this stage because it’s the next step in converting the candidate.

Here are some calls-to-action to consider for your landing pages:

Search Jobs: Give them an option to view job pages for specific positions. This should go to your job search page.
Talent Community Opt-In: Candidates don’t apply, but they opt-in with their email to receive job alerts and other recruitment marketing content.
- Tip: Be sure to email candidates relevant job alerts and content to the position or department they want to work for. They’ll unsubscribe quick if you send them emails that aren’t relevant.
Apply: They’ve clicked through to your page so they’re interested. It’d be smart to include an apply button in case they’re ready to apply. Some companies don’t want a general apply, they’d like the candidate to go one step further and apply when they’ve landed on a specific job or department.

For example, check out Dell’s career landing page (below).

Notice the prominent “Search Jobs” call-to-action (above the fold) and the “Join Talent Network” call-to-action (bottom of the page).

If you scroll down to the bottom of the career page you’ll see a nice “Join Talent Network” call-to-action.

Recruitment Marketing Strategies

In this section I’ll highlight a couple of high traffic areas on your career site.

These areas are where you want to implement recruitment marketing strategies to maximize your career site’s effectiveness.

Company Career Page

This is an important one.

It’s the primary landing page dedicated to candidates on your corporate site.

And often one of the top Google results when searching “[company name] careers”.

The best company career pages include:

A strong headline
Videos and pictures
Employee testimonials
Benefits and perks
Values and culture info

Here are a couple of company career page examples we love:

Note: Click image to see full career page.

Virta Career Page Example

Ellation Career Page Example

Lending Tree Career Page Example

Here are some more resources if you’re looking for company career page inspiration:

Job Postings

Job postings are an important asset for employers, but unfortunately they are often generated by applicant tracking system (ATS) software.

Most ATS-generated job pages are text-based with little to no branding. Remember:

“Applicant tracking systems were never meant to be pretty (external), they were meant to help manage workflows (internal)”.

– James Ellis, The Talent Cast

A while ago I published Boost Your “Digital” Candidate Experience with Job Page Overlays.

I defined a job page overlay like this:

Job page overlays allow you to take control of your job pages and give you the ability to easily add:

Videos and images
Recruiting widgets
Custom design
Branding
Recruiting content

Recruitment marketing platforms like Ongig, Talentbrew, PhenomPeople and Smashfly will help you create and implement job page overlays.

Diversity & Inclusion Statement

D&I statements have become important copy for you to write.

Increasingly companies are investing in text analyzers for their job descriptions and D&I statement to better articulate their company values and culture.

We created this visual to give some tips on what to include in your Diversity & Inclusion Statement:

Check out these awesome diversity statement examples. We reviewed the Fortune 100 Best Workplaces for Diversity list and selected 20 that we believe are either excellent overall or at least have an idea or two for you to consider.

Diversity & Inclusion Page

For a lot of companies just having a D&I statement isn’t enough.

These companies are upping the ante and creating a whole page dedicated to D&I that houses all of their diversity content.

Last year we wrote about diversity pages and their importance, here are some benefits we listed in that article:

One of my favorite diversity page examples is from AT&T because it includes:

Job Search Bar: Located at the top of the page and makes it convenient for candidates to search jobs right away.
Diversity Awards: They do a great job showcasing these front and center. You want candidates to know you’re an employer of choice, especially for diversity and inclusion.
Diversity Officer Quote: Quotes from leadership are always a nice touch.
Workforce Diversity Stats/Numbers: One of my favorite features on AT&T’s diversity recruiting page. It shows candidates transparency. They even give the percentage of their budget allocated to D&I initiatives!
Other sections include: Diversity report, employee groups, diversity and inclusion blog content.

Email

Email marketing is still a top digital marketing strategy and continues to evolve in recruitment. You can use email at every stage of the recruiting funnel, whether you’re reaching out to a new candidate or nurturing one from the past. Additionally, it seems there might be some gaps in reporting regarding bulk verification and email verifier.

You can use email at every stage of the recruiting funnel, whether you’re reaching out to a new candidate or nurturing one from the past.

Here are some email lists you should be building (notice there are 3 different segments):

Applicants
Talent community Opt-Ins
Potential candidates

Some tips for recruitment marketing emails:

Personalize the message
- Don’t just use first name and last name either. Dig deeper and include school(s) attended, interests outside of work, projects or technologies they’ve worked with, etc.
Always include a call-to-action.
- Use different messages and calls-to-action for different segments.
Optimize your emails for mobile devices.
Include content that candidates want to read about:
- Benefits & perks
- Employer of choice awards
- Salary information
- Job openings

Here’s a recruitment marketing email template for a past applicant or talent community subscriber:

Social Media Recruiting

Social media can be one of the biggest outlets for your recruitment marketing messages.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are where candidates are hanging out.

Those platforms also offer the best targeting options for advertising.

It’s amazing how granular you can get when choosing targeting options.

Here’s an example for targeting on Facebook:

Some tips for your social media recruitment posts and ads:

Create in-depth candidate personas
- These are the personas you will be targeting and retargeting with your ad campaigns.
Use awesome video and images
- You’ll be using this media to attract and catch the eye of candidates.
Create landing pages focused on converting
- Content matches the topic/message of the post or ad.
- Optimize with the right calls-to-action (search jobs, talent community, apply)
Track your results (likes, comments, shares, impressions, clicks, conversions)
- The results will tell you if the ad was a success or not. If it is apply the strategy to other campaigns. If it isn’t adjust it and test again.

Recruitment Marketing Platforms in 2021

What is a recruitment marketing platform?

A recruitment marketing platform is software that helps companies:

Promote their employer brand through their career site (i.e. career page and job postings).
Reach out to candidates and prospective hires (i.e. email campaigns, talent community).
Leverage social media platforms (i.e. recruitment advertising, recruiting content).
Track the effectiveness of recruiting.

Earlier this year we released 15 Examples of Recruitment Marketing Platforms [Used by 500 Top Employers] and gave a nice snapshot of the recruiting software market and a quick description of each recruitment marketing platform.

Here’s a breakdown of some of the top recruitment marketing platforms on the market today.

Benefits of Recruitment Marketing

Here are 3 of the top benefits you’ll reap from recruitment marketing:

Candidate Experience

Recruitment marketing improves your candidate experience by making it more personal.

The Beamery explains the impact of recruitment marketing on candidate experience in this excerpt:

Better candidate experience with recruitment marketing

Employer Brand

Recruitment marketing is designed to put an emphasis on employer branding.

Running social media campaigns, staying active on social media platforms, investing in programmatic advertising, and personalizing outreach and communications.

These are all things that will build a stronger employer brand with the goal of increasing awareness and visibility.

Undercover Recruiter got a great quote from VP of Talent @ Great Clips, Jared Nypen:

Candidate Targeting & Quality

Another benefit of recruitment marketing is giving employers the ability to create hyper-targeted ad campaigns.

Here’s an explanation and list of benefits of targeting recruitment campaigns from Appcast:

Why I Wrote This

Ongig is a recruitment marketing platform focused on job pages and job description text.

Our Career Site Builder is recruitment marketing software that optimizes job pages with videos, images, recruiting widgets, and other recruiting content to engage and convert candidates. Our text analyzer optimizes job description text by eliminating gender, racial, age, and other biases.

October 10, 2019 by Nick Misa in Recruitment Marketing