Recruiting Campaigns: Why Recruiters Should Think Like Marketers

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Contents

• Rethink your recruiting from the ground up
• Building recruiting campaigns: be authentic, honest and approachable
• Use marketing techniques like storytelling
• Market your employer messages
• Conclusion
• Frequently asked questions

TL;DR

Successful recruiting campaigns today need marketing strategies. Because companies now apply to talent rather than the other way around, only audience analysis, authentic messages and storytelling instead of empty phrases win people over, spread through multiposting and social media recruiting. An optimized career page holds on to the attention you have earned. Think like a marketer and you also reach passive candidates.

!Four people with laptops and tablets photographed from above, with colorful round icons for social media, hashtags, chat and cloud in the center. A symbol for recruiting campaigns approached like marketing across several channels.

Author: Dominik Becker · Published: 02/02/2022

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Recruiting campaigns along the lines of "We're looking for superheroes like you" or "Get to know our innovative company" are everywhere. But they usually deliver only modest results, because they are shallow and say nothing about an organization's core values. As a recruiter, you need to ask a different question instead: What do we have to offer as a company? What makes us special? That is what applicants care about. You should put the answers into compelling messages in your job postings and on your career page, and then market this content to job seekers across different channels as skillfully as you can. And here you can pick up a lot from your colleagues in marketing.

Rethink your recruiting from the ground up

There have never been more jobs and never fewer candidates. For you as someone looking to hire, this has completely flipped the dynamics of recruitment. Employees no longer apply to you. No, you apply to talent. To do that, you have to rethink your recruiting completely. You have to market your company as an employer to the outside world.

What helps here is to think like your colleagues in marketing, specifically on these points:

1. Build recruiting campaigns designed to win candidates over on the spot with authentic employer branding messages.
2. Increase the reach of your recruiting by exploring new ways to promote your jobs, on top of posting them on job boards.
3. Open up a new audience, namely passive candidates. These are people who have a job but are quietly open to a change. And there are a lot of them.

So what does that mean in practice? We look at that in the next sections.

Building recruiting campaigns: be authentic, honest and approachable

When you get to the substance of your recruiting campaign, the same rule applies that has always applied in marketing: there is no second chance for a first impression. You have to convince people right away and spark in talent the desire to apply to you. Otherwise they are gone. The choice of jobs today is so large that career-minded people do not hesitate for long and move on if they do not immediately like what they see. So to really impress talent, you should craft recruiting messages that make clear at a glance what makes your company special for applicants at its core.

But first you have to know what your audience actually cares about. The more precisely you know that, the better you can craft messages that spark enthusiasm and leave no question open. So how do you find out what makes your audience tick? Through good old audience analysis. An old hat in marketing. To do it, ask employees of the same age and with the same background as the talent you want to reach in recruiting what information they most expect from employers like you. You can also ask rejected applicants for their view, or people you have just hired:

• What did you find good about the application process?
• Where is there room for improvement?
• Which questions were left open?

From this information you can derive audience-appropriate messages for your recruiting campaigns.

Use marketing techniques like storytelling

One thing matters most here: authenticity. Steer clear of any glossing over and portray your company realistically. Talk about company culture, bonuses, benefits, team spirit and work-life balance measures, for example, but without any exaggeration. Because in recruiting, talent wants to learn what a company is really like, not the idealized picture of your company culture.

A small tip: do not embed this information in dry text that lists one fact after another. Put it into short stories and anecdotes instead. They do not have to be long. Often a few lines are enough. Even small stories like these make your company more approachable. Marketing experts call this principle storytelling. A very effective tool.

Something else you can pick up from your marketing colleagues: use high-quality visuals from your company, so talent can form a first impression of what goes on behind the scenes. Show real colleagues in a real company setting. Graphics, which advertising also likes to use, are valuable too. They let you fit a lot of information into a small space. Recruiting videos are highly recommended as well. According to a study by Cisco, video content in marketing draws more than 300 percent more traffic than other content. Put this know-how to work in your recruiting and employer branding too. Why should it be any different here?

Market your employer messages

So far, so good. Now it is time to market yourself as an employer. The foundation for this is and remains the job posting, which you can promote across a wide range of platforms and channels. Here too you can pick up quite a bit from marketing.

#1 Multiposting of job postings

Marketers, for example, use tools that automatically distribute their campaigns across a wide range of portals. That way they generate huge reach. A perfect way to reach more people in recruiting in this manner is multiposting.

This is the automated distribution of your jobs across several job boards at once. It boosts your reach enormously. With a good applicant management system this is no problem. You create your job posting right inside it and publish it by ticking a few boxes in the interface. With those, you mark which job boards it should go live on. The technology handles the rest. It does not get any simpler.

#2 Social media recruiting

You can also promote your job postings through social networks like Facebook or Instagram. Use the ad formats the networks offer for this. They do not only work for placing promotional content. To do this, you add a few images or videos from your company, include a short piece of ad copy and link everything to your detailed job posting. This creates a sponsored post that is automatically served in the timelines of the social media users who match your audience.

And it happens completely regardless of whether they are actively looking for a job or not. This is probably the biggest plus of social media recruiting. When serving a social media job ad, networks like Facebook and Instagram do not distinguish whether a candidate is actively looking for a new challenge or not. So your job ads reach passive candidates too. And with that you open up huge recruiting potential. The consultancy EY recently found that 78 percent of employees are more or less ready to move to a new job. If that is not something.

... and win your talent over!

A well-designed career homepage is now an essential part of an ideal recruiting mix too. Many people who notice an appealing job posting on job boards or social media, for example, no longer apply to it directly. Instead, they jump over to your career page to learn even more about your company. But it matters that you offer applicants not just perfect content on your career page, but perfect functionality too.

Your colleagues in marketing have long known what makes a web presence perfect:

• Easy to find on Google
• Optimal user guidance
• Responsive design, meaning the page can be accessed on all devices without a hitch, from laptop to smartphone
• Simple and intuitive functions

With career homepages, though, there is catching up to do. That is the conclusion of the "Career Websites 2021" study by Rhein-Main University of Applied Sciences. The survey gives almost half of German companies' career pages a rather poor report. 46 percent of the web presences examined for the survey belong to the group of outdated or lagging career homepages. Are there shortcomings on your page too? Then you should improve it.

Because the benefits of a convincing career page are enormous. It speaks to talent that is already fundamentally interested in a company. If candidates then find their way around the page perfectly and also get the chance to apply quickly and easily, why would they not do it?

Conclusion

Modern recruiting means learning from marketing. That applies to the substance of your messages and to the choice of your channels. On the latter, multiposting, social media recruiting and an optimized career page increase the chance of winning over more talent, both active and passive. In an info call, we are also happy to show you which recruiting software lets you steer all of this perfectly.