Recruitment marketing is about taking an active approach to finding great candidates. An active marketing approach means delivering your brand message and vacancies to candidates in a creative way, in addition to your traditional job board advertising.
There are countless styles of recruitment marketing but here are a few examples of how you can deliver your job vacancy details to a wider group of potential candidates.
Social media
Engaging with social media can have its pros and cons, especially for a first-time user, but there is no denying the rise of social media means there is a whole new way to market to potential candidates. Small businesses should create a business profile and begin to follow leaders within the same industry, learning how they market to their followers, and how often.
Work with the time and resources you have, but try to create your own process for posting daily to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to ensure any candidate searching for you will find your social pages. Once you have built an online community you can begin posting your job ads to your company pages each time you have a vacancy.
Guest blog posts
The goal of your recruitment marketing is to attract the best candidates in your industry, which means you can’t limit yourself to job search forums and websites. Instead, build your brand awareness by guest blogging and linking vacant positions in your company.
All industries have popular blogs these days so if you search for publications in your field, and ask to contribute blogs and articles, you’ll soon build up a reputation in your field for being in-the-know. Once you’ve published a few posts you can then link those articles in your job ads to build your credibility.
Industry forums
Participating in industry forums is a great way to build a name for yourself or your company within the forums, showing off your company’s skills and knowledge. Over time you’ll develop a rapport with the community, and you’ll often either find individuals contacting you about open positions or, at the very least, a more receptive community to the positions that you eventually advertise.
Ultimately when you have a job vacancy you have the choice to sit back and wait, hoping candidates with come to you through one job advertisement, or you can think ahead and implement recruitment marketing tactics to ensure candidates actively pursue your organisation. The latter will certainly see you prosper in the long run, rather than scramble to fill a vacancy each time it arises.
Saxon Marsden-Huggins, Managing Director, Recruit Shop
