Recruitment Marketing Guide

From building a distinctive online presence… to learning which are the best online marketing campaign tactics to take. From how to get your roles and client services in front of the right audiences… to easing the efficient flow of your daily recruitment operations. Empowered by the latest resources on offer to recruiters, throughout this Recruitment Marketing Guide we run through the strategies needed to take your recruitment marketing to the next level.

Bing Ads

Bing ads brings big results too

Bing ads may be the Cinderella to the Queen of internet advertising that is Google AdWords but you shouldn’t dismiss it as an option. Although its search engine market share is lower than Google and has more basic interface, Bing works just like Google in the way it determines which ads to show in search results. It’s also great news for the budget conscious recruiter with research showing that the cost per click can be lower and the average position achieved in search results, higher than Google AdWords. With Bing driving one in every five internet searches in the UK, it’s a search engine you might want to take for a spin.

Recruitment Marketing Guide Bing Ads

Content Marketing

How content creates more custom

Recruitment can be a cutthroat business. All recruiters are vying to offer the best service to job applicants and companies providing the roles. How in tune you are as a recruiter to their needs is paramount to attracting the best talent. A highly effective way to help prove your expertise and level of support is through a regular flow of relevant insightful online content. Whether it’s articles, blogs or email tips, they will combine to build an attractive trusted image for your recruitment agency. You can show that you’re not just another ‘me-too’ but one that goes the extra mile. By posting regular content on social media you can engage closely with candidates and by tracking their levels of engagement get a clear picture of how to best focus on recruiting the best talent.

CRM

Maximise opportunities using Contact Relationship Management Systems

The formula to getting a continual supply of talent is building up trusted relationships with qualified candidates. This means having a managed approach to marketing and capturing the information you have garnered from your contacts. CRM systems allow you as a recruiter to access your recruitment and marketing activities from one place and obtain analytics on your company’s overall performance or in target areas. The best software automate the majority of CRM elements, so that you’re free to focus on doing your key work tasks. Apply CRM to your job ads, social media campaigns, and company website and you can harness greater value from your relationships. Instead of simply emailing potential candidates lists of new roles, why not create helpful content such as interview tips and start a blog to create debate and interest in your recruitment business. This helps foster that all important bond that shows your candidates how in touch you are with their needs.

Diversity Hiring

The value of diversity in recruitment

Diversity can mean different things to different people. It is normally linked to race, or ethnicity. But it can also apply to a person’s country of origin, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, disability, gender and age, as well as social class. Companies that embrace a diverse workforce and the contribution that a diverse mix brings, help attract and retain a broad range of people. If we take the converse view, a workforce that is not diverse will be in danger of being fixed in a narrow view of experience, knowledge and ways of doing things. By incorporating a diverse mix however the business could breathe new life and create innovative ideas that lead to more profitable decisions. As companies become more aware of the importance of diversity, your value as a recruiter increases if you’re able to seek out new candidates from a more diverse talent pool. Keep your eyes and ears open for candidates from any contacts you may obtain via minority represented associations or societies, job fairs, friends or social media contacts.

Email Marketing

Create highly responsive email marketing

As a recruiter, emails are one of the most powerful tools for grabbing attention and getting a high response rate. Don’t just email job roles. By also providing snippets of helpful advice that address job-seeking challenges you have a great chance of retaining their interest. Faced with flood of emails each vying for our attention, how do you get people to open your message? You need to provide a subject line that is enticing, creating intrigue with the message itself revealing most but not all the story. The message should leave with a strong call of action to encourage them to click on a link to your website to read more. Timing plays an important part too. You don’t want to bombard recipients with too many annoying emails that risk getting ignored or your list being unsubscribed. Automatically send emails that are rich with content that’s tailored to their interests and skill sets.

Employer Branding

Building a powerful employer brand

What’s the primary motive behind your job adverts and communications? They should be to present compelling reasons for applying to a company. Image is everything. This is what effective branding is all about. Giving the image that your client’s company is an exciting place to work at, help drives recruitment and aids retention. In the face of fierce competition from other roles, it helps you’re your competitors nabbing your best talent. With a strong image, job application rates improve and clients have a wider pool of talent from which to select. In your job advert, mention everything that makes employees feel valued, such as reward and benefit schemes and training opportunities. Equally important is the image of its work culture. So put emphasis on areas such as work-life balance and mention top employer and Investor In People awards. But don’t resort to simply list selling points; use emotive language and you’ll build a strong positive and enticing impression.

Facebook Advertising

Why it pays to advertise on Facebook

Over a billion people visit Facebook every day. How’s that for reach? So it figures Facebook advertising is the way to go to get your recruitment agency seen and your message heard. Facebook is great because it allows you to target by location, age, education and to specific areas of expertise such as team leadership. These net you qualified respondents rather than a more random mix that jobs boards often bring. Deploying the pay-per-click model you can easily keep your spending under control. Similarly, with a relevance score showing the response rates for your ad, you can steer the spending of future campaigns. Another major benefit is the community that you can create, pooling together interested people, keen on being notified about future job opportunities and inside industry updates.

Resources & References

Recruitment Marketing Guide Facebook Ads

Google Adwords

How Google AdWords can work wonders for recruiters

As testament to its popularity, 51% of all digital advertising spending in the UK is through paid-for-search, according to the latest IABDigital Adspend report. When you’re in need of traffic and attracting candidates to your roles, Google AdWords fits the bill. It deploys a Pay per Click model. Simply put, you are charged whenever a potential candidate clicks on your ad to apply. You can set your own budget so that you can keep a tight grip on your spending. Another plus is that the results are easily measurable, compared to the Search Engine Optimisation of websites. That makes it quicker to see what keywords you should put in your ads to get the desired response. Thanks to the ability to create targeting advertising on niche sites you can finally track down those hard to reach candidates from specialist markets.

Resources & References

Recruitment Marketing Guide Google Adwords

Google Display Network

Readvertising through Google Display Ads

Are you eager to build real presence for your recruitment brand? Then Google Display Ads have the visibility to ensure your company is front of mind for your potential candidates. You can even create ads that follow people around. Remarketing is showing ads for sites that visitors have recently visited. As a recruiter one way you can gain exposure is to place a display ad that pops up after someone has previously visited your company site.  You might want to give them a helpful rundown on your latest advertised roles. Although the visitors have left your page, they may still have an interest in applying for a position but may have simply been distracted by an incoming email or conversation. Your display ad will gently remind them and is an effective way of reigniting their interest.

Resources & References

Recruitment Marketing Guide Google Display Network Advertising

Instagram Advertising

Instagram advertising is well worth a look

Attracting 400 million users worldwide, Instagram is a golden relatively unexplored opportunity for recruitment advertising. Owned by Facebook, you can manage ads through the site. It also follows the same target criteria: location, age, education, job title, number of employees etc. Therefore, you can target your ads to the right people and only those people. At Instagram, like Facebook, you can set pricing per click, which is helpful for starting small and increasing your spending as you grow. Or you can opt of the cost per thousand impressions model (more suited to building brand awareness fast). The beauty of Instagram adverts is that they fit unobtrusively into the sleek-looking interface, so users don’t feel spammed with ads and more likely to engage. The ads also allow you to include a link helping you drive respondents to your recruitment agency website or to any page for applying for a post online.

Resources & References

Instagram Posting

Create exciting snapshots of work life through Instagram

Instagram is a photo sharing site allowing users to share snapshots of their lives with the glamorous gloss of filters to give their shots a professional edge. So how does that benefit you as a recruiter? You can’t advertise roles through it but you can show what it’s like to work at a particular company. By posting images you can create an aspiration that will not only appeal to potential applicants but help build your client’s brand. Use your imagination and show images that create a tantalizing feeling of life at a particular workplace. For instance, you could post images of technology in product development (to show innovation), people in quirky situations doing silly things (to show friendly team-bonding) and awards ceremonies and company days out (to show recognition of each person’s efforts).

Job Boards

Be seen on the job boards

There are job boards to suit every job under the sun. Most are in the public domain while some are private, such as on internal corporate or government department sites. Their scope can be national, showing all types of jobs, or local or specialised in terms of relating to specific job sectors. They can be free or subscription based. As a recruiter, what better place to start advertising your roles through free advertising sites such as Craigslist and Gumtree as well as Indeed.co.uk which trawls multiple job sites worldwide when advertising online. If you find this approach too scattergun it may pay you to invest your budget in the big sites, which attract the biggest share of qualified job hunters. It is crucial to link how much you spend on advertising to the number of overall and shortlisted applicants ultimately generated.

Resources & References

Lead Generation

Generate continued, relevant leads to grow your business

It’s time to think outside the box when it comes to getting those leads. You can save money and time on hiring meeting rooms and attending jobs fairs or networking conferences by tapping into the global networking power of the internet. Get on Skype to wheedle out the most suitable candidates for interview. Hold online networking events and get interested candidates coming straight to you. The internet is simply great for engaging and getting to know more about any possible candidates. Whether it’s promoting job opportunities through social media sites or using online tests to check on any jobseeker’s suitability, there’s so much you can do to cover all the bases.

Resources & References

Linkedin Advertising

Advertising jobs on LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers an array of solutions for attracting the best talent to your roles whether they are passive or active jobseekers. Jobs for You Web Ads takes a member’s profile information and targeted data you provide to show ads on thousands of other sites they happen to visit. There are attention-grabbing large banner ads heading the tops of pages. This as with LinkedIn’s Job Boards deploys analytics, allowing you to track who is viewing your ads by their location, position and company etc. Your job postings are also linked to the widget ‘Jobs You May be Interested In’, presenting your roles in a noticeable but unobtrusive way. You can also post job listings on discussion boards. However, don’t go overboard. Bear in mind that some group administrators limit the posting of job listings to recruiters who don’t regularly contribute to discussions.

Resources & References

Linkedin Posting

How to create better visibility through LinkedIn content

If you want to raise your profile and get your jobs in front of interested potential candidates, there’s no shortage of tools on LinkedIn to help you achieve success. From uploading job posts to posting content it pays to be active in every area. Share job posts with members of specialised groups and start topics on jobs discussions. You can also join in answering questions in the Answers section. These are all effective ways of building recognition and trust in your brand. You may also want to promote your latest roles in your member subscribed regular updates. However, don’t let the roles detract from the original intent of these updates (to provide members with tips to further their career or help with job searching). You can strengthen your professional identity even further with long form posts. Send content (in a long form) then link it to your job posts. Think also about incorporating imagery or videos so that these can appear as sponsor updates on members’ homepages.

Linkedin Profile Viewing

Viewing candidates profiles on LinkedIn

LinkedIn goes a long way in helping you to build your brand, attract job interest and find the right match. But there is only so much you can do with a free account. Be prepared to shell out for paid for elements to really maximise its recruitment potential. The premium Talent Finder allows you to view expanded profiles and conduct more detailed searches on potential candidates, such as years of experience, education and employer size. The site allows up to 50 search alerts per day and gives you access to InMail (so that you can email members about recruitment opportunities). Remember profile searching works both ways, with job seekers searching for potential employees or recruitment agencies by keywords. So be sure to get yours in top form (with a concise profile that’s enriched with highly relevant keywords) and advise the same for your company clients.

Linkedin Recruiting

Hiring new talent through LinkedIn

With the advent of LinkedIn, the stakes have been raised for professional candidate selection. The power lies in its networking capability. Devote time to building up relationships and you will likely find that these contacts will come up with strong recommendations for candidate referrals. Stay in touch with everyone you meet: past employers, co-workers, friends, contacts through job fairs and training seminars. Because you never know who people may know. The site comes into its own for hunting specialised candidates, thanks to keyword searching (matching the keywords in users’ profiles). Together with the site’s internal messaging service, Inmail, you can drop a quick email to anyone you might think would be interested in a role. If no interest results, that person will have likely worked with other similarly skilled people that could be a great match. So why not get in touch with their network of co-workers and past employers about the role.

Marketing Automation

Is it time you subscribed to automated marketing?

If you’re finding sending job applicants emails and posting social media and website content a laborious process, you’re not alone. Thankfully automated technology can save you precious time and your sanity along with it. Thanks to popular software solutions from the likes of Marketo, you can schedule automated SMS text message straight to the mobiles of job applicants. You can also hit your social media followers with the latest roles as they come in. Notifying unsuccessful job applicants by email also gets the automated treatment. Plus with the added functionality of tracking it will tell you what happens when respondents receive emails and their age and demographics. As its first adopters – the large multinational brands – found, it’s the bedrock of learning about your audience reaching them through more focussed campaigns.

Mobile Recruitment

Why go for mobile recruitment?

Internet browsing is so accessible via our mobiles nowadays, it’s no wonder many people are almost surgically attached to them. In recruitment, the knock on effect is an upward trend in browsing job sites on mobile sites – approaching 50% of all recruitment website visitors. On top of that, with jobs filling fast and being more competitive, mobile offers a quicker, convenient and (at work) a discrete way of pouncing on opportunities as they arise. All the more reason why you should target these users by redesigning your site and the emails you send such as job alerts, to ensure they are mobile friendly.

Old Vs New Recruitment Methods

Which is best?

Today there are more ways to recruit people than ever before. The internet, of course, has revolutionised job searching and hiring. It makes the whole process faster, easier and cheaper than the traditional approach of newspaper recruitment advertising. Web advertising also makes it possible to track visitors through web analytics to help target your spending wisely. With the net, we are all better connected and social media has found a natural shoe-in, allowing you to network and build up a vast pool of candidates. That’s not to say you should ignore traditional methods of recruiting talent. Newspaper and magazine adverts still have their place in attracting a localised group of people that might not be regularly job-hunting online. The moral of the story is to keep all your options open to open up the opportunities for ultimately hiring the right person.

Online Tools

Streamlining your recruitment workflow

Online tools can help you work faster and smarter throughout candidate search and selection. In searching and making valuable connections, Meetup is very helpful for recruiters. The event site allows members to join groups and organise local meetings. The advantage for you as a recruiter is that you can access the public list of interested people. By refining your search with keywords such as interests, skills and location you can get in touch with people who may have a keen interest in your roles. Reddit too is a useful site for building up possible contacts in an informal personal way. For managing the efficient flow of candidate applications, you might want to consider Workable. It automates the process of writing and posting job ads, stores CVs, and enables you to complete bulk actions such as sending rejection notifications. Other indispensable sites include Indeed (a leading jobs board site with convenient cost effective pay per click advertising) and Survey Monkey (for creating applicant screening questions).

Resources & References

Outreach Marketing

Successful outreach marketing strategies

How can you best spread the word about your recruitment business online? The trick is to get your content seen by influencers. The reason being that any content they share gains wide exposure among their network. It is important because promoting your posts on your blog and social media will help you drive more traffic to your website and overall raise your profile. Keep in contact with your influencers. Think of it like building a close relationship and slip in the chance to promote any upcoming campaigns through commenting regularly on their posts. If you don’t have a huge following of influential people, you can find bloggers via Twitter lists and capture them in a spreadsheet program to track their engagement and level of influence.

Recruitment Events

Make new candidate connections at recruitment fairs

Your business needs leads to survive and the more the better. But they also need to be qualified. To attract and gauge applicant’s interest in your business and your roles, there’s no substitute for getting out there and meeting people face to face. Recruitment fairs and interview events are ideal. Or why not hold your own recruitment evening? It’s a low cost way you can promote your brand of recruitment services and build connections to prime talent who might be suitable for current roles. Over wine and nibbles, you can get to see the real personalities that hide behind the CVs and online profiles. It’s also an opportunity to network and uncover people who might offer you valuable referrals.

Referrals

How to get people referrals

You could say that no-one knows how suitable a worker is for a role than an employer or colleague. Referrals are a reliable way to recruit and have the added benefit of being cheap and faster to implement than many other recruiting methods. Get the ball rolling by setting up a referral programme that suits the work culture of the company and excites people to take part. By linking with social media, you can open up a wide network of potential candidates. To encourage uptake and retention, recognise and reward those you make the most referrals and maintain close contact through motivational updates and advice in helping people improve their rate of referrals.

SEO

Why SEO works great for recruitment

What matters most to you as a recruiter is that your site and job opportunities are easy to find. When someone, for instance, searches for account managers in Manchester and your business crops up high up in the search results you are onto great thing. You will attract visitors who could convert into candidates. So how do you achieve high Google ranking? On a basic level, ensuring that you have the same keywords visitors will likely search for, is key. But it gets more complicated than that with Google employing complex criteria (or algorithms) to determine which sites get pushed to the top. These criteria can involve the speed of loading, the content’s relevance, number of links, its readability on mobile devices and more. The biggest obstacle you might face, however, is that the big boys in recruitment employ SEO specialists to optimise their recruitment sites. But you can beat them at their own game by doing the same.

Social Media Recruiting

How best to recruit through Facebook

Online job seeking and networking used to be the preserve of mainly LinkedIn. Now Facebook has got into the act, with career pages springing up. Facebook typically serves a younger demographic than LinkedIn and those in the formative stages of their career. Many companies have a Facebook presence to promote their brand and are keen to latch onto their followers’ interest by advertising their roles there too. There’s another key advantage of advertising your client’s roles on Facebook and that’s the personal aspect. If candidate’s pages are on public display, their posts can be a revealing snapshot of their personality and prove useful when matching the best people to the company. You can also, thanks to Facebook Messenger, enter into informal conversations with potential candidates whilst building up a rapport.

Resources & References

Talent Networks

Tapping into talent networks

Talent networks…what are those, you might be thinking. They are communities that companies create online to gather the best talent. The idea being that when opportunities arise, there is a supply of potential applicants, which can save precious time and hiring costs. The best talent networks have a welcoming community feel. You want users to feel comfortable in uploading their profiles so that employers can spot potential people. Engagement is crucial whether it is through email updates or providing conversation starters through articles, online videos, company news, articles etc. It’s a win-win for everyone. For applicants, it provides an informal way of getting to know more about the organisation before applying. For employers a cheap and effective way of attracting more job applicants.

Twitter Advertising

Tips to recruiting through Twitter

In recruitment you have to play the numbers game and get your advertised roles across to as many people as you can to get applications rolling in. With an active presence on Twitter, it’s logical to use this popular platform to help drive responses. There are many ways you can advertise jobs. These include putting job together with a link to your site for more information and to apply. Make use of hashtags in your tweet eg, #systemsanalystjobs, to maximize its exposure, and be sure to follow influential people on Twitter. Encourage people to retweet your posts and also feel free to re-post to get attention during various times when your audience will be online. Aside from posting job roles, keep in mind ways to engage with followers through providing useful information such as career fairs, teasers to your blog posts, results of polls and the numbers of specific jobs you have in their local area.

Resources & References

Twitter Posting

Promoting your business on Twitter

Twitter is a quick and easy social site. It slips comfortably in people lives, that it feels less intrusive than other social media sites. This leads to people having the willingness and freedom to be more socially active. Informality rules the roost here. So try to give a chatty style to help attract with potential candidates with a friendly welcoming approach. To be seen, you need to be highly active – from tweeting to retweeting and following. But it needs to be targeted to engage the right people. HootSuite is a great help here because it highlights anyone mentioning topics of interest to help narrow down whom to follow, reply to, or content to retweet.

Resources & References

We hope this Recruitment Marketing Guide has been of help, if you have any questions or wish to discuss how we can help turn your ideas into ROI speak to one of team today…

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