Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing

Moving Beyond The Recruitment Blog

As mentioned above, blogging is not the only path in crafting or shaping your company's narrative or prompting passive and active jobseekers to explore what your company offers and ultimately apply for open positions. And in actuality, it shouldn't be your sole tool to communicate, position, and illuminate why your company is an important thought leader and true disruptor in your industry.

Ask any sales or marketing team about the diversification of their strategic frameworks. You'll get explanations about channel variance, A/B testing, and how different kinds of content can function or influence customers differently. The same should be true of your recruitment marketing content. Any recruitment team that leverages a lone source of content and messaging is rubbing two sticks together while other companies are walking around with a Zippo lighter.

It's time to look beyond the blog, so let's examine different content media that today's hiring managers should be deploying.

Social media

Whereas an Inbound Marketing strategy via a blog and email platform is essentially its little sandbox for conveying narrative and messaging career opportunities and an employer brand, the same goes for social media.

First, from a recruitment marketing perspective, defining what we mean by social media is essential. Yes, social media, of course, means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Still, let's take social media as a platform for companies to communicate with potential candidates and for candidates to commiserate with each other. We must include platforms like LinkedIn and sites with job board components like Indeed and Glassdoor.

Secondly, let's quickly dispel social media as merely a vehicle to post links to your blog posts, landing pages, or other Inbound Marketing content pieces. Yes, while you can and should be doing this to help amplify your content, you should also be using social media as a vehicle for exclusive, unique content designed to engage the passive and active job seeker in the language of that platform. You can click on our blog to learn how to make your social media recruitment marketing stand out. 

Some key things to consider: 

• Photos: Social media is a visual platform - use that to your advantage. Photos used on social media should be authentic and genuine. They should showcase current employees, locations/facilities, or actual processes your company conducts as part of its daily operations.

• Video: Brevity is not only the soul of wit, but it's also the soul of social media videos that drive reach, engagement, shares, and hopefully clicks and apply to your job applications. As with photos, you want your videos to be professional but don't want them to be too polished. Today's technology can put quality video shooting and editing power in the hands of your recruitment team via an iPad, which is a reasonably low-cost investment, rather than investing in a videographer or marketing agency. 

• Polls: Whether it's Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, the use of a well-crafted question via a poll can not only drive people to engage and interact with your profile (which creates a captive audience that may be more apt to apply for open positions and at least keep you top of mind) but recruitment teams can – depending on the question – use responses or polling data to understand better what job seekers value and how you can incorporate those values into your processes, workflows, or subsequent content.

A survey by Clutch found that 1 in 10 hiresr in today's job market came directly from content, engagement, or interaction between a recruiter and candidate on social media.

Videos

Yes, we just mentioned short, intimate videos specifically designed for use on social, but longer, more sophisticated video content for use in other contexts is also an important vehicle to reach different segments. Frankly, using video in your recruitment marketing strategy should be a given. As many as 78% of marketers believe that video content, whether on social media or your website, should be a key component of your content strategy. It's easy to digest, it's engaging, and most of all, it's shareable. It also demonstrates to a potential job candidate that your company is game for adapting to technology, new ways of thinking, and how people communicate and share ideas.

Before starting, ask yourself these questions:

• Does your company maintain a YouTube channel?

• Do you house videos on your website?

• Do you use videos in any email marketing campaigns?

• Do you make video content the focal point of a landing page?

Each question represents a situation or context prime for video content as a functional variant of blogging or more traditional written content. Common push-back on the suggestion to incorporate video content into a recruitment marketing strategy stems from a place of budget and expenditures. In reality, an in-house team can do it at a reasonable cost. 

However, one quick hack is simply repurposing existing video content but reframing how said content is prefaced. For example, say you're discussing how your organization is forward-thinking, progressive, and provides employees with the best tools and resources, rather than creating content to explicitly demonstrate that pulling a product, process, or solution demo video from your company's library can be just as useful. From that, you can craft a social, blog, email, or landing page post that reframes the angle of vision from a recruitment and employer branding vantage point.

Other video options can include team member testimonials, guided tours, or profiles of exceptional employees. We've comprehensively looked at the best video types for recruitment in our blog. 

Speaking of Testimonials

LinkedIn says employees are 3x more trusted than employers regarding messaging and how passive and active job seekers perceive a company. That means such recruitment marketing components as team member testimonials, team member reviews on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, and any referral-marketing-based strategy where employees spread the good word about a company's attributes or standing within the industry holds much more weight than anything your recruitment and marketing team can create. So use it. Any instances of team member feedback, reviews, ratings, and testimonials placed on those job sites or your site are fair game and can be leveraged in various contexts and channels. In addition, don't forget to make your testimonials. Actively source and create testimonials from employees your recruitment team feels best to demonstrate or embody your company's culture, mission, and vision.

Testimonials can be applied or deployed in various methods and mediums – from regular blog posts or specific, dedicated pages on your website to email campaigns and social media posts. Also, don't relegate team member testimonials to strictly text forms. This is where short videos for social use also come in handy — putting employees on camera and having them respond to one question about what makes your company an excellent place to launch and develop a career can pay dividends.

Podcasts

Food for thought regarding podcasts: 

• 165 million Americans have listened to a podcast during the last month.

• 70 percent of Americans are familiar with podcasting.

• Podcasting spans more than 100 languages worldwide.

While some still believe podcasting is a niche content form, these statistics clearly show that podcasts are not on the rise but have arrived as a way in which people absorb information regularly. As such, this makes podcasting a potent tool in your recruitment marketing toolbox not only for the reach and amplitude but also because it's a content form your audience can engage with while completing other tasks – which is extremely valuable in today's multi-tasking world, especially if you're trying to reach the passive job seeker. Also, generating a podcast can be as easy as repurposing content you already have. 

In addition, podcasting is still consumed primarily by today's younger generation. Suppose you ask any recruitment team or hiring manager. In that case, it is a prime demographic that is often difficult to reach, given the sheer volume of competition and noise from other companies and industries.

After you've done all that - created a robust marketing plan comprised of blogs, videos, social media, and testimonials, what then? How do you know if it's working? 

Measuring Recruitment Marketing ROI

The concepts and principles of recruitment marketing and employer branding frameworks outlined above seem extremely attractive to talent acquisition managers and specialists because they demonstrate to candidates an acumen with technology and current thought leadership. But all that means nothing if you can't track it and prove it works with cold, hard data.

Data tells a story, reporting drives action and analytics push how recruitment teams deploy strategies or tactics in applicant sourcing. This means that proving return on investment in recruitment marketing and employer branding must be defined and communicated for recruiters to understand the value proposition in continuing to engage job seekers in a marketing-driven way.

But what are the critical metrics in recruitment marketing? How can today's recruitment specialists understand ROI? What data points should recruitment teams look to as proof of concept? With these questions in mind, let's examine five key ways to measure recruitment marketing ROI.

The Time to Hire

Perhaps paramount in a recruiter's dashboard (perhaps overcome by one metric we'll discuss in a moment) is the time to hire or accept, depending on your industry and company's verbiage. Regardless, we're talking about the following elements:

• the number of days that elapse from posting a job vacancy to

• engaging in recruitment strategy, and

• having a candidate accept an offer.

In terms of a marketing funnel, think of time to hire in the same realm as the buyer's journey – the time from when a visitor to your blog or website became a lead, was nurtured, and then finally turned into a conversion via closing the deal of a sale.

It's a simple question: Did a recruitment marketing strategy for a specific position in a specific market with a specific amount of resources allocated for the campaign result in a shorter time to hire than a similar position in a similar market without a recruitment marketing strategy?

That's the question a recruitment specialist needs to answer to evaluate whether recruitment marketing effectively impacts the hiring time.

The Cost Per Hire

As referenced above, the cost per hire is perhaps the only metric that can dwarf time to hire, especially given the restraints, constrictions, and increased agility companies across the board had to face after the COVID-19 pandemic. The elements that factor into cost per hire can vary by industry, but essentially you're looking at:

• Promoting the position on job boards like Indeed

• Utilizing outside search firms

• Leveraging a temp agency to fill a position while a long-term candidate is found

• Other outreach and engagement methods include posting a position to a professional organization or using a third party to help funnel applications or mailing lists.

The costs of these avenues can range based on the depth at which recruiters deploy them. As with our time-to-hire example, it's imperative to judge the ROI of recruitment marketing in an apples-to-apples fashion. You can't judge how a recruitment marketing strategy fared with a highly-skilled position in a very competitive marketing compared with an entry-level position in a feast-and-famine market.

If all things are equal and your cost per hire decreases when you execute a recruitment marketing strategy, you have the ammunition you need regarding proof of concept.

Social Media Engagement

While the first two ROI metrics relate directly to recruitment, analytics, and reporting regarding social media help, prove directly how well job seekers receive your employer brand, narrative, and messaging – both passive and active job seekers. The key data points are impressions (how many viewed your content), engagement (how many people liked, shared, commented on, or otherwise interacted with your content), and your amount of spend per boosted post or ad, particularly on sites like Facebook and Instagram, but also on platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

In addition, regarding Twitter, another valuable metric is re-Tweets or how many times your Tweet was copied and Tweeted on another user's profile. And, hey, if you can get your content trending (as long as it's positive), you're most likely golden in reaching the maximum number of eyeballs with your employer branding.

But social media platforms like Facebook can also help evaluate how effective content is regarding recruitment. The number of link clicks on a certain post (particularly if you drive traffic back to a specific job post or landing page) can also help you better understand the number of job seekers engaged with your social content and job posting.

Web traffic

Similar to the social media engagement metrics, evaluating your web traffic reporting relative to your company's main website, individual landing pages, pillar pages, and other digital destinations are another KPI to consider when examining the strength, depth, and reach of your employer branding strategy. The same is true if part of your recruitment branding strategy includes a blog (how many hits, clicks on links in your blog post, and how long visitors stay on individual posts). These data points can also help drive editorial decisions regarding your published content. If certain entries drive higher traffic rates than others, then your visitors signal the content that matters most to them.

Part and parcel to web traffic analytics are video views via your YouTube page or another third-party video housing service integrated with your website.

Brand awareness

What search terms are job seekers using to find you? Whether via a search engine like Google or a job board like Indeed, the closer and more specific job seekers search for you by brand.

How large is your social media following? How many contacts do you have via email marketing campaigns? How many unique visitors do you have to your website instead of returning visitors? These metrics are critical in measuring ROI in recruitment marketing and overall employer branding frameworks and strategies.

Any and all metrics you can glean from your content marketing and recruitment efforts can help you develop your best practices and make your proposition stronger to recruit the caliber of candidates you're looking for. 

But, much like any other marketing endeavor, there are certain pitfalls, potholes, and potential hurdles to watch out for.

Common Missteps in Recruitment Marketing

You've discovered the essential strategies, pathways, and elements of excellence in recruitment marketing and employer branding to thrive in today's competitive job market. While these lessons are valuable for advancing your recruitment marketing strategy, their true potential can only be realized through an in-depth exploration of their origins, their significance in driving success, and how these principles and concepts can help you avoid wasting valuable resources, time, and effort.

Awareness of common pitfalls in recruitment and employer branding is critical. These missteps can potentially undermine your recruitment strategy and negatively impact your employer brand.

Your Window For Success

Perhaps one of the more damning (if not the most damning) missteps a recruitment team can make in marketing and employer branding is establishing an unrealistic timeline for success in devising a recruitment marketing strategy. The same principle applies to sales and marketing strategies when Inbound Marketing is employed in any B2B or B2C context. Content marketing takes time. Inbound strategies are about playing the long game. Recruitment marketing and employer branding are no different.

Defining your voice and tone, building a captive audience, and moving that captive audience (both the passive and active job seeker) may take many months to achieve or bear fruit.

From a pure recruitment standpoint, you wouldn't post a position to a job board or professional organization career center on a Friday and expect applications to roll in en masse by Monday morning, right? Sure, you may check your applicant flow tied directly to this position once or twice a week, but if you received 5 or 6 quality applications from such a post over 60 days, you'd call that a success.

Same for recruitment marketing content. You're building a pipeline with this recruitment strategy, which requires nurturing time and patience.

Lack of authenticity

Perhaps the second more egregious misstep a recruitment team can make in crafting and deploying a recruitment marketing and employer branding strategy is ignoring authenticity in favor of stock images, generic team member testimonials, or canned responses to social media posts and inquiries.

Ask today's job seekers what they value from an employer or what grabs and holds their attention in terms of marketing and its authenticity – job seekers want to feel potential employers are speaking to them honestly and candidly about the organization's narrative, goals and how a team member can fit into their culture. Don't spin a story about your business that's untrue. 

This is why engaging current employees in testimonial campaigns, utilizing actual team member photos, and determining who your audience is. The messaging most resonating with them is critical in creating an authentic brand identity. In short, if you will engage in recruitment marketing and employer branding, do it. Today, job seekers are too shrewd, have too many resources, and are hit with so many avenues for recruitment content and employer branding that spotting a half-hearted attempt is easier than ever.

Misevaluating The Job Seeker

Effective recruitment marketing content knows its audience – it knows who it is trying to speak to, why it is speaking, and the value proposition of any given statement or idea relative to the audience it is attempting to entice.

Imagine you're a regional healthcare provider. Would you speak to a registered nurse with 20 years of experience about your organizational culture like you'd address a healthcare mechanic? Does this nurse care about the same benefits as the healthcare mechanic? Probably not. Thus, these two audiences require different messaging and distribution platforms to be reached and successfully brought into your application pipeline.

The same goes for job seekers at different stages of their careers. A registered nurse with 20 years of experience will care more about different elements of your organization than a registered nurse fresh out of school and looking for their first gig.

It may sound elementary, but not properly evaluating the job seeker you're trying to attract and how you need to engage with that job seeker (messaging, tone, distribution vessel) can derail your recruitment strategy before it gets off the ground.

Ignoring internal partnerships

Don't forget: even though you're a recruiter, talent acquisition specialist, or HR generalist, you're not alone in talent sourcing – your entire organization thrives and depends on the right person filling the right role at the right time. This means recruitment teams must not ignore opportunities for cross-organizational partnerships and collaboration in content creation or curation.

Especially as an organization's size grows, the likelihood of communication and collaboration silos becomes more and more prevalent. Whether it's working with your sales and marketing team, compliance team, logistics, and supply chain team, or the C Suite, remember that part of a successful recruitment marketing and employer branding scheme is relying on the thought leaders within your organization to intelligently and effectively help you share your company's narrative and brand.

Inconsistency across platforms

You're likely leveraging yourself across multiple platforms in any effective recruitment marketing or employer branding strategy.

• A website and blog.

• Social media like Facebook and Instagram.

• Career and recruitment websites like Indeed and LinkedIn.

• Video streaming platforms like YouTube.

While the user bases on some of these platforms may align with each other, many may not – for example, a LinkedIn user in their 40s may not be as visible or engaged on YouTube as a recent college grad. That doesn't mean your visual identity and core mission values should change. Your recruitment content strategy needs to be consistent across all major platforms. Ensure that the content you're creating and the narrative you're forwarding is aligned and unified across each outlet.

This works on a two-pronged approach: first, it ensures your company's narrative and value proposition are reaching the most extensive and most varied candidate pools possible, and second, it demonstrates to job seekers who may encounter you on multiple platforms that you're fluent and capable of creating consistency and stability in a multi-platform world.