10 Recruitment Marketing Tactics That Can Add Up to Big Wins for Hiring Managers

According to Zippia, qualified job candidates are only on the job market for about 10 days before deciding to work for a new employer. With such a short window of opportunity, Your recruitment marketing tactics must grab a candidate’s attention before your competition does.

Here are 10 tactics that can help you position your company as the best place to work and quickly communicate that value to drive top talent into your hiring funnel.

1: Know Your Audience to Focus Your Recruitment Marketing Efforts

It takes more than a spray-and-pray marketing campaign to attract top talent. Just like with any type of marketing, recruitment marketing requires you to know your audience before you waste valuable resources on recruiting tactics that may not appeal to your desired job candidates.

You can start by creating job candidate personas. A persona is a representation of your ideal job candidate for positions you need to fill, such as a young community college graduate who may have an interest and/or aptitude for machine operation at a metal fabrication facility.

As you develop each candidate persona, you can include demographic details like education and work experience, as well as psychographics (what motivates your candidate persona). Does your persona want to make more money than he or she is earning now? Or are they more interested in company stability with plenty of opportunities for career advancement?

Look for workforce trends reports and surveys to help you find out what motivates your ideal job candidate. Reports like these are a great starting point for developing personas, which in turn can save valuable time in your recruitment efforts.

2: Create a Strong Employer Brand

You can use many of the same marketing tactics your company is already using to sell your brand to potential customers. Start by defining your company’s key value proposition as an employer. You may offer competitive pay, but there’s always another company willing to pay more to grab top talent. This is why you need an employer value proposition.

Your value proposition may include on-site paid training, mentorship to help employees advance their careers, or perks like flexible scheduling or extra PTO as performance awards. Sell the benefits and perks that are most likely to appeal to your ideal candidate persona as your value proposition in your recruitment marketing campaigns.

3: Build a More Engaging Careers Website Page

A careers page serves as your home base for your workforce recruiting efforts and should articulate your value proposition as an employer. It should also help candidates apply for jobs more quickly and set expectations about employment at your company — encouraging more serious (and more qualified) applicants to apply.

Use your careers page to back up your value proposition with specifics, such as “We promote from within to build careers.” Include details about health, dental, and other benefits such as 401K plans. Emphasize special perks that competing employers don’t offer, such as an on-site fitness center or reimbursement for gym memberships.

Most importantly, make it easy for job candidates to find and search jobs on your careers page. Position jobs by category or geographic location at the top of the page, so applicants don’t have to scroll down to search for open positions. Include a prominent phone number or chatbot to answer questions.

4: Use Email Newsletters and Blog Content

Email newsletters are one of the most popular workforce recruitment tactics for targeting candidates with certain criteria, such as people in a specific geographic area.

You can use newsletters to offer helpful blog content, such as how-to articles on ways to ace a job interview. Providing candidates with high-value content positions your brand as a company that values and supports its employees.

Most importantly, you’ll want to highlight the latest job openings at your company, so you may want a separate newsletter for people just interested in current open positions. Be sure to include details such as key benefits and the minimum qualifications required to apply. Make it faster and easier for candidates to apply with links that go directly to each job posting.

5: Add Video to Your Toolbox of Workforce Recruitment Solutions

Your company may already be using video to engage sales prospects and help drive leads. Video is an equally effective tool for boosting your recruiting efforts. It’s one thing for a job candidate to read your value proposition, but seeing that value through video is worth a million words.

Employee testimonials and senior management messaging can humanize your employer brand. You can also embed videos in your recruiting emails and on your careers website page to boost your click-through rates for job postings.

6: Use Social Media to Attract and Engage Industrial Talent

Nearly 85% of organizations are recruiting through social media, and for good reason. Over 70% of job seekers aged 18-34 have found jobs through social media, according to Zippia. And because over 65% of job candidates use social media to research companies, social media recruiting content now goes beyond job listings.

You can also use social media content to announce employee promotions to back up your value proposition as a company that promotes from within. Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Glassdoor make it easy not only to list job openings, but to share your employees’ success stories and testimonials about your culture and company benefits.

7: Use Employees as Your Employer Brand Ambassadors

Using your employees as your employer brand ambassadors is a great way to humanize your company and build your credibility as a great place to work. This can be especially impactful when your employees tell a story, with testimonials and success stories that can leave a lasting impression on job candidates.

Your employees can even work as an extension of your recruitment team by referring their friends and former coworkers to come to work for your company. Consider implementing a referral program that rewards employees financially or with perks like extra PTO. Highlight your new hires through video and/or on your website and in social media.

8: Use Multiple Channels to Cast a Wider Recruiting Net

Today’s workforce recruitment solutions can include everything from your careers page and the content you produce, to placing job ads in trade associations publications, to applying multiple tech stacks to connect all your recruitment marketing efforts.

This type of targeted marketing is easier than it sounds, thanks to digital marketing platforms like HubSpot that make it easy for hiring managers to streamline their efforts. Using different marketing channels, you can cast a wider net to attract top talent to your company.

In addition to the email newsletters, blogs, and social channels we noted earlier, your careers website can be optimized to be more strategically visible to qualified job candidates. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help candidates quickly find your careers page and job postings.

9: Invest in a Recruiting Tech Stack to Save Time

Tech stacks refer to technology that hiring managers use to save time in their recruiting efforts. You may already be using job boards and social media to attract talent and post your open positions.

Glassdoor, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, SimplyHired, and LinkedIn are some of the most popular job boards and aggregators for posting job positions and job ads. Your job ads must convey your unique value proposition that helps your ad stand out from other employers who may be hiring for similar positions.

You can also use applicant tracking systems (ATS) such as Greenhouse, Zoho Recruit, BambooHR, Workable, and Bullhorn to determine the success of your job postings and quickly weed out candidates who don’t have the desired qualifications. There are also automated employee referral programs to make it easier for your employees to work as your recruiting brand ambassadors.

10. Implement Analytics to Measure Your Results

Analytics are essential to workforce recruitment solutions when it comes to assessing the success of your efforts. By combining multiple marketing channels, such as social media and other earned, paid, and organic media into live dashboards using basic tools such as Google’s Looker Studio or more advanced ones such as Tableau, you can better determine if you’re hitting your CPH and CPL metrics.

You can then use the analytics from your integrated dashboard to make data-driven decisions on where to spend your job ad dollars and recruiting resources. This can help you determine where to focus your resources, how to improve your recruitment marketing performance, and to help you find places to decrease costs across the entire candidate journey.

Need Help Re-Energizing Your Recruiting Strategy?

Now that you have some ideas to help jumpstart your next recruiting campaign, you may be asking yourself, “How can I find the time to implement all these tactics, when I’ve already got a full plate?”.

We know that it can seem overwhelming with all the noise online, but we have 20 years of experience helping Industrials with their marketing, sales, and recruitment practices. If you have questions, it’s likely we have answers, because we’ve seen it before.

Starting with your free consultation, we can help you re-energize your recruiting strategy with data-driven, workforce recruitment solutions to attract, engage, and retain talent.