There are a lot of facets to inbound marketing, but in my mind the word that describes it best is genuine. To be an inbound marketer, you need to genuinely want to help the population you are marketing to. Instead of pushing information out that people may not want to see, inbound marketing offers a refreshingly relevant serving of content that focuses on timeliness and targeting. As I mentioned, there are many inbound marketing best practices, but here are a few inbound recruitment marketing best practices our agency lives by.
Keep the Candidate in Mind
You are not marketing a job to an uninformed person. Instead, you are marketing to a person who probably knows more about the career opportunity they are considering than some industry professionals. In today’s environment, the candidate is in the driver’s seat. That’s actually not a bad thing though! This means that applicants are relying more and more on things like company culture and a transparent recruitment brand, so as long as your company is promoting those things, the right candidates will find you (with the right strategy that is!)
Promote Employee Experiences
Your happy employees are their own recruitment marking campaign. Happy employees bring in applicants. Most candidates will search to see if you have Instagram, Facebook or Twitter career pages and the more personalized you make them, the more others will want to work for you. Employees volunteering, enjoying each other’s company and generally having a good time show potential recruits that although you work hard, you still are there for each other. Be a team they want to join! You can promote these experiences socially (ideally you will have specific Social Media Career Pages for this) and via methods like direct mail and radio. If you'd like more information on Social Media Career Pages, check our our free E-Book!
Use Real Images
I might be a bit biased (I’m a photographer by trade), but with so much stock photography out there, using real images can set your recruitment brand apart. Also, there’s the added bonus of recognition should a current employee’s neighbor be looking for a job. They are definitely more likely to consider a place where a connection of their’s is part of the advertising efforts.
Segment Your Marketing
Really dialing into a niche group of candidates with specific needs helps get your message out there more effectively. For instance, per another article, “If you are looking to recruit for a heart surgeon, placing that job on a general physician board will not benefit you as much as a discipline-specific site.” As Hubspot mentions regularly, content is not effective without context. You can blog, post socially, promote offers and upgrade your SEO strategy, but it will all be for nothing if you can’t understand your audience, send segmented communications and perfect a personalized web presence.
In fact, that’s where recruitment microsites come in! These microsites are the perfect venue for a specific career path or position you are looking to fill. If you’d like to learn more about microsites, check out our blog, So What IS a Microsite.
Be Mobile!
This really should go without saying, but mobile optimization and responsive design is not really an optional aspect of marketing anymore. Those sites that are not readily usable via mobile are just not going to going to perform well when it comes to capturing applications. After all, two years ago Glassdoor reported that 9 in 10 job seekers search for jobs via mobile.
Nurture Candidates
Some people aren’t going to convert immediately. What I mean by that is they aren’t going to apply today. Some candidates are more passive and will take several interactions with your recruitment website before hitting the apply button. Building a recruitment microsite that fully answers the questions they have is the first step, but building a long-term relationship with candidates is an equally if not more important one. When a candidate feels that you are providing value versus pushing a promotion, they will be much more likely to want to work for you.
Be Timely
This part takes research and testing. Monitoring when you audience is most active and staying on top of top times to send each sort of communication is key to building and maintaining an engaged talent pool. The great thing is though; once you hit the sweet spot it is usually very easy to replicate your success thanks to analytics! If you are worried about having time to execute this kind of monitoring, make sure to utilize your agency. We spend a good deal of time monitoring campaign performance on a daily basis so that our clients don’t have to think about it. We are the set it and forget it option for recruitment marketing!
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I could talk about how the entire concept of inbound marketing is better than outbound marketing based on cost alone. I could list the wide array of benefits that come from participating in one of the fastest growing marketing movements around. However, what it really boils down to is shifting your focus toward providing value to candidates. Be the resource your ideal audience is searching for and watch the applications pour in!
