What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment is the entire process of finding the best-suited candidate for the right job. This includes sourcing applications, screening them, selecting the most suitable applicants for interview, and finally appointing the right candidate for the position. The recruitment team is also responsible for predicting talent requirements and proactively managing talent.

With complex business structures and the availability of increasingly diverse talent, recruiters need smart recruitment strategies. This includes identifying the need for talent in the organization, attracting the best-suited talent, building an employer brand, and employing cutting-edge technology for screening and selection.

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the process of building and promoting an employer brand with the help of marketing strategies. This helps recruiters attract qualified talent, and engage with them throughout the recruitment life cycle.

The need for recruitment marketing tactics stems from the growing culture of candidates researching employers, to form a definitive perception before applying for a job. The job of a recruitment marketer is to tell the company’s story as a great place to work to attract high-qualified talent.

Recruitment marketing Funnel

Let’s break that down recruitment marketing in form of a Funnel. There are six stages to the recruitment marketing funnel.

1. Building Awareness – Marketing the company as a potential employer on the right platforms to increase awareness.
2. Consideration – This step involves an evaluation of the profiles you have sourced in the previous step. This can be done with talent analytics tools such as applicant tracking systems to segregate the best-fit candidates from the others.
3. Interest – Generating interest or engaging with the candidates sourced by this exercise is one of the key elements of recruitment marketing.
4. Application – At this stage recruiters receive applications from the candidates they have attracted.
5. Selection – This is the stage wherein the selection process is initiated to find the right candidate from the pool of applicants.
6. Hire – The final stage of the recruitment marketing funnel, here the recruitment offer is made to hire the best-suited candidate.

Why is Recruitment marketing Important for Employers?

The traditional recruitment process had a transactional nature to it, which is fast losing relevance in today’s world. There is an endless bank of recruiter information available to candidates online, and they prefer to analyze recruiters and read reviews about employers, to form a perception about the company before deciding to apply. If your brand as an employer does not appeal to a well-suited candidate, you may miss out on finding the right talent for your organization.

To ensure that your organization’s image as an employer is well-regarded, HR needs to have an effective recruitment marketing strategy.

Benefits of Recruitment marketing

Here are a few benefits of Recruitment Marketing:

1. Recruitment marketing helps build a talent pool: Recruitment marketing is the process of building a long term relationship with potential candidates. This helps maintain a talent pool that can be tapped whenever there is a need for recruitment.
2. Lesser Time-to-Hire: A good recruitment marketing strategy can accelerate the recruitment process and reduce time-to-hire.
3. Employer Branding: To be a great place to work – that candidates aspire to be hired for, recruiters need to invest in building a strong employer brand.
4. Attract High-Quality Candidates: Marketing for recruitment forces recruiters to think of the whole candidate journey. This is key to attracting the right talent and creating a talent network to ensure that only the highest qualified candidates apply to your organization.
5. Enhanced Candidate Experience: Recruitment marketing allows you to enhance the candidate’s pre-application experience which can influence their decision to apply.
6. Reduced Hiring Costs: Recruitment marketing platforms help you track the effectiveness of your efforts to generate an applicant pipeline. This helps reduce hiring costs and prioritize investments.

Should You Consider Recruitment marketing?

Competition for hiring the best talent is intensifying. This makes it important for your organization to stand out from the crowd as a great place to work. Recruitment marketing is a strategic discipline that builds brand awareness and attracts the right talent to your organization.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Differences between Recruiting and Recruitment marketing?

• Recruitment is a transactional process that starts from the moment a new position needs to be filled in the organization.
• Recruitment marketing is an on-going process that builds an employer brand of the organization to attract and engage the right talent.
• Recruitment attracts talent to jobs.
• Recruitment marketing attracts talent to employers.

Is Recruitment marketing a Practice, or a Profession?

Recruitment marketing is both a practice and a profession. As a practice, recruitment marketing forms an integral part of all recruitment activities done by the HR team.

As a profession, recruitment marketing encompasses brand awareness, reputation management, social engagement, email, text and chat communication, event management, and lead generation.

How to Develop a Recruitment marketing Plan?

Planning for recruitment marketing can be divided into six steps –

1. Goal Setting – Deciding the goal and objective of the recruitment marketing exercise.
2. Defining Roles – Clearly define the roles and positions you are recruiting for.
3. Define Candidate Persona – Establish the ideal candidate persona for the position you are recruiting for.
4. Identify Channels – Determine the best channels where you can find suitable candidates.
5. Budgeting – Decide the resources you would like to allocate to recruitment marketing in concrete terms.V

Content marketing is a key element in recruitment marketing and a lot of effort should be dedicated to creating the right content that can engage high-quality talent with your employer brand. It is important to identify the nature and timing of interaction that candidates have with your employer brand and to employ the right content at these points. This enhances the candidate experience and increases the chances of talented candidates to apply.