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When it comes to marketing, “Content is king’’. And so it is for recruitment marketing. Content works around the clock to fill your recruitment funnel with the most suitable candidates. It can however be challenging for recruiters without relevant marketing or content writing experience to get started with creating and promoting content. In this third post of the four-part series on recruitment marketing, we cover all things content: from creation to tool recommendations.
Creating content
Have your ICPs and EVP handy:
Knowing your target audience and the value you can provide them is the basis for any effective content marketing strategy; which is why we highly recommend creating your ICPs and EVP first. An Ideal Candidate Profile (ICP) describes the characteristics and traits of your ideal candidate while an Employer Value Proposition (EVP) encapsulates the value they can derive by working for you. If you do not have these handy yet, we recommend the first two articles in the series for a detailed walkthrough:
Understanding and profiling your ideal candidate
Crafting a Compelling Employer Value Proposition
Pick the channels and content types:
Pick channels where your ICPs are active and target them with periodic and engaging content. Below are the common channels and what works in each of them:
Careers site:
According to LinkedIn’s research, 66% of candidates want to know about your company’s culture and values. A careers site provides a wide playground to showcase your company culture and provide information valuable to your candidates. Here are some ways you can make your careers site impactful:
Employer Value Proposition:
As mentioned already, an EVP encapsulates the value you provide your ICPs. Your careers site should therefore clearly and prominently highlight your EVP.
Employee testimonials:
Who better to talk about your culture than your employees? Include employee testimonials from different departments, hierarchies and demographics on your careers site to appeal to candidates from varied backgrounds.
Blogs:
Blogs are a great way to cover a range of topics that convey your culture; be it an employee’s day-in-the-life, your emphasis on diversity, how to prepare for technical rounds or a specific team’s culture.
💡Tip: You could ask your employees to volunteer for one-on-one sessions or chats with your careers site’s visitors. Like a product demo, this can help build conviction and boost chances of conversion.
Here are a few good career pages for your inspiration:
Social media:
Pick social channels where your ICPs hang out and create engaging posts that give a glimpse of your culture like pictures of a recent team trip or bring your dog to work day, employee video testimonials and the like.
Outreach:
90%- That’s how many professionals want to hear about your open job opportunities as per LinkedIn’s Global Trends Report. It is therefore important to find talent and nurture them on personal channels to build pipelines for current and future job openings. You can send periodic newsletters highlighting your culture, one-time email campaigns to announce an event or send a sequence of multi-channel messages to inform and seek interest in applying to a role.
Planning your posts
You have decided what content to post and where, it is now time to plan when to post and who writes them.
When should you post?
Consistency is the key to your content strategy’s success. You need to make sure you are posting regularly on multiple channels. A content calendar can come in handy in planning out your posts; you can plan posts for the coming week, month, quarter or whatever works for you. Good old spreadsheets work just fine to create a content calendar; you can find many free templates online (recommendation below) as well.
Who creates the content?
If you are lucky, there is someone in your team with good copy and content writing skills. Otherwise, your company most certainly already has content creators and marketers who can help you out. You can also encourage your employees to contribute to blogs, testimonials and wherever else possible. And there are always AI tools to the rescue (recommendations below)! Once you have a list of people who can contribute, assign them to each post in your content calendar.
Promoting content
SEO:
A great careers site is no good if it does not show up at the top of the search results. SEO revolves around best practices to boost your page’s rank and make it appear at the top of search results for relevant searches. When was the last time you viewed the second page of your search results? Turns out that less than 10 per cent of users move to the second page. Again, you can take your marketing team’s help here. But if you want to do it yourself, this detailed guide can help you get started.
Find communities:
You can find and engage with communities of your ICPs on different social channels such as LinkedIn, Slack, Facebook etc to boost visibility and engagement for your social posts and careers site.
Tools you can use
Social media posts, blogs and emails:
There are many free and paid AI tools out there. jasper.ai is a popular one for a wide range of content with a focus on brand consistency.
Job descriptions:
textio.com helps optimize job descriptions to be bias-free and inclusive.
Managing Outreach:
Humbird AI’s Talent CRM - You can create email campaigns, send and respond to one-off messages from the multi-channel inbox, or create sequences of email, SMS, WhatsApp and Inmail. You get detailed reports for every sequence and it seamlessly integrates with your ATS. Now is a good time for a demo!
Content Calendar:
Check out this template by Semrush.
What next?
Once your posts are up and running, you would want to periodically measure the success of your efforts, tweak and iterate to maximize success. The next article in the series discusses how to measure your content’s success like a pro.
