Are you looking for a recruiting solution that helps you attract the right talent for your organization, enhance the candidate experience, and promote your brand?

If you’ve started to notice the flaws in your traditional outbound recruiting strategy, now is the time to consider inbound recruitment.

This recruiting strategy combines the best marketing principles and recruiting methods to help you attract top talent. Here’s all you need to know about inbound recruiting.

Table of contents

• What is inbound recruiting?
• Inbound vs. outbound recruiting: What’s the difference?
• What are the benefits of inbound recruiting?
• What is inbound recruitment marketing?
• How can you implement an inbound recruiting strategy?
• 3 efficient inbound recruiting examples that use search engine optimization
• ✅ Make skills tests as part of your recruiting process

What is inbound recruiting?

Inbound recruiting involves developing your employer brand to boost its appeal to potential applicants, which increases your chances of attracting job seekers to your organization and receiving more applications for your open positions.

Recruiters who use this recruitment methodology also use appealing employer brand content related to their brand to enhance their candidates’ perceptions of their organization’s business and team environment.

Inbound vs. outbound recruiting: What’s the difference?

Outbound recruiting is more of a traditional strategy, while inbound recruiting is a more modern recruiting approach.

Whereas inbound recruiting focuses on attracting candidates to your organization by enhancing your brand, outbound recruiting involves posting open positions on a job board or company career website and reaching out to candidates using cold-calling, ads, or events.

What are the benefits of inbound recruiting?

Inbound recruiting can also attract passive job seekers and enhance the candidate experience. The process gives you a wider candidate pool and requires less effort than outbound recruiting.

1. Attracts passive job seekers and facilitates decision making

Since inbound recruiting helps companies target skilled passive job seekers, it solves the complex paradox HR professionals sometimes face of struggling to choose from a candidate pool even though they have plenty to choose from.

2. Enhances the candidate experience with a strong brand

With an inbound recruiting method, you’ll create a strong employer brand, which will contribute to a better candidate experience.

In turn, this will lead candidates to share their positive impression of your brand with others, providing additional marketing for your company and further building your brand!

3. Gives you access to a larger candidate pool and helps to diversify your team

As a result of this additional marketing, you can expect the size of your candidate pool to increase, and you’ll begin to attract hundreds or even thousands of people who are interested in your company.

With a larger talent pool, you’ll be able to amplify your efforts to diversify your existing team and hire a candidate who has the right skills for your organization.

4. Requires less effort and lasts longer than outbound recruiting

Since constant communication with candidates and other time-consuming strategies, such as cold calling, are not a requirement of inbound recruiting, you’ll expend less effort with inbound recruiting compared with outbound recruiting.

Your recruiting team can focus their efforts on other areas of the recruitment process, such as developing an onboarding strategy.

You’ll also notice that inbound recruiting strategies have more long-term efficacy in terms of giving your organization a constant supply of potential candidates.

There’s no need to relaunch any recruiting efforts, as inbound recruiting lasts for a long time. Even though it takes longer to implement, you’ll notice long-term rewards for your efforts in terms of talent acquisition.

What is inbound recruitment marketing?

Inbound recruitment marketing is one of the cornerstones of inbound recruiting. Inbound marketing is a strategy that is used in the marketing field to attract clients or consumers to a brand.

It typically uses search engine optimization (SEO) and keyword research, social media marketing (SMM), analytics tools, and content marketing.

Inbound recruitment takes these inbound marketing principles and applies them to candidate sourcing and talent acquisition in the field of recruitment.

How can you implement an inbound recruiting strategy?

Create your inbound recruiting strategy by first focusing on an inbound marketing strategy and then increasing the awareness of your brand. Then turn your attention to candidate sourcing, and measure your efforts with KPIs.

1. Use the first stage of an inbound marketing strategy

Because your organization’s brand is an essential part of your inbound recruiting strategy, begin by using brand-enhancing strategies to attract candidates (which is the first stage of an inbound marketing strategy). Here are three ways to attract candidates:

• Describe the company culture, career opportunities that are open to your candidates, and training and mentorships that successful candidates will receive.

• Present the perks and benefits of your organization on an optimized company career page by using quality content that reflects your brand. Your content should show off the positive experience employees have, which will help applicants get an authentic look inside your organization.

• Produce regular content to continuously enhance the candidate experience and rank highly on Google’s search engine ranking pages (SERPs).

2. Create a talent pool and vet talent

When you begin to attract candidates, your next step is to vet applicants and assess whether their skills align with your organization.

For instance, if you’re hiring a software developer, you must find out whether your candidates have experience with particular coding frameworks or skills that your business uses. It’s no good hiring a candidate who only has expert Python skills if your team uses Ruby frequently.

The ideal way to vet talent and their skills is to use a good-quality skills assessment platform that offers the following benefits for inbound recruitment:

• Although you’ll have a broad talent pool when you use an inbound recruitment approach, skills assessments will facilitate the process of narrowing down your candidate options
• Even though inbound recruitment takes longer to implement than outbound strategies, you’ll save time during the vetting period with skills assessments
• Once you’ve enhanced your brand and found that you have additional spare time during the recruitment period due to your top inbound recruitment approach, you can focus on onboarding and effortlessly develop training programs based on skills test results

3. Assess and measure key performance indicators regularly

Use web analytics to keep track of your inbound recruiting efforts. For example, if you use social media marketing to attract and engage potential candidates, assess which social media channels are most effective at attracting applicants.

4. Use application completion rate metrics to evaluate efforts

Metrics and KPIs can also help you track whether the branding efforts you have expended on your company career page are working. Since branding and company culture attract the top 20% of candidates, one metric that can assist you in verifying the efficacy of your branding is the application completion rate.

This metric measures the ratio of applicants who have successfully completed an application for your open position compared with the total applicants who dropped out of the application process. Use it to deduce whether you need to tweak your branding efforts to reduce the applicant drop-out rate.

5. Use metrics to track and adjust your recruitment budget costs

Since inbound recruitment strategies change over time, the other benefit of monitoring KPIs and recruiting metrics is that you’ll notice if you’re overspending your recruitment budget on fruitless areas of your recruitment campaigns.

3 efficient inbound recruiting examples that use search engine optimization

Some of the SEO strategies that can help you implement an inbound recruitment strategy include building a landing page, creating a company blog and posting on it regularly, and regularly posting social media updates.

1. Build a landing page

As stated by SmartDreamers, a job landing page can be a sleek, conversion-centric part of your applicant funnel. Building one is a strategy that can help attract candidates to your organization, enhance the applicant experience, and encourage them to apply to your open position.

When you build your career landing page, keep in mind that application drop-out rates tend to be higher if the page is difficult to navigate, confusing, byzantine, or otherwise results in a poor user experience.

2. Create a company blog

A company blog that uses SEO approaches can help you attract applicants to your organization and drive organic traffic to your business. This recruitment marketing strategy involves implementing keyword research. You should also include employee profile features and share new employees’ journeys here.

3. Create social media posts

Creating regular social media posts on different channels is another strategy that uses SEO strategies to enhance your brand. Don’t limit this to text content—a social media strategy often works best when you post videos and pictures of the job and your offices.

The content you create should be broad in its scope—for example, you could create a video highlighting the best of your business’ brand. Or you might create graphics or charts to show the success of your organization.

Attract candidates to your organization with inbound recruitment

Implementing an inbound recruiting strategy doesn’t have to be difficult. When you plan your strategy, keep in mind the importance of your brand, and ensure the tone of your content reflects your culture and values.

Remember, if you use SEO strategies to attract candidates, monitor your KPIs and recruitment metrics to keep track of how your recruiting efforts are progressing. Make adjustments where needed to enhance the efficiency of your hiring process, and hire the right candidates for your position with a top inbound recruiting strategy.