Hiring top talent is no longer as simple as posting a job and waiting for the perfect candidate to walk through the door.

Okay, maybe it never was that simple.

But today’s candidates have much higher expectations of their employer than in years past.

Just as we can read reviews for hotels, watch video unboxings of retail products, and check out photos of every menu item at a restaurant, prospective job candidates seek the same type of detailed information about their future employer.

Candidates want to know about your company’s values. They want to know who their co-workers will be. They want to know about your diversity and inclusion policies. They want to know how you keep remote workers engaged. And, perhaps most importantly, they want to read past employee reviews.

Therefore, to bring in top talent, you have to create content that showcases your value as an employer and builds a strong employer brand.

This is known as recruitment marketing.

Through recruitment marketing, you allow candidates to learn more about your organization than what’s listed in the job description. 

In this guide, we’ll explore what recruitment marketing is and why it’s worth pursuing for your organization.

To help you get started, we’ve created a step-by-step guide to pull off a recruitment marketing plan that fills your recruitment pipeline and helps you fill more roles, faster.

Table of contents

• What is recruitment marketing?
• Why recruitment marketing is worth the investment
• A step-by-step guide to building a recruitment marketing strategy
• Popular recruitment marketing channels
• ✅  Screen your growing pipeline of candidates with TestGorilla

What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing tactics to enhance your recruitment efforts. It’s about creating marketing content that showcases your value as an employer.

The ultimate goal of recruitment marketing is to make it easier for your organization to find, attract, and nurture the right job candidates.

Recruitment marketing allows you to tell your employer brand story in all the places candidates may be when they’re looking for jobs or researching your company. This includes job boards, your website, social media profiles, and any other channel that may be relevant in your industry.

Typical recruitment marketing content consists of:

• Photos and videos
• Social media and blog posts
• Web pages (i.e. your Careers page or different landing pages)
• Employee interviews or testimonials
• Events
• Email campaigns

For example, you could post a video interview with a recent hire or hold a hiring happy hour where employees can invite friends for a free drink while you chat about open roles at your organization.

The possible forms of recruitment marketing are endless.

Recruitment marketing is about showcasing value

What does it really mean to apply marketing tactics to recruitment?

If you’re new to marketing or sales, you might think of cheesy TV ads or hard sales pitches from used-car salesmen. 

But good marketing isn’t about pushing anything. It’s about showcasing product fit at every step of the sales cycle.

In other words, it’s about showing how your product fulfills (or doesn’t fulfill) the needs of your customer. It’s about making a match or connections in your customer’s mind.

In a nutshell, recruitment marketing isn’t about selling your company to candidates. It’s about increasing awareness of and aligning your organization’s values with your candidates’ values in the form of helpful, informative content that answers their questions and erases any doubts.

Recruitment marketing supports the entire recruitment funnel

Recruiters and marketers both commonly use the concept of a funnel to describe the lead or candidate nurturing process.

There are countless versions of these funnels (and debates about their accuracy), but the general idea is that a candidate or potential customer is taken through several stages of discovery, where they get to know your company and figure out whether there’s a good fit.

Typical stages of the funnel include:

• Awareness: Learning that your company exists
• Interest: Learning about your company and how you may bring them value
• Consideration: Comparing you to competitors
• Evaluation: Making an informed decision
• Conversion: Choosing your company

It’s easy to see the parallels between the sales and marketing funnel and a recruitment funnel.

So where does recruitment marketing fit in here?

Many people argue that recruitment marketing is the “top of the funnel” in the talent acquisition process—i.e. recruitment marketing generates awareness for your job postings. They argue that recruitment marketing happens before the recruitment process begins, by introducing candidates to your job postings.

However, recruitment marketing should be thought of as an initiative that supports the entire recruitment funnel.

Yes, it’s true that recruitment marketing generates awareness for your job postings. But when done right, it also provides continuous value throughout the recruitment and hiring process, all the way to the point when the candidate decides to accept your offer or not.

How does recruitment marketing differ from recruitment?

You may be asking how this is any different than the role HR and recruitment already plays. After all, they share the same end goal: bringing great talent into your organization.

The core difference is that it’s a recruiter’s job to fill open roles by identifying and contacting potential candidates, whereas it’s a recruitment marketer’s job to tell a story that promotes your company as an employer.

These two concepts intertwine, but can be teased apart by these key differences:

How is recruitment marketing different from employer branding?

Your employer brand is your company’s image and reputation as an employer. Your employer brand is the outcome of your company culture, how you treat your employees, how your employees feel about working for you, what people say about working for you, and how people feel about you as a potential employer. 

Recruitment marketing is a series of tactics and strategies that showcase and build your employer brand.

In simpler terms, your employer brand is your reputation as a place to work, and recruitment marketing are the actions you take to improve and grow it.

Why recruitment marketing is worth the investment

Nearly every company has recruiters, but many companies do not practice recruitment marketing. 

This is in part because recruitment is viewed as a necessity—you have open roles, so you employ a staff to help you fill those roles—whereas recruitment marketing is often seen as an optional expense that’s simply an add-on or value-add to the recruitment process.

Recruitment marketing does take continual investment, which can create a barrier for organizations to take on the effort.

However, candidates today have higher expectations for employers than they used to, and they can more easily compare companies, which has turned recruitment marketing into a necessity.

Here are a handful of compelling reasons why your company should hop on recruitment marketing ASAP.

1. Showcase your culture

Candidates expect transparency from their employer—especially when it comes to company culture.

Candidates want to know if their values, working style, and career ambitions align with your organizational values and goals. 

Recruitment marketing allows you to show off the company culture you’ve worked so hard to build.

If your only form of recruitment marketing is job postings, you’re leaving your candidates in the dark. They won’t know what it’s like to work with you until they speak with you in the job interview. And they may not even bother to apply if they don’t immediately get warm fuzzies about your organization.

2. You get to own your story

No matter how amazing your company culture is, you’re bound to have a few detractors: every business will receive negative reviews from past employees on job boards at some point.

Unfortunately, ex-employees who had negative experiences are faster to rush online to leave reviews than your perfectly happy employees, and it might take you 40 positive experiences to undo the damage of a single negative review. Without a recruitment marketing strategy, you let other people tell your company story for you.

By proactively creating content, you get to tell your own story.

3. Attract passive candidates

An estimated 70% of the global workforce consists of candidates who are open to new opportunities but not actively looking for a job. They’re called passive candidates.

By pushing ads and marketing content to qualified passive candidates, recruitment marketing allows you to get their attention before they start interviewing with other companies and stay top of mind.

4. Reach a greater diversity of candidates

Diversity has countless benefits in the workplace—both from a social responsibility and business perspective. Many organizations have made diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) a priority, however employers often report a lack of diversity in the candidate pool itself.

Recruitment marketing can help attract a more diverse participant pool on several levels and help you overcome inadvertent unfair hiring practices. 

At the most basic level, recruitment marketing simply gets your company in front of more people.

If your strategy included posting on diversity recruiting sites like Diversity Working, Advancing Women, or Hire Autism, you would showcase yourself to these audiences as an equal-opportunity employer.

But there’s a higher level to this, too: recruitment marketing showcases your existing diversity and commitment to equality by transparently sharing your workplace culture and team members. 

Candidates can see firsthand that your organization is tolerant of people of all races, genders, abilities, and backgrounds, and will feel more accepted from the start, reducing psychological barriers to applying.

Pre-employment skills tests are one of the many ways you can show your candidates you value their skills and knowledge most of all, and that you’re committed to a fair hiring process. 

5. Help candidates self-select

If possible, you want to avoid spending a lot of recruitment time on candidates who aren’t a fit for your organization. While we’ve argued there’s no such thing as culture fit and that we should talk about culture add instead, there are certainly scenarios in which some candidates thrive more than others.

For example, if a candidate hates change and your organization is constantly changing and evolving, they likely won’t be a long-term fit.

If your recruitment marketing is open, honest, and transparent, you’ll make it easier for candidates to self-select.

In other words, you’ll give candidates more information to evaluate you as an employer before having to sit down for an interview (and potentially waste your time, and theirs).

6. Improve the candidate experience

Recruitment marketing doesn’t just benefit you, it benefits your candidates too.

According to the 2020 North American Candidate Experience Research Report, almost 35% of candidates said they would like to see career pages in multiple languages, 32% said they needed more information about the organizational culture, and another 32% wanted to know more about why they should choose one employer over another.

Providing answers to these questions creates a better candidate experience when applicants research, apply, and interview with your organization.

7. Reduce recruitment costs & attract better talent

All of these factors add up to making it easier to attract better talent to your organization with less recruitment effort.

As you build your employer brand through recruitment marketing, candidates will start coming to you, versus the other way around. A more full candidate pipeline combined with proper nurturing of that pipeline means better applicants and a better application-to-hire rate.

According to LinkedIn, a strong employer brand reduces the cost to hire by 50%, increases qualified candidates by 50%, and speeds up the time to hire by up to 2X.

A step-by-step guide to building a recruitment marketing strategy

To do effective recruitment marketing, you have to think like a marketer. This means understanding your audience, your business, potential tactics, and key metrics. 

Here’s a step-by-step recruitment marketing strategy to help you put an effective plan together.

1. Start by setting goals

What are your organization’s business and culture goals? How does HR and recruitment support those goals?

Without answering these questions first, your recruitment marketing strategy will be meaningless.

For example, is your goal to ensure a more diverse candidate pool? Increase your candidate pipeline? Improve the candidate experience? Reduce your average time to hire?

Collaborate with your company’s leadership to ensure you’re on the same page regarding your recruitment goals.

2. Define roles and expectations

You’re probably wondering: who owns recruitment marketing? Marketing or HR?

In truth, recruitment marketing is a collaborative effort between leadership, HR, recruitment, and marketing, so it shouldn’t fall to one individual or department.

Answer the following questions between your key stakeholders:

• Do you have your leadership’s buy-in?
• Which department’s budget does recruitment marketing fall under?
• How much budget do you have (e.g. for advertising)?
• What activities will HR be responsible for vs. marketing?
• How much capacity does your marketing team have to help?
• What are the expectations for content quantity, scheduling, and turnaround times?
• What will be your process for engaging with team members for testimonials?

Here’s an example breakdown for what HR typically takes care of versus marketing:

How you divide the workload will of course depend on the makeup of your teams and which tactics you decide to pursue later in your strategy.

3. Define your employer brand

As we covered above, recruitment marketing is the promotion of your employer brand. Therefore, a strong recruitment marketing strategy requires a clear understanding and definition of your company’s employer brand.

Start by creating an employee value proposition (EVP). This is a summary of the positive aspects of working for your organization.

Your EVP should answer:

• How does your business offer ongoing support to its employees?
• How is every employee recognized and valued?
• What are your company’s values? 
• What is your company culture?

You can answer these questions by reviewing your competitors or similar-sized employers in your region.

What makes you different? What would make someone choose to work at your organization over theirs? 

Remember: you’re not trying to appeal to everyone. You’re trying to create an honest reflection of your organization and where you’re heading.

It’s crucial that your EVP is honest. Otherwise, you won’t get buy-in from your employees and it will be hard to keep your story coherent and consistent.

4. Create target candidate personas

Marketers always create content with target buyer personas in mind. These are fictional representations of the ideal customer defined by demographic and psychographic details. For example, what is the ideal customer’s age, income, location, background, goals and challenges?

These personas are used to inspire content with an emotional appeal and a message that resonates with the target audience.

Creating candidate personas for recruitment marketing is a little more challenging, but equally helpful. For example, you wouldn’t want to introduce hiring bias by defining your ideal candidate by demographic details like age or gender. 

Instead, you can define candidate personas by ideal traits and attributes, such as:

• Job titles
• Experience and education
• Skills or interests
• Common pain points
• Values
• Must-haves in a job
• Nice-to-haves in a job
• Job search behavior
• Preferred online and communication channels

Come up with 3-5 specific personas that cover a range of possible target candidates. The idea isn’t to pigeonhole the only people you want to hire, but rather to give yourself inspiration for your marketing content.

For example, you may end up with Developer Denise, Marketer Matthew, and IT Ian. When creating content, keep all three of these personas in mind, and make sure you’re speaking to their ambitions, pain points, and values.

5. Develop a content marketing plan

Equipped with clear goals, roles, employer branding, and candidate personas, you’re finally ready to create a content plan.

Your content plan should consider the entire recruitment lifecycle—from attracting talent to your pipeline all the way to following up with candidates.

Your content plan should cover:

• Content subject matter: What will your content actually be about?
• Content formats: What types of media will you create?
• Marketing channels: Which online and offline channels will you prioritize?
• Content creation: How will you create content? What is your editorial and approval process? What tools/software will you need to manage or create content?
• Content distribution: How and when will you distribute the content you create?

We’ll cover all the recruitment marketing channels and content formats you should consider using below.

6. Capture candidate leads

Sometimes, candidates will be interested in working for your organization, but you won’t have any open roles that are a fit for them at the moment.

As a recruiter, you don’t want that candidate to forget about you and move on. You want to be able to notify them when a new role opens up.

That’s why you should consider capturing candidate leads (outside of job applications). This means having a form—typically on your careers page or website—where candidates can subscribe to updates about open roles in your organization. You might also want to invite candidates to follow your company on LinkedIn or on other social media channels. 

This allows you to build your candidate pipeline independently of your open roles at any given moment.

7. Engage with your candidates

Once a candidate has applied for a role or subscribed to career content updates, you can continue to use recruitment marketing tactics to support the candidate experience.

Thoughtful, periodic engagement throughout the recruitment process not only showcases your organization’s culture and values, but also shows that you are a thoughtful employer and forward-thinking organization.

For a job applicant, engagement tactics could include:

• Automatic email response thanking them for their application
• Pre-employment assessments
• Emails about what to expect at each stage of the interview process
• Rejection emails
• Email with employer branding content
• Feedback after interview(s)
• Candidate experience survey

These emails can include a combination of text, video, and images—be creative!

Don’t forget to engage with your candidate leads who haven’t applied to a specific role too. For candidates who subscribed to career updates from your organization, you can:

• Send a weekly or a monthly email digest with new roles
• Send an email nurture campaign with a pre-planned sequence of emails about your company
• Send a monthly or quarterly newsletter with company updates and career advice
• Invite them to job fairs

The options are limitless.

8. Measure your performance (and adjust)

Something any marketer will tell you is that there’s no marketing tactic that works flawlessly for every company. What marketing channel, content type, or messaging works for some will not work for others.

That’s why marketers always have to test, evaluate, and adjust based on what works and what doesn’t. The same goes for recruitment marketing.

The benefit of a digital recruitment process is that you can measure the effectiveness at every link in the recruitment and post-recruitment chain and then adapt your strategy as needed based on where you see the biggest gaps.

Here are some of the most important recruiting metrics and what they can tell you about your recruitment marketing strategy.

1. Conversion rate metrics

First, you have many conversion rate metrics to track various stages of the recruitment funnel.

• Visitor-to-applicant ratio: What percentage of people who visited your careers website or job posting submitted an application? Did some drop out during the submission process?
• Candidate-callback rate: What percentage of candidates returned your recruitment phone calls or messages?
• Application completion rate: What percentage of people who start an application complete it?
• Applicant-to-interview ratio: What percentage of applicants are chosen for an interview?
• Interview-to-hire ratio: What percentage of candidates interviewed end up hired?
• Offer-to-hire ratio/offer-acceptance rate: What percentage of offers to candidates turn into hires?

What these metrics tell you: Conversion rate metrics can show you at which stage you’re losing the most candidates, indicating where you need better marketing support. 

For example, if your visitor-to-applicant ratio is low, it signals that you need to improve the content on your careers site or the quality of your job descriptions. Or if your applicant-to-interview ratio is too high, it can signal that you need to use pre-employment skills tests to better filter out unqualified applicants.

2. Hiring metrics

You should also consider tracking various hiring metrics, such as:

• Time to hire: The average amount of time it takes to hire a candidate for a role
• Candidates per hire: The average number of candidates needed to fill a role
• Cost per applicant/hire: The average cost of filling a role or average cost to generate a single application

What these metrics tell you: These metrics help you track the overall performance of your recruitment marketing initiatives. The more recruitment leads you have in the pipeline, the shorter your time to hire will be. A gradually lowering cost per hire indicates that your recruitment marketing efforts are paying off.

3. Quality of hire metrics

But it’s not all about quantity and cost. You should also track quality of hire metrics, such as: 

• Quality of hire: This is the value a new hire adds to your company. How this is calculated depends on the organization, but typically factors in job performance, ramp-up time, engagement score, culture add, retention rate, productivity/revenue, and more.
• Retention rate: This refers to the ratio of employees who remained employed for an entire period vs. the starting number of employees in that period.

What these metrics tell you: It’s possible that your recruitment marketing efforts could create more applicants, which helps you fill roles faster, but that doesn’t speak to the quality of candidates. These metrics help you assess if you’re bringing in the right type of employees. If not, you could tweak your employer value proposition or improve your content quality.

4. Channels 

When it comes to recruitment marketing, you also need to determine which channels are producing the best results by tracking: 

• Candidates/hires per channel: The number of candidates or hires from each marketing source (including employee referrals)
• Channel conversion rates: The conversion rates of visitors-to-applicants or applicants-to-hires per channel
• Cost per channel hire: The cost of hire per cost spent on each channel

What these metrics tell you: You have a limited budget and capacity, so knowing which channels produce the best results is essential to creating a data-driven recruitment marketing strategy.

Whichever metrics you decide to track, it’s best to track them as soon as possible, so you can start to benchmark your recruitment marketing efforts against industry averages, and see how they change with time.

Popular recruitment marketing channels

Now that you have a good sense of how to execute an end-to-end recruitment marketing strategy, let’s explore the many channels available to use as part of your content strategy.

Add channels progressively as you go, optimizing one at a time. For example, start with great job descriptions before moving to your careers page. Then you can start scheduling social posts, before moving on to a newsletter.

Don’t feel like every piece of the puzzle has to be perfect before you roll out your strategy. You can’t tell what will work until you try. Eventually, you’ll get into a content-creation groove.

Here are the most popular recruitment marketing channels.

1. Careers page or website

Your careers page or website is the pillar of your recruitment marketing strategy, because every recruitment path will lead back to your careers page.

Therefore, in addition to housing your job postings (or at least linking to them), your careers page should give candidates a 360-degree view of what it’s like to work with your company.

Before you start, you need to choose the format. You have three careers page/website options to choose from:

• Careers page: A single page on your company website (e.g. https://www.taskrabbit.com/careers)
• Careers website (subdomain): A careers website hosted as a subdomain of your main site (e.g. https://careers.airbnb.com/ or https://jobs.nike.com/)
• Careers website (separate domain): A careers website hosted on a different URL from your corporate website (e.g. https://www.spotifyjobs.com/)

Which option should you choose?

The quick answer is that you should go with whatever’s easiest to integrate with your ATS (applicant tracking software) and your website design.

Most of the popular ATSs give you the option of either embedding a jobs widget on your main company website or hosting your job listings on a separate website domain or subdomain.

It typically comes down to your website design.

Creating a separate careers website or subdomain typically gives you more control over the design (e.g. the page layout and menu structure), as it can be built separately from your corporate website. However, developing and hosting a separate website is more expensive.

It’s best to discuss the pros and cons of creating a careers page versus a website with your marketing and IT teams to decide which option is best for your organization.

What type of content should you include on your careers website or page?

There are a few elements you need to include:

• Job postings: Prominently display your open roles so that your candidates can find them easily. If you have many open roles, consider splitting them by geography to make them easier to sort through.

• Company description & mission: If you’re not a major brand, it’s likely candidates won’t know what you do. Give at least a two-to-three sentence description of your company’s products or services.

• Company values: Sharing your company values gives insight as to what drives people at your organization. Netflix has a famous 4,000-word culture statement that acts as the backbone of their company.

• Benefits and perks: List the benefits your organization provides, whether it’s health care, fitness opportunities, team events, free meals, or anything else that may catch applicants’ attention. Pictures of team events are a bonus!

• Employees: Showcase your amazing team with real employee photos, stories, video testimonials, and more.

• What is it like to work for you? Do you offer remote work? Where are you located? What does a typical day look like? These are the types of questions candidates like to have answered through photos, videos, and stories.

• Recruitment process: If you have a multi-step recruitment process, explain it on your website so candidates know what to expect. Do you use skills tests? Do candidates go through multiple rounds of interviews? Do they have to complete test tasks? Let your applicants know.

• Diversity and inclusion content: To showcase your organization’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, include a statement about your organization’s stance on diversity, statistics about diversity at your organization, and any initiatives your organization participates in that promote diversity.

• Translated or localized content: According to the TalentBoard 2020 North American Candidate Experience Research Report, 35% of candidates cite a multilingual careers site as the most valuable marketing content. If your company does business in more than one language, consider having a translated careers website.

If your business has many international locations, consider localizing your careers website to display different content and roles in different regions.

You may also want to include:

• Company awards
• Business performance or financial information
• Engagement survey results
• FAQs
• And more!

Of course, many of the examples here are for major international brands with multi-million dollar budgets. Don’t feel like you have to mimic the scale of these careers sites.

Task Rabbit’s careers page, for example, is fairly minimalist in design, but still checks most of the boxes listed above.

Recommended reading: 10 best career pages in 2022 and tips on how to write one

2. Job descriptions & landing pages

While your job descriptions typically live on your careers site, they’ll also be posted on third-party platforms. For this reason, they have to pull some weight on their own.

A great job description includes:

• A clear, keyword-rich job title
• Who the role reports to
• A succinct summary of the job
• A list of the knowledge, skills, and competencies required
• The working conditions (such as location or physical labor requirements)
• Company benefits
• Company description
• Salary or compensation (optional)

For specific job description tips and templates, check out our post: How to write great job descriptions.

3. Job boards

As a recruiter, you’re likely well aware of job boards. These sites are search engines that aggregate job postings from around the internet.

Popular job boards include:

• Indeed
• LinkedIn
• Monster
• CareerBuilder
• ZipRecruiter

Social media sites like Facebook and search engines like Google Careers are also starting to feature job posts. 

Most ATSs can connect directly with job boards, so they’re a convenient channel for getting your postings in front of more people, fast.

While job boards usually offer a handful of free postings, most of them require payment if you’re posting several roles. Typical payment models include:

• Pay-per-click: Indeed and LinkedIn charge per click on a job posting, limited by a daily budget.
• Subscription: Monster and ZipRecruiter offer tiered subscriptions that allow a certain number of postings per month.
• Per posting: CareerBuilder and Workable charge per job post.

If you’re focusing on diversity hiring or hiring in a particular niche, there are also specialized job boards such as:

• Non-profit job boards
• Student job boards
• Military veteran job boards
• Disability job boards
• Job boards for different niches (e.g. legal, marketing, medicine, finance)

4. Job review websites

Job review websites allow current and former employees to leave reviews about working for your organization. They also typically encourage employees to provide information about salary and benefits at your company.

Glassdoor is the most popular job review platform in North America. With a free profile, you can fill out your company’s basic info and mission, respond to reviews, and access your profile analytics. With paid plans (no affiliation), you can add custom employer content and highlight featured reviews—effectively giving you more control of how your company appears on the website.

Job review websites are the double-edged sword of recruitment marketing. 

On one hand, they’re an additional opportunity to showcase your employer brand. On the other hand, they can quickly turn into a breeding ground for spurned former employees to vent about their negative experiences at your company.

What can you do about negative employee reviews? Here are some tips:

• Respond to all reviews on your profile, whether they’re positive or negative. It shows that you’re actively working to make your workplace better.
• Don’t respond defensively to negative reviews. Acknowledge any shortcomings that the review mentioned and what you’re doing to improve.
• Remember your audience. Your main audience for your review responses isn’t the reviewer, it’s future candidates. Use your review responses to teach them something new about your company.
• Encourage your current employees to leave honest reviews. Happy, engaged employees will be happy to leave positive reviews if it means attracting great people to your organization.
• Take the feedback to heart! If there are consistent themes showing up in the reviews, it’s a sign that you need to act on the feedback.

5. Social media

According to a 2020 Jobvite survey, 80% of recruiters planned on increasing their social media investments.

Social media is an invaluable tool for recruitment marketing. But it’s actually quite tricky to pull it off.

There’s major competition for eyeballs (your careers-oriented content is going to appear next to cat videos and sports highlights), so you have to make content people actually want to see.

Here are some popular social media recruitment options:

• Posts in your company feed: Most companies post occasional employer branding content interspersed between their usual social posts. 
• LinkedIn careers pages: This allows you to add an applicant-focused section to your LinkedIn page where you can feature your employer branding content.
• Separate careers accounts: Create a dedicated Instagram or Facebook page that only showcases careers content (best for larger brands).
• Employee-generated content: Create a company hashtag where employees can post their own workplace content. You can also use the feed on your careers page to keep your content fresh!

A note on organic vs. paid social: It may be tough to get many organic (i.e. unpaid) impressions on your social content when you’re starting out. Consider dedicating a budget to promoting (sponsoring) your social posts.

Bonus tip: Sometimes, an inactive social media profile that hasn’t been updated in years is worse than no profile at all. Only create social accounts you’re able to keep up to date.

6. Video

“Video” isn’t necessarily its own channel, as video can be used on most other channels, but it’s worthy of its own section because video content is so effective.

Your options are nearly limitless, but common examples include:

• Recruitment videos that showcase your overall employer value proposition
• Video job descriptions
• Interviews with your team
• Employee profiles
• Highlights of company events

For example, Galileo Learning created a series of high-quality video job descriptions for their summer camp positions.

While it’s ideal to have at least one professionally produced recruitment video in your arsenal, don’t feel like every video has to be perfectly polished. Sometimes, a highly personal selfie video from the hiring manager is enough to trigger extra interest in an open role.

7. Employee advocacy

Your employees are your best recruitment marketing channel, so include them in your recruitment marketing efforts.

Most companies have some type of employee referral program that offers incentives for referring employees. But rarely do companies actually supply employees with recruitment marketing materials to help make those referrals easier.

Some companies use employee advocacy tools that automatically push your content to your employees so they can re-share it on social media. These tools are really useful when it comes to recruitment marketing.

You can get creative here! Talk to your employees about how they think you should promote your open roles.

8. Recruiting events

Not everything has to be online! There’s still incredible value in meeting in person.

Recruitment events, such as open houses, meetups, and career fairs are a great way to establish your value as an employer, plus it’s a fun way to meet potential candidates.

It’s best to keep these events simple: offer networking opportunities, a Q&A session, a short presentation or two, and, of course, food and drink.

Recruitment events don’t have to be incredibly formal or highly advertised. You can host a recruitment happy hour where employees invite their friends who are interested in open roles, giving you a chance to meet face-to-face.

9. Nurture campaigns

Earlier, we discussed capturing candidate leads—for those candidates who simply applied for the wrong role at the wrong time.

Candidate nurture campaigns can keep those candidates engaged. For example, you can send a monthly email newsletter that:

• Shares your latest employer branding content
• Encourages candidates to follow you on social media
• Invites them to upcoming recruiting events
• Shares open jobs
• Offers career or application advice
• Shares recent positive employee reviews or testimonials

A nurture campaign ensures that you’re staying in front of candidates on a regular basis.

Screen your growing pipeline of candidates with TestGorilla

Assuming you pull off a flawless recruitment marketing strategy—which we know you will—you’re going to have a full pipeline of candidates and applicants.

TestGorilla’s pre-employment assessments help you screen your growing pipeline of candidates.

With TestGorilla, you can create high-quality assessments for each role using our ever-growing test library, allowing you to evaluate the best-fit candidates for your organization.

Try creating your first pre-employment assessment now with a free trial of TestGorilla.