The Optimal Mix in Recruitment Marketing: Advertising Jobs vs. Content

Most companies today are heavily focused on job advertising, or emphasizing why qualified candidates should apply for a position, with a more transactional approach in talent acquisition. However, without variety in their recruitment marketing their efforts will fall short.

The optimal strategy has a mix of job ads and ads with meaningful content that answer the viewer's questions such as "Why should I want to join the company". In this article, we will consider some of the most prevalent questions when optimizing your company's recruitment marketing strategy.

How can I attract more quality candidates?

A common problem when trying to fill an open position is not just acquiring applicants, but making sure they are quality candidates. A lot of the time you’ll get more applications than you need, and a fair amount of them will have irrelevant skills that don’t match the ones you need for the role. You want to be sure you are making the right hire for the position, not just the most convenient one. So how can you increase the volume of quality applications? Consider the factors of the job advertisement first such as:

Compensation
Required skillset
Location
Experience level
Competition

If you know from this information that the candidate pool is going to be small, you will have to be more proactive when it comes to hiring. The goal here is not to simply attract applicants but is to attract the few qualified candidates that fit the role perfectly. In order to put yourself in the best position to do so, consider utilizing your company website, referral programs, employee testimonials, and online recruiting to find the message types of messaging to engage potential hires.

Some great examples of job ads include:

Your Website

Make sure you know your company's mission and values forwards and backwards, and make them extremely clear on your website. Another element that needs to be expressed through your site is your employer brand or your reputation as a place to work. If these key components are not evident on your website a candidate cannot assess if they are a fit. Whether or not someone is an active or passive job seeker, they’ll invariably be aware of your company, so you need to ensure you have your best foot forward to catch the attention of a suitable candidate before they even need to start looking. Once they see a potential job opportunity, the first thing that a qualified candidate will do is go to your website before ever applying for the job. Those candidates that know they are qualified are going to have their own requirements for the companies they want to work for.

Optimizing your careers page will help to bring in top candidates. Those that apply directly through a career page are more likely to get hired than applicants from a job board. This is because a candidate that takes the time to research the company will typically be better qualified for the position and take the application more seriously. It is easy to mass-apply on job posting websites. While this is a great feature, it results in an influx of unqualified candidates.

UiPath career page is a good example of a candidate-centric approach to content and experience.

Referral Programs 

“Good people know other good people”

Employee referral programs are very effective for attracting quality candidates as well. Since a company’s greatest advocate is its employees, they are the best ambassador for sourcing candidates and encouraging them to consider the employer’s brand and reputation. Therefore, consider implementing incentive programs such as more time off, monetary bonuses, gift cards, etc... to motivate employees to seek out possible new hires. 

Another benefit is that employee referrals have a higher rate of receiving offers, consider themselves more loyal to the company, share the company’s values,  and also tend to stay with the company longer than hires from other sources. 

Testimonials 

Anyone that is seriously considering a job with your company is going to read any reviews online that they can find. More often than not, those reviews are written by disgruntled ex-employees or applicants that were turned away. This should be an incentive to make sure you have a positive candidate experience with everyone you are engaging with whether they are hired or not. Encourage your current staff to be writing reviews online about the company, as well as from customers and clients.  

Job seekers trust these testimonials because they come from real people just like them. People trust people above all else so make good use of employee testimonials and company reviews. 

Social Media And Industry-Specific Job Boards

Social media is an easy way for people to learn about your company and see the more personal side of the business. You can share photos from company events, individual testimonials, recruiting graphics, and more to attract and inform potential applicants. What’s critical to remember is that social media is just more than posting an update and waiting for results. Utilizing social media also means joining groups on Linkedin or Facebook to answer questions, post articles, conduct surveys and build relationships that can bear recruiting fruit. Certain social media channels offer specificity in the types of followers they attract and subjects that they focus on.

Givaudan social ads are deployed and managed via the SmartDreamers platform.

Extending from that is turning to specific job boards to find niche talent. If you’re looking for certain hard-to-fill roles such as FrontEnd Developer or Full Stack Developer you can turn to Stack Overflow Jobs, for example. Or, post to Mediabistro if you want to share a job in the media industry or Engineering.com for Tech and Engineering gigs. If you know where job seekers who are looking for work congregate, then you’ll find the perfect environment for recruitment.

What type of message will engage my audience most?

A lot of companies struggle to get the most suitable candidates to see, engage with or apply to their roles. This is because there are specific messages that are going to attract different types of candidates. Your company has to make sure that the messages that are being used are targeted to the right people for the job. By that same token, care must be taken to offer potential recruits these job opportunities in a medium that will resonate with them. 

For example, the typical job advertisement is text-based, outlining requirements, skills needed, compensation, and some measure of employee benefits. But does that truly encapsulate your brand identity and what it really means to work for you? Or are there other ways, in tandem with job postings, to share opportunities and demonstrate how your workplace will be better with them on your team?  

1. Tell a Story

The most experienced candidates will be judging your company just as much as you are judging your applicants. It is important to tell a story through the job ads being used. The ads, job descriptions, and company website should tell more than just a blurb about the position. This content needs to reflect company culture, values, and day-to-day life in the office. 

This can be done via content on your website that includes employee testimonials, blogs, customer reviews, and even awards and badges of recognition from industry professionals and authorities. As well, the way the site is laid out tells a narrative of who you are as a company. A bright and easy-to-use website, that entices a potential candidate to take a journey through everything the company does, will do wonders for convincing someone to apply. A boring, hard-to-navigate, and relatively outdated website could convince the client that it might not be a good fit for them.

2. Photos/Video Content 

Video content has been proven to attract more engagement than still photos or graphics. Especially if it’s specific to your organization. Using videos and photos of your actual employees, conducting their everyday duties, as well as enjoying each other’s company, it’s the pinnacle of an engaging recruitment ad. However, if you don’t have access to videos or internal photos, you can find free high-quality images and videos, or stock images, to use in your marketing and social media. Frankly, any visual content will increase engagement on your job advertisements and help promote your organization. If you hope to attract great applicants your content and ads have to be appealing. 

This becomes doubly important when looking to staff highly technical and hard-to-fill roles as you can demonstrate the particulars of a job posting via photos and videos, rather than just posting a long list of required programming languages and competencies. There’s a lot to be said for showing, as opposed to just telling.

L'Oreal video ad deployed and managed via SmartDreamers platform.

3. Automation

Implementing your recruitment marketing strategy gets infinitely easier when you can automate your efforts in tandem with the earlier points. Everything from candidate attraction, resume evaluation, and sorting, to conversion and nurturing can be automated through data-driven software. This software can manage budgets, collect and organize data, offer scalable RPA and API integrations, and more, giving you the time to focus your efforts where they’re needed. While you can be mindful of where you place your recruitment advertising and do everything else right, you still may have a lot of irrelevant applications coming your way. Automation takes the onus off of you and your HR teams to sort, evaluate, and approves only the candidates you want. 

Utilizing SmartDreamers 

Most job postings are a one-way flow of information, with very little feedback. You place a job advertisement on a job board or a “work for us” page and based on the replies, you gauge interest in the position, hopefully, conduct relevant interviews, and walk away with a hire. But that’s becoming an outmoded model of thinking. Today, you need data to find the right candidates for the job on the right platforms. Without monitoring data, you can’t know if you’re really optimizing your recruitment marketing. SmartDreamers can help you to take your data and insights to the next level. Our program makes advertising jobs and talent acquisition as hassle-free as possible by automating your social media posts, managing your vacant position postings, importing CVs, and helping you nurture leads. We monitor a variety of metrics in order to show how long-term campaigns are performing and how to improve them. The more data we can track, the better the quality of your new hires will be.

Whether you are currently seeking new talent or thinking long-term, begin to track your metrics today to help you to acquire the best talent available.