In the world of talent acquisition, employers have discovered that they can attract and source potential candidates by improving and personalising candidate experience. Working in conjunction with this, digital recruitment marketing is another avenue utilising social media, email marketing and display advertising to source the candidates you need.
For digital recruitment marketing to attract top talent effectively, companies need to consider several vital aspects. This article will show you what you need to do to take your digital recruitment marketing to the next level.
Understanding and creating accurate candidate personas
One of the first elements of a successful digital recruitment marketing strategy is constructing the persona of your ideal candidate for each department you could recruit for.
Your personas should be produced by gathering internal data that reflects the ideal candidate’s behaviour, interests, goals, and challenges.
Gathering the required data
When you begin gathering the necessary information to build your ideal candidate persona, you must focus on your business’s successful hires and placements. To understand what qualities are required in the role you’re recruiting for, interview the current professional working in that department. The data points that you should consider include:
- The background
- Personal attributes
- Goals
- Qualifications and experience
It will also be helpful to speak to other Recruiters and Hiring Managers who have recruited for a similar role in the past. Your aim is to accumulate as much information as possible for each position or job opening in your organisation. The more information you have to work with, the better the personas will be.
Data Analysis
Analysing the data you’ve collected allows you to identify the traits that a successful candidate should have. Using this information, your persona should start to take shape and form the basis for future recruitment. During your analysis, there are some essential questions you need to ask:
- What traits do ideal candidates share?
- What are their motivators?
- Where do they search for new jobs – social media, job boards, or marketing?
- What goals do they share?
This information will allow you to understand the attributes of candidates that are a good fit for a specific role and your company culture.
Writing your candidate personas
Information you gathered and analysed will form the basis of a hypothetical candidate for each role you may need to recruit for. If you choose, you can assign names and pictures to make them more realistic and multidimensional, but be aware of unconscious biases that may come from giving random names and images to personas.
Write SEO friendly job posts
When your company needs to recruit, you’ll want to share this vacancy as widely as possible to allow you to attract the top talent your organisation requires. So, the first step is to create an SEO friendly job post to advertise the role. There are a few steps to creating a friendly and robust job post; here are a few pointers that will ensure you attract the right candidates.
Keywords
For your job posting to be found when candidates search for roles, you need to brainstorm a list of keywords relevant to the position you are recruiting for. The job title is a prominent place for a keyword, and other keywords can be scattered through your job description to improve your chances of being found by candidates searching online for the role you are recruiting for. However, avoid using the same keyword repeatedly by using synonyms so the job site won’t censor you for keyword stuffing.
If your keyword strategy is well thought through and appropriate, when an ideal candidate searches for ‘X job’ in ‘X location’, your job posting should appear towards the top of the search results.
Appropriate URL
To improve your ranking in the search engine results, it’s imperative that your URL is both self-explanatory and as short as possible. In addition, keeping the URL short will ensure that your job posting has more opportunities to be indexed by the various search engines.
Finally, for your job posting to be successful and attract potential candidates to your website, it must be searchable. This means that you need to ensure that it is simple, relevant, and includes your chosen keyword, doesn’t include numbers or special characters unless absolutely necessary, and if required, use hyphens (not underscores) sparingly.
Social sharing
Social media is where millennials and Gen Z prefer to search for new opportunities, and so your job posting will be seen by the most appropriate candidates for your role. Additionally, the more a job opening is shared on social media, the better its search engine results will be.
The amount of traffic and shares influences the algorithm used by search engines, so posting your job description on high traffic job sites will get your role in front of more active jobseekers and improve your SEO.
Ideally, when you write your job post, the ideal length is between 500 and 700 words.
Diversify your marketing mix
When you are looking at the best ways to market your job vacancies to attract the largest pool of qualified candidates, job sites are by no means the only option available to you.
In recruitment, experimentation with your marketing is essential to effectively promote your job openings online. One option is to use graphics and photography for advertising your vacancy and try several different mediums to see which is most effective in attracting the type of candidates you need.
Use email to contact previously qualified job applicants from your applicant tracking system (ATS) or schedule mass texting campaigns using one of the many mass texting platforms like EZ Texting or Slick Text; many others are also available.
Creating career-specific pages on social media to market job openings allows candidates to find links to jobs on your website and is helpful to give updates on company culture and show recent press releases.
Attending job fairs provides you with a vast pool of active job seekers who you can meet, talk with and assess face-to-face. However, before attending a job fair, do your research and ensure that it will attract suitable, qualified candidates and is in the correct location.
Finally, reaching out directly to candidates who are qualified for the role you are recruiting for can be particularly effective as it allows you to sell the position and your company culture while you build rapport with them, complimenting them on recent achievements or discussing mutual connections.
Conclusion
Digital recruitment marketing effectively attracts the candidates you need to fill current and future roles. However, it requires some preparation and forethought to fully understand the type of person you want to attract to a position based on past successes. Additionally, you’ll need to think through preparing your job posting, SEO, and marketing strategy to improve your chances of finding the talent you need.
