You may already have a great content creation strategy, whether it’s in-house or outsourced to freelancers or an agency. That content is primarily designed to entice potential customers, inform and educate them, and ultimately drive them through your sales funnel on a customer journey that leads them to a purchase.
Some of your content may also be designed to raise brand awareness, but even here you may hope to convert awareness to customers in the end. But do you use content marketing for recruitment? Your knee jerk answer may be no, but content can be used to compel a potential colleague just as it can compel a potential customer.
Why use content marketing for recruitment?
From a content marketing perspective, think of customers as being no different from job candidates. The main goal (outside of sales) is for your content to build or strengthen a relationship between you and the reader.
In one scenario, that reader has applied—or is thinking of applying—for a role in your organization. They want to know more about your brand so they visit your website and your social media platforms to get a better idea of who you are and what you do. That can mean reading everything from blogs to the ‘about us’ section of your site so they can see your mission statement and core values.
In a second scenario, a reader or viewer has no plans to apply for a job but comes across some content that piques their interest. As in the first scenario, they read more and learn more about you. Once they have ingested enough information about you, they come to a conclusion that they’d love to work for your business and subsequently register interest or monitor your company for job opportunities.
As with potential customers, your content marketing is the first impression many job candidates have of you. Therefore, it can help attract quality candidates who can see that your business offers value and that you would be a good employer. They may also look at independent review sites to gauge the levels of employee satisfaction at your organization.
What types of content will potential candidates look at?
While someone may look at a wide variety of your content, there are some areas that draw focus. It can make a lot of sense for your HR team/department to collaborate with your content creators to ensure that any content contains information that will help both potential customers and potential recruits.
1. Blogs
Blogs can be a great way for someone to get a feel for your business. They often seek to establish your organization’s authority in the sector you operate in. The subject matter of blogs can vary greatly, from an overview of legal or regulatory rules that govern your sector to a discussion of a new product, the problems it solves, and the new features it might have.
In some cases, you might have a guest blogger from outside your business. Even this can leave an impression on a reader if your guests are carefully selected to bolster your company message. Links also play a vital role in blog content. Some may take you to other relevant posts, product landing pages, or a reliable source that validates any statements you have made.
By looking at your various blog posts, a candidate can establish the level of credibility your business has. Who writes the blogs can matter too. Appearances by C-suite executives or industry experts demonstrate that you want to provide a high caliber of information to your customer base.
One potential avenue that will appeal to customers and candidates alike is a series of behind the scenes posts. These can show employee experience, how a business treats its employees, what your company culture is like, and what a new recruit might expect. You could even consider including workers as writers or contributors.
2. Social media
In this omnichannel era, it’s likely that you have a presence on several social media platforms. Your content here offers candidates two different opportunities: to see the content you post and to see how you interact with users. When someone sees a brand interacting well, being friendly, answering questions, dealing with complaints and criticisms well, etc., this generates a positive perspective of its customer service tactics.
Similarly to active engagement on social media platforms, you can also utilize an SMS broadcast app to ensure timely and direct communication with potential candidates. This tool allows you to quickly share important updates, job postings, and event information directly to people’s phones, enhancing your outreach and engagement efforts in real-time.
Another thing job candidates will look at is the various videos you post on those platforms. 88% of marketers see videos as an integral part of your overall content marketing strategy. Videos can show the personalities behind your content, and make it easier to imagine your workplace culture.
Similarly to blogs, videos can cover a wide range of subjects from product demo videos to educational ones covering subjects like VoIP integrations. Behind the scenes videos can connect with both customers and recruits, providing valuable insights into who you are as a brand and as an employer.
As with potential customers, you want potential hires to see your business as worthwhile, transparent, and authentic. When creating your content try seeing it through the eyes of recruits as well as customers. What message would you take away from a video if you weren’t working for (or on behalf of) a business?
3. Podcasts
As of 2024, there are over 5 million podcasts with more than 71 million episodes available online. With more and more businesses including podcasts in their content creation strategy, they can be a great way of connecting with potential customers and recruits alike. They also offer the concept of saving time; people can listen to them while doing other things such as driving or working.
Podcasting offers a great opportunity to both spread awareness of your brand and establish yourself as a trusted authority and thought leader. By having a wide range of guests, from industry experts to leaders from your organization, you can provide insights that people will want to listen to.
Your podcasts can have a different subject with each episode. This means that a recruit can listen in and get a real idea of who you are and what you are trying to achieve. You could also incorporate the behind the scenes idea here, with guests being typical workers who can talk about what they do.
4. Infographics
Everyone loves an infographic! They can take a fairly dry subject such as operational auditing and transform it into something that’s almost fun. They’re a great way of taking reams of statistics and other data-based information and making them far easier to ingest than pages of numbers.
Getting an idea of what data or information means—but in a fraction of the time it would take to read (and probably reread) it in long form—can be a great marketing tool. It can be a very effective at-a-glance tactic to inform customers and recruits alike.
You could even use infographics as part of your recruitment process, showing potential hires how your process works and what stages are involved in recruitment. From application to final interview, an infographic can explain to them what to expect and even how long each stage of the process might take.
How to do effective content marketing for recruitment
You now have some idea of the types of content that can be used for both customers and potential recruits. How do you merge your content creation tactics so that content can appeal to and inform both groups?
1. Create a candidate persona
One thing brings all your efforts together, whether for retail recruiting or DevOps recruiting: the individual on the other end. You should have an idea of who you want to recruit and what skills or experience they may have. When you were looking at a marketing content strategy, there were probably several things you considered:
- Who are your demographic targets?
- What segmentation can you apply to break that target audience into different groups and use personalization to connect with them?
- What buyer personas can you build that reflect the demographic groups?
It’s no different when it comes to recruitment. You think about the role you will be advertising, look at the various requirements you have, and then build your ideal candidate persona. Identify any hard and soft skills that would be preferable, what previous experience you’d like them to have, and what their career goals may be.
With a candidate persona created, you can then generate a candidate journey map that highlights all the main tou 2. Collaborate chpoints a candidate will have. Which platforms are they likely to use, and for what purpose? Which format of content would they be most likely to engage with?
2. Collaborate
While your HR team may control most of the recruitment process, it helps to have input from other areas when it comes to your content marketing for recruitment strategy. By collaborating on recruitment content with other internal stakeholders, you can ensure that the correct information is being posted in the most engaging way.
It may also be down to you to incorporate HR’s ideas into the forms of content they identify as best placed to connect with potential recruits. You’ll need to decide where a line is drawn between content designed solely for recruitment processes and what doubles as normal content marketing.
3. Learn from the data
If you have data on past recruitment drives available to you, use it. Your HR team will want to track and monitor relevant data such as diversity metrics, so previous campaigns should inform any new recruitment process.
Every time there has been a recruitment campaign, you will have surveyed applicants on their experience. This may have focused on their experience as a whole, various touchpoints and pain points, and what stood out for them.
To further refine our processes and ensure that our content creation and posting schedules are as efficient as possible, our team uses a project time tracker. This tool helps us monitor how much time is spent on specific tasks and can lead to more informed decisions about where to allocate resources for maximum impact on recruitment strategies.
If you’re not doing so already, you should also ask applicants about the different types of content they encountered and how that content affected their view of your employer branding.
4. Timing
Customer-centric content may have a specific timeline that will move people through your marketing funnel and into your sales funnel. You have to think about where this timeline intersects with the timeline for your recruitment process. Recruitment may have a set timeline, so you need to identify content that will achieve certain benchmarks within that time frame.
You will be posting a lot of content regularly and some of that content, such as blogs or podcasts, will follow a set schedule. Social media updates may be daily while email marketing, excluding tactics like unlimited warmups, might be only monthly. Look at where your two timelines offer opportunities to insert content that enhances the recruitment process.
5. Keep in touch
You can look at the recruitment process and the need for good content marketing for recruitment to be ongoing and constant. Just because someone is not successful for a current advertised role does not mean your (or their) interest stops at the end of that specific process.
They may continue to monitor your content and wait for another opportunity to present itself. While you obviously hope to have high staff retention rates through good employee engagement, there is always natural turnover which means you will need to fill those positions. They may also join your mailing list and, if there are enough previous candidates doing so, you could segment them into their own group and offer personalized content.
The takeaway
Of course, you are going to create some content that is only focused on the recruitment process and the roles available. What you need to consider is that nearly all your marketing content can also be viewed as content marketing for recruitment. Recruits will look at your content to gain insights into your brand, your processes, what you do, and what you’re like as an employer.
There has to be some awareness of recruitment needs in all your promotional tactics, including any PR releases, social media marketing, and any other content you utilize. Keeping one eye on your marketing funnel and the other on any recruitment process means you can produce content that will appeal to both audiences.