7 Steps to build your own recruitment marketing campaign (Free workbook included!)
Recruiting is not getting any easier. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Monster, 67% of recruiters say their jobs are harder today than they were five years ago.
Talent acquisition teams increasingly need to think outside of the box and consider creative solutions to get in front of the passive talent they want to land.
→ This is where recruitment marketing campaigns come into play.
This blog post, based off a presentation we delivered at Art of Talent Conference on November 13, 2019, will provide all the details you need to launch your own recruitment marketing campaigns to achieve your talent objectives.
What is a recruitment marketing campaign?
Put simply, a recruitment marketing campaign is a strategic marketing effort to get in front of a target talent demographic and drive them to action.
The strategic marketing efforts that go into launching a campaign can vary quite a bit. Here are the seven steps you can follow to launch your own campaign (or, if you’re short on resources or time, partner with us and we can launch for you!).
As you walk through these steps, you may also want to access our FREE build your own recruitment marketing campaign template. You can mark up this document directly to create your own blueprint for your first campaign.
Step 1: Establish your objective
Before launching a campaign, you need to decide what you ultimately want to get out of it. Setting up your campaign objective will help set the stage for all the other decisions you need to make.
Here’s a list of some of the typical recruitment marketing campaign objectives our clients tend to approach us with (the first three are the most common):
Build employer brand awareness
Boost pipelines (potentially in a new market or with a new demographic)
Increase applicant numbers for a particular job type
Shift how a talent audience thinks of you as an employer
Drive traffic to your new career site
Get people to join your talent network
Keep silver medalist candidates in your ATS engaged
Boost attendance for a company open house or recruiting event
Pick from the list above or come up with an objective based on the specific people goals your organization is currently looking to achieve.
Step 2: Define your target audience
Beyond your objective, another guiding star for your campaign is determining your target audience. You can do this by developing candidate personas that answer the following types of questions:
Who are you trying to reach?
Where do they spend time online?
What does their life outside of work look like?
What are their pain points with their current role?
What are their motivations for moving?
You can use our candidate persona template in the free build your own recruitment marketing campaign workbook to answer these questions.
Creating a candidate persona is useful for three reasons. It will help you to:
Choose where and how to publish or share your campaign
Create content that is interesting to your audience
Set the ad targeting criteria if paid ads are part of your campaign
Step 3: Develop your content
Once you’ve firmly laid out what you’re trying to achieve and who you’re trying to target, it’s time to think about what type of content to create.
To create content that stands out, we’d recommend using an element of your employee value proposition (EVP) in your content. If you’re not sure what an EVP is, you can read all about it on our blog, “What is an employee value proposition? And why do you need one?”
If you don’t have an EVP, you can instead consider the ways that your company stands out from hiring competitors by asking yourself and colleagues questions like:
Why did you join our organization?
What motivates you to stick around?
How does our organization stand apart from other employers?
Consider who you are writing to and then create something that shares how you stand out from the crowd. Otherwise, your content will simply blend in with all of the other white noise out there!
Step 4: Pick your channels
As part of your candidate persona work, you should do some research to see where your candidates are spending time online.
For example, Stack Overflow conducts an annual developer survey that reveals the top social media platforms in the U.S. where developers spend time online. The 2019 results reveal that these are the top platforms:
Reddit
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Instagram
Once you know which platforms are most popular with your demographic, consider piloting ads across the top two to three spots.
You can then combine these ads with other organic (free) channels, like: community groups, your employees’ networks, and email marketing to your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) database.
Lastly, depending on your campaign goals, you may also want to consider which job sites you want to post ads on, such as Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, etc.
If you are considering posting job ads, we recommend using programmatic job advertising to get the most bang for your buck. This is a machine learning software that can garner amazing results because the job ad budget is optimally distributed to wherever jobs are performing best. We manage programmatic job advertising campaigns for our clients at The Employer Brand Shop, so let us know if you’d like more info!
Step 5: Set up your ads
From here, it’s time to actually set up your ads within each platform.
This is fairly easy to do. Advertising platforms are simple and intuitive so that the widest number of people will be likely to use them and spend money in platform!
Simply google whatever platform you want to post an ad on and the word “ads” to get started.
On any platform, you will typically have to set your objective first. Go back to the objective you’ve set for your recruitment marketing campaign and try to pick an objective from the platform list that matches as closely as possible to your recruitment marketing campaign objective.
The objective you set will impact the way you pay for the ads (i.e., are you paying for views or paying by clicks?) and the way your ads are optimized to deliver results for you.
From there, each platform’s targeting criteria (who you’re sending the ads to) looks a little different. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram have the best targeting options for recruitment marketing audiences, because you can drill down quite specifically by location and job title. However, if your audience isn’t using those platforms as much, it might be worth trying ads in a different spot - like on Amazon, Reddit, YouTube, or even Spotify.
Step 6: Plan out your campaign journey
It’s important to think through exactly where you want to send the people you are targeting the campaign to. If you don’t include a specific link or next step, then all the efforts you are going to will be for nothing - you likely won’t be any closer to achieving your objective.
Here are some typical places where you might send your target audience, based on what you’re looking to achieve:
Build employer brand awareness → send them to your career site for more info
Increase a talent pipeline → send them to a landing page or LinkedIn pipeline builder tool
Boost applicants for a specific job type → send them to a job description or the job family landing page for that role
Increase attendance for an upcoming recruiting event → send them to an RSVP or ticketing page
Step 7: Measure results
Last, but definitely not least, time to measure the results of your efforts!
Measuring results is very important because it helps to validate what you’re doing so you can secure more budget. The more budget you have, the more great outcomes you’ll see from your efforts. Plus, tracking results also lets you see what’s working and where you can improve over time.
That being said, when it comes to digital marketing, there are a thousand and one metrics you can track. And since most of you reading this probably aren’t doing recruitment marketing on a full-time basis, you won’t have time to track everything under the sun.
So, to drill down on what you should measure, think back once again to your overall objective. Determine what metrics will show you if you’re making progress towards that objective and focus solely on those metrics instead.
Here are a few examples of what you can measure by objective:
Build employer brand awareness → number of impressions or views, clicks to visit your career site to learn more
Increase a talent pipeline → number of new leads collected in your ATS / talent network / LinkedIn pipeline during a campaign period (can compare with prior period for baseline)
Boost applicants for a specific job type → average number of applicants per relevant open roles on average during a campaign period (compared with prior period for baseline), source of hire
Increase attendance for an upcoming recruiting event → number of event attendees (compared with prior non-campaign period events), number of clicks and conversions on RSVP or ticketing pages
Questions? Get in touch
We know that was a lot of information for one blog post! If you have questions or need help getting started, please get in touch directly at kaitlyn@theemployerbrandshop.com.
About The Employer Brand Shop
The Employer Brand Shop is a boutique recruitment marketing and employer brand agency located in Kitchener, Canada. Our team helps organizations around the world attract and engage talent using creative marketing strategies.