When it comes to employer branding and recruitment marketing, you may hear people use these terms interchangeably. Recruitment marketing—aka RM—is the process of promoting your employer brand (EB) with the use of marketing methodologies throughout the recruitment life cycle to attract, engage, and nurture relationships with qualified talent. (builtin)

At the core of recruitment marketing, two types of content provide the foundation. 

• Awareness Content: designed to drive awareness of your company as a potential employer. This is not about pitching your jobs, so it’s best to focus on useful information about your organization such as sharing your EVP, your core values, awards your company has won, etc. 

• Decision Content: provides job seekers with more context about your company or open roles (and hopefully pushes them toward an eventual application!).

In a recent member call, Lindsey Sanford (Palo Alto), Jess Katz (MongoDB), and Jackie Denner (Mongo DB) led our discussion about recruitment  marketing. Here are a few highlights from the conversation.

What do you wish you knew at the beginning of your employer branding career? 

We’ve answered this one before here on the TBA Blog, but our call addressed a few additional thoughts. Primarily, people wish they clearly understood and could easily communicate that employer branding and recruitment marketing are two totally different things. 

Employer Branding = the story that is told

Employer branding has the potential for transformation, creating a sense of belonging for employees. It allows people to be who they are (which improves retention!).  

Recruitment Marketing = getting the EB story seen by its target audience

Recruitment Marketing is the process of building and communicating an organization's employer brand and employee value proposition (EVP) to attract and hire top talent.  It brings the EB to life, and it's how you “go to market.” RM supplements the brand, and you can use RM tactics to get the word out about your organization and its open positions. The main goal of RM is to drive talent to apply to the company’s open roles. 

People don’t trust brands. They trust people.

When it comes to being influenced, we believe what a person says over an organization that has something to gain by us listening. Because of this, employee advocacy is key in recruiting. When employees share about their companies on social media, people interact with the content much more than social posts and blogs from corporate accounts. It’s important to have some social media guidance in place so that employees feel empowered to post things on their own.

Different platforms yield different outcomes. 

To determine where to post ads—Facebook/Instagram vs. LinkedIn—investigate your target audience. Learn about which platform(s) has most of your audience. LinkedIn is great for targeted ads and is a good tool for generating new leads (RM). Facebook and Instagram are typically better for your employer brand because they have a broad reach (and are less expensive). These platforms are great for building awareness and engaging with potential talent because you can cast a wide net.

However, some TBA members have had great success with finding entry-level talent and hourly employees through Facebook ads. So it very much depends on your organization’s talent needs and involves researching which platform is best for your goals!

What advice do you have for the community?

Define your hypothesis – then keep testing it!

Testing takes time.  Just because one FB ad didn’t do well doesn’t mean you should stop doing them. And when you have promising results, don’t rest on your laurels. Keep watching metrics for any campaigns you have running. (Their performance could change!)

Do A/B testing with different creatives for your audience. What you discover may surprise you. For example, one of our TBA Members always thought the military wanted to see themselves in uniform in ads. She found out through A/B testing that the specific military audience she was targeting actually prefers to see pictures of themselves out of uniform with family, etc! 

Don’t rely on organic posts. Spend a few hundred dollars to reach your target audience.

Sure, organic posts are free and have the potential to yield great conversions, but a little paid boost can go a long way. You’re probably already spending thousands of dollars on HR tech tools and job boards, so why not spend a few hundred on social ads to reach a highly targeted audience? (builtin)

A few TBA members talked about partnering with Marketing to do more than just organic social posts and to learn more about the sponsored side of social media. This is where your relationship with the Marketing team is more important than ever! Marketing has been doing paid social posts for years, so let them teach you their ways, and you can alter it for your audience and recruitment marketing purposes.

Knowing what you know now, what would you repeat over and over again?

Having a phased approach to your RM strategy is very helpful and keeps you on target.

For example, start by utilizing your employees to create content. Work with someone in a key role and learn what it’s truly like to work in that department or on that team, then write it up in a “Why here?” “Why now?” blog. You can also include the hiring manager in the discussion and add that perspective. Once you have the post, promote the content to your audience on LinkedIn, and repurpose it on other social channels. It’s important to use engagement/awareness metrics (not application goals) in your targeting. 

Once an audience is familiar with your company from awareness content like a blog, follow up with a lead generation campaign. Although response rates may not be great (but they could be!), the quality of leads will be strong. Bring your recruitment team along for the ride, and don’t forget to provide metrics when you’re done. 

To scale this, have someone develop your content, for example an internal or external copywriter or the employees themselves if they are willing. Then showcase the content internally. When people are recognized in this way, it generally leads to more volunteers (and more blog posts to highlight!) 

When you have more campaign budget to run again, always retarget the “warm” audience.

What’s something you learned along the way that you would never do again?

Don’t make promises you can’t keep! 

When you run advertising strategies, you might think you can predict the outcome. What most of us have learned (or will learn) however,  is that you have to be very careful about what you promise stakeholders.  You may try to connect RM strategies to engagement and then hires. However, results often surprise you. For example, Facebook typically isn’t as successful in generating hires; it drives awareness, engagement, and interest, which gives your overall messaging a lift. 

There’s much more to recruitment marketing than you think, and we are always learning. That’s the beauty of this #talentbrand space! If you’re interested in being a part of these EB conversations in the future, join the Talent Brand Alliance today by clicking here. 

About our TBA Members: Haley Sasser and Jackie Fogas