Maximize Digital Marketing Efforts By Using Them As An Employee Recruiting Tool

As a digital marketer, you’re tuned into your conversion funnel and the strategies you need to deploy that move your audiences from awareness to purchase.

Have you ever considered thinking about prospective employees in the same way?

We need to nurture current and potential employees and communicate with them on their time and in their space. Essentially, we need to think of employee audiences the same way we think about our consumer audiences.

When it comes to hiring, we can think of the process like we think about lead generation, nurturing, and converting sales leads. Your brand is your calling card to prospective employees. According to CareerArc, 89% of passive job seekers will investigate your brand’s reputation before ever applying with you. That number is nearly matched by active job seekers at 84%. Your brand communication needs to be immaculate to serve the many, many, many audiences who are making decisions based on that experience.

It starts with a persona

As with your sales efforts, you can, and should, create personas. Who is the ideal candidate for your organization? What traits will allow them to sync with your organizational culture? Who are your primary competitors for this talent? What platforms are they using to search for job openings? What digital platforms do they use in general? What is important to your ideal candidate when they’re making career decisions?

Once you’ve done your homework and answered these questions. You can begin to craft a brand communication strategy that will speak to the ideal persona(s) for your organization in a way that resonates with them at a time and place that serves their needs.

Build your strategy

Armed with your persona(s) and the tone, voice, and messages start thinking about how to best deploy the digital strategies available to you. A few suggestions:

• Deploy a landing page for prospective job candidates. There are numerous advantages to you, and them, of creating a great landing page.
  • They don’t have to sift through your entire website right off the bat to learn basic information about the application process, the current openings, the values of your organization, and the benefits you offer.
  • You can add a retargeting pixel to the landing page to follow up with them and remind them of your brand after their visit.
  • You can qualify your leads via a simple quiz or pre-application process. Develop a lead scoring system based on responses gathered here.
  • You can invite them to view relevant content like employee blog posts and short video testimonials.
  • Effective SEO can help your brand page rank highly among the job seekers best suited to you.
• Use social media to share stories of your brand as an employer. What are your thoughts on an industry trend – TikTok versus YouTube Shorts or the role of telehealth in the current mental health access crisis? Using short-form videos (Instagram Reels, for example), content carousels, or photo arrays offer plenty of options for developing great social media content that showcases your organization as an employer.

You could share a case study of how you helped a client solve a problem but be careful not to come off with too much of a sales pitch. A prospective employee wants to know about the organizational culture and knowledge you brought to the situation more than they want to know you got a “win” for a client.

• Invite your current employees to blog about their roles in the organization. This is another content marketing tool that can be accessed via your landing page and publicized through your social media channels (including LinkedIn).

You’ll need to review and edit for consistent use of brand-standard language but it’s a great way to generate new content and shine a light on the thought leadership you’re developing among your employees. This is a great place to put those SEO keywords to work for you.

Track and analyze

Capture data from the potential employees who interact with your digital efforts. Who took the quiz on your landing page to see if they were a good match, and who simply provided a name and email address without diving any deeper? Who responded to your retargeting efforts and who didn’t?

Use some A/B testing or “funnel” testing to see which pieces of content or PPC is yielding the highest responses from the most-qualified candidates, then focus your resources there. Same with your SEO research. What keywords and phrases are yielding the best results for you? Work those strategically into your content marketing.

When it comes to hiring you, and the prospective employee, are looking for a good match between values and skills. Using the same strategies that develop good relationships with customers can also be a fantastic way to recruit new employees.

The digital marketing experts at ACS Creative provide smart, effective, and efficient solutions for your brand communication efforts. Let us help you find great employees.