As a marketing professional, you’ll be well adept at maximizing your brand in order to attract new customers. But have you considered how brand marketing can increase your candidate attraction efforts too?
After all, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for organizations to entice candidates out of their current roles, with the ONS reporting that UK employment hit another record high at the end of last year.
As such, if you want to secure the top talent in 2019, you need to position your company as an employer of choice. With this in mind, below we explain how brand marketing can increase your candidate attraction efforts and what you need to do to get in front of potential employees.
Before you get started, ask yourself, what does your brand say about you as an employer? If you were a potential candidate, what would you think about the organization if you were to visit your website?
Your brand isn’t just your company logo and website. It’s how you interact with customers and candidates, and the type of information you put out into the public domain.
With this in mind, think about how you want to position your brand and how you want candidates to view you as a potential employer. For example, while you might adopt a formal tone with potential customers, you may choose to speak to candidates in a more ‘human’ manner.
Once you’ve figured out how you want to get your brand across, you can start to explore different ways of using your brand to increase your candidate attraction efforts.
When it comes to marketing your brand, having a social media strategy is vital. With the potential to reach thousands of users, it’s important that you’re not only pushing your products in front of prospects, but also using these platforms to boost your candidate attraction efforts.
So, consider the messaging you want to put out there. A mix of different content is the best approach. You might want to promote specific vacancies in your company, pulling out the key perks of each specific role. For example, you may include the names or details of exciting clients or projects they could be working on, the software they’ll use and any bonus schemes they may benefit from.
You may also want to push positive images around internal events, employee promotions, or successful campaigns that individuals have worked on.
Alongside this, another way to showcase your brand is to publish employee testimonials. Ask your employees why they wanted to join the company and what they enjoy most about their job and working for you. Then, write these up into short, snappy posts and use images to help bring them to life.
This is something that we do at CV-Library and it gives a nice snapshot into what it’s like working in certain departments. We’ll then link these posts to the relevant section within our careers page.
One thing to be aware of with social media platforms and employee review sites is that while they’re great for employees to promote your company in a positive light, they also open up the potential to be targeted by disgruntled employees, past or present.
So what should you do if you get a negative employee review online? It might be tempting to shy away in the hope that no one will see it. But, it’s likely that with a quick search on Google, candidates will find it some way or another.
As such, use these platforms to take control of your brand marketing. Address any concerns that are raised and show that you’re taking a proactive approach to bettering your workplace. In doing so, potential candidates will see that you’re committed to keeping your staff happy, only helping to improve your candidate attraction efforts.
Whether it’s called ‘Work for us’ or ‘Careers’, having a dedicated area on your website that explains the benefits of working for you is crucial. As mentioned above the vast majority of potential recruits will research your company online, so make sure you’re giving them the insights they need.
Your careers site should be the hub of all of your recruitment marketing efforts. Especially as candidates will go to your company website first. So, be sure to include relevant images, employee testimonials, details of your vacancies, interesting stats and information on the key perks you offer.
What’s more, you could also include information on any awards you’ve won. Essentially, it needs to give the ‘wow’ factor, making candidates want to join your company, immediately.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is now a huge part of recruitment and the good news is, you’re likely to be one step ahead in this area if you work in marketing. With this in mind, consider how you can utilize SEO in your brand marketing efforts, particularly when it comes to your careers site.
For example, if you have a company blog, make sure you’re using it to publish insightful content that people within the industry are going to want to read. That might include posts such as ‘A day in the life of a content marketer’, or ‘What’s it like to work in content marketing’.
It’s extremely important to be competitive and if you’re seen to be a marketing thought leader, potential candidates will be more familiar and engaged with your brand.
Again, SEO is important nowadays as most candidates start their job search on Google, so think about what you can do to make to work for you. That includes optimizing your job posts by using the correct keywords and including important details such as salary and location.
A huge part of brand marketing comes into play when you’re speaking with potential recruits. Nowadays, candidates are king and you need to ensure they have a positive experience of dealing with your company. With this in mind, ask yourself the following:
These are just some examples and certainly not an extensive list, but it should get you thinking about how you’re interacting with candidates and whether it could be impacting your attraction efforts.
After all, individuals that feel as if they’ve been waiting around for too long, or that have multiple offers on the table, will likely go for the opportunity where they feel most valued.
If you’re looking to grow your workforce in 2019, ensuring that you understand how brand marketing can boost your candidate attraction efforts is extremely important.
So, be sure to make the most out of social media, your careers site, and SEO, as well as practicing good communication, and you’ll stand a much better chance of securing the best recruits this year.
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