5 Content Marketing Best Practices That Can Help You Recruit

As a recruiter, you need to put on a marketing hat. I know you’ve heard that before; after all, “recruitment marketing” is all the rage. You can whip up amazing job descriptions seasoned with photos and videos, and blog posts peppered with engaging “about us” messaging, but if your target audience isn’t seeing them, much less consuming, why bother? Take it from a content marketer working in the trenches… here are five hard-learned rules to up your recruitment marketing game in 2015. 1. Measure your channels It’s always eye-opening to check the numbers. As content marketers, we analyze traffic to our website and blog, as well as followers earned and engagement on every single social media channel. This tells us where to invest and where our audience is consuming our content. This will change over time, of course, so it’s important to regularly monitor your top channels to help hit your team’s objectives. As a recruiter, your career site matters, but it isn’t the only real estate to watch over. Check your candidate messaging on every social channel—measure the jobs they’re clicking on and which are converting to applicants. “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen,” marketers like to say. Numbers talk! They can help you build a business case in where to invest to recruit top talent. 2. Develop personas Marketers think about buyers and their pain points; for example, what specific content might help them at any given time? For recruiters and candidates, the same applies. Prep for interviews by researching where your candidates are coming from. Create personas of those you hope to hire for each role. This will help frame why your company is the right choice, why your company is better at addressing pain points they may have suffered at their last company. Give concrete reasons why your company is different and will meet their needs. Personas also help you satisfy candidates’ cravings to be spoken to uniquely—a one-size-fits-all message won’t work to both engineer and sales candidates. Persona research helps you target the right talent with the right message. For example, we surveyed two talent groups on Glassdoor and found:

• Sales Professionals: 68% will be looking for a new job in the next year, but only 7% say blog posts from other sales professionals help them uncover opportunities.
• Software Engineers: 25% will be looking for a new job in the next three months, and 33% say blog posts from engineers within the company hiring help entice them.

Pro Tip: With a Glassdoor Free Employer Account, you can easily see who is visiting your page based on age, experience and jobs they are clicking on. You can also filter by reviews from employees who have a positive business outlook versus those who don’t, and those who would recommend your company to others and why. This can help you hone in on attributes to use to attract your next all-star! Also, if you're looking to target more specific audiences, check out our useful guides on recruiting software engineers and sales professionals to get inside the minds of these specialized individuals. 3. Plan plan plan Create a content calendar detailing upcoming posts and where. If you have hiring pushes during certain months or quarters, a calendar can help you keep track of the content needed to hit those goals, as well as measure and monitor the results against KPIs you’ve set. 4. Make it about them, not you! We all know your company is awesome. That’s why the candidate applied! But a job description and “about us” messaging is more about speaking to the candidate’s specific needs and how your company plans to meet them. Sell them on the job experience both online and when they come in to interview. Remember, candidates are interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing them. Explain why a role is the best fit for them and their key strengths. 5. The 3 R’s: recycle, reuse, repurpose When your job descriptions speak to the talent and personas you want to hire, repurpose, recycle and reuse the messaging where appropriate. For example, there’s no need to re-cut videos over and over again for positions on the engineering team or jiggle universal content like your mission statement. Instead, spend your efforts on customizing content for hard-to-fill posts. Repurposing is also a great way to do maximize the time and budget spent on creating original assets. For example, video testimonials can easily be turned into great social posts, blogs and syndicated across different channels. Content marketing Once you have the right content and personas, it’s all about picking the right channels to find, influence and attract your target talent. In the words of Jenny Terry-Tharp, Director of Staffing Strategic Initiatives at AT&T, content is king, but distribution is queen! Where you post your content (and how) can make all the difference.