Perfecting Your Recruitment Marketing Mix with Content and Job Advertising

Inbound recruiting has changed the game when it comes to finding and attracting talent. Before the shift to inbound recruiting, candidates typically learned about your brand through job boards or referrals. While job boards are still incredibly important for inbound recruiting, the way candidates discover you has fundamentally changed. Recruitment marketing strategies are evolving.

Job seekers are more eager than ever before to learn about their prospective employer’s culture, values, leadership, accolades, and employees before applying for an open position. A successful inbound strategy puts content front and center to lead candidates’ understanding of their employer brand. Recruitment content is one of the most effective ways to tell your brand story to job seekers and opens up other opportunities, like more targeted job ad campaigns.

Why Content and Storytelling are Key to Recruitment Marketing

Given the recent turmoil in the labor market – from high profile layoffs at big tech, to the spotlight on toxic workplace cultures – today’s candidates are more selective than ever before. Here’s where a content-first approach to recruitment can help.

Using stories to sell products is nothing new, but as marketers would tell you, a well-told story can be more memorable than a branded message. In fact, a good story is one of the most effective ways to persuade and is often more convincing than a recitation of facts and statistics. Stories are built to resonate with us as humans, and date back to our earliest ancestors.

Though the way we tell stories has evolved immensely over time, from the spoken word to podcasts and interactive video, it remains one of the most powerful ways to connect with people and affect audience behavior. In fact, research shows people remember stories twenty-two times more than facts and figures alone.

But how can you take advantage of story-driven content to improve your recruitment marketing mix and where do you start? Here are a few elements of a well-told brand story.

Using content in brand awareness campaigns

It is likely that most candidates will discover you through job boards – they remain the most effective tactic for advertising open roles. However, they will learn even more about you through your website, career page, and social media. Here’s where you can use the potential of story-led content to kickstart your brand awareness.

Content has a level of flexibility that makes it an important marketing tool for recruiters. It helps drive authenticity by letting you define what your employer brand sounds like, what your brand aesthetic is, and your organization’s values. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 60% of employees use beliefs and values to choose their employer.

Here’s a great example of a London-based agency using an eye-catching recruitment ad on their site to hire a copywriter. They used content brilliantly, conveying their brand voice and aesthetic to attract potential candidates:

The example above shows how employers can creatively infuse content to bolster their inbound recruiting strategy.

Another powerful way to build your employer brand awareness with content is to create value beyond “selling” open positions. Think about ways to inform, educate, or entertain prospective candidates.

Do you offer remote work? Don’t just say it on your site – share your philosophy through a blog post, podcast, YouTube channel, or newsletter.

This shouldn’t be about persuading candidates to apply directly. Instead, this is a relationship-building and employer brand-awareness practice that creates more opportunities for candidates to get to know your culture, values, and brand.

Here’s how Buffer, a social publishing tool, explains why they operate remotely:

Content and Job Advertising: The Perfect Ingredients to Your Recruitment Marketing Mix

While many view job ads as transactional, we’d beg to differ – job ads are the gateway to your brand. They are what gets candidates to your site, but content is what keeps them there (and encourages applies!).

The modern recruitment marketing mix relies on advertising and story-led content to invite prospective candidates to consider your employer brand when looking for jobs.

Integrating job advertising with content can be a powerful tool for organizations looking to reach their audiences and stand out in the minds of their prospective candidates. However, recruiting teams are often limited in terms of resources and team capacity and can’t embrace advertising at scale. Programmatic job advertising  can be a cost-effective and time-saving way to advertise jobs at scale without a significant investment. This way your recruitment team can invest the time needed to content efforts and tell compelling stories that will resonate with your candidates.

To learn more about how Joveo can help you supercharge inbound recruitment, book a demo and see our platform in action. Also, follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we’re always working to help you get the most out of your recruitment advertising.