Organisational people strategies are often full of really valuable workstreams focussing on employee development programmes, engagement initiatives, and retention schemes. All of these are, of course, essential to building a culture that employees enjoy working within.
But they all share an often overlooked dependency: each can only succeed if the right people are in the business to begin with.
Reactive Recruitment Needn’t Be The Norm
Talent acquisition can often be viewed slightly separate within HR functions, perhaps because it’s primarily concerned with the talent outside the organisation rather than inside.
Internal recruitment teams can be seen as an internal agency whose services are called upon only once a vacancy arises. Working only on the problem directly in front of you makes it difficult to move from the reactive into the strategic; where talent is attracted to a company long before there’s an available position and each vacancy only adds compound benefits to future talent acquisition.
Recruitment marketing works to change that. It pulls on marketplace data, the gaps projected through a workforce plan and the culture and values of a company, and uses this to build out a targeted talent acquisition strategy. Putting your organisation and it’s opportunities in front of prospective employees rather than hoping the perfect candidates are scrolling through jobs boards when a vacancy is made live.
Recruitment Marketing has never been more important for HR leaders who still need to recruit new talent into an organisation but who need to ensure better ROI is being extracted from Talent Acquisition budgets.
The wider economic landscape continues to challenge and squeeze organisational budgets and demand better ROI from every penny spent. Recruitment Marketing is the long-term, strategic answer for achieving this in Talent Acquisition. It brings perfectly matched talent to a business, quickly, for less money and will deliver longer and more successful employee lifecycles.
“Recruitment Marketing has never been more important for HR leaders who need to ensure better ROI from Talent Acquisition budgets.”
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
To understand recruitment marketing, it helps to separate three related concepts:
-
Employee Value Proposition (EVP): what you truly offer your people in return for their contribution; salary and benefits but also culture, purpose, flexibility, growth opportunities and belonging.
-
Employer Brand: how you are perceived in the talent market both implicitly and explicitly as an employer; this includes your visual brand identity which you control but also the sum of your reputation (including reviews on Glassdoor etc.), employee stories and articles about your organisation which you may not.
-
Recruitment Marketing: how you activate and communicate your EVP and employer brand in the market; the strategy you build and the marketing tools, channels, and data you use to attract, engage, and nurture potential candidates.
In simple terms: EVP is the promise, employer brand is the reputation, and recruitment marketing is the strategy.
Why Recruitment Marketing Matters to People Strategy
A people strategy without some form of recruitment marketing is like a customer strategy without advertising. You may have the best product in the world, but if no one knows about it or sees it’s worth, you’re limiting your own success.
Here’s how recruitment marketing strengthens a people strategy:
It Creates Awareness Before the Vacancy Exists
Talent pipelines don’t materialise overnight and the best candidates are often passive and may not even be thinking about a change from their current employer.
Recruitment marketing ensures your brand is visible to this passive talent without them even going looking. When a suitable role does then go live, you’re a known entity that they feel more comfortable applying to.
Achieving this involves understanding where the best quality candidates for a role are likely to come from so they can be targeted – are they local to an office? Do they tend to work for direct competitors or are skills transferable from a number of industries? What are their web browsing habits and can we target with display advertising?
It Attracts the Right Talent, Not Just More Talent
Recruitment marketing filters as much as it attracts. By communicating your EVP (your offer as an employer) clearly and consistently, you naturally draw in candidates aligned to your values, and deter those who aren’t.
The result? Higher quality applications, better engagement throughout the recruitment process (and therefore fewer withdrawals) and better outcomes from interviews; building a bank of silver medalists already begins to move the dial away from an exclusively tactical approach into a strategic one.
Reflecting on how this translates into a better ROI, this means your Talent Acquisition teams are spending less time screening large swathes of unsuitable candidates and can spend more time building connections with talent that is both suitable for today and for the future.
It Makes Hiring Faster and Cheaper
One of the biggest savings that proactive attraction can deliver is through reduced reliance on costly job boards and agency hires. This is often a two-pronged attack; adverts once live will deliver better matched, higher-quality candidates but also, if setup effectively, recruiters will find it easier to build talent banks and pipelines that they can call upon when the perfect vacancy does present itself.
This of course is not a change that can be delivered overnight, but starting to build a warm pipeline of engaged candidates across the spectrum of departments within your organisation means shorter hiring cycles, less operational disruption and overall a better reputation for your Talent Acquisition teams.
It Strengthens Retention from Day One
A common cause of attrition is misaligned expectations.
Recruitment marketing, done authentically, prevents this and helps a candidate understand your organisations values ahead of application. Candidates who accept offers are already warm to the culture and reality of working in your business; they’re joining with clarity and those misalignments are therefore less likely.
Recruitment Marketing should filter through every stage of a process – it should be factored into the language used on socials and display advertising, the wording of job adverts, even (and perhaps most importantly) in the way recruiters speak about the organisation in conversations with prospective candidates.
It Provides a Competitive Edge in Tight Talent Markets
When skills are scarce, reputation and visibility matter.
Recruitment marketing isn’t in itself what differentiates your organisation but it is the megaphone that you use to shout about what makes you different and why talent should want to work for you.
The Unsung Heroes of Recruitment Marketing
Many organisations will spend heavily on job boards and/or other paid campaigns and, sometimes, this may be worthwhile for certain niches. However, most often these are part of a (costly) scattergun approach to vacancy sharing and won’t be the optimum source for the talent they need.
There is, as always, more to the equation (and I use equation literally here!) when trying to workout where to place spend in order to extract the most benefit.
The good news is, all of the recruitment data points needed are very often within reach and just waiting to be put to use.
Three examples stand out:
-
ATS data: Your applicant tracking system holds a goldmine of insight. Where have you candidates come from? Which sources gets the most candidates to interview stage and beyond? Which job ads perform well and which don’t? Very few organisations will analyse this data as rigorously as they should, but those that do are finding endless ways improve their candidate experience and offer more bespoke candidate journeys based on the nuances of the sector.
-
Careers site analytics: Your careers site is often the first stop for a candidate. Data here shows you what people care about, when exactly they are convinced to apply, and conversely what makes them exit. Yet too many careers sites are designed as static brochures, rather than dynamic assets that are measured, tested, and optimised. Your careers site should retarget those who begin to engage, but then hesitate. It should also be passing crucial source information into your ATS to help you build a conversion funnel that will in turn give you a better understanding of where to apportion your budget.
-
Employee advocacy: Candidates trust people more than brands, particularly in the culture of authenticity that we live in today. The posts, stories, and testimonials of employees carry more weight than any corporate campaign. Yet organisations rarely track or encourage this systematically. Having a strategy to extract stories that are shining examples of your culture and values is paramount – if you are turning that into the correct format for your audience, even better – video content is king right now, so even a home-grown effort to generate this can be extremely effective. Measuring the reach, engagement, and sentiment of employee-generated content reveals what truly resonates.
Treating these as “nice-to-haves” is a mistake. They are levers that can fundamentally transform how recruitment supports your wider people strategy and enable a step away from the hope that the right people find your vacancies when they are made live.
Recruitment Marketing and People Strategy in Action
Organisations are realising that talent is no longer just an HR concern, it’s a business-critical driver of growth.
Recruitment marketing is where your culture, values, and EVP are tested in the open market and are working harder to help bring the talent directly to you.
In summary, when done well, Recruitment Marketing allows you:
- Attract the right people faster through a better candidate experience
- Reduce hiring costs
- Build a workforce aligned to your culture and goals
- Reduce organisational turnover; deliver better operational performance
- Strengthen your reputation in a way that compounds over time for future talent acquisition
How Lamplighter Digital Can Help with Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment marketing isn’t merely about decoration or sharing a link to a blog about a recent event. It’s about understanding the culture of your business and the lived reality of your employees, then communicating this clearly and strategically with the audience who you believe would fit right in either now or in the future.
If you’re a leader of Talent Acquisition in your business and the idea of moving your recruitment processes to more strategic TA practices resonates with you, I’d love to continue the conversation and hear about how Talent Acquisition is done in your organisation.
As a recruitment marketing consultant, I work with organisations to activate their EVP, build stronger employer brands, and integrate recruitment marketing directly into people strategies.
If you’d like to set up a free networking call, feel free to connect with me directly through LinkedIn or through the Contact Us page on the website, or even directly through email.
