“Content is king” — the expression never gets old, as such is the power of content marketing. It is a way companies build trust and relationships with their audience.
We have already seen how digital marketing methods can be used for recruitment marketing.
The use of content marketing can be expanded beyond marketing to departments like HR for hiring.
Candidates view job applications the way potential customers do before making purchases, weighing every pro and con. They research a lot to verify your credibility and reputation before they apply for a role. They’ll gauge if you’re a good fit for them as your company would.
HR professionals worldwide are using the power of compelling content marketing strategies that not only help them position better and attract the ideal candidates.
Reasons to have a recruitment content marketing strategy
There’s a lot of information available about the dearth of skilled candidates, which has made the hiring landscape more competitive than ever before.
Candidates will look up your company on the internet to research whatever they can about it. You can use content marketing to rise above the rest and hire the top candidates.
Matt Charney, the Executive Editor at Recruiting Daily, says that “In recruiting today, it’s not only recruiters who are doing the research. With 85% of job searches starting with a search engine, top talent is searching for a company the same way they would any other purchasing decision – which is why employer branding is so critical.”
Moreover, the hiring process can be time-consuming and often costly. To eliminate those, you can use content marketing to tell candidates an engaging story about your company.
Recruiters can make the most of different ways and mediums of content marketing to reach candidates.
- Studying the market and understanding candidate personas can help companies create helpful information about job hunters. Having a targeted persona will add value, precision, and effectiveness to your hiring efforts and ensure that your targeted audience responds to your message the way you want them to.
- The better you use content to put out attributes that you appreciate in a candidate, the higher the chance you’ll get more ideal candidates. Candidates who’ll do in-depth research about your company will automatically understand what you expect of them, and they’ll send their applications accordingly. This will automatically eliminate the risk of inviting a large number of irrelevant applications.
- Step into the shoes of your prospective candidates and create content to solve the queries that they might have. This will ensure that candidates beforehand have answers to questions about your work culture, expectations, and roadmap to success.
- The better you tell your story through content marketing, the more likely you will attract suitable candidates. Candidates appreciate companies that put themselves out in public like an open book to help candidates make informed decisions. Not all companies take the time to be so detailed in their hiring. The ones who do, get the most out of it.
Building a content marketing process to attract the ideal talent
The hiring process has become more time-consuming than ever before. Receiving irrelevant job applications is a headache and a common pain point that recruiters are facing worldwide. However, these problems can be solved by deploying the right content marketing strategy into your recruitment process.
Follow these steps:
- Think like someone who’s looking forward to joining your company. What is the message that you want to give out on your social media and website to attract the right talent pool?
- It’s the right opportunity to position yourself along the lines of your vision and values. Tell people what it is that you’re trying to change and why they should believe in your vision.
- Talk about the values that your current employees possess and how those values build the very foundation of your company. To connect with the right candidates, tell them what you appreciate about your employees.
- With the ideal candidate profile, you can connect the dots to see what a person in the position aspires to be and put that clearly out through your content marketing. Candidates should feel that you can help them achieve their career goals.
- Send a message through your recruitment content marketing that your company invites applications from people from all walks of life, provided their fundamental values match those of your company.
- Do a thorough study of your present hiring content and see where it lacks. Improve on those problems. Answer questions like, “Who are you targeting with your recruitment content?” “What channels will you use to distribute it?” and “What resources will you need to invest in to get it right?”
- Take action on it. Run experiments, study the results well, and re-work on areas you still might be lacking in until you finally get to the point where you’re satisfied with the kind of employees your new hiring content marketing strategy is giving you.
What type of content can you write?
Make it a mix of content that talks about a company from the employer’s point of view and content that talks about the experience of the current employees. Every kind of content, even something as basic as writing a good job description, helps a prospective employee make confident decisions about the company at each hiring stage, so make optimal use of different kinds of content for each stage.
- Content for the awareness stage: Use social media, infographics, industry insights, and news about your company to help a candidate educate themselves about your company.
- Content for consideration at this stage: Use content like employees’ experiences, growth stories, company newsletters, and webinars to help them learn more about your company and what they can gain by joining you.
- Content for the decision-making stage: Use Glassdoor reviews, personalized landing pages, and talent networks to help candidates decide if they should join your company.
Improving your hiring is in your hands
While it might look like you can do absolutely nothing to change the present painful hiring process, investing in the right content to put out a clear message can up your hiring game by leaps and bounds.
About The Author
Sharad Panwar is a Growth Marketer at Adaface. When he’s not working, he is either learning MMA or discussing Politics and Philosophy.
