How to Use Marketing for Recruiting

Your biggest challenges all stem from a single problem: you have unfilled roles on your deskless workforce. When you have openings on your team, your current staff end up overworked, leading to more problems: work quality suffers, deadlines are missed, workers are dissatisfied with schedules and pay—the list goes on and on. And what you end up with are more open roles.

How do you break this vicious cycle so you can focus on acquiring new customers and contracts rather than constantly recruiting and hiring for the same role over and over?

Use the talents and strategies you already use for growing your business and apply them to growing your team. The most successful businesses out there know that having the right people on the team can matter as much as a well-timed and well-placed advertisement.

Getting recruitment marketing right will not only help you fill those lingering open roles, but it will help you hire top talent faster, resulting in higher employee engagement and lower turnover. And an added bonus of treating the recruiting process as a marketing exercise is that it performs double duty in areas such as increasing brand awareness and reputation.

Why Should I Change the Way I Recruit?

In the current Safer-At-Home environment in most states, it has become increasingly difficult to use traditional recruiting methods such as career fairs, walk-in interview days, and—my favorite—handing out your business card at the local donut or sandwich shop.

Sure, you can “spray and pray” (post your jobs to every job board, craigslist, the local paper, your social media channels, your website), and you might get some quite a lot of applications. But are they the right applicants?

Just like marketing has an ideal customer profile that is the target for your website, ads, and direct mail programs, recruiting has an ideal candidate profile. Getting lots of applicants for a single job through the “spray and pray” method will only result in more work and higher costs overall thanks to the additional time it will take to  for you in

But there is still so much of the recruiting process that requires your unique, humanness to ensure you hire not only to get the job done but that the person is the right fit for your team and overall company culture.

How Do I Use Marketing for Recruiting?

The first step in any good marketing exercise is to ensure you have the right value proposition. You are familiar with the value your company provides to its customers, but what about the value you provide to your employees? Beyond pay and a free lunch here and there, what is the unique differentiator that would make an applicant choose you over the company down the road?

1. Write a Great Employee Value Proposition

Putting your employee value proposition front and center on your careers page and job postings lets future employees know you care about them, not just the work they will provide for you. This is a great place to let your company culture shine by highlighting the unique reasons your current employees love working for you.

Michael Page has a fantastic exercise for writing your employee value proposition to get you started.

2. Show Off Your People Personality

Writing an employee value proposition can tell a person what working with you is like, but there is nothing compared to letting them see it for themselves. Videos are a great way to show potential employees what a day-in-the-life is like, especially if you include interviews with current employees. Don’t worry about making it fancy or highly-produced. The more real the video, the better.

We love this in-depth recruiting video from Crain Construction:

And this employee-interview style from DBL Landscaping:

3. Post Your Jobs Where Your Candidates Already Are

There are the big job boards like Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and Monster, and these are great for getting lots of applicants. There are also job-specific boards as well to help target your applicants, like All Truck Jobs and ManufacturingJobs.com.

But any job board is only going to get you applicants who are actively looking for employment.  The #1 reason most people switch jobs is for a better career opportunity, so it’s up to you to put your great opportunity in front of them. Advertising on Facebook is one of the best ways we’ve found to do this.

The other key strategy for reaching candidates where they are is via text messaging. Research shows that SMS open rates are as high as 98%, compared to just 20% of all emails. And it takes just 90 seconds to respond to a text where it can take on average 90 minutes to respond to an email!

Make sure your jobs all have a “text to apply” feature, and consider sending this link out to all your current employees to get pre-vetted referrals quickly and easily.

Making these three marketing-inspired changes to your recruiting process is a great start to moving away from the “old ways” of hiring that just aren’t as effective anymore. You’ll see the dividends early and often when your newly hired employees get the job done better and stick around longer since you both did the work upfront to ensure a great fit.

Feel ready to implement more marketing-inspired best practices into your recruiting and team management processes? Give Team Engine a try, and see how we can transform your business.