Inbound marketing can be used to attract and recruit talent for your business in exactly the same way as it can attract and convert customers. Here are three ways that you can use your existing inbound marketing framework to elevate your recruitment strategy.
1. Create Recruitment-Focused Content
Content is the fuel of inbound marketing, so investing in recruitment-focused content can help set your business apart as an attractive potential employer, and improve your visibility for jobs in competitive markets.
Where to start? Your employees. Employee testimonials are a powerful way to showcase your company value proposition through authentic voices. Written stories, video interviews, and social media takeovers from the people who actually work at a company carry far more weight than any number of company recruitment pages and agency blurbs. Sharing a cross-section of real experiences from your current employees – from senior managers to the shop floor, can humanise your company and make it easier for potential candidates to picture themselves as part of your team.
You could also write blog posts and downloadable guides to address the challenges faced by candidates in your industry, providing tips on skills and career development, opportunities, and any other sector-specific news that jobseekers might find valuable.
2. Use Social Media To Locate And Engage With Candidates
Social media platforms are full of people looking for jobs, and are increasingly used by jobseekers to connect directly with high value positions and decision makers within target businesses – often bypassing formal job advertisements. LinkedIn leads the field in this regard, in many ways replacing the role of traditional job boards as the first place that people go to look for a new opportunity. Jobseekers often take to social media even before looking on Google for available jobs in their area.
When recruiting, make full use of this trend to maximise your visibility on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to locate and engage with potential candidates. Keeping up an active presence and an up-to-date company page will maximise your visibility for potential recruits. You can also search directly for jobseekers matching your specific job requirements, using the search filters provided by LinkedIn and Facebook. For example, you can pinpoint candidates based on their location, background, qualifications, experience level, and even salary expectations, making it easier to find the right match for your business.
This saves a lot of time during interview, as you’ll already know the type of business you’re candidates enjoy working for, and whether they are likely to get along and in your business environment. Recruits can be targeted through paid adverts and sponsored content in the same way as sales -related campaigns. You could also take part in relevant groups on LinkedIn or Facebook where industry professionals gather, many of which have a strong recruitment focus.
3. Recruitment SEO To Increase Visibility For Your Roles
Recruitment SEO might take second place to social media marketing when it comes to talent acquisition, but it’s still important to maximise the visibility of your recruitment content on Google and other traditional search engines. Carefully research the keywords that talent are using to look for jobs like yours – often these are the ones that you purposefully exclude when optimising content for sales! Building these keywords into your job postings (on your website and social media), career pages, blog articles, and external agency sites makes it easier for jobseekers to find your opportunities on Google. As many people look for jobs on mobile devices, it’s also essential that any CTAs and contact forms are easy to use on phone screens.
When optimising your content for SEO, it’s worth remembering that SEO itself is changing. Alongside Google, many people now use AI assistants and Large Language Models (LLMs) as search tools. Instead of looking for keyword density like a search engine bot, AI search tools typically look for where certain words, concepts, and phrases appear in ‘clusters’, rather than being evenly spread out throughout the content – a phenomenon called burstiness. This makes consistency of theme and content structure more important than traditional keywords when optimising content for AI visibility.
Find Out More
Please get in touch with JDR today to find out how inbound marketing can support your recruitment strategy and secure the talent you need to grow your business.
Image Source: Canva
