If your company is growing, you are likely looking to implement a recruitment strategy to attract top talent to your thriving business. But what is a recruitment strategy? How do you sift through the hundreds of applications to find candidates that align with your company’s values, mission, and employee culture?

Modern recruitment is about going beyond sifting through thousands of resumes on a large job posting site. It’s about using what you know about the marketing industry and harnessing your brand’s power to encourage meaningful engagement from qualified candidates.

Let’s explore how you can use your marketing savvy to attract the perfect applicants to your job posting and build a recruitment strategy for your growing business.

What Is Recruitment Marketing?

The goal of recruitment marketing is to attract ideal talent to your organization and engage with candidates before a job opens up at your company. In recruitment marketing, you’re creating and nurturing a talent pipeline of both active and passive job seekers, transforming casual consumers into actively engaged applicants in the event of a job vacancy.

Let’s say, for example, there is a social media user named Nicole who has the specialized skills your company is looking for but currently works for a competitor. She sees a targeted ad on Facebook for your organization and decides to look you up on your well-established Instagram profile, where she notices you have cultivated a community of followers with her interests.

She decides to give your page a follow, and over the next few months, she views current employee testimonial videos and interviews describing a thriving and positive company culture. When you share a compelling job opening on your social media, Nicole applies.

This is just one example of the power of recruitment marketing. Through positive social media content and active follower engagement, a skilled professional who is already employed in her field went from not knowing about your organization to applying for a job.

What Makes Recruitment Marketing So Popular?

Back in the day, most job recruiting was performed internally. The Harvard Business Review estimates that in the post-World War II era, 90% of job openings were filled by current employees. Today, less than 28% report internal candidates as an important hiring source. Job seekers prioritized a lifetime position and security over the flexibility that many modern candidates crave.

As companies grow, modern recruiters are under more pressure than ever to innovate how they attract, engage, and recruit potential candidates. Employees are leaving positions voluntarily, and as companies grow they have to innovate to fill existing vacancies while creating a talent pipeline for future growth. This is where recruitment marketing comes in.

Using Your Marketing Skills To Modernize Recruitment

In the digital era, recruiters are more like expert marketers than salespeople. Think of the skills you use to market your business, and apply those skills to the recruiting process. Essentially, you’re making the shift from viewing recruitment as a “sales pitch” to engaging in recruitment as marketing.

Use your marketing skills to modernize recruitment by solidifying your brand identity, and always keeping it fresh and current. Use social media platforms to build meaningful connections with your followers, turning them into customers and future applicants. When you use marketing tools to optimize your recruitment strategy, you will see a shift in the quality of engagement.

The field of talent acquisition is rapidly modernizing and innovators in recruitment marketing are changing the game, optimizing candidate engagement through branding, social media, and digital marketing initiatives. While you’re learning to create fresh, contemporary engagement with potential candidates online, consider partnering with a talent acquisition professional to revamp your career site and help tell your brand’s story in a way that entices top talent to your organization.

Conclusion

Keeping your recruitment strategy relevant and current will attract top talent to your organization, allowing your company to grow and thrive. Modern recruitment, much like contemporary marketing strategy, compels you to be fresh, agile, and flexible. Start viewing employee recruitment like a marketing strategy and you’ll see an increase in qualified job applicants, build your talent pipeline, and grow your business.