If you lead hiring, HR or marketing at a growing company and your open roles fill slowly, or only with whoever happens to apply, this guide is for you. It shows how to build a recruitment marketing strategy that draws qualified candidates to your company before you have a vacancy to fill.
The short answer: define what you want to achieve, build a candidate persona, state what makes your employer brand worth joining, publish content for each stage, make your career site convert, then nurture a talent pool and measure the results. Nine steps follow, each with what done looks like.
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Recruitment Marketing Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing methods to show job seekers what it is like to work for your company, so the right people want to apply and stay. |
You will finish with a written plan that fills your talent pipeline
Many companies still treat hiring as a reaction: a role opens, a job posting goes out, and the hiring team waits. That reaches only people who are already looking and leaves the rest of the job market untouched.
At the end of these steps you will have one document: a goal, a candidate persona, an employee value proposition, a content plan, a channel plan, a talent pool process and a monthly review. It sits on top of inbound recruiting, which applies the same attract, engage and delight thinking to people instead of customers.
Recruitment marketing covers the first three stages of the candidate journey. In awareness, people learn your employer brand exists. In consideration, they compare you with other employers. In interest, they decide to apply. The recruitment process and the interview process take over from there, so keep the same promise in both.
The thinking is borrowed from inbound marketing. A buyer researches before talking to sales, and a candidate researches before talking to a recruiter. The best strategies treat candidates the way marketers treat consumers: they compare options and decide on experience.
Recruiters who see part of their job as marketing have an edge, because they earn attention from top talent instead of waiting for resumes to arrive. Your hiring efforts then focus on the right person for each specific role. Because candidates keep researching, recruitment marketing is a continuous process, not a one-time campaign.
What to have in place before you start
You need four things ready before step 1.
- An owner. One person accountable for the plan, the calendar and the numbers, usually from the marketing teams or talent acquisition, with hiring managers as partners.
- Access to hiring managers. Their time, because hiring managers know what the perfect candidate looks like and which interview questions reveal it.
- Your current people. A few current employees willing to share what the work is really like.
- Your hiring data. Where recent hires came from, how long roles stayed open and where candidates dropped out.
Build a recruitment marketing strategy in 9 steps
1. Set hiring goals you can measure
Write down what the strategy must achieve and by when. Link each goal to a hiring result the business cares about, such as more qualified candidates for a hard-to-fill role, a shorter time to fill, or more visitors who start an application.
Pick two or three goals, not ten, such as more applicants, better-quality applicants or more career site visitors.
Then work backward: estimate how many visitors become applicants, applicants reach interview and interviews become hires. Those ratios become your monthly benchmarks.
Done looks like: two or three written goals with a number, a role or segment and a date, plus the ratios behind them.
2. Start creating candidate personas for your hardest roles
A candidate persona is a semi-fictional profile of the ideal candidate for a role, built from evidence. It turns the ideal candidate from a hunch into a description your whole team can use. Creating candidate personas stops you writing for everyone, which means writing for no one.
Go deeper than the job requirements. Capture professional experience, hard skills, soft skills, new skills they want to learn, motivations, frustrations, where they spend time online and the personality traits that suit your company culture.
Build the persona from real input. Interview your best current employees in that role, talk to hiring managers, and review recent applicants and offer declines. A simple candidate persona template with a name, role, goals, concerns, channels and the message that would reach them keeps every persona consistent.
Hiring managers then share one picture of the ideal candidate, so job descriptions, screening and interviews all point at the same goal, and messages match what each candidate cares about, improving their experience.
A persona describes a pattern, not a person, so never use it to screen people out. Ask several team members to review it so unconscious bias does not slip in.
Done looks like: one persona for each priority role, each answering a single question: what would this person search for on a Tuesday evening?
3. Define the employee value proposition behind your employer brand
Your employer brand is the reputation you hold with job seekers, and the employee value proposition is the promise at its center. It says why a strong candidate should join you instead of a competitor. A strong employer brand shows the company's values in action and becomes a deciding factor when two offers look alike.
An employee value proposition defines what your organization offers people in return for their work, and it goes beyond pay. It brings together compensation, benefits, career growth, work environment and company culture. Be honest about each, because candidates compare what you say with what your employees say.
That honesty matters more than polish. Candidates give more weight to what current employees say than to what the company says about itself, so build the message from what your people actually say.
Done looks like: a one-page statement of your employee value proposition, tested on five current employees who recognize it as true.
4. Make the career site and job descriptions do the selling
Your career site is the center of the strategy, because every channel sends people there. Candidates expect to find your mission, the company's values, company culture, open positions, benefits and an easy way to apply, all working well on a phone.
Treat the site as a hiring tool that answers your target audience's questions without a phone call.
Rewrite job descriptions in plain words, with a clear title, the real day-to-day work, a salary range where you can and the benefits that matter to your persona. Use the words your persona would search for, so the job postings appear in search engine results and bring organic traffic from search to your career site.
Add an FAQ section that answers what candidates ask most: what the hiring process involves, how long it takes and what you offer. See how to optimize your website for leads and build an SEO strategy, because the same basics apply.
Done looks like: a career site that loads quickly on mobile, tells a candidate everything in the list above and offers one obvious way to apply or join your talent network.
5. Create recruitment content for each stage of the journey
Job ads alone are not enough. Content shows potential candidates who you are before they apply, and it reaches people who never visit a job board.
Match the format to the stage. For awareness, use employee stories, behind-the-scenes posts and short videos of the workplace. For consideration, use day-in-the-life articles, team profiles and guides to your hiring process. For interest, use clear role pages and a short note on what happens after someone applies.
Use authentic photos and video from your own people rather than glossy stock, because real life at the company is what job seekers are trying to judge.
A regular email newsletter keeps candidates engaged over time, including people who are not ready to apply. See our overview of content marketing.
Done looks like: a content calendar covering all three stages for each persona, with an owner and a publishing date for each piece.
6. Use social media recruiting and employee advocates to attract candidates
Social media recruiting lets you show your culture, announce roles and talk with candidates directly. It works best as a supplement to other channels, not a replacement for them.
Choose platforms by persona, not by habit. Go where your target audience already spends its time.
Reply to comments and messages quickly, because candidates read responsiveness as a sign of the workplace. Our guide to social media for B2B marketing covers channel choice in more depth.
Your current employees are your most credible voices. Invite them to share open roles and write about their work, and give them simple guidelines on professionalism and privacy. An employee referral program with a clear, fair process adds to this, especially for specialized roles.
Done looks like: two chosen channels, a posting rhythm, a short guide for employee advocates and a referral process people can use in a minute.
7. Reach passive candidates with targeted ads
Most skilled professionals are not browsing job boards. Passive candidates are employed, reasonably content and open to a conversation if the right role finds them. They are the group a reactive hiring process never reaches.
Paid advertising can put a role, a short video or a story in front of that audience, based on job title, skills and location.
Also use channels beyond the obvious. Niche job boards reach people with specific skills and widen the candidate pool, and industry meetups let your team meet top candidates before a role opens.
Done looks like: one small paid campaign aimed at your priority persona, sending people to a role page that matches the ad.
8. Build a talent pool and nurture it
A talent pool is a database of people who have said they are interested in working with you, even though no role fits them today. It feeds your talent pipeline so the next opening starts with warm contacts instead of a blank page.
Offer a way to join on every page of your career site. Collect details at hiring events, through webinars, with a job guide or by inviting past candidates who narrowly missed out.
A pipeline of your own contacts reduces reliance on outside agencies, which tends to lower cost per hire and shorten time to hire. Segment the pool by skills, seniority and interest so you can send relevant updates. A candidate who receives useful content stays warm for the day a role fits.
Done looks like: a sign-up form on the career site, a tagged talent pool and a first nurture email that goes out automatically.
9. Measure the recruitment funnel and adjust every month
Treat hiring like a recruitment funnel and track each stage: career site visits, applications started and completed, qualified candidates, interviews, offers accepted and hires by source. Add cost per hire and time to fill to see whether the strategy is making hiring cheaper and faster.
Use analytics to compare channels and content, and treat the plan as a continuous cycle. Keep the channels that bring qualified candidates and drop those that bring only clicks. Review the numbers with hiring managers monthly and write down what changes.
The candidate's experience counts too. Companies that shorten the hiring process, reply promptly and include peers in the interview process give candidates a reason to say yes. A strong employer brand also builds a stock of warm candidates, which is how it lowers the cost of each hire.
Done looks like: a dashboard showing the full funnel by source against your goals, and a monthly meeting with a short list of decisions.
Avoid the mistakes that stall most recruitment marketing
- Starting without a goal. Without a target, you cannot tell which activity brought the best applicants.
- Writing for everyone. Generic content attracts nobody. Name one persona for each campaign.
- Overpromising. An employer brand that does not match the real workplace costs you hires in the first months.
- Ignoring reviews. Glassdoor's employer branding guide reports that 86% of applicants are likely to research company reviews and ratings when deciding where to apply. Respond to them calmly, and actively invest in the workplace those reviews describe.
- Letting the talent pool go cold. A list nobody writes to is not a pool.
What you gain when this is done properly
Sales gets stronger hires faster
An empty territory earns nothing. A steady flow of qualified candidates shortens the time to fill, and candidates who already understand the role ramp up faster.
Marketing gets an audience that compounds
Employer content, career site pages and email lists keep working after you publish them. The marketing team can show which activity produced applicants, and the employer brand becomes an asset you improve instead of a guess.
Customer success keeps its people
Teams that serve customers lose the most when they lose people, and existing employees carry extra work during every gap. Candidates who joined with an honest picture of the work tend to stay.
Recruitment marketing works best inside a connected go-to-market system
The roles you fill decide how fast your sales, marketing and service teams can move, and career site data belongs in the same system as the rest of your pipeline. Our guide to an inbound marketing strategy shows how the same steps work for customers.
Propello is a HubSpot partner. It designs and builds connected GTM systems on HubSpot, as described on the about page. If your hiring and growth data sit in separate places, a GTM audit is the place to start.
