These days, content marketing isn’t just about attracting more customers to your brand, it is also used to attract prospective employees. Many CMOs are aware that there’s a talent shortage and that utilizing content marketing can encourage individuals to apply to their companies. They are creating good quality content to get people to notice their brand and possibly want to find out more, even if they are not on the market for a job.

Why Traditional Recruitment is Outdated

Traditional recruiting methods often take too much time and cost companies a lot of money. Employers may use basic job boards to recruit candidates, which is inefficient and doesn’t guarantee success. The long hiring process can lead to a talent shortage, which may reduce employee productivity, increase training costs and reduce a company’s ability to properly serve clients.

Read: 10 Reasons Why Traditional Marketing Doesn’t Work

Content Marketing as a Recruiting Strategy

Goals of Content

No matter what type of business you run, content can be an effective way to get your brand to stand out from the competition and attract both customers and potential employees to your message.

• Increase Brand Awareness

The first goal a CMO has with content marketing is to build brand awareness. By creating interesting and engaging content that offers value to readers, you can build an attractive following surrounding your brand’s message and company culture. Distinguish yourself from other businesses by providing a means for readers to identify with your community. Don’t just simply post an opening on a job board, broadcast your company’s message in blog posts, podcasts, etc. Learn to speak to your candidates through your content. Try to emphasize the characteristic traits and qualities of your company and how they play a bigger role in the mission as a whole.

A diverse range of content or mediums of display and interaction will help potential candidates familiarize themselves with your company.  If you want your brand to be viewed as creative and fun – create the content to match. Participating in company challenges, posting funny pictures of your staff having fun, or sharing funny viral content can have a great impact on your brand.

Learn: Are We Doing Content Marketing Right?

• Customer Engagement

According to Gallup’ research, customers who are fully engaged represent a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth over the average customer.”; The stronger the emotional connection with your brand, the more they promote, share, buy and loyally follow you. Engagement through content aims at triggering a reaction or interaction, be it sharing a blog article, commenting on social media or retweeting a post.

Engage with your audience on a more personal level. Segment your content to match the interests and abilities of your intended prospects. Don’t use executive level jargon if you’re searching for interns or entry-level candidates. Your company should be made more accessible to the prospects your are trying to attract.

More marketing specialists are utilizing social media outlets to develop and deliver their company’s content marketing techniques. Social recruiting is on the rise and showing engagement and responsiveness on social media humanizes your brand and creates a pathway to more quality connections.

• Lead Generation

Gearing your content towards those most likely to convert is the best way to grow your lead generation rate. High quality content that is valuable and informative and mindful of a potential client’s or applicant’s stage in the Buyer’s or Journey will have the most promise. Developing ideal buyer personas, or in this case candidate personas, can help provide a frame of reference when creating engaging content. Understanding their wants, desires, likes, dislikes, and behavioral patterns can help you build relevant and relatable content. Offering high-value educational material, like e-Books, webinars, or free consultations, will help further qualify your leads as well as collect their information for future marketing use.

Read: 5 Ways to Get the Best ROI from Your Lead Generation Strategy

Types of Content

There are several types of content formats you can use to attract your ideal employee. Let’s take a look at some of them.

• Articles

Informative articles are one of the most used forms of content. They aim to educate and provide qualified information on topics that potential clients and hiring prospects may be researching or interested in. This medium is especially useful to establish yourself as an authority in your field and increasing your credibility. Educating others can help bring awareness to a potential problem that you may be able to remedy for them.

• eBooks

eBooks balance high-value content and lead generation. They complement a company’s content marketing strategy by offering valuable expertise to a targeted audience and are effective at generating leads by collecting information in exchange for access. This information can be used to nudge them along the lead nurturing process and into the Sales funnel.

• Infographics

According to Pearson Prentice Hall, 65% of people are visual learners. Infographics provide a means of more effective distribution and understanding of information. Ethos3reports that “social media users are 40 percent more likely to share visual content than other types of content”. They can better distill information into more bite-sized amounts, so that readers grasp more of your content in a smaller time frame – increasingly the likelihood of attaining a viral and shareable nature

• Newsletters

Newsletters are an invaluable and effective content marketing tool that can help keep your audience engaged. Through newsletters, potential customers at the Subscribers stage can be offered and sent Lead nurturing content like special offers, webinars, eBooks, etc. to convert them into Leads. They also offer a way for your audience to remain updated and in tune with your company’s development. As a Chief Marketing Officer you can elect to send out announcements regarding new product launches, referral programs, community engagement pieces – basically anything that can help build more brand awareness and credibility around your company. Showing that you care will encourage your current and future employees to care.

There’s a lot more content you can create, based on your goals and target’s interests such as recipes, slideshares, even video marketing (deemed the future of content).

Content Marketing Best Practices

Businesses want their content to increase traffic to their website and build a bigger audience. The following content marketing best practices and tips will help improve your marketing efforts.

SEO

In order for users to find your content on search engines, it’s critical to incorporate SEO. Keywords are one of the most effective forms of SEO, and it matters also in content crafted with a hiring intent. How do people possibly looking for a career opportunity search? By using keywords related to their industry (yours).

Read: 10 Reasons Your Business Should Invest in SEO

Responsiveness

Because people view content on several different devices these days, it should respond to a user’s environment and behavior. Typically, if you have a job, you are careful not to explore other avenues while at your desk. The first thing you do on your lunch break is get your phone out and check what’s out there.

Distribution and Promotion

It’s critical for content marketers to spend a good amount of time distributing and promoting their creations. Social media outlets are amongst the most effective channels to promote content. Businesses that target potential new hires will post and share on LinkedIn, mostly, but also other channels where their target is likely to be active.

Use of Buyer Personas

Inbound marketers use buyer personas to better understand their ideal customers. Marketers aim to find out their behavioral patterns, life goals and challenges, and the types of relationships they have in order to create the best offer and match their content and products to their needs.

This method can also be used to find ideal employees. If you utilize talent personas, you will have an easier time finding candidates who are a perfect fit for your company. To attract the type of talent you want, you want to find out specific information about these candidates, such as how they receive industry news and what types of events are important to them.

Read: Why Developing Buyer Personas is Crucial for Business 

Influencers

Influencer marketing can also be used to reach your ideal candidates. If you find the right influencers to share your content, more talented candidates will learn about your company’s job opportunities.

Once you have identified your key influencers, it’s important to build relationships with them so that they engage. For example you can comment and like their posts or mention them in one of your articles.

Marketing Automation

Talent Lead Nurturing

If you want to attract the best talent to your company, you need to utilize lead nurturing. It lets candidates know that you value them. For example, you can send your leads webinars and case studies that they may find interesting and informative. These materials will help establish your company as a leader in your industry and address the needs of your candidates.

CRM tools

Candidate relationship management tools, like Hubspot and Marketo, can help you connect with your candidates in a more personal way. These tools allow you to view their resume history, tracking past interactions, organize candidate by custom criteria and leverage real-time messaging. Much like you manage customers and monitor their progress towards closing, you can use a CRM software to qualify applicants or potential employees.

Candidate’s Journey

A candidate’s journey is more similar to a buyer’s journey than you think. These days, job seekers use similar tactics when searching for positions as customers do when searching for products. Just like inbound marketing changed the ways consumers make buying decisions, inbound marketing recruiting strategies change the way candidate find a position. Many job seekers are becoming aware of job opportunities through their own searches, rather than through recruiters. From there on, they filter and establish a shortlist of companies they are interested in and compare opportunities as they would products or services. 

When used properly, content marketing can help you attract candidates that will be great assets to your company.