As the labor market nears full employment, contractors trying to expand their workforce face a daunting challenge. You already know that people are your number one asset, but it’s not easy to grow your business when skilled tradespeople are in such short supply.
Enter recruitment marketing. It’s about promoting the value of your business to recruit top talent. When done right, recruitment marketing can maximize your return on investment, helping you hire the right picks for your team, company culture, and long-term success.
The clock is ticking—and you can’t afford to lose qualified candidates to the competition. Here’s how to run toward the fire with a winning recruitment strategy.
Just like traditional marketing, recruitment marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. You need a comprehensive, long-term plan to drive results for your business—and that requires multiple moving parts.
So, how can you capture the attention of skilled workers? Here’s how to lead your company toward hiring success with a strong recruitment foundation.
Your competitors are fighting for skilled technicians, contractors, and salespeople. The war for talent is raging on—and you can’t just copy and paste your job openings on Indeed and wait for candidates to come pouring in. To find the right candidates for the job, you need to meet them where they already are: on social media.
Social media is already so ingrained in our professional lives, but countless business owners still rely on cold calls to attract candidates. You already know that social media marketing is one of the best ways to reach your buyer personas. What about your candidate personas?
Social selling can help you find, connect with, understand, and nurture prospective candidates. It’s an incredibly powerful recruitment strategy, and the numbers back this up. According to CareerArc, 96 percent of job seekers use social media during their job search. But that’s not all—social media can help you get in front of passive job seekers, too.
When you’re planning social media content, avoid the hard sales pitch. Instead, you want to craft a subtle strategy. Your goal is to create value for your target audience by posting relevant, engaging, informative content that guides your top picks down the funnel. Then, when you’re ready to hire, you’ll have a pipeline full of candidates who check all the boxes.
Let’s face it: Recruiting quality candidates isn’t getting any easier. Maybe you’re a tried-and-true SEO fan, but the talent shortage is taking a toll on your efforts. You need to break the mold and explore every available strategy, and that’s where paid advertising can save the day.
When our clients think of PPC in the world of recruitment, they think of online job boards and digital recruitment agencies—but PPC doesn’t end there. Truth is, PPC can be much more effective than traditional pay-per-click recruitment channels.
How can PPC transform your recruitment strategy? It’s simple. PPC puts your jobs in front of active and passive candidates that are most likely to convert into applicants. When you run a strategic PPC campaign, you can bypass traditional job boards and reach your top picks.
PPC puts you in front of candidates whether they’re searching on Google, scrolling through social media, or browsing the web. The best part? Even if your candidate doesn’t click on your job ad, well-placed ads can boost awareness so you can dominate the competition without spending a dime. Win-win!
For the best results, don’t just limit yourself to Google Ads campaigns. Try dipping your toes into the world of PPC with:
Programmatic advertising (usually referred to as programmatic) can sound overwhelming, so let’s start with a simple definition. Just like paid search, programmatic involves purchasing, publishing, and optimizing ads.
You use an automated bidding system to purchase ad slots. Then, your bidding system uses an algorithm to determine ad placements in real time. And before you wonder what happened to the human equation, don’t worry—it’s all there. With programmatic, the only difference is that humans do what they do best and let technology do what it does best: make cost-effective ad spend decisions in a fraction of a second.
When you tap into programmatic advertising, you can maximize ad spend and drive real results for your recruitment campaign. It’s time to wave goodbye to inefficient campaigns, wasted ad spend, and unqualified candidates. Programmatic is the tool you need to show job ads to the right candidates at the right time without burning a hole in your recruitment budget.
So, how exactly does recruitment advertising work? Four key components will guide your programmatic strategy:
As the saying goes, content is king. You’re already using content marketing to capture new leads for your business. Now, it’s time to step up your content game to drive candidates down the talent funnel.
According to Forrester Research, it takes up to eight brand touchpoints to influence a customer’s decision. Just like most customers aren’t ready to hire your company on their first website visit, most applicants aren’t ready to fill out an application right away.
That’s right—candidates are thinking about applications in the same way they’re considering buying decisions. They want to learn more about your company before joining the team. They’re investing valuable time to research your company, services, and culture before clicking Apply.
That’s where content marketing comes into play. You want to give candidates all the information they need to feel confident in their decision. Your content should answer any questions they might have about your employer brand, company culture, and value proposition.
But remember: Education isn’t always a linear process. You need to appeal to candidates as they progress through their decision-making process. Not only that, but you need to create different types of content for different candidate personas. If you’re not sure where to start, try filling your content gaps with:
In an age where competition for top talent is at an all-time high, you need to pull out all the stops to attract top trade talent. To set your business apart from the competition, you need an intuitive recruitment website—complete with a professional design, simple application process, and user-friendly navigation.
Think of your recruitment website as the foundation of your recruitment marketing efforts. The look of your website goes a long way in attracting and retaining candidates right off the bat, so you’ll want to invest in a professional web design.
When you’re piecing your website together, think about millennials. By 2025, they’ll account for over 40 percent of the global workforce. You’re marketing to a tech-savvy crowd, and most of them can probably throw together a decent website themselves. To make a strong impression, you’ll need to impress them.
Of course, building a website is easier said than done. To amplify your efforts with an optimized recruitment website, consider hiring web development experts to do the dirty work for you.
Whether you’re trying to slash hiring costs or fill open positions fast, it’s time to rethink your recruitment strategy. To win the war for talent, you need a holistic strategy to avoid falling behind.
What are you waiting for? To start brainstorming your new strategy, schedule a discovery call with our partners at Main Street Recruitment.
By auditing your current recruitment processes, you can see how your recruitment strategy stacks up. Once you understand what’s working (and what isn’t), you can take steps to capture the attention of your future workforce.
