For manufacturers, hiring has become a visibility challenge as much as a recruiting challenge.
The best candidates aren’t just searching job boards—they’re researching employers. They’re reading reviews, visiting career pages, comparing company culture, and deciding whether your organization feels like a place where they can build a career.
That’s why recruitment marketing has become an essential part of workforce development.
Before investing more money in job ads or wondering why applications have slowed, it’s worth taking a step back. A recruitment marketing audit helps you evaluate every stage of your hiring process—from your employer brand and candidate experience to the metrics that reveal what’s working and what isn’t.
Whether you’re hiring production workers, skilled tradespeople, engineers, or leadership positions, these four steps will help you identify opportunities to strengthen your recruitment strategy and attract better-fit candidates.
Auditing your recruitment campaigns isn’t just a good idea—it drives real results for your business, including revenue. The competition for talent is heating up, and your ideal candidates are browsing dozens of job listings in seconds. You need a clear-cut strategy that sets your business, HR managers, and new hires up for success.
Sure, recruitment auditing probably isn’t at the top of your priority list. Maybe you don’t have the resources to audit your recruitment campaigns, or you’re too busy working in the field to sacrifice hours behind a desk. Unfortunately, the war for talent isn’t ending anytime soon. It’s time to start investing in recruitment—and it starts with an audit.
When you take a deep dive into your marketing strategy, you’ll gain key insights into the candidate journey, your employer brand, and your competition. Then, you can start crafting a comprehensive strategy to captivate your ideal candidates.
The frequency of your recruitment audits should depend on your business, the amount of hiring involved, and how successful your current processes are.
Of course, marketing should never be a guessing game. Even if your strategy is driving results, recruitment is a long-term strategy, and there’s always going to be room for improvement.
To maximize your ROI, schedule regular check-ins to monitor your performance and refine your strategy. If you’re not meeting your hiring goals, don’t wait to conduct an audit. Our clients drive the best results when they make it a priority to carry out minor and major audits at regular intervals.
To improve your recruitment processes, you have to start by understanding what’s working, where there are bottlenecks, and how your business stacks up against the competition. Whether you’re reflecting on your approach or preparing for a meeting with your hiring team, a recruitment audit is necessary to gain insights into your campaigns.
Pro-Tip:
Today, Main Street Recruitment helps manufacturers build stronger employer visibility through recruitment marketing—not traditional recruiting. Their free Recruitment Marketing Audit helps manufacturers evaluate their career website, employer brand, recruitment content, digital presence, and candidate experience to uncover opportunities for improvement.
If you’re looking for a more comprehensive assessment of your hiring strategy, download the Recruitment Marketing Audit to see where your organization stands.
Download the Recruitment Marketing Audit
No matter what your current strategy looks like, here’s how to start thinking about your recruitment life cycle, including your employer brand, candidate experience, and recruitment metrics.
Before customers decide to hire your company, they go through a lengthy thought process. It takes time for them to research your company, learn about your products and services, and decide whether you’re the best choice for the job.
Just like customers, candidates navigate multiple steps in the candidate journey before sending in an application. When they decide to apply, the second stage of their journey begins.
Understanding the candidate journey from the candidate’s point of view is a key step to improving the overall candidate experience. Every touchpoint with your business plays an important role in whether potential candidates will convert into actual candidates—and auditing the candidate journey can help ensure each touchpoint leaves a positive impression.
You’re dedicating valuable time, money, and resources to captivate your ideal candidates and guide them through the candidate journey, but your efforts aren’t paying off. How can you maximize your ROI and make the most of your marketing efforts?
Even if your candidate journey is flawless, your employer brand can still interfere with your recruitment strategy. According to Glassdoor, 75 percent of active job seekers are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively promotes its brand. What’s more, 92 percent of people would consider switching jobs if offered a position with a business with an excellent employer brand.
In other words, your employer brand can make or break your marketing strategy. To audit your employer brand, start by looking at:
Once you have a clear picture of your employer brand, you can figure out what message to send and set realistic goals for your branding strategy.
Data can be an invaluable resource for your business. It provides insight into how your marketing campaigns are performing and who your customers are—and it can even help you make smarter hiring decisions.
Just like any other marketing campaign, the quality of your data is much more important than the quantity. The secret to a successful audit is knowing where to look and what metrics are worth analyzing.
Depending on your strategy, you might tap into HR data to discover hiring trends, send surveys to gain insight into the candidate experience, or track engagement on your employer social media posts. Once you start collecting data, you can set internal benchmarks to track your marketing success.
Some of the most important recruitment metrics to track include:
At this point, you should have a solid idea of how effective your recruitment marketing is. Now, it’s time to spy on the competition to see how your marketing strategy stacks up.
Whenever you can, take time to check out your competitors’ recruitment campaigns. If you can learn from the areas they perform better than you or understand why they’re attracting qualified candidates, you can tailor your messaging or fill gaps in your own strategy.
So, where do you start? Take a look at your competitors’ employer brands to see how they present themselves to candidates. In addition, consider what methods they use to engage candidates. Maybe they’re actively promoting job openings on Facebook, sharing employee stories on Instagram, or sending email newsletters to interested candidates. How does your marketing strategy compare?
Once you’ve gathered some inspiration from the competition, you can use this information to improve your strategy, strengthen your employer value proposition, and differentiate your brand from the competition.
Hiring the right people rarely comes down to posting more jobs. The manufacturers that consistently attract skilled talent are the ones that invest in their employer reputation long before they have an open position.
A recruitment marketing audit gives you a practical starting point. It helps uncover gaps in your messaging, candidate experience, and digital presence so you can make smarter decisions and build a more predictable hiring pipeline.
At Company 119, we help manufacturers strengthen their visibility in the marketplace. Through our sister company, Main Street Recruitment, we apply that same strategic approach to employer branding and recruitment marketing—helping manufacturers become employers that skilled candidates actively seek out.
