Finding the right talent for your team is one of the most important things for the success of your business. This is precisely why companies are constantly looking for the most experienced and skilled professionals in their respective niches.
But you can’t simply expect specialists to come to you. You need to be the one reaching out and attracting talented professionals. This is precisely why you need a recruiting content strategy. Hence, here’s how to create a purposeful recruiting content strategy.
What Is a Recruiting Content Strategy?
A recruiting content strategy is exactly what it sounds like. It is a content marketing strategy used in the recruiting process. Essentially, it is a part of your recruiting campaign that often uses content, ads, job listings, and other methods of finding the right candidates for one or more job positions in a company.
Having a recruiting content strategy is necessary for planning your entire recruiting process before you actually start looking for potential candidates. Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective types of marketing, so using content to find professionals is by far the best choice you can make. Without further ado, here’s how you can create your own recruiting content strategy:
1. Create an Attractive Image for Your Brand
First of all, you need to create an attractive image for your brand. Branding is essential for your company to do business successfully, but it is actually also necessary for recruiting. In other words, when you have a strong brand, there will be more people who will want to work for your company.
Just think about the big companies in the tech industry. Everyone wants to work for Google, Apple, or other well-known brands. That is precisely why you first need to work on your branding before you focus specifically on your recruiting content strategy.
2. Promote Your Company as a Talent Destination
Once you have established a strong brand image for your company, you can start promoting it as a talent destination. It’s not enough to simply have a strong and recognizable brand – you should also have a reputation for being the perfect place for people to work at.
To put it simply, having a strong brand will give you authority, prestige, and influence. But having a reputation of a talent destination is what will ultimately boost your company’s attraction factor and will lead to more candidates applying to your job listings.
3. Define Your Ideal Candidate Persona
Now that you’ve laid a foundation by establishing your company’s brand image and reputation, you can start thinking of your recruiting content strategy. The first step is to define your ideal candidate persona. This is the specific kind of person you want to see in a specific role in your team.
If you don’t know how to put together your ideal candidate persona, you can hire a professional writer from the writing services reviews site Best Essays Education who will help you do this. Your ideal candidate persona is somewhat similar to an ideal customer persona (but here it’s about your future employee).
4. Involve Current Employees in the Hiring Process
To create your recruiting content strategy faster as well as to have different perspectives throughout the planning process, you can involve your current employees. They can help you find the kind of person who will be perfect for your team.
Your current employees already know their strengths and weaknesses, so they will be able to give you tips on how to create your ideal candidate persona. Moreover, they will also give you ideas for your recruiting and onboarding strategies.
5. Put Together an Employee Referral Program
An employee referral program is a program that allows your current employees to invite potential candidates and get benefits in case one of the candidates gets hired. Essentially, it is a way for you to encourage more employees to invite talented and skilled people to your company.
Your referral program won’t be a part of your recruiting content strategy but rather a part of your overall recruiting and onboarding strategy. Still, you can include some plans to promote the referral program into your recruiting content strategy (e.g. emails to your current employees informing them about the referral program).
6. Find Tools to Make Recruiting Easier
Today, you don’t need to be doing everything manually. In fact, there are so many tools available that can make your recruiting easier that it would be stupid not to use them. Here are just some examples of tools you can use for your recruiting content strategy:
- MailChimp – Email marketing platform.
- Hootsuite – Social media management platform.
- Grammarly and Hemingway Editor – Grammar and style checkers.
- Canva – Editing software with templates and customization features.
7. Keep Relevant Recruiting Documentation
Keeping relevant recruiting documentation is by far one of the most important aspects of having a recruiting content strategy. You need to make sure that you not only have the right documents accessible at all times but that you also have all your activities and plans documented.
To help you with documentation, you can hire experienced writers and editors from the writing agency Trust My Paper. If you don’t have any knowledge on how to keep such documentation, then you should definitely get professionals on board to assist you.
8. Follow Up on All Your Candidates
It doesn’t matter who you hire, but you should follow up on all your candidates. Even those who don’t end up working for you could join your talent pool and could become your employees in the future.
This is precisely why you need to follow up on all candidates after you have screened their applications, conducted interviews with them, and ultimately decided to hire someone else. Tell them that they didn’t get the job, but that you will still keep their information and get in touch with them in case an appropriate position becomes available at your company in the future.
9. Use a Variety of Content Types and Formats
As a part of your recruiting content strategy, you will need to use a variety of content types and formats rather than sticking to one or two things at a time. Some of the content you can use as a part of your recruiting content marketing campaign:
- Emails
- Social media posts
- SMS and messenger texts
- Blog posts and articles
- E-books, webinars, and podcasts
- Videos, graphs, infographics, and presentations
10. Measure Results and Upgrade Your Strategy
Last but not least, don’t forget to measure the results of your recruiting content marketing campaign and upgrade your strategy based on what you see. Recruiting with content successfully doesn’t happen if you keep making the same mistakes, so you need to learn from them and improve.
If you see that something isn’t working, try something else or change your approach to what you are trying to do. There are so many content formats and types out there that you will definitely find something that will work for you.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, a purposeful recruiting content strategy will definitely help you attract and hire truly experienced professionals. Use the tips in this article to help you build your own recruiting content strategy that will help you successfully gather your team.
Author Bio: Lillie Jenkins is a creative copywriter and content writer. She has worked as a copywriter since graduating school, so her writing skills are well-honed. She writes publications in such fields as marketing, business, education, and personal life. More than writing, Lillie loves to travel and read professional literature.