Digital marketing can be a real asset during your next recruiting drive. You can use digital materials to promote your business, find qualified candidates and outperform your rivals. 

Digital recruiting is popular, too. Over 67% of prospective employees use social media to find new opportunities and 90% of recruiters use LinkedIn to find and evaluate talent. 

After all, recruitment is a form of marketing your company — just with an audience of potential new hires. It’s one of the most common recruitment mistakes to not harness digital marketing. However, creating a digital marketing campaign that attracts talented employees can be tricky. You need to make a few key strategic decisions and should tailor your content to suit the talent you want to attract. 

Digital Marketing Basics

Merging your recruiting efforts with digital marketing can help you land great talent. However, if you’re new to digital marketing, it’s easy to get lost in technical jargon and complex editing programs. 

Instead, stick to the basics of effective digital marketing by creating a clear, well-strategized plan. At minimum, this plan should include key details like: 

      • Budget
      • Goals
      • Target audience
      • Tone and voice

Establish these parameters before you start posting to social accounts or writing for a blog. A clear strategy will get everyone on board and save you plenty of headaches in the future. 

Inclusive Content

All of your digital content should be intentionally inclusive. However, inclusivity is paramount during recruiting campaigns, as exclusive content will turn talented employees away from your business. 

You can create inclusive content by highlighting existing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in your workplace. This is something that major brands like Virgin Atlantic already do well. 

As part of their recent digital recruiting campaign, Virgin Atlantic updated their gender identity policy so all staff could present their true self while on board. They highlighted these changes in their “See the World Differently” campaign and highlighted the experience of current employees. 

You can follow suit by assessing your existing policies and highlighting any areas that you’re particularly proud of. Prospective employees care about working with businesses that share their values, so your inclusive content is sure to garner attention online. 

Benefit-Based Content

Employees care about the benefits packages they will receive when working for you. Sixty-three percent of prospective employees look for careers with great benefits during their job search. As a recruiter, it’s your job to get the word out there about the benefits your business offers to employees. 

Start creating benefits-based content by surveying your current employees. Ask them which benefits they value the most and which make the biggest impact on their day-to-day lives. Use these insights to plan a series of posts, blogs and video content based on the benefits you offer. 

You may need to expand your benefits in order to attract the best talent. For example, many employees today are interested in working for companies that actively promote mental health services. You can help employees choose the right mental health professional for their specific needs by funding treatment from licensed psychiatrists, psychologists or psychotherapists. 

Make the most of your robust benefits policy by interviewing willing employees and foregrounding their testimonials. This will present your business as an authentically people-friendly workplace. 

Social Media 

Social media is often underutilized by recruiters and hiring managers. However, if you want to find talented younger employees, advertising on social channels is a must. 

Consider investing in paid content on Instagram and Facebook, as over 79% of employees have used social media to start their job search in the past year. Be sure to do your market research first, as you need to meet the genre conventions of each social media platform. 

If you’re planning to sponsor posts on Instagram stories, try to create visually appealing, data-driven content. Content that grabs users’ attention and quickly gives them key details is more likely to resonate with job seekers than content that contains too much information. 

If you’re advertising on Facebook, consider including further information in your post. Posts on Facebook tend to be lengthier than Instagram posts, as users can quickly scan for key details on Facebook. 

Once you’ve run your sponsored campaign, utilize your account insights to determine which posts were the most effective. Facebook and Instagram allow you to see how much engagement each post receives. You can combine this with data from Google analytics to see how many referrals you receive from your social media pages. 

Tailor future content based on your findings to increase your reach and engagement next time around. For example, if your data shows content videos of employee experiences perform well, try to create more posts that foreground your current staff. 

Conclusion

Digital marketing can take your recruiting campaign to the next level. Start by covering the basics: create a clear budget, identify your target audience and establish a voice you want to establish. This will get everyone on board and maximize the effectiveness of your campaign. 

When it’s time to start creating content, consider pushing material that shows off your commitment to DEI and benefits. Employees today want to work for firms that share their values and support their well-being. Creating content based on your existing policies will convince talented employees that you’re right for them.

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Authors
Ainsley Lawrence

Ainsley Lawrence is a freelance writer from the Pacific Northwest. She is interested in better living through technology and education. She loves traveling to beautiful places and is frequently lost in a mystery podcast.