Recruitment marketing can be a complex area, given the dynamic expectations of candidates from their employers. Today, we look at the basics of a recruitment marketing campaign, along with best practices learned from campaigns by Ogilvy & Mather, the U.K. Army, Cisco, Lego, and Eurowings.
Modern recruiters aren’t just looking to fill up vacancies. They need to build a well-planned recruitment marketing campaign that leads to superior candidate quality, a steady flow of applicants, and a positive perception of your employer brand. This goes beyond just hiring for the job vacancy at hand. Any recruitment marketing campaign today must combine the best practices of marketing with a careful understanding of organizational requirements to strategically select hiring investments.
So, what are the elements of a successful recruitment marketing campaign? What can you learn from smart employers that got this combination just right? Let’s take a look.
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The Basics of a Recruitment Marketing Campaign
Recruitment marketing encompasses all the tools and strategies that help you to engage with potential talent before they apply for a job. Essentially, you convey the value of working at your company to attract applicants when the time comes. Therefore, recruitment marketing can be a process that spans months to almost a year, not limited to a specific vacancy or hiring cycle.
Several targeted recruitment marketingOpens a new window campaigns are geared for short-term outcomes. You can build on the existing employer brand to create a target profile of the ideal applicant. Based on this profile, job ads, emails, website content, and social media are designed to reach out to candidates optimally. Finally, those who apply as a result of your recruitment marketing campaign are nurtured until they join the company.
There are myriad ways in which you could approach a recruitment marketing campaign – to create awareness about your employer brand or to actively boost applicant numbers. We look at five brilliant recruitment marketing campaigns that you can inspire from.
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5 Examples of Brilliant Recruitment Marketing Campaigns
Recruitment marketing can often be confusing.
What exactly is the difference between recruitment marketing and employer brandingOpens a new window ?
When should your recruitment marketing campaign begin?
Do sudden job vacancies trigger your campaign? Does this make it too late to start a campaign at this time?Â
The best employers in the world know the answer to all these questions and have carefully formulated a recruitment marketing strategy to meet their unique needs.
Here are five examples and best practices you can learn from them.
1. Turn assessments into social chatter, like Ogilvy & Mather
Contests have become a popular recruitment marketing tactic, especially in the technology sector. Applicants are often asked to solve puzzles or write code via social media – this acts both as an initial assessment and a way to grab the applicant’s attention. Contest announcements, tests, and results are also easy to share online, which makes it much easier to build a campaign around assessments.
In 2010, Ogilvy & MatherOpens a new window leveraged YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter to find what it called “the world’s greatest salesperson.â€
Through a YouTube video, the company asked applicants to create a video of themselves selling a brick, with the promise that the best videos would be featured at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. The winner was also awarded a three-month fellowship.
This was an engaging way to attract some of the most creative minds to one of the biggest ad agencies in the world.
The unique Ogilvy & Mather ad asking candidates to create videos selling bricks
2. Talk directly to your future employee, like the U.K. Army
Recruitment marketing campaigns, at their core, are a marketing initiative and require a deep understanding of the target audience. A successful campaign will involve creative, intelligent copywriting – it cannot merely be a boring job ad.
The U.K. ArmyOpens a new window achieved this with incredible success when it launched its January 2019 recruitment marketing campaign. The message was geared specifically toward millennials, a segment that the army wanted to target for this period. It redefined descriptors like “selfie-addicts†and “binge-gamers†positively – equating these uniquely millennial interests with qualities such as confidence and drive, respectively.
Though this campaign was criticized heavily, the number of applicants to the U.K. army jumped by more than 4,000 in one month, with 2,700 applications coming in after just five days of the campaign launch.
The U.K. Army’s recruitment marketing campaign, launched in January 2019
3. Make your existing workforce part of the recruitment marketing campaign, like Cisco
Remember, your work culture forms the foundation of your recruitment marketing strategy, and at the center of your culture is your workforce.
By inviting employees to participate in brand building and showcasing the company culture on social platforms, you can gain the interest of like-minded applicants.Â
Cisco’s created an entire recruitment marketing video showcasing their own employees with the slogan “Be you, with us.†The ad demonstrates the value of unique perspectives and the freedom to share them in the workplace, inviting applications from professionals who are keen to showcase their individuality.
“Be you, with us†is also a popular hashtag that the company uses on its social channels to stand out and create a unique brand.
Cisco’s recruitment marketing ad affirming they want applicants who “don’t blend in†but stand out
Learn More:Â
What is Full Cycle Recruiting? Definition, Process with ExamplesOpens a new window
4. Leverage the power of gamification, like LEGO
Everyone likes a good contest, and it can also be a great way to test out your candidate’s capabilities before they join a job. Gamification doesn’t need to be limited to technical posts either – while coding challenges and puzzles have become a staple for technical hires, this tactic can be leveraged in other forms of recruitment marketing campaigns as well.
LEGO used gamification when hiring a Master Model Builder for its LEGOLAND Discovery Centre. The company hosted an event where hundreds of visitors came in to participate and watched the LEGO building competition.
LEGO was able to turn its recruitment marketing drive into a local event, establishing itself as a prominent employer in the region.
Lego combines gamification with event-based marketing to reinforce its employer brand
5. Smartly design the candidate UX, like Eurowings Airlines
The user experience (UX) can make a big difference to participation rates. Recruitment marketing campaigns follow the same principle – by designing a campaign that’s engaging and interactive, you can urge more candidates to apply. You can even use a mobile app or social media to deploy the campaign.
Eurowings did exactly this when looking to hire in 2018. It converted each job post into a Tinder profile, and job seekers could either swipe left or swipe right.
Tinder is immensely popular across the globe, with an estimated 5.2 million users. Eurowings tapped into this segment for its recruitment marketing campaignOpens a new window , where swiping right would reveal more information about the job and would finally, result in a “perfect match†just like a dating app.
Recruitment Marketing Is All About Finding Your Voice
A recruitment marketing campaign is less about the tools you use, and more about your brand’s unique, differentiated voice. And, the success of your campaign depends on how this voice resonates with the target audience. So, ask yourself the following questions before designing your next recruitment marketing campaign:
- What’s your objective: awareness, a larger talent pool, or immediate vacancies?
- What does your ideal candidate look like?
- Where does this candidate hang out, and what are the channels they use to communicate?
- Finally, what value can you offer them as an employer?
What these brands showcased above have done is reimagined recruitmentOpens a new window as a candidate-first experience, where they attract talent just like they do their customers. Using similar strategies, you can arrive at the perfect formula for recruitment marketing geared for near and long-term outcomes for your organization and attract talent that will be assets to you.
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