Five tactics that Talent Acquisition teams should steal from Marketers to supercharge their hiring

With the world constantly evolving, so too does the recruitment industry. Talent acquisition teams are always looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve and recruit the best talent out there. What better way to do so than by applying tried and tested marketing tactics and principles? 

In this blog, we will look at five marketing strategies that talent acquisition teams can use to supercharge their hiring efforts.

1. Commit the time and resources to build your brand

While there are tangible elements of a brand, like logos and taglines, so much of the equity of a brand is in the intangible goodwill and recognition that is built over a long period. This equity comes from every touchpoint and every experience that a consumer has with that brand and they all reinforce a larger perception of that organization.

The challenge of brand building? The activities, repetition, and investment it takes to build a strong brand do not deliver an immediate quantifiable return, so it’s often difficult to get leadership buy-in to maintain this investment. This is probably starting to feel familiar to those working in talent, recruitment, and HR who have focused on building an employer brand.

In Byron Sharp’s ‘How Brands Grow’, Sharp highlights the importance of reach and frequency as two of the key drivers behind capturing market share and cultivating brand loyalty. Additionally, a brand that is unique and recognizable is more likely to be differentiated from rivals.

So what does this mean for talent teams? Here are the key takeaways…

Get your EVP and employer brand right

Think about and nail down your Employer Value Proposition (EVP), it’s the backbone of your employer brand. You want to ensure it is distinct and unique, but also consistent. Your visual identity, messaging, and brand voice need to be the same across every touchpoint people have with your employer brand. If you're not sure where to start when crafting your EVP, you can read our complete guide to employer brand and EVP as a great starting point.

Optimize your employer brand activities for reach and frequency

On the topic of touchpoints, focus on reach and frequency in your employer brand activities. It’s not enough to run an employer brand campaign when you’re actively looking to hire. Employer brand is a year-round endeavor. The employers that are consistently reaching potential candidates across a variety of mediums and platforms will be the ones that are not only top of mind for candidates, but will also be viewed more favorably as prospective employers.

Keep your narrative and brand consistent

Building an exceptional employer brand involves everything from defining your company culture, values, and mission statement to creating engaging job descriptions and user-friendly career websites. By doing so, you'll appeal to candidates who align with your company culture and values. And the most important part of all this, is to keep your brand and messaging consistent across every one of these touchpoints.

2. Always experiment with social media

The landscape of social media is ever-evolving, in 2023 the average person spends almost two and a half hours per day on social media. As many know, these platforms are driven by ever-changing algorithms that look to balance the interests of the platform themself and advertisers while also aiming to keep users visiting and coming back to their platform.

Social media can be an excellent tool for recruiting top talent. But, to be effective, you need to do more than post about job openings. Use social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to showcase your company culture, your happy and fulfilled employees, and the successes you've had as an organization. This will help build a community that's engaged with your brand, and it’s more likely to attract top talent.

Experiment with new platforms and formats

LinkedIn and Twitter are staple platforms for most businesses. However as new platforms emerge and existing ones evolve, we are increasingly seeing more ‘professional’ geared content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

It’s important to experiment and try new platforms and formats, with many traditional channels flooded with content it is often hard to stand out and be seen by your target audience. You often don’t know if a platform is suitable until you give it a try and find out for yourself if the audience and the engagement are there.

Finally, when a platform you’re on releases a new format or feature—use it! Platforms have a vested interest in their new formats proving successful and often there is not only an advantage in being an early adopter of a new format due to lack of competition, but these users will frequently see algorithmic bumps in their reach too, as the platform looks to promote and boost the visibility of that new format. This gives you a fantastic opportunity to reach new audiences and reap the benefits as an early adopter.

3. Compelling copywriting is invaluable

Too often, job listings fall into the same formulaic rut. But, this is the perfect opportunity to set yourselves apart! Use your job postings to describe what makes your company unique and what sets you apart from others. Share your brand messaging that speaks to potential competent employees and use calls to action to prompt them to apply for the role. Don't forget the importance of creating mobile-friendly job postings that provide a seamless application experience.

While we all ‘learn’ to write at some point in life, as a marketer you quickly learn that simply being able to write does not mean your copy will be engaging, compelling or effective.

There’s a very good reason that copywriting is still a valuable skill set in marketing.

If you’re looking to improve your writing skills, consider Josh Bernoff’s ‘Writing Without Bullshit”. There are many valuable lessons to be found within, but if you don’t have time, here are the key lessons you can implement in your own writing when it comes to job listings:

• The Iron Imperative: Treat the reader’s time as more valuable than your own. Don’t use more words than you need, don’t embellish and always write with a clear view of who you are writing for and what they should take from that piece of writing.
• Eliminate jargon: Defining some crucial concepts and using them in the text is fine, but too much jargon makes a text hard to understand. The golden rule of eliminating jargon is inspired by Albert Einstein, who said “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”
• Optimize for mobile screens: Bring important information to the top of pages, page sections and paragraphs. The smaller the screen, the longer the page, section or paragraph. So you must make key information more visible. Limit paragraphs to 50-60 words, long paragraphs can fill a whole screen on a mobile phone. Finally, use a heading roughly every 2-4 paragraphs, scrolling while skim-reading is common, and it can be easy to miss something if it's not labeled.

4. Embrace word-of-mouth

Word-of-mouth is a highly effective medium for advertising. Recent studies have shown that when it comes to marketing, word-of-mouth can result in 5X more sales than paid ads. The reasoning behind this is simple, as people we place far greater trust in the advice of people we know personally. This is why, when it comes to talent acquisition, your current employees are one of your greatest assets in recruiting top talent. 

Your employees can act as word-of-mouth advocates for your employer brand, and their recommendations will hold a lot of weight in their professional circles when prospective candidates are considering you as an employer.

Encourage and empower your employees to become your brand advocates in their networks by giving their feedback, sharing inspiring stories, announcing job openings to their networks, and offering organic social proof. Getting employees on board not only adds credibility to your job openings but also helps build and maintain a healthy company culture.

The ‘argument’ against word-of-mouth

There are some that push back on the idea of word-of-mouth marketing as an effective tactic. The primary objection is the notion that you do not control the message and this may not always be a positive one that is shared. However, the counter to this is quite simple, if you are fostering a positive culture and are in fact a good place to work then this is not something you need to worry about.

5. Re-engage and re-market

One of the most frustrating aspects of recruitment is when you have an interested and qualified candidate drop off mid-application. While you may not be able to secure everyone, employing e-commerce principles such as cart abandonment and remarketing, you can prompt people to finish applications and capture those who showed interest in the past. By consistently and respectfully reaching out with reminders and new job openings, you can maintain consistent engagement and keep your company top of mind (read once more, the importance of reach and frequency in building your employer brand).

Capture interest and build a mailing list

If someone has landed on your job ad or made it to your careers page, they’re already a significantly warmer prospect than someone who has never engaged with your company. Giving these prospects the ability to sign up for future updates about roles with your company is a great way to ensure that interest, and potential ad spend that brought them to you, doesn’t go to waste. 

There are any number of reasons someone might not ultimately apply for a job, it might not match their skills or current career aspirations or it simply might not be the best time for them to change jobs—that doesn’t mean a future role won’t be right up their alley!

Platforms like Outhire make this easy, with the ability to subscribe for updates, plus automated emails to your subscriber list when a new role is posted. With Outhire, you can also give prospects the option to save a job for later, sending them an email with a link they can come back to and apply for the role. Great candidates will take their application seriously and be eager to put their best foot forward, so it’s important to give them a simple way to bookmark your open role so that they can come back and complete their application when they have the necessary time to spend on it.

Follow up ‘abandoned carts’

When you’re investing your budget into job advertising, you want the best possible return on that investment. Abandoned cart emails are a staple of modern email marketing and can help convert prospects who have navigated away from your job listing for any number of reasons. Outhire brings these abandoned cart capabilities to your hiring tech stack, automating reminder emails to users who have yet to complete their applications.

Harness re-marketing to drive the best return across platforms

Re-marketing is a staple of digital pay-per-click advertising, building audiences from users who have previously engaged with your brand so that you can serve ads directly to these users. Remarketing allows you to reach warm prospects that have a higher chance of converting into applicants.

When you launch a targeted talent campaign you will be pushing your job ad out across a number of platforms. Sometimes you might find a platform is not performing well, there’s a high volume of people click through from your ad but very few conversions. It may be that this platform is ineffective for reaching the right type of audience, however, often remarketing can turn an ineffective platform into a conversion powerhouse.

For example, your job ad might not convert ‘cold’ leads when they click through from Instagram, however by simply switching these campaigns to only remarket to existing prospects on Instagram, you could see conversion increase exponentially.

It’s important to consider the candidate journey and ‘funnel’ that takes people from their first touchpoint with your brand all the way through to a conversion (application). This journey could be different across industries or even between employers in the same industry. Always consider and experiment with where platforms serve you best in your recruitment. A platform might not be great at converting cold leads but that doesn’t mean it won’t be fantastic at getting warm leads over the finish line to complete their application.

The power of an entire marketing team at your disposal

If your plate is already full and you don’t have the time or bandwidth to dedicate to implementing these strategies, don’t fear, Outhire is here to help.

Outhire is a talent attraction platform that brings these marketing principles to help supercharge your hiring. With Outhire, you have the power of an entire dedicated marketing team in one simple platform that is purpose-built to make it quick and simple for anyone to create a fully optimized targeted talent campaign. With an assist from AI, you can do everything from crafting your job listing to generating eye-catching ad copy and creative, then in minutes a highly targeted campaign is ready to go so you can reach your next great hire.

As the recruitment industry becomes more competitive, it's essential to keep up with industry happenings and apply successful practices from other areas such as digital marketing. By focusing more on brand building, social media presence, interesting job posting design, employee advocacy, e-commerce principles, and remarketing talent acquisition teams can stay ahead of the competition and find and attract exceptional candidates for the organization.

Get started for free today, create your first two jobs for free and see how simple the future of hiring can be!

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