6 Innovative Recruitment Marketing Strategies That Win the Best Candidates

Any business that wants to maximize its chances of success and gain an edge over its competitors must be able to attract and retain talented employees.

This is becoming increasingly difficult at a time of acute skills shortages. Nearly nine out of ten companies worldwide are already affected by talent gaps, or expect to experience this problem within a few years, according to research by McKinsey.

As a result, employers need to be prepared to navigate a candidate-driven jobs market, in which the most sought-after individuals can take their pick of multiple businesses vying to secure their capabilities.

In this highly challenging environment, it pays to think about what you can do to set yourself apart from the pack and take a truly innovative approach to recruitment.

Here are 6 recruitment marketing strategies you need to consider in order to attract top talent:

1. Rethink your employer branding

Employer branding has an important part to play in recruitment, and becomes particularly crucial when labor market conditions are tight and you need to present a compelling case for why people should want to work for you.

Your employer brand is what differentiates you from other companies and allows you to showcase how your broader organizational values connect to your people strategy and policies.

If you're looking for ways to freshen up your strategy in this area, one option to consider is getting existing employees on board as brand ambassadors. There are many reasons why the people who already work for you are the best placed to represent your brand, the clearest of which is that they can speak from personal experience about what the company does to support its workforce and fulfill its employee value proposition (EVP).

Think about what you can do to present employee stories in a unique, engaging way. This could involve inviting people to share their individual accounts of working for you, or how the business has helped them achieve their personal goals.

2. Take a fresh approach to social media

Social media has become a key component of many core business functions, including recruitment. If you're able to use social platforms in a way that enables genuine connections and engagement with strong candidates, while setting your brand apart from that of your competitors, you'll be in a good position to identify and acquire the talent you need.

As the leading professional network for jobseekers and HR professionals, LinkedIn is likely to be your first port of call when you want to take a social-first approach to hiring. This is a powerful channel through which to cultivate your employer brand and build relationships with candidates and potential recruits.

There's a lot you could and should be doing on LinkedIn to show what makes you unique as an employer, including:

• Regularly updating your company page with relevant information
• Joining and participating in groups relevant to your area of business
• Using search and filtering tools to find attractive candidates looking for new career opportunities

Your social recruiting efforts don't need to stop with LinkedIn. The likes of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can also offer huge potential to increase your brand visibility and promote content that has a real impact on your audience.

Learn more: How to Use Social Media to Recruit the Best Talent

3. Create candidate personas

Much like you would use customer personas in marketing to provide a detailed picture of audience segments and what they want from brands, candidate personas can strengthen your understanding of what defines and motivates the people you want to add to your workforce.

These representations of the sort of applicants you're looking for will vary depending on a range of factors, such as the unique demands of particular roles and departments, but should include:

• Educational and professional background
• Personal attributes and characteristics
• Any specific qualifications or accreditations relevant to the role
• Career goals and aspirations
• Potential objections to working for your company

This information will help to guide and inform your efforts in other key stages of the recruitment process, from writing job descriptions to creating supporting content for social media.

4. Modernize your EVP

It's crucial that your EVP is up to date and relevant, not only in terms of what your company is currently able to offer its workforce, but also what's most important to your target candidates.

Make sure you understand what modern jobseekers want from employers (besides fundamental provisions like fair pay and benefits) and focus on how you can make this a core element of your EVP.

Gallup research has shown that Gen Z and millennials - two highly influential cohorts that make up nearly half (46%) of the full-time workforce in the US - are looking for:

• Care and protection for their wellbeing
• Strong ethical standards
• Open, transparent leadership
• Diverse and inclusive workplaces

Putting concepts like these front and center in your EVP will help you build stronger engagement with top candidates and differentiate your employer brand.

5. Create specialist recruitment content

In another parallel with marketing, you should be creating a range of unique, diverse content that supports your recruitment activities by promoting your brand and demonstrates what you have to offer as an employer.

Your careers page can be used as a central hub to host a range of content types, from videos that give people a 'day in the life' look at what it's like to work for you, to employee blogs, profiles and testimonials.

This is another area where social media will prove highly valuable for amplifying and drawing attention to what you've produced. Employee-generated content such as blog posts and photographs illustrating life in your business, for example, should be showcased on LinkedIn and other platforms to maximize their value.

6. Measure results and stay agile

You should always have a good understanding of how your recruitment marketing strategy is performing at any given time, which relies on the systematic collection and analysis of data.

Make sure you're following a process to measure results and gauge progress against recruitment metrics and key performance indicators such as:

• Time to hire
• Qualified candidate ratio
• Interview to offer ratio
• Cost per hire
• Quality of hire

If the data suggests you're falling short on your most important metrics, it's time to think about which aspects of your recruitment process are letting you down and what needs to change to deliver better results.

An emphasis on agility and a willingness to change could prove crucial as you look to stay relevant and keep up with candidate expectations in a highly demanding market.