Do you find recruitment a pleasant, easy experience?
No, didn’t think so.
Your business probably doesn’t have a huge budget to advertise new roles, and if you operate in particularly competitive industries the bigger players often get first dibs on the best talent.
Result? Frustration 99% of the time you need to make a new hire.
The default position of many businesses is to post an ad to a job board and hope for the best, or rely on expensive recruitment agencies. This approach isn’t working for a lot of businesses the way it used to.
Time for a New Approach
There’s a way to take a lot of the pain and cost out of attracting new employees, and that’s to make content marketing do the hard work for you. Content marketing, done right, increases your visibility and improves your reputation so that people perceive your company as an attractive place to work.
The best thing? Once created, your content is always out there working on your behalf, championing your business and attracting potential new employees.
In this piece we’ll take you through some key areas, so you can get started making content marketing work for your recruitment process.
How Does Content Marketing Apply to Recruitment?
Your content marketing should always aim to do one of the following things for your audience;
- Inform
- Educate
- Entertain
- Engage
By regularly posting content which meets these objectives you increase awareness, credibility and ultimately trust in your business. You also control the narrative about your company, instead of leaving would-be candidates to guess or rely on third-hand information.
Your content marketing output should also convey your values and beliefs, which further help generate engagement and affinity for your company.
This all helps you stand out from your competitors for jobseekers, in much the same way as it does when you’re trying to sell a product or service.
What are the values which drive your business? Have a think about how you can get them across in your content.
Write for Your Audience, But Be You
Prospective employees want to understand what your company is about, so your content should answer the kind of questions they could be asking.
What type of work do you do?
Which space do you occupy in the industry?
Where do you see your future as a business?
What is it like to work at your company?
These are just a few; think about the questions you would want answered when learning about a company. Ask recent hires what information they would have benefited from prior to joining your company, to find out what’s relevant to current candidates.
You need to tell the story of your organisation through blog posts, emails and across social platforms in a way that is uniquely you. If your audience is technically savvy then you can delve into the jargon, but make sure your content is still engaging and interesting to read. You can do both!
Before you sit down and start writing, take some time to decide what messages you want to convey about your business and what key values you want to communicate through your content.
Identify what makes you stand out and emphasise that; authenticity is an important factor for the modern employee, so being able to articulate that will take you a long way in standing out from your competitors.
Thought Leadership
People are attracted to leaders.
It’s a fact across work and life, and it presents a real opportunity in content marketing to position your company as a thought leader. By demonstrating your knowledge, insight, and pioneering approach you can establish your credentials and build an engaged following.
When you create that reputation as a thought leader and pioneer, you become a go-to resource for people seeking to improve their knowledge and understanding.
As mentioned above, that leadership and success is attractive and further positions your company as one which people will want to work for. Next thing you know, you’re receiving CVs from people who want to work for a leading organisation like yours.
Mix It Up and Encourage Engagement
You need to be consistent in your approach to posting and sharing content, but at the same time you don’t want your online presence to be mundane and stale.
Don’t make the mistake of constantly being on transmit; nobody likes a one-way conversation so you need to provide your audiences with opportunities to get involved in the discussion.
You can drive interaction by being active across social media, as that’s where you will engage with more people.
Post about work events, share news stories relevant to your industry with your comments, encourage engagement by asking others for their opinions - even work social events, to shed more light on the human face of your business.
Written content isn’t the only type of content out there either - images, infographics and videos are other great ways to engage with people and show different sides to your business.
Measurement and Improvement
One more thing before we finish up, and it’s an important one! You need to constantly review and evaluate the content you’ve shared:
What’s worked?
What’s fallen flat?
What’s generated the most shares and comments?
Create more of what works and discard the rest, so over time you fine-tune your content to resonate with readers.
This applies to your content marketing to generate business leads too - the chances are some of your content will appeal to people who want to work for you just as much as people who want to work with you.
What Next?
So now you know how you can create a brand through content marketing that makes people want to work for you.
It’s not rocket science - most of what you need to write about is probably already in your head, and you might already have some ideas after reading this blog!
Make content marketing a central part of your strategy with regular time and thought, and it will pay you back many times over. It could even land you your next employee!
If you want to attract more candidates but don’t have the time or resources to put a content marketing strategy in place, get in touch at hello@prizecontent.com to find out how we can help.
