Update your recruitment marketing strategies for 2023 | BlueSky PR

It's hard to believe 2023 is behind us. And what a year it was. Full of twists and turns, and perhaps most critically when it comes to recruitment, a year of change.

And one big change has been the flip-flop in certain sectors from a client-led to a candidate-led job market. Which means, if you haven’t already, you need to urgently adapt your recruitment marketing strategy and focus more of your messaging on candidate acquisition.

Why should I care about the candidates?

I could say compassion. I could say manners. But the key reasons (besides those) are:

1. Reputation - candidates talk and they aren't shy about posting their poor candidate experiences on social media, some of which in the past have been been picked up by the media (all press is not good press).
2. Business development - guess who the next hiring manager you're pitching candidates to could be?

The new normal or a better normal?

'The new normal' was one of the key phrases of 2020., and we jumped right on the band wagon with our ebook looking at what recruitment might look like after COVID-19, how much changed in those first few months, and what changes are here to stay. These insights were garnered from a virtual roundtable with thought leaders and suppliers to the recruitment industry (including ourselves) discussing their opinions on the state of the recruitment industry with particular focus on the effects of COVID-19.

So, which predictions panned out? In our '2023 ultimate recruitment marketing report', we looked at the changes we saw in recruitment marketing in 2022-2023 and tips for your recruitment marketing strategy going forward.

Planning your recruitment marketing strategy

Recruitment tends to be a 'full speed ahead' industry, it's all or nothing. But if you want your activity to be truly successful you need to stop and plan. You need to ask yourself:

• Why will this be valuable to my business?
• What’s the objective?
• How are you going to ensure you hit that target?
• What tools do you need?
• What channels are best?
• What’s the competition doing?

There’s a lot that goes into planning a successful recruitment marketing strategy: everything you do as part of your recruitment marketing process needs to have a purpose and needs to deliver the right results. By carefully planning and outlining what you want to achieve and why, you’ll be setting yourself up for the best possible success.

Planning your social media recruitment strategy

Whether you build social media into an overall marketing plan or build out a separate social media strategy, it's important to ensure your goals are aligned.

So, what are the key steps to building a killer recruitment social media strategy?  

• Social media auditing
• Competitor analysis
• Goal setting and alignment
• Developing personas
• Content planning
• Measurement and analytics

Measuring your recruitment marketing success

How do you know how to spend your time or money unless you measure what works.  Recruiters often spend the bulk of their budget on online job listings because it is easy to track the number of applications and make a quick decision on sites to keep and those to ditch. But where are the candidates you place coming from? 

We have many more free resources for you in our blog, ebooks and webinars.