The definitive guide to recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing is the process of attracting and nurturing candidates, clients and potential staff to your recruitment firm. This involves moving prospects through the marketing funnel from the point of not being aware of your agency to registering their details or contacting your consultants.

Recruitment marketing has grown in popularity as agencies recognise the benefits that an effective strategy can deliver. This guide will provide an outline of what you can do to develop and enhance your firm’s recruitment marketing.

Before you start planning your recruitment marketing activities it is vitally important that you have created and/or updated candidate, client and talent personas for your firm. Personas are fictional representations of your business’s ideal customers which enable you to clearly define and segment your firm’s audiences.

They will enable you to:

• Identify the talent that is the perfect fit for the roles you are recruiting for.
• Understand the most relevant channels to target candidates on.
• Produce tailored marketing content, such as blogs, social media posts and emails.
• Create alignment across your firm’s marketing and recruitment functions.
• Provide detailed data to feed into your overall recruitment marketing strategy.

Where to source data for candidate and client personas?

So how can you start gathering the data needed to develop your personas? Here are four simple methods that your recruitment firm can implement:

• Integrate it into the on-boarding process – you should liaise with your recruitment consultants to ensure they are asking relevant questions and recording the responses they receive into dedicated fields of your CRM system.
• Look at the LinkedIn profiles of candidates and clients – if their profiles have been completed and they actively use the platform, their LinkedIn accounts will provide a wealth of valuable information, from their employment history and qualifications through to the type of content that they engage with.
• Interview previously hired candidates – you should work with your consultants to ensure that their follow up communications with successfully placed candidates include questions on their career aspirations and interests. This will provide you with regular insights that you can use to develop and refine your candidate personas.
• Send out targeted surveys that offer an incentive – you should segment your database into small groups and target individuals with themed surveys featuring questions relevant to their job roles. For example, you could design one that aims to find out the most common struggles faced when applying for a new role or what the biggest challenges facing HR directors are. Offering a small prize or incentive, such as a gift card for a lucky respondent, will help increase participation.

What questions should you ask?

To gain the insights needed to produce accurate candidate, client and talent personas, you should ask a diverse range of questions. It is recommended that you ask questions from each of the six categories in the template below.

How can you analyse data to produce candidate, client and talent personas?

Once you have collated this data you will need to carefully work through it to identify any recurring themes or trends and use this to highlight your audiences’ key characteristics.

We recommend working with your recruiters to ensure that you are getting more than one function’s perspective. After you have finalised their ideal characteristics you should bring them to life by giving them a suitable name and image (like the example below).

These personas will provide you with a wealth of data that you can use to create tailored recruitment marketing content that targets your ideal audiences.

Content needs to be at the heart of every recruitment marketing strategy. When produced and utilised correctly it enables your business to generate brand awareness, build relationships with candidates, clients and bring your overall marketing costs down.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing in recruitment is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing content that is valuable, consistent and relevant to your audience in order to attract, engage and retain candidates, clients and potential new staff.

Instead of simply posting about jobs you are hiring for or the services you offer, you are producing content that educates or adds real value to prospects to help them solve any issues or pain points they may be experiencing.

Recruitment firms needs to use a variety of methods and channels if they are to reach prospective candidates, clients and employees with the right content at the right time, from email marketing through to social media.

Four types of content to enhance your recruitment marketing activities

1. Blog posts

Blogging is one of the most popular types of content marketing for recruitment businesses as it enables them to demonstrate their knowledge of the sectors they specialise in, provide thought leadership and offer advice to candidates, clients and potential new hires.

Blog posts can be incredibly effective when authored, or ghost-written, by different employees in your company, from the CEO to the heads of division or marketing manager. This enables you to present a diverse range of insights and opinions from across the business.

2. Infographics

Infographics are a fantastic way to illustrate detailed information and statistics in a visually engaging yet easily digestible format for readers.

Infographics are incredibly versatile and can be used as part of a blog post to provide additional context, or posted separately on social media as a piece of stand-alone content.

3. Podcasts

Over 20% of UK adults now listen to at least one podcast per week, around 11.7 million people. And because of this, many recruitment firms and suppliers are now producing their own podcasts to capitalise on this growing demand for audio content.

Podcasts help to humanise brands and give them a voice that candidates and end-hirers can relate to. They also help businesses by providing them with a unique opportunity to present their take on the latest industry trends, offer advice and share insights into their company culture – which can be extremely beneficial for employer of choice messaging when hiring internally.

4. Video

Video is another form of content marketing that has seen exponential growth in the recruitment industry over the last few years, particularly during the pandemic where working from home has led to a huge increase in videos being produced for social media.

These have more often than not taken the form of talking head videos, where an individual talks directly to the camera of their smartphone or laptop. These are an incredibly effective outlet for recruitment professionals to get themselves in front of their audiences on social media. While they may lack the polish that a professionally filmed video possesses, the rawness adds to the authenticity and you can brand the videos up and add subtitles by using speech-to-text software.

Hero content is a meaty piece of content that can be repurposed into lots of different formats. For example, part of your recruitment marketing strategy may include surveying candidates and clients.

The output from this activity can be turned into reports or white papers which can be hosted as gated content on your website and marketed out through social and e-marketing campaigns to help you capture leads.

The main themes of the report could then be turned into a press release which in turn will generate coverage for you to showcase through social media. The findings could also be repurposed into a series of themed blogs with the top level results being featured in an infographic – the opportunities for repurposing this type of content is endless.

How to create hero content

We quite often hear recruiters make statements like “We don’t really have enough to talk about – not enough to produce a robust report”. As a result, they often focus on writing about what they do rather than what they know. However, recruitment professionals know far more than they give themselves credit for - they know about the people agenda. This is the knowledge regarding:

• Pay going up or pay going down and what’s driving that
• Skill shortages and what’s driving those skill shortages
• Talent pools and pipelining
• Global and regional comparisons
• Diversity in the workplace
• Leadership
• The future workplace
• Employability

And recruitment firms will have tonnes of data that will support any of these themes. So, if you are responsible for recruitment marketing in your organisation then have regular 10-minute brain dumps from the consultants in the business on some of the topics above. Ask them what the current pain points of their clients and candidates are and look at how the data in your business can be sliced and diced to support the themes of the content.

Email marketing can be an extremely effective channel for recruitment firms enabling them to communicate with potential candidates and clients on a regular basis. However, to get the most out of this recruitment marketing channel it is critical to ensure best practice is implemented. Here are 14 tips that you should follow:

1. Build a compliant email marketing list

To kickstart your email marketing campaign you need to make sure that you have a list of GDPR compliant contacts on your CRM system that would be interested in hearing about what your recruitment firm is up to.

You can then build on this pool of contacts by ensuring that prospects have opportunities to provide their contact details with you on your website by creating lead generation activities, such as a simple newsletter sign up form, or through gated content.

2. Define your audience and establish goals

Next you should clearly outline your audience and set goals for your campaign. For example, are you sending an email to your candidates or your clients? And what kind of content does your audience want to receive?

This will not only enable you to clearly define the purpose of your email campaign and ensure it works in tandem with your other recruitment marketing channels, but also set measurable goals to evaluate its performance.

3. Segment your audience

Once you have built your initial list and identified your audience, you should segment this into specific target groups so that you can send them custom emails that feature content which is relevant to their individual interests.

Segmenting your audience and providing tailored content will result in fewer unsubscribes, higher open and click through rates, and prospects that are far more likely to turn into qualified leads.

4. Personalise your emails

Personalisation can dramatically improve the open and click through rates of your email campaigns. Try writing as if you are directly writing to one recipient by using their first name, speak to them by using ‘you’ and sign it off using the name of the most relevant member of staff to that specific sub-group.

5. Feature valuable content

You must make sure that your message is aligned with your goal and contains relevant and valuable content that is informative, useful and educational to ensure that recipients consistently open your emails and take the relevant actions. If you feature job posts and nothing else, it is likely to result in an increase in unsubscribes.

6. Include clear calls to action

Every email campaign that you send should have one or more clear calls to action that encourage your recipients to take action. Whether that’s finding out more about the jobs of the week, reading the latest candidate advice blog or downloading an ebook, writing a clear and direct CTA will direct users to the appropriate landing page on your website.

7. Add social sharing buttons

Including social sharing buttons in your email campaigns will allow you to promote your message to a wider audience as it allows subscribers to share your content. This, in turn, will help generate new leads for the business.

8. Craft a compelling subject line

A subject line is the first thing that subscribers will see in their inboxes. Therefore it’s essential that you craft a subject line that stands out among the hundreds of other emails that are vying for their attention from not only other recruitment firms, but also their friends, family and brands from other industries.

9. Make your email scannable

With the average person receiving 121 emails per day, it’s vital that once they’ve opened your email that the messaging is clear and easy to read otherwise they’ll simply close it and click delete.

You should use plenty of white space, bullet points and headings to break your content up into clear sections and avoid long blocks of text.

10. Optimise for mobile

With 46% of all emails opened on a mobile device, it is essential that your email is mobile-friendly and uses a responsive design. This will ensure that the content is still easy to read on the screen of a mobile phone and that all links are easily clickable.

11. Send a test email

Before sending your email to your list, make sure that you send a test email to yourself, a colleague and ideally a Gmail account. This will allow you to get it proofed by a second set of eyes, make sure that all links work and that it displays correctly on a different email service to the one that you use internally.

12. A/B test your email

A/B testing is incredibly useful to see what tweaks resonate most with your audience. This is where you make two versions of the same email and send one to one half of your list and a slightly different version to the other. You can test various elements such as:

• HTML formatting vs. text only
• Varying colour schemes
• Different orders for the content that features in the email
• Call to action wording
• The times you send your emails out

13. Make it easy to unsubscribe

It is important that you make the unsubscribe process as easy as possible. You should ideally have an ‘unsubscribe’ or ‘manage subscription’ option in the footer of your email which lets them change their email preferences.

14. Regularly clean and update your email list

Make sure that your contacts are kept relevant by removing those who do not open your emails and deleting undeliverable email addresses and bounce backs. This will ensure that your emails are only going to those who are engaging with your content and will dramatically improve your open rates going forward.

How to use AI for recruitment marketing

Are you ready to take your recruitment marketing to the next level? Let's talk about how AI can help you out!

AI is quickly changing the way we work, and it's time to start leveraging its power to enhance your recruitment marketing efforts. The HubSpot Blog team has been using AI in their content creation process for a while now, and we can learn a lot from their strategies. Here's how you can use AI to attract top talent:

Use generative AI to learn about topics faster

Generative AI uses large language models and existing web-based data to develop responses for almost every question imaginable and provide concise, helpful responses. As a recruitment marketer, you can use this to your advantage by using it to research topics related to your sector. But before you think about posting this content straight onto your website / blog / social channels you need to edit for voice and accuracy, not to mention you’ll want to add a unique, human perspective. You can use AI to speed up the research process but if you don’t add your own touch to the content it will be bland and who wants to read that?

One way you can use generative AI for recruitment marketing is by using it to learn about industry trends and insights. Let's say you're a recruitment firm that specialises in the tech industry - you can use AI to scan the web for the latest developments and create content that speaks to those trends. By staying on top of industry news and insights, you can position your recruitment agency as a thought leader in the field.

→ Download our ultimate 2024 recruitment marketing report

Another use for AI is to learn about your target audience. You can use AI to analyse online conversations and social media activity related to your target talent pool. This can help you understand their interests, pain points, and needs, which you can then use to create content that speaks directly to them.

Leverage generative AI to create outlines

Similar to using AI for research, you can also use it to create outlines for your content pieces. This can greatly cut down the time you spend writing, but again, make sure to add your own voice to the final copy. AI-generated outlines can act as the first draft of an article, but it's up to you to make it your own.

Another idea would be using it to generate topic ideas - you can use AI to scan the web for popular questions related to qualified candidates in your industry or your target clients. You can then use those questions as the basis for your content outlines.

You can also use it to create outlines for social media posts. Ask it to analyse social media activity related to your target audience and create outlines for posts that are likely to resonate with them.

Take advantage of generative AI as your new idea bouncing sidekick

Coming up with ideas can be a tedious process, but with AI technology, it doesn't have to be. Use AI to suggest new and creative ideas for your recruitment marketing content. This can save you time and introduce new perspectives that you may not have considered before.

You can ask it to scan the web for popular questions related to your industry or target audience. You can then use those questions as the basis for your content ideas.

You could also ask it to create new angles for your content. If, for example, you're creating content about a specific job role, you can use AI to analyse online conversations related to that role and find new angles that haven't been explored yet.

Experiment with AI-generated videos for your recruitment marketing content

We don’t have to tell you how important video is these days but have you considered that AI could help you create videos more efficiently? With AI tools to generate video from blogs, to create captions from video, and even to provide voice overs, there’s a lot to test out. Speeding up the video production process (which I know first hand takes a significant length of time) can expand your talent acquisition strategy and allow you to make your content more engaging for potential candidates.

One option is to use AI to create explainer videos. For example, if you're recruiting for a job role that may be unfamiliar to some candidates, you can use AI to create a quick explainer video that outlines the responsibilities and qualifications for that role.

You could also use it to analyse social media activity related to your target audience and create videos that are likely to resonate with them. For example, if your target audience is active on Instagram, you can use AI to create short, engaging videos that are optimised for the platform.

Example video with captions generated using AI

Use generative AI for meta descriptions, social summaries, and email descriptions

Quickly coming up with the right messaging to promote your recruitment marketing content can be a challenge, but AI can help. Use AI to create meta descriptions, social summaries, and email descriptions that are concise and effective. That way it is summarising and condensing your own words rather than generating them from scratch.

You can use AI to analyse the content of your blog post and create a meta description that accurately summarises the content and entices readers to click through.

You can also use AI to analyse the content of your blog post and create a social media summary that accurately summarises the content and makes them want to read more.

AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we approach recruitment marketing. By using generative AI to learn about topics faster, create outlines, brainstorm new content ideas, experiment with video, and create effective messaging, you can streamline your recruitment marketing process and create content that resonates with your target audience. However, it's important to remember that AI should never replace the human touch in recruitment marketing. 

It is vital that you regularly analyse the performance of your recruitment marketing to ensure that your strategy is working. However, it is all too common for recruitment firms to rely on vanity metrics, such as the website traffic their site receives or the number of social media followers they have, when reviewing their data.

Here are seven marketing metrics that you can use on Google Analytics to assess the performance of your recruitment marketing strategy.

Seven Google Analytics metrics to use

1. SEO rankings

Discovering where your website pages and content rank on Google for the keywords they have been search engine optimised for is essential. After all, if you’ve noticed that your latest blog post is receiving little to no organic traffic whilst receiving plenty from social you will need to investigate and find out why this is.

2. Traffic volume

Measuring the traffic volume of your recruitment firm’s website is incredibly important. Whether your agency has local branches or not, your website is your virtual store and you should be utilising all of your recruitment marketing channels, such as social media and email marketing to drive relevant traffic to it so that you can nurture prospects over time depending on the actions that they take.

3. Traffic source

Measuring your website’s traffic sources enables you to filter by a number of methods to drill down and discover where users are coming from to view your website’s content.

For example, you can filter by traffic channel – where you can see the top level channel source, such as email marketing, social media and organic search, the source and medium – which displays where the traffic originated from, for example, Google/Organic, and the referral traffic – which shows you the website or platform that referred the traffic to your site, such as LinkedIn.

4. Bounce rate

A ‘bounce’ is a single-page session on your website. This means that someone has visited a webpage from a traffic source and has exited the site without taking any other action.

Traditionally, a high bounce rate is seen as a negative but it depends on the page that they land on. For example, if your homepage is suffering a high bounce rate then that, of course, should raise a red flag as it shows that visitors aren’t clicking to learn more about what you do as a business or the jobs you are currently recruiting for.

5. Location

Location is a metric that is often overlooked for some of the more quantitative ones that Google Analytics provides. However, if you have a job ad on your site for an HR Director position in Birmingham and a large percentage of those landing page visitors are from Exeter and Glasgow, you should be using this data to help understand why.

6. New vs. returning visitors

Monitoring how many users are returning to your website provides you with insights into what is working well and why they are visiting your site on a regular basis. For example, a high user retention is likely to show that your visitors are still looking for a job and that the blog content offers them plenty of value which will be a key factor in them returning as they will view you as a trusted source for career advice.

7. Goals

Goals are actions that can be set up and monitored to provide you with completion rates and tangible outcomes that you can feed back to the wider team. These are often actions such as submitting a CV, registering as a candidate or signing up for an e-newsletter.

Five email marketing metrics to use

As outlined earlier on this page, email marketing is an important channel for your recruitment firm. Here are five metrics you should be using to measure the impact of your campaigns.

1. Open rate

Open rate is the simplest email marketing metric to understand and tracks how many subscribers have opened the email sent to them.

This is vital for seeing how many received it and provides insight into the success of your subject line.

2. Click-through rate (CTR)

The click-through rate measures how many people have clicked on the links in your email. For example, if your email contained a round up of your latest blog content and top jobs the CTR would measure the percentage of subscribers that have clicked on those links.

3. Click-to-open rate (CTOR)

The click-to-open rate compares the number of unique clicks to unique opens. Unlike the click-through rate, the CTOR shows the number of clicks out of the number of opens. This helps you to understand how effective the email content and design was.

4. Bounce rate

The bounce rate is an important metric to track as it measures how many subscribers didn’t receive your email. This will be because of either soft bounces which are temporary problems with email addresses or hard bounces which are permanent issues.

5. Number of unsubscribes

Unsubscribes show you how many people have unsubscribed from your mailing list after receiving an email from you. A high number of unsubscribes can be viewed as a negative as they indicate the content is no longer relevant for the receiver, however, it can also be viewed as a positive because it shows that your subscriber list is made up of only those who want to hear from your firm.

Four key social media marketing metrics to use

Choosing the appropriate social media metrics is important if you are to assess how your social channels are performing and contributing to your recruitment marketing as a whole.

Here are four metrics you should include in your reporting:

1. Post reach and impressions

These two metrics will enable you to gauge how many users are being exposed to your content. Post impressions refer to how many times users have seen your content on their screens, while reach refers to how many unique users have seen it. Monitoring visibility enables you to see whether you are posting at the right times of the day and using the most relevant hashtags.

2. Click-throughs

If you are sharing content, such as company blogs and curated content to add value to your audiences, you should monitor the number of click-throughs your posts are receiving. This will allow you to see what types of content are generating the most clicks and inform your content mix.

3. Engagement

Each social media platform has its own way of measuring engagements, however, it is key to monitor the engagement rate of your posts and account as a whole to see what content is resonating with your audiences and what the most common forms of engagement are – whether it’s a like, share or comment.

4. Quality of followers

Many marketers are obsessed about building a high number of followers for their recruitment brand across their channels. However, it is much more important to have a small number of followers who are your ideal target audience rather than a large figure made up of bots and people who are unlikely to apply for the roles you are advertising.