When trying to source the best candidates for a role, recruiters sometimes forget that a well-planned content strategy can make their job a lot easier for them. Engaging and informative content attracts top talent through ranking your site higher in Google, drawing people who are looking for information, and helping you build a reputation in the saturated sector as industry experts and thought leaders.
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Content Marketing
Here are some examples of types of content that can be featured in your content marketing:
Blogging. According to online statistics agency Hosting Facts, over three million blog posts are published online every single day. In addition to the millions of personal blogs out there, more and more companies are realizing the incredible power blogging can have and are embracing it as part of their marketing strategy.
There are all sorts of reasons you should create a company blog if you haven’t already done so. For starters, companies that blog see around 97% more inbound links, according to Blogging.org; Google rewards websites that are continually updated with good content, so blogging could help your ranking. It can also help your rank for certain topics and key terms, if you produce high-quality blogs on in-demand topics that receive lots of traffic.
Scour Google for top ranking blogs surrounding careers and recruitment. Think of how you can improve or add to the existing results in order to outrank what’s already out there. Considering keeping an eye on the news section of Google to see what’s currently trending.
Infographics. People have short attention spans, and research has found 65% of us are visual learners. Therefore, adding infographics to your site can help you engage more potential candidates.
Online blog posts, which include images get 94% more views, so it pays to condense the information you want to convey into an easy to understand, bite-sized infographic. Most people will only skim through a blog and may not retain all the salient points, but if you add an infographic you can quickly give them all the information they need in a nutshell.
Your infographics don’t have to be all singing or all dancing, but they do have to be well done if you want people to engage. It’s probably worth outsourcing graphic design work (unless you have an in-house designer) and ensuring the graphic is uncluttered, branded, and eye-catching if you want to attract top talent.
White Papers. Put simply, a white paper is an authoritative and in-depth report on a specific subject. Marketers use white papers to educate their audience about a particular topic. In the recruitment industry, it could be on statistics or a survey on candidates, information into a certain industry, or the latest government statistics on employment and unemployment rates.
If you can demonstrate your knowledge through a series of reports, you give people more reason to trust you and more reason to want to work with you.
E-mails. Do you think e-mail marketing is dead? Think again. In the world of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it’s very easy to dismiss e-mail marketing as a nuisance. However, 59% of B2B marketers say that e-mail is their most effective channel, and for recruitment, an industry that relies on e-mail, it couldn’t be more true.
E-mail marketing is cheap, quick, easy, and direct. It can be used to share blog posts and articles, advertise roles, and attract clients. There are many mass mailing platforms out there, including MailChimp and Constant Contact, for example.
Why Use Content Marketing?
Now that you know the types of content marketing that’s out there, it’s important to understand why you should be using a content marketing strategy in the recruiting process.
Builds trust. One of the key aspects of any successful marketing strategy is positioning your business as a trusted source of advice and knowledge. And this is no exception for recruiters. Sharing up-to-date, accurate insights about your industry lets clients know that they can trust you for useful information. You want to offer clients the kind of news, articles, blog posts, and thought pieces that they can’t find anywhere else.
Could save money. It is estimated that recruiters spend around 30% of their budget on job boards. This is a significant cost, especially when you consider that job boards may not always be an effective way to source top talent. Having a website that is continually posting great content that readers are engaging with does wonders for your search engine optimization (SEO), and ranking highly in Google will result in natural traffic.
Attracts candidates to apply for your roles. There are hundreds of jobs advertised online—make yours stand out. Job descriptions tend to use the same generic phrases. Go a step further—include real accounts from people who work at the company, quotes from candidates whom you’ve placed before, and insight into the office culture and day-to-day tasks.
Keeps candidates interested. Finding a strong candidate is the first challenge for any recruiter. After all, according to one survey, 65% of recruiters say that talent shortages are one of the biggest obstacles they face. The next challenge confronting recruiters—perhaps an even bigger one—is keeping strong candidates interested.
When you find top talent, you want to be able to stay in contact with them, even if you don’t have the perfect role for them at the present time. By sending out content such as your top jobs of the month or the latest blog post, you can keep them interested in potential roles that could arise.
Builds a base. When formulating a recruitment marketing strategy, you want to make sure that your content is broad and diverse in nature. The goal should be to build a base of candidates who are suited to both existing roles and any future roles. When recruiters create content that is limited only to current vacancies, many people may find the content irrelevant and stop reading.
SEO
In order to devise a truly comprehensive and effective marketing strategy, recruiters should pay close attention to SEO. Your Google search rankings are of paramount importance to your brand’s visibility, credibility, authority, and organic traffic.
However, less than half of small businesses have a budget for SEO, and of those that do have one, 17% spend less than $100 a month on it. There are also simple things recruitment agencies can do to improve their SEO strategy without breaking the bank.
On-site SEO. On-site SEO involves optimizing what is on a website by making it easy for search engines to:
- Understand what a webpage is about.
- Identify a page relevant to search queries (which relates to the use of keywords).
- Find a page that is useful.
Small changes you can make that will help to improve your on-site SEO:
- Conducting basic keyword research (using tools like Google’s Keyword Planner);
- Testing your website’s speed;
- Adding more content to your website;
- Making changes to your metadata; and
- Including more hyperlinks and adding alt tags (image descriptions) for pictures.
In contrast, off-site SEO refers to techniques that boost a search engine or user’s perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, authority, and trustworthiness. This involves actions that encourage reputable sites to link to your webpage or through the promotion of your website.
Link building. In a nutshell, link building is the process of getting other websites to link to your website. And you do this by promoting your website to other businesses with the primary goal of securing a link on their site that links back to your webpage. You can achieve this by:
- Getting customers to link to you, which you can do by sending out partnership badges— graphic icons that link to your site
- Building and maintaining a company blog that is valuable, informative, and engaging
- Creating content that is designed for viral sharing and natural linking
- Being newsworthy
- Press activities
- Outreaching useful content
- Guest blogging
Link building is a highly effective tactic in SEO because links signal to Google that the information on your site is useful, trustworthy, and authoritative.
By following some of these tips on improving both on-site SEO and link building, you can ensure that users will be able to easily find your recruitment website, as well as feel confident about the services you offer.
Social Media
Research has found 92% of recruiters use some form of social media to find candidates. Each social media has its own uses and benefits.
LinkedIn®. As a recruitment agency, LinkedIn is one of your most important tools, with 575 million current users and 87% of recruiter using it. After all, it’s a huge pool of working professionals, many of whom are searching for their next opportunity.
Set up a company page with all your key information. You can post content such as your open positions and blogs and share the content of others. LinkedIn can also be used by individuals to find candidates. You can join groups and discussions, discover rival companies, discover who is hiring, and find alumni from specific universities.
Twitter. Twitter can be useful in engaging with other businesses, and you can refine what you are looking for by searching various hashtags based on location, job types, and sectors. Twitter is a very interactive platform, so it’s a great place to promote your content.
Instagram. Instagram can be used in demonstrating the values of your company and instilling trust, as well as posting jobs. Bear in mind that it has a younger demographic, with 59% of its users aged between 18–29.
Facebook. Although Facebook has decreased in popularity the past year, losing 8% of users, it’s still used by over one billion people. Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with candidates currently on your system. It can be useful in posting jobs and content and answering inquiries.
YouTube. YouTube has grown into the second largest search engine, gaining 30 million visitors every day. Recruitment agencies have been slow to use video, but there are many reasons why it’s a good idea. With 3.25bn hours watched on YouTube every month, video is a digestible, easy way to advertise roles and offer candidates great advice. Video can help you stand out in a very saturated market.
Overall, content can take many forms—from e-mails, short blog posts, to long white papers. Content marketing is an important way to build your company’s reputation and keep in touch with candidates and clients, and it has numerous SEO benefits. Consequently, it should remain an imperative part of your 2019 growth strategy.
Ella Patenall is the Marketing Manager and Editor of Inspiring Interns, the United Kingdom’s leading graduate recruitment agency.