Some of the most sought-after talent requires a bit of extra work to secure. That’s because those individuals may not be actively looking for a job. If you want to add their skills to your team, you’re going to have to do some recruitment marketing. To get their attention, you need to make your company so enticing that they want to apply even if they’re happy where they are.

In a sense, hiring managers need to view candidates in today’s market as customers. While a company may believe that everyone wants to work for them, this is not true.

According to research conducted by LinkedIn, just 12 percent of people actively look for jobs. So, if you are waiting for the perfect candidate to knock on your door, you may be waiting a long time. To win the war for talent, you must be proactive. Connecting with your target audience is critical to the success of any recruitment strategy.

Imagine a world where the best talent considers you their employer of choice. With effective recruitment marketing, this can be a reality.

Success, however, requires an ability to analyze the effectiveness of your employer branding strategy and understand the things that connect with your target candidates. To do this most effectively, it is important to have a centralized location for data collection, analysis, and discussion. A streamlined talent acquisition platform (TAP) is the ideal solution for this. Not only does it bring all these pieces together, but it also positions you for success once you’ve made connections with candidates and the hiring process begins.

Candidate Journey

Perhaps looking at the situation from the candidate’s perspective will shed light on the experience you must create as a recruiter.

The six stages of the candidate journey are:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Interest
• Application
• Selection
• Hiring

All of these intersect with your employer brand, so if you don’t have a sound strategy in place, you’ll need to go through that process before embarking on a recruitment marketing campaign. Working with an employer branding agency is a great way to build a strong plan that will put you ahead of the competition.

The last three stages—application, selection, and hiring—can be seen as part of the traditional recruitment process. The first three, however, fall under the recruitment marketing umbrella. A passive candidate must first become aware of the opportunities at your company. They will then consider whether a move can advance their career goals. If it does, then your recruitment marketing strategy must nurture that growing interest in your brand.

Create the Experience

This is where an element of the process called inbound recruiting comes into play. What’s that, you may ask? Inbound recruiting is the building of relationships through content designed to attract, engage, and hire the talent you seek.

Communicating an attractive employee value proposition throughout your recruitment process—and doing so in the right way at the right time and at the right place—is critical to attracting high-caliber talent and nurturing the talent already on your team.

The content you develop can take many forms and should provide flexibility in distribution. Written material is important, but multimedia content is a must in today’s world. Video, in particular, is one of the best ways to engage talent. Whether it is a short clip shared through TikTok or an extended look at a topic that creates a bridge between your brand and a potential candidate, video is one of the most effective ways to convey your brand and employee value proposition.

If you are like many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), you may not have a team of video producers, writers, and designers in house, and producing this content may seem difficult. In that case, working together with an employer branding agency is a great way to craft and package your message effectively and efficiently.

TAP into Relationships

Once your content is out there and bridges start to take shape, it’s time to begin managing the experience through the interest and application stages.

We’ve talked here about the basics of recruitment marketing and how important it is to communicate and build connections with top talent. But regardless of how good your marketing is, you’ll likely lose out if you don’t act quickly on the connections you make. Candidates in today’s market are willing to wait only about two weeks before moving on.

Nurturing interest and moving candidates into and through the hiring funnel will be much easier with a TAP powering your recruitment process. Instead of the haphazard, opaque approach of email and spreadsheets—which have long been the tools of choice for many SMBs—a TAP allows all stakeholders to be involved throughout the journey, with clear metrics, insights, and communication channels at their fingertips.

By following recruiting best practices, creating a strong arsenal of content, and deftly guiding the candidate experience, you can attract elite talent.

See for yourself what an advantage an ATS can give your organization, and how little it costs. Book a free demo today at: https://www.zookeep.com