Why Content marketing is important for recruiters

Online Recruiting SystemWhen you’re trying to persuade people to apply for your roles you need to think about more than just writing a good job description and having a fancy online recruiting system.  As recruiters you should be thinking like marketers.

If you want the best people to apply for your roles you need to convince them that your company is the best place to work. They’re the best candidates, they’re going to have other available options.

The best way to do this, is to employ content marketing efforts into your recruitment plan.

Most recruiters don’t think about content when they think about recruiting, but there’s no way to avoid it. If you want to be an effective recruiter then you need to know that content marketing will help you do this and has been proven to be the most effective in attracting not just new talent but the best talent.

B2B COMPANIES THAT BLOG GENERATE 67% MORE LEADS PER MONTH THAN THOSE WHO DO NOT BLOG.

If you can give candidates relevant content in the same sector as your industry, it’s a great chance to bring traffic to your website and your social channels. The more people who know of you, means more people will consider applying for one of your roles.

Using Google for recruitment is difficult unless you have large marketing budgets, and so content marketing is one way to attract your target audience. You can’t just write content about anything though, you need to make sure it’s engaging and relevant to your industry.

One of the benefits with content marketing is that it encourages your audience to have a conversation with your company or brand. Conversations are brilliant because they create a sense of comfortability that the reader feels when interacting with your brand and website.

When you’re having conversations with your readers about your content it truly shows they are engaging.

Online Recruiting SystemAs we stated, using Google for your recruitment efforts is tough unless you have a big budget, but creating content is perfect for SEO. Search engines look for, and reward websites that are offering fresh content that brings value to the readers. Having the search engines reward you is effective because it helps boost your web presence, meaning more people can find you and there are more chances of the top candidates wanting to apply for your roles.

If readers are finding your content appealing and interesting, chances are they will share it amongst their own networks. This broadens the reach of your company and opens the doors for more people to find out about you and potentially apply for your roles.

It takes time in order to successfully put together a content marketing plan that supports your recruitment, but if done effectively it’s a sure-fire way of attracting and retaining the top talent

How do you go about organizing your content efforts for recruitment?

There are a number of steps you need to take:

  • Define your audience. For this step you need to have a clear idea who your audience are, what their needs are, what they want to know. If you skip this step you’ll end up putting out content that just isn’t relevant and all you work will be pointless.
  • Decide core reasons why your potential candidate is looking for new role. It’s important to get into the mindset of the candidates in order to understand what makes them seek out new job opportunities. Once you know this you will be able to align your content to their own goals.
  • You then need to start curating your content. Remember you don’t have to create all the content yourself, simply pushing out content you think is valuable to your social media channels will solidify you as a thought leader and channel lots of traffic to your site as people become accustomed to you providing the most insightful content in their niche.

Did you know that marketers on average seem to be spending a quarter of their budget on content marketing, the reason is because it works.

When you are doing content marketing there are a few things you need to consider

1) Don’t make it about you.

If all your content is sales-y, people will want to avoid it. People go to content because they think it will bring them some value. The purpose of creating good content isn’t to sell, it’s to position yourself as a credible source and establish your company as a thought leader who understands the problems in the industry and how they can be solved.

2) When you write content, ensure it’s on topic

Think about your content and think about the people reading it. Think about the questions they have and the answers they want and make sure your content falls in line with that.

When you are cresting content before you begin please do ensure you have some sort of strategy in place. If you don’t have this then you run the risk of creating content that no one is interested in. This will hinder your advances rather than help them.

Part of creating a strategy is ensuring that you have your company culture understood and this culture is fed throughout all your content in many ways. Your company culture is what will attract the best candidates and so it’s important that they can get an understanding of this culture at any point when reading and taking in your content.

One way to apply company culture to content is to tell a story. Make it meaningful and interesting to the reader and allow for space in the story to explain why they might want to work at your company.

As we said you don’t have to always create content, simply pushing good quality content out that you find from other sources is a good method of attracting good perspective employees. However if you are running a blog your chances of attracting the best candidates significantly increases.

Studies show that people say they wouldn’t want to work at a company who had a bad reputation and so one way to ensure your company has a good reputation is to stick to the culture you align yourself with as well as ensuring that you’re giving enough valuable content out for you to be seen as an important asset in your industry’s community.

When you’re creating blog content one thing that is important is to stay current. Keep an eye on current trends and be sure to offer your own comments when something in your industry happens.

Basic elements of good writing such as keeping it structured nicely, breaking up larger paragraphs into smaller ones; taking large bits of information and using bullet points to hash out ideas are all ways you can keep your readers engaged by your content.

What people often forget when it comes to content marketing is the call to action. It’s very important and especially from a recruiting stance. Offering a call to action at the end of the blog post helps let the readers know what they should be doing next. Let’s take a look at Buffer for example.

Online Recruiting SystemBuffer is a social media scheduling tool and they’re currently hiring. At the end of their blog posts, they include a short CTA to let people know they’re hiring. What they do well is they always link the job role to the type of content in the blog post. Again keeping it relevant to ensure that the people who read it follow through and check out the job options. It would be pointless if you wrote a blog post about the important of good design but then at the bottom had a link for a developer job. The two aren’t connected. What would be more effective would be if you wrote the blog post about the importance of good design and then wrote “we’re currently on the lookout for top designers, if you think you have what it takes, why not click this link and read more about the opportunity”.

Once you’ve created content you need to be promoting it. You cannot go in with the idea that once you create content they will come and read it, it’s simply not the case. 27 million pieces of content are shared per day.  This means it’s hard to stand out. This is where your social channels are important and effective.

Use all your social channels to share your content, from LinkedIn to twitter. Make sure you add links back to your career sites as well so people consistently associate your good content with your valuable job offerings.

Encourage your other employees to share the content as well, a company who looks like everyone is behind the content and the messages you’re sharing is a company people will want to work for.

Re-purposing your content.

You don’t have to constantly create new fresh content. One beautiful thing about content is that if the content was successful you can repurpose it in order to make it more effective through a different channel. This means if you had a blog post that worked really well, you could repurpose the content on there onto a Slideshare. If you had a white paper that was really successful you could take the information found in there and turn it into a video.

Measure success

When you’re creating content it’s important to look at the metrics and measure how successful your efforts are in order to optimize it to improve it for the future. One way you can measure success is by looking at engagement. How many people are reading your content, how many are engaging and getting involved in discussion, how many are sharing. These will give you an insight into how valuable your content actually is and from there you can work on methods to improve the content you’re creating or work on understanding in greater detail, who you’re creating content for.

Content really is king and it shouldn’t be overlooked when it comes to your recruiting plan. Recruiters are marketers and they need to start thinking the right way if they’re ever to consistently attract the best talent.

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