Build Your Resume with 3 Recruitment Marketing Skills

In the coming years, employers will need more professionals with Recruitment Marketing skills in order to recruit today’s socially engaged and digitally connected candidates. For some, Recruitment Marketing will be a full-time job and even a department, and for others it will be a skillset that’s needed for their role in HR, Talent Acquisition or Marketing.

While the job description of a Recruitment Marketer is still evolving, here are three Recruitment Marketing skills you’ll need on your resume, and ways you can get the experience now.

Content Marketing

What is it? Content Marketing is the practice of creating and sharing content that’s valuable to the candidates that you want to attract, with the goal of getting candidates to take some action with your brand, like visit your career site or apply for a job.

How is it used in Recruitment Marketing? By publishing and promoting content that’s relevant to your candidate personas, you can help candidates discover your brand in the channels they use, like when they search for key topics online or visit industry websites or follow social media. Every piece of content and information that candidates consume about your brand shapes their perception of your company, your leadership and your employees. If they like what they read and see, they may consider you as a potential employer, for themselves or a friend.

Where can I get experience? You can add Content Marketing as a skill on your resume if you can create content yourself; help others to create content; and curate content that your audience would find relevant; and then find ways to share and distribute the content through channels that will reach your target candidates. Like:

• Interview an employee to find out why they joined your company and what their job is like, and publish their story on your career site or company blog. Add a photo of the employee in their work environment. You can also record the interview on video with your cell phone, if you don’t like to write. Start with employees from key job families or hard-to-fill roles.
• Assist a thought leader in your company to write an article about an industry topic. If they don’t have time to write, interview them and ghostwrite the article on their behalf. Then post the article to their LinkedIn and your company’s LinkedIn channel, or submit it to be published on an industry website.
• Curate content from around your company like corporate news, customer wins or a presentation given by a company leader. Then package the content into an email and send it to your talent network to keep your company top of mind. Include a call to action to apply for open jobs.

Social Recruiting

What is it? Social recruiting, also called social media recruiting, is the art of using social media to find and attract target candidates, and to promote your company’s employer value and job opportunities to them.

How is it used in Recruitment Marketing? Social recruiting can be direct and indirect. For example, you can source candidates by researching their social profiles and digital footprints, connecting with candidates and inviting them to apply. And you can attract candidates to you by sharing relevant content that they can find and follow, and by engaging in channels and forums where target candidates hang out.

Where can I get experience? You can add Social Recruiting as a skill on your resume if you can use channels like Twitter and LinkedIn to research and follow target candidates and then recruit candidates into your pipeline; share relevant content and posts to attract and grow your followers; and know how to engage your network through tags, comments and replies. Like:

• Sending an InMail is easy, but not always effective, and not necessarily useful for every candidate audience. Challenge yourself to source a candidate through Twitter. For example, if you are hiring nurses, use Twitter Advanced Search for People who use the hashtag #nursesweek and are near your location. Follow them, like and share their posts, and share posts that they may like and share. If they follow you back, send them a direct message to invite a conversation.
• Create a regular schedule to share content through your social channels. Use the content in your Content Marketing toolkit, and add relevant hashtags so that your content can be found. You can’t claim to be a Social Recruiter if your social streams are bare, or if all you do is retweet. Social media monitoring tools can provide you with recommended content to share — though many are paid — but you can also set up free Google Alerts to get the latest news and blog postings that include your keywords.
• It takes confidence and some practice to show your personality and share your thoughts and opinions on social media. And perhaps even more confidence and practice to begin tagging people in your posts and trying to engage them in social conversations. But the key is to be authentic – do what you’re comfortable with – and the more you engage, the more natural it will feel, and the more you’ll make new connections that will grow your network and your personal brand (and your employer brand – that’s next!).

Employer Branding

What is it? Employer Branding is the process of authentically promoting your company’s value proposition as an employer and actively managing and influencing your employer reputation, so that you can recruit and retain talent.

How is it used in Recruitment Marketing? Your employer brand is the value proposition that your company offers to employees (what you say), and is the reputation that your company has as an employer (what others say about you). Modern recruiting strategy focuses on marketing your employer brand first in order to attract candidates who will want to work at your organization, and then promoting your available jobs second to find a role that fits.

Where can I get experience? You can add Employer Branding as a skill on your resume if you can define and communicate your employer value proposition (EVP); have identified the most effective channels for marketing and managing your employer brand; and have ensured consistency in how you present and message your company’s employer value prop through all the touchpoints you have with candidates. Like:

• If your talent acquisition team has already defined your employer value prop, then you don’t need to reinvent the wheel — just make sure you’ve got it down pat. If it’s been a while since the EVP was refreshed, step up to lead the project. Remember that your employer brand and corporate brand are intertwined, so be sure to collaborate closely with all key stakeholders, especially Marketing.
• There are many employment websites and job boards to advertise your jobs. But marketing your employer brand requires different channels to reach passive candidates. Examples include websites that profile a company’s culture or give career advice, social media and talent communities, industry news and content sites, career fairs, and many others. The key is to know which channels are best for your company to reach your target candidates. If you don’t know, advocate for testing different channels until you find out which ones lead the most qualified candidates to you.
• Candidates will interact with your employer brand on multiple channels before deciding that they’re interested. In each touchpoint, it’s important that your EVP be presented consistently. Volunteer to audit what messages are found about your company as an employer across all touchpoints in a typical candidate journey, and then work with your team to create an action plan to ensure uniformity in how you present your employer brand value.

If you want to build your Recruitment Marketing resume with more experience in Content Marketing, Social Recruiting and Employer Branding, get more ideas in our Ideabook: 18 Ways to Share Employee Stories.