New to Recruitment Marketing, Part III: Hitting the Ground Running

Hey Rally community,

This is it: my last “New to Recruitment Marketing” blog for Rally Recruitment Marketing. In prior posts, I updated you on my journey in employment branding in parts one and two.

To kick off this post, I have to first share a personal update. I have reached my last month of training for the Atlanta Peachtree Road Race, a 10K, roughly 6 miles, happening on Independence Day. To some, this length is a piece of cake, but for me, this race has been a barometer of mental toughness and perseverance.

So, how does this race relate to my career journey in Recruitment Marketing?

Well, I’ve found a lot of symbolism in how I’ve built up my endurance to run, and in the same way, I’ve built a foundation of expertise in employment branding over the last few months.

With running, I found out very quickly that I needed a strategy in place for how to tackle these six miles, which included a written plan detailing the days of the week that I would run and distance goals to achieve. I also had a supportive network of runners and athletes who had prior experience running the same race.

Now with employment branding at Cox Enterprises, I found out very quickly that I also needed a strategy in place to build out and communicate our key employer brand messages. This process included creating a plan to spotlight the real, true culture of our company. I went about this in a number of ways, one being employee spotlights, where a network of employees shared their experience and personal thoughts about the company through personal blogs. The second was managing our brand on Glassdoor. Lastly, it was figuring out how to advance this candidate messaging to attract the coolest and brightest individuals to our open roles across Cox.

In all honesty, both running and developing brand messaging can be a challenge, especially in the beginning when a pulse check is necessary to see where you are. For me, with running, I had to learn the truth about how far I could actually run – which was a 5K, roughly 3 miles to start. Not bad, but not where I wanted to be.

With brand messaging, I learned that I needed interesting content and fresh stories that spotlighted the company. So I set out to work with stakeholders across each of the Cox divisions to capture overall themes of our work environment and hiring needs. I pulled sentiments from prior employer surveys and focus groups. I studied the language and brand personality of our company, the mission and our vision and lifted the key components that would resonate with a prospective candidate, new hire or a passive job seeker.

Finally, much like my race training, I began to develop a pace or rhythm in how I shared the story of our company to candidates. With gradual increases to my mileage and speeding up my average pace in my daily runs, the same happened with my strategy of sharing our employer brand messaging. Check out some of our recent employee blog posts:

June marks six months in my role and come July I’ll be crossing the six-mile finish line of the Peachtree Road Race. It’s been an incredible journey thus far and I’m super grateful to Rally Recruitment Marketing for allowing me to share my career journey.

Thanks, Rally readers, for your support. Don’t hesitate to follow me on LinkedIn!