Did you know that a major shift is happening in Recruitment Marketing?
In the past, most talent acquisition teams have kept their employer branding and job advertising strategies separate. Each area had different goals, a different budget and success was measured independently too.
But increasingly we’ve noticed that more and more practitioners are creating job advertising that leads with their employer brand message to see better results in attracting talent and driving applications.
When companies plan out a media strategy with an integrated employer brand and job advertising lens, they can see the bigger picture and optimize their overall campaign results.
Curious what this looks like in action? We’ve collected real-life examples for you in our latest Rally Ideabook: 6 Content Examples That Rethink Media Strategy, featuring Ecolab, DICK’S Sporting Goods and Northwell Health.
Here’s a summary of the top trends we’re seeing in how employer branding and job advertising strategies are converging.
Trend 1) Sharing employer brand-led content to attract talent to jobs
Savvy Recruitment Marketing teams today use content that communicates their employer value proposition (EVP) to drive people directly and indirectly to open jobs. For instance, an employer might share a “day in the life of” story on some of their media channels and direct people interested in a similar role to visit their related open jobs.
This approach works because it grabs the attention of passive talent who might scroll past a plain job ad, but who might stop scrolling to consider your company if the EVP messaging resonates with them. Using content up front you can showcase why employees should be excited about a gig with your company over their current employer.
Leading with branded content works to drive candidates to open roles. But how do you get that brand-led content in front of talent? This leads us to our second trend:
Trend 2) Using programmatic and remarketing ads to reach candidates
Employers are starting to embrace automated approaches to get their messages in front of candidates. More and more teams are starting to deliver their EVP messages through channels that auto target the right people across the web, not just in one particular spot as with traditional advertising.
Let me slow down a little and explain how they’re doing this using programmatic and remarketing ads.
What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising uses software algorithms to automate the ad-buying and distribution process.
In Recruitment Marketing, you might use programmatic advertising to automatically distribute job ads across different job boards on the web in a way that optimizes the spend based on which board is performing best for a given job.
Programmatic can also be used to distribute content-based ads to different locations on the web too, reaching a target audience across a number of places where they spend time online.
You can find out more about programmatic job advertising in this RallyFwd On Demand session, It’s Not Magic, It’s Programmatic Job Advertising.
What is remarketing advertising?
Remarketing ads are a little different because they are ads that target people who have already visited your site.
You’ve probably already encountered remarketing ads as a consumer: once you leave a site and go elsewhere on the web, an ad will follow you around encouraging you to go back and empty your cart, finish your purchase, etc.
In Recruitment Marketing, remarketing ads can target candidates who visit your careers page but don’t submit an application. An ad would then follow them around the web to try to re-capture their interest and send them back to complete an application.
Trend 3) Personalizing the candidate experience to increase apply rates
The last major trend we’re seeing in employer brand and job advertising is that organizations are starting to get more personalized in their strategy to attracting talent.
The brand-led content that they are pushing out using tools like programmatic, remarketing and other owned and paid media channels are often separated now by region or job type.
An employer might create an ad that spotlights the EVP associated with joining a certain job family at their organization. When candidates click through they’re then taken to a landing page for that job family or for all openings in the area.
Further, when candidates click on a specific job posting, the job posting is now often filled with content that speaks to the different experiences and perks that someone in that job family might have. The job posting might use employee stories and other content types to really provide a full picture of life at a company and encourage site visitors to apply.
In this way, good employer brand content can become part of your overall job advertising strategy by attracting candidate attention and increasing applicant flow. This is why developing a combined strategy for approaching and measuring your employer brand and job ad approach together is a smart move.
If you want to learn more about a combined employer brand and job advertising media strategy, as well as see some examples of employers doing this well, take a look at the new Rally Ideabook: 6 Content Examples That Rethink Media Strategy.
And, as always, we want to hear from you, Rally community members! Please send us a note if you’re inspired to put a new strategy into play for your next campaign because of this article. You can reach us on Facebook, Twitter or e-mail me directly at lori@rallyrm.com.
