Recruitment has long been filled with silos. For example, many companies put employer branding in one bucket and job advertising in another. This made sense when these two strategies had different goals and budgets.
But with the rising importance of Recruitment Marketing, we’re here to suggest that it’s time to do away with this siloed thinking, and instead move toward converging employer branding and job advertising into one robust strategy that will boost your talent attraction efforts.
Why? Everything you are promoting – whether it’s your EVP, career opportunities or another candidate message – is related. Think about it: When posting a job description, you’re not just posting information about the specific role, you’re also communicating your company’s culture and values. When sharing an employee story, you’re also highlighting career progression opportunities. With all of this messaging now connected, and with all promotion really drawing from the same TA budget, it only makes sense to converge your current media strategies under one holistic plan for attracting talent.
Some companies are making this shift already. We feature 3 employers and their successful approaches in our Rally Ideabook: 6 Content Examples That Rethink Media Strategy.
One of these companies is Ecolab, a global leader in delivering water, hygiene and energy solutions in order to promote safe food, clean environments and improve operational efficiencies for customers. Among its successes are safely producing 44% of the global milk supply, and providing products for cleaning more than 40 billion hands around the world.
The company knew it wanted to create a content-led strategy that communicated its EVP by showcasing the value and impact of the work it does. Here are 4 ways that Ecolab used a convergence of strategies to drive candidates to jobs:
Employee Stories
Ecolab grabs the attention of potential candidates with video social posts like these that tell an employee story. This LinkedIn post uses the WIIFM rule (What’s in it for me?) by telling candidates: “You get the autonomy to create your schedule.” The link leads candidates to the Jobs home page to learn more about what it’s like to work at Ecolab. Media budget was used to create this professional employee story video, which Ecolab uses in different lengths across its recruitment marketing channels.
Result: On LinkedIn, this video has had over 25,560 impressions, 6,500 page views, over 110 likes and 164 click-throughs (0.64% CTR) to the Ecolab Jobs home page.
Sponsored Jobs
For high-volume and hard-to-fill roles, Ecolab takes an omnichannel approach – with sponsored jobs, social posts and digital ads – to surround job seekers in a market with the Ecolab employer brand and with information to help candidates decide whether or not to apply. Here, Ecolab leads with a message about a company award to set them apart. Sponsored jobs are managed through Symphony Talent’s automated media optimization platform, which is continuously optimizing where and how jobs are advertised using programmatic advertising.
Digital Ads
To appeal to commercial drivers, Ecolab includes a real employee photo of a driver with the EVP tagline, “My impact is safely delivering new technologies to my customers.” The ad design is simple yet on-brand using Ecolab’s hand-drawn icons and hand-written text. Ecolab uses programmatic job advertising to serve up the paid ad to targeted audiences while candidates visit various Internet sites. Note that the ad does not advertise a specific job req, but rather the job family for commercial drivers. The call to action, “Join Us”, leads to a listing of all commercial driver jobs.
Result: Ecolab has found that promoting a job family in a digital ad or through a social media post performs 5 times better than promoting a specific job because the message is more appealing to a broader pool of passive talent. For example, one of their higher-performing single job ads received an engagement rate of 2.4%, compared to up to 14% for job family ads.
Recruiter Tips
If passive talent scrolls past a traditional job ad, career advice content may catch their attention. Ecolab has a regular “Recruiter Tips” series on Facebook featuring advice from real Ecolab recruiters. The striking blue graphic features a cartoon drawing that stands out among typical people photos on Facebook and uses a large, simple headline to convey the subject. This post includes a tip about preparing for an interview and links to the Ecolab recruiting process page on their careers website. The right-hand column on the landing page gives candidates access to search for jobs, as well as persuades candidates with EVP content showcasing the company’s purpose and values.
Result: This post had a reach of 5,387, 792 likes and 15 shares, with a 16.5% engagement rate and 78 click throughs (1.4% CTR).
The recruitment process landing page:
Want to see more examples? Our Ideabook 6 Content Examples That Rethink Media Strategy provides more insight and inspiration from DICK’S Sporting Goods and Northwell Health, to help you converge your employer brand and job advertising efforts into one cohesive strategy that can boost the candidate experience and encourage candidates to apply.
Note: Symphony Talent is a sponsor of Rally and supports our efforts to provide educational content and events on Recruitment Marketing.