How to Partner with Marketing to Achieve Your Recruitment Marketing Goals

Hi Rally community!

This is the last post of my 3-part “New to Recruitment Marketing” blog series!

Firstly, I want to thank you all for following along on my journey. We started out learning how I transitioned my career from recruitment to Recruitment Marketing and how I leveraged my recruiting background and experience partnering with Marketing teams to land my dream role. In part two, I talked about how a great employee experience (EX) matters to Recruitment Marketing and how to partner with your Human Resources team to influence and create a stronger EX.

In today’s post, I will be focusing on how I partnered with our Marketing team to achieve our Recruitment Marketing goals.

Many people debate whether Recruitment Marketing should sit within Marketing or Human Resources. As with many complex questions, the answer I think is “it depends.” Since I personally report to the Human Resources Manager, collaborating with Marketing is really important. However, if your role sits under Marketing you might consider how these tips might apply to collaborating with your Talent Acquisition peers. Either way, the point is you can’t operate in a silo!

As a result, one of the areas that I’ve been really focused on recently is developing strong relationships with Marketing and looking for opportunities where we can leverage each other’s work to help achieve our goals. Here’s are 4 approaches that have been effective for building the relationship, supporting each other’s expertise and aligning our goals.

1. Consider how to align your employer brand and corporate brand

First things first, if you have an employer brand strategy or framework, it is key to communicate that with your Marketing team. You may also need to educate them a bit on what employer branding is in the first place and why it’s an important space for them to be aware of.

Additionally, you should communicate how your company’s employer brand impacts your corporate brand, and vice versa. Meet with the Marketing team to learn more about the corporate brand and how it might impact your employer brand. After all, at the end of the day, you are one company with one voice.

2. Develop a content calendar together

While some larger organizations may have separate social media accounts for their corporate brand and employer brand, my organization is not big enough — nor do we have the resources to manage two different online presences.

To make our shared accounts approach work well, I learned that I needed to be at the table when the Marketing team was developing their content calendar. This is also an excellent time to work on a Recruitment Marketing content calendar to make sure it aligns with your company’s overall goals.

This ensured that we weren’t cannibalizing each other’s content by putting out content at the same time or putting out similar content. And, with a seat at the table, I can always ensure that recruitment priorities remain top-of-mind when content is being planned and developed. In addition, in this capacity, I can partner closely with our creative team to leverage the existing assets (e.g. image templates) versus creating my own.

3. Leverage pre-existing marketing content

As my company, Indellient, is a service organization versus a product company, our people and their expertise are essentially our product. This means that our Marketing team has worked hard to position our team members as experts and thought leaders in our space.

Typically, this content is used to attract prospective customers, however, we can also leverage this from a Recruitment Marketing perspective. After all, at the end of the day, it’s not snacks or ping pong tables that make employees stay at your organization — it’s their coworkers and other more substantive factors.

Prospective candidates want to know that they will be working with smart, competent team members and managers. Utilizing these thought leadership pieces can help elevate your employer brand by showcasing who your people are and what they know. It also offers some insight into the day-to-day experience of working at your company.

Here’s a look at one of Indellient’s Recruitment Marketing videos.

Additionally, you may have candidates who are interested in working with more exciting products or who want to learn a specific tech stack. It’s very likely that your Marketing team has content around your products and the technologies your teams are using.

Whether it’s a blog post, case study or white paper, this is particularly good content to leverage if you have candidates who are motivated to make a career change because they’re working with stale technologies at their current organization or they’re looking to work with more exciting products.

4. Take advantage of your existing Martech stack

There are so many great social media and brand management platforms out there that can elevate your Recruitment Marketing efforts. However, before you dive into tinkering with new technologies, you should leverage the stack your Marketing team is already using.

For me, learning these new technologies has been invaluable and will inevitably help my career growth and trajectory. I’ve been able to gain experience using Active Campaign (an email marketing platform that I now use for developing internal communication), Hubspot (for social media scheduling), WordPress (for blogging) and SEMrush (for SEO).

Since the Marketing team has already been using these tools for a while, they also have a firmer grasp on reporting and analytics, which is key to measuring the effectiveness of your Recruitment Marketing strategy. If you’re new to the Recruitment Marketing space like me, getting the skinny on existing metrics from your Marketing team is a great way to get a grasp on existing benchmarks, which you can then translate over to understand how your Recruitment Marketing content is performing.

I hope these insights on working with your marketing team are helpful for you to read about. Further, I’m so glad to have been able to share the early months of my foray into Recruitment Marketing with you all! I’m excited to have now created a foundation for partnering with the HR and Marketing teams, and to see what we can achieve together next at Indellient!