Content marketing shouldn’t just be regarded as only an additional layer to your marketing strategy. It can also find favour in HR as a recruiting tool.
When you use content marketing that’s aimed at prospective employees, you’ll find those new hires. Just think of them as one of the personas your marketing team is creating content for, and you’re ready to go.
Here’s how you can use it too for your B2B organization.
- Partner with HR to discover more information about hiring needs. Have regular meetings between marketing and HR to share information. Find out what positions your organization needs to fill right now, what ones will be needed in the near future, and then ones that they’ll need over the long term. Read up on current job descriptions to find out what kind of skills and experience are needed for those positions. Ask HR where current employees were hired from (geographic area, schools, previous employers, etc.) This helps with your audience persona, so you can create the content that will get their attention. The more aware of you they are, the more likely your future job postings will reach the right audience.
- Build recruiting into your formal content marketing strategy. Content Marketing Institute finds that effective B2B marketers document their strategies to keep everyone on track. So ensure to build recruiting into that strategy, and see where you can leverage your content production to help with it. Such a move will also help you to avoid duplicating content production efforts, since a lot of the content you produce for prospective customers can be used for prospective employees as well.
- Involve current employees in the recruitment strategy. They’re your best source of information on what drew them to your organization in the first place, what type of skills and experience they have, and what topics and websites they used to research your organization before joining. They’re a gold mine of information about your prospective employees. Additionally, as a B2B marketer you’re already used to working with product subject matter experts in your organization to create your current content. Use this same process for your recruiting efforts.
- Build out audience personas to target your recruiting content marketing. The same reasons your buyer personas work for your current content marketing efforts are the same reasons that they’ll work for recruiting prospective employees. After all, salespeople, developers, and project managers don’t always read the same content on the same websites. Build up recruiting audience personas to match your employment needs.
- Train employees to send recruiting requests to the right place. Social media and online life has crept into all facets of our lives today, so it’s possible that non-public-facing employees will receive job inquiries on their personal social media channels. Knowing where to direct those requests will be important for HR so they’ll know who’s interested in the position, but it also removes the possibility of anything going wrong. This includes your social media and marketing teams, who may think they already know what to do, but they may not. Plus, if your B2B organization’s not used to using content marketing for recruiting, it’s a new experience for everyone.
- Showcase your thought leadership. Flexing your knowledge about your industry, market, and customers is good for growing your business. It also helps at recruiting employees because you’re showing off your expertise. Prospective employees want to see that you’ve got a good understanding of what your market is doing, what it looks like, and using that to grow your business.
- Feature employee & company life. Behind-the-scenes looks at employee and company life are also great content to highlight for prospective employees. They want to know what it’s really like to work for you. Photos of employees at events, highlights of them on the corporate blog, even short videos of celebrations at the office are all ways you can feature your B2B organization culture to prospective employees.
- Measure your recruiting success. Given time, your recruiting content marketing will start to work, and uncover the right employees for your organization. But if you don’t measure your efforts and success, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. Recruitment content marketing is just like any other marketing strategy, and needs to be measured tracked. If you’ve been using social media to send out links to your website’s application form, track those links using URL tracking software like bit.ly, or something built into your marketing automation software. Recruiting websites often include tracking and statistics with their services, so work with them to define and record that information as well.
Organizations are starting to see just how much reach they can have by using content marketing to recruit new employees. They’re using it to grow their business and find new customers, so why not use it to find new employees to help support the growth they’re experiencing? B2B organizations can do the same thing, and as they continue to use content marketing in one area of their business, it may be time to start using it in others. Are you ready to give it a try? Your next, best employee may just be a blog post or social media message away.
Photo via Flickr Creative Commons
