5 Tips on How Content Marketing Can Help Attract Top Talent
According to a LinkedIn study, only 30% of your potential talent pool is actively seeking a new job. This means that if you want to attract the top talent, you’ll probably have to woo them away from their current position. Adam Blackford-Mills, Director of Sales & Marketing at MRS Digital, shares his expertise.
To attract the kind of talent that is happily married to the job they’re already in, you need to market your business just like you’d market your products or services, through content marketing. When it comes to recruitment, a content marketing strategy will involve creating and distributing valuable content, specifically designed to attract talent.
Marketing your business is different than just selling your company. A successful talent attraction strategy gives your target hires something of value in addition to showcasing your company culture and open positions.
Here are 5 tips on how you can up your content marketing game to attract the talent your business needs to busy your operation to new heights.
1. Define your audience
If you provide a range of services to specific audiences, you’ll know how important it is to understand who you’re talking to. You don’t want to push people away by not speaking their language, so make sure you clearly define your audience.
Are you recruiting for a technical or a creative role? This simple distinction will massively impact how you create your content. Both in the language you use and the form your content takes will change depending on who you target.
To define your target audience or candidate persona, ask yourself what types of people you’re looking to attract to your company. If the role you’re looking to fill is one that you already have in your organisation, speak to that person. Ask them what attracted them to your businesses and what sort of content they engage with.
2. Location, location, location
Even if you create the greatest content the world will ever see, the world won’t see it if you don’t distribute it in the right places. So, once you’ve nailed down who your audience is, you need to figure out where they’re engaging, whether it’s a specific social network or a handful of platforms.
As well as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, there plenty of other channels too, including:
- YouTube
- GitHub
- Professional/Industry Magazines
- Influencers
Knowing where you’ll be posting your content will also have an impact on the sort of content you’ll make. Different types of content work better on different platforms. For example, Power Points and longer articles work well on LinkedIn, while Twitter is better for pithy, short pieces of impactful content.
3. Make your content interactive
Hiring top talent is all about starting a relationship, so allow your prospects to start up a conversation through your content.
Interactive content has the benefit of immediately engaging your audience, giving them clear and actionable goals to complete. Not only can this speed up your recruitment process, if you do it right, you can improve brand awareness too.
Plus, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 81% of people agree that interactive content hook people better than static content does. So it helps you stand out too!
4. Be transparent about your company culture
Telling your company’s story is a big part of employer branding. You need to be clear as an organisation what your culture is, as well as what your teams need.
This will help you avoid making promises about your business that you aren’t prepared to stand by. Claiming to be flexible, but denying flexible working options, for example, will only push top talent away.
Make sure that throughout your content, your company culture is clear and consistent. This will also help cement your core values and establish your brand as a serious player.
5. Track your ROI
Just like any marketing activity, proving return on investment is key. Just like you’d measure the performance of any candidate source, such as an outsourced recruiter or email campaign, it’s important to apply the same rigour to content production in your hiring. To help measure your ROI on recruitment content marketing, measure metrics such as:
- Talent pool engagement
- Number of applications
- Number of interviews
- Number of new starters
If your business already does content marketing, you don’t need to change your thinking too much when it comes to recruitment. You just have to reach a different audience to your brand. If this is all new to you, these tips will give you a jump-start on catching top talent.
