If your company is struggling to find new skilled and diverse employees, it’s time to look at your employer branding and consider a recruitment campaign.
Canadian HR professionals are dealing with one of the worst employee shortages in recent history. According to a recent survey of 510 Canadian hiring decision-makers, one in four employers have hired someone they normally wouldn’t have due to a shortage in workers. For employers struggling to recruit top talent in a job-seekers market, weak employer branding may be to blame.
Online job boards and standard approaches to recruiting employees aren’t working like they used to. We need to demonstrate greater value to potential recruits and help them see the benefits of partnering with your organization.
We need to think about marketing jobs the same we think about marketing products. We need to connect with both the head and the heart of employees and we need to stand out. Too often we hear from great companies who can’t find employees and from great employees who can’t find a great place to work.
We can’t rely on sites like Indeed to do the work for us as these sites typically only attract folks actively looking for a job change or new career. Instead, we need to target folks who aren’t currently thinking about a change in order to get the base of applicants we need.
So how do we do this? We recommend the following three steps.
- Develop or refine your employer brand story
- Develop or refine the creative assets you use to promote your employment opportunities
- Level up your recruitment marketing with three levels of advertising
1. Develop or refine your employer brand story
Connection Points
We need to identify how we best connect to potential employees, whether it be through quality, community, self-improvement, or exclusivity. Look at how this aligns with your current external brand messaging to ensure it’s consistent and use brand language that centres around your connection point.
Audience Profiling
We want to find ways to connect our messaging to specific recruitment audiences. To do this, review your current audiences and discuss what you can offer them. You will want an overview from folks you already work with to better understand what brought them to your company.
Employer Brand Story
Every good story has a protagonist, an object of desire, a force of opposition, and a human value. Let’s use these building blocks to craft a compelling employer story that brings meaning to your company’s employment experience. This story forms the base language we pull from when crafting messaging for each audience and any assets we create.
Head and Heart Appeal
People “buy” on emotion and then rationalize their purchase with logic. Let’s define the head and heart messages (sometimes called “reasons to believe”) that you’ll attach to your employer story. These messages can be used in advertising and communications for each group.
Visual Identity
With the connection point, brand story and positioning as our guide, explore a visual direction for recruitment initiatives. Look at your current brand and find ways to build on this to better reflect your employer brand. We recommend compiling a database of photography, graphic elements and treatments to keep materials consistent.
2. Develop or refine the creative assets you use to promote your employment opportunities
Once the brand story and supporting visuals are developed, we can develop employer brand assets. These may include a Squarespace micro-website that you can point potential prospects to, overview and profile videos, updated collateral (employee manual and job descriptions), and digital marketing ad templates.
Some examples include:
Website
Consider updating the career section on your main company website, or if the website isn’t capturing the brand properly, a separate career site might draw in desired jobseekers.
Overview Video(s)
If you’re looking for a longer-term solution to employer branding and recruitment, we recommend creating employer videos and looking at specific profile videos for departments, divisions, or careers you regularly hire.
Employee Manual & Job Descriptions
If your company is looking for a longer-term solution to employer branding and recruitment, we suggest updating your employee manual to reflect an updated brand. Also consider looking for ways to incorporate brand language into your job descriptions.
Digital Marketing Materials
Create a bank of creative ads and templates that can be used for specific postings and general recruitment campaigns going forward. This may include short-form videos (cut from the longer-form assets mentioned above), digital graphic ads, text-based ads, and social posts.
3. Level up your recruitment marketing with three levels of advertising
We recommend employers consider these three different promotion paths as well as three levels of messaging. Positioning yourself in the digital market in this way will encourage jobseekers to seek employment with your company specifically, rather than treating your posting like another drop in the bucket.
“Always On” Employer Brand Advertising
We suggest setting up a continuous campaign to promote your company’s careers page or microsite. We can do this with Google Search ads and retargeting.
Department or “Career Track” Advertising
We recommend setting up specific media buys for different career tracks or departments. The needs of each team within your company will help determine the best course of action. Once you have a better understanding of what is needed, you can help your company make media recommendations (likely a mix of industry-specific publications and digital media).
Specific Postings or Positions
Set up a sub-campaign for key positions (ongoing) and digital audience profiles for specific postings as they come up.
