What Is Recruitment Marketing? Ultimate Guide With 15 Examples
You have your employer value proposition and employer brand, but how do you put all that out there and get people excited? This is where recruitment marketing comes in!
Recruitment marketing is under-utilized in many spaces, which is precisely why you have the opportunity to make a big splash regardless of how big or small you are.
It's an opportunity to get creative with expressing your company identity, take candidates on a journey, and have a little fun!
Use this guide to understand the what, why and the how. Sprinkled throughout is advice on what to watch out for when putting yourself out there.
Let's dive in.
What Is Recruitment Marketing?
Recruitment marketing, sometimes called talent marketing, is when you adapt traditional marketing strategies to attract and hire talent. It’s aimed at potential candidates to advertise what your company does, who you are as an employer, and what working for you will look like.
In reality, recruitment marketing occurs everywhere regular marketing occurs because potential candidates will also see what you’re putting out there that’s aimed at clients.
That’s why it’s good to work with your general marketing team when creating your recruitment marketing strategy.
However, there are certain channels that are more specifically aimed at job seekers that you should be taking full advantage of. That way you will find yourself attracting the best talent for you.
Why Is Recruitment Marketing Important?
With the rise of social media, especially platforms like LinkedIn, recruitment marketing has become an essential part of the recruitment process.
In a competitive talent market, marketing helps you stand out as an employer and attract the right talent to your organization.
In the recruitment funnel, recruitment marketing mostly makes a difference at the top of the funnel i.e. using storytelling to increase employer brand awareness and show off your employer value proposition (everything you offer as an employer).
Further down the pipeline, recruitment marketing can still support you and your recruitment team to close candidates by providing them with info and insights into what it’s like to work for your company.
Organizations can take advantage of multiple marketing channels e.g. social media, email, careers fairs, their careers page, as well as marketing tactics like retargeting past candidates, all supported by a data-driven approach.
Difference Between Recruitment And Recruitment Marketing
Recruitment and recruitment marketing are distinct yet complementary processes in talent acquisition.
Recruitment
Recruitment is the full process of filling specific job openings through activities such as sourcing candidates, conducting interviews, and negotiating job offers.
It covers the full hiring process, is triggered by immediate and future hiring needs, and involves a varied cast of people including HR, recruiters, hiring managers and individual contributors.
Recruitment marketing
Recruitment marketing is an important part of the recruitment process focusing on promoting candidates and advertising roles.
Responsibilities are often managed collaboratively by HR and marketing teams, using tactics like social media campaigns, employee testimonials, and career events.
The ultimate goal of recruitment marketing is to create a pipeline of potential candidates by generating ongoing interest in the company.
Components Of Recruitment Marketing
The key components of recruitment marketing combine to ensure a strategic approach to attracting and engaging top talent.
1. Employer branding
A clear and compelling employer brand communicates the company’s mission, values, culture, and what makes it a desirable place to work. This serves as the foundation for all recruitment marketing efforts.
2. Employee value proposition (EVP)
The EVP defines the unique benefits and experiences employees can expect in return for their skills and contributions. It covers aspects like salaries, career growth, work-life balance, and company culture.
3. Careers website
A well-designed careers page is the central hub for recruitment marketing. It should feature job openings, company values, employee testimonials, and application instructions while being mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
4. Content marketing
Engaging content, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and social media updates, showcases company culture, employee stories, and industry expertise. Consistent content builds brand visibility and credibility.
5. Social media and digital presence
Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and X are essential for promoting the brand and sharing job openings.
Digital campaigns, paid ads, and social engagement enhance visibility and candidate reach.
6. Talent pool management
Building and nurturing a database of potential candidates ensures a ready talent pool you can keep engaged through personalized emails, newsletters, and event invitations.
7. Candidate experience
A positive candidate experience, from application to hiring, reflects well on the company’s brand. This includes clear job descriptions, simple and accessible application processes, timely communication, and constructive candidate feedback.
8. Analytics and metrics
Tracking and measuring recruitment marketing efforts helps optimize strategies. Key performance indicators (KPIs) include application rates, source of hire, time-to-fill, and candidate engagement metrics.
9. Recruitment campaigns
Targeted campaigns, such as job-specific advertisements or employer branding initiatives, help meet immediate and long-term hiring goals. These campaigns should align with company objectives and be adjusted based on performance data.
10. Employee advocacy
Employees can be powerful brand ambassadors by sharing their positive work experiences on social media and review platforms.
Employee-generated content, as it’s called, if crucial for adding authenticity and credibility to the employer brand.
Recruitment Marketing Funnel
The recruitment marketing funnel outlines the stages candidates go through up until making an application. They all bleed into one another, but here are the 4 key stages:
Create awareness
The first stage is awareness, where, as the name suggests, the primary goal is to make candidates aware of you as a company and potential employer.
This involves building a strong employer brand identity in harmony with the overall brand. Central to this is defining your employer value proposition (EVP) i.e. everything you offer as an employer from mission and values to salaries to career development opportunities.
Once everything’s in place, it’s time to show it to the world! Some effective tactics to do so:
- Social media: Use platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter to post engaging content that reflects your company culture. This could include behind-the-scenes footage or celebrating achievement and milestones.
- Advertising campaigns: Launch targeted campaigns with consistent messaging across multiple channels platforms. This can be paid advertising on job boards, social media, actually media, TV, even billboards.
- Employee advocacy: Encourage employees to share their positive experiences on social media and review platforms like Glassdoor and Indeed.
- Recruitment events: Participate in or host events such as job fairs, industry conferences, and open house events. Use these opportunities to provide a direct experience of your company culture.
- Strategic partnerships: Collaborate with universities, training organizations, or industry associations to increase brand visibility among future talent.
You’ll also want to optimize your careers page to clearly showcase your EVP through compelling visuals, employee testimonials, and a clear explanation of your culture, benefits, and growth opportunities.
Generate interest
Your awareness efforts are hard at work putting your brand out there, maybe you went viral with an inspired TikTok post and are kind of famous now (one can dream).
Now it’s time to get more targeted and start to advertise specific roles to specific groups.
For example, if you met someone at a job fair and they gave you their email address, you can send them information about roles that could interest them.
You can of course advertise roles as part of your brand awareness efforts, and the two certainly aren’t mutually exclusive, but some specific tactics here include:
- Job board advertising: Post job openings on major job boards like Indeed, LinkedIn, and Glassdoor. Use niche job boards specific to your industry e.g. Dribbble for designers, to increase visibility among the right talent pool.
- Employee referral programs: Encourage existing team members to refer candidates by offering incentives. Make sure to promote specific job openings internally through company newsletters, emails, and staff meetings.
- Email marketing campaigns: Create engaging email campaigns targeting passive and active candidates. Include job details, application deadlines, and links to apply.
- Outreach messages: Be it LinkedIn or other platforms, outreach messages also have to be treated as a form of marketing. Try to personalize as much as possible, even if it’s just by category e.g. “open to work”.
- Community outreach: Engage with niche forums, Slack, or Discord communities relevant to your industry. Just remember to follow community rules, participate actively, and provide value to establish trust.
- Career page promotion: Feature job openings prominently on your careers page or even your homepage.
This process is underpinned by publishing as much useful information as possible so engaged candidates can explore the role and, preferably, team even further.
It’s why optimizing your LinkedIn and careers pages is so important, and some organizations even create dedicated social pages for careers.
Nurture the decision
You had my curiosity, now you have my attention.
Candidates in the consideration stage are evaluating whether your company is a good fit for their career goals and personal values.
They may compare your organization with others and seek more detailed information about the roles, benefits, work environment, and career growth opportunities.
Useful tactics here:
- Informative content: Interviews with current employees, ‘day-in-the-life’ videos, team success stories, office tours, hiring process information.
- Highlight career development opportunities: Emphasize how your company supports career growth through training programs, mentorship, and advancement opportunities. Show examples of employees who have grown within the company.
- Invite them to a company event. Invite them to attend a company event, networking session, or webinar. This provides an opportunity to experience your culture firsthand and meet potential colleagues.
- Reiterate your EVP and culture: Share aspects of your EVP such as work-life balance, flexible work options, and unique company perks.
Application
You’ve done a lot of work to get someone interested enough in a position at your company so they’re ready to take the plunge and make an application.
The goal of this stage is to ensure they complete this successfully and give you all the information you need during the screening stage to make a decision about progressing them through to the interview stage.
Some tactics here:
- Simplify the application process: Ensure your application process is user-friendly, mobile-optimized, and accessible. The aim is to ask for just enough information you need.
- Provide clear instructions: Clearly outline what information is required and how to complete the application. Use step-by-step guides, tooltips, and examples to clarify application sections like resumes, cover letters, and assessments.
- Use a progress tracker: Include a progress bar showing how much of the application has been completed. This gives candidates a sense of progress and motivates them to finish.
- Send friendly reminders: If someone starts but doesn’t complete their application, send personalized email reminders highlighting the role's key benefits and encouraging them to finalize their submission.
- Follow up: Use automation in your applicant tracking system or recruiting software to send an email confirming the application and outlining next steps. If someone doesn’t meet a specific criteria, e.g. visa status, then you can also send an automated rejection email stating the reason.
How To Create A Recruitment Marketing Plan
Like most things, recruiting marketing is most effective when there are clear objectives, measures of success, defined roles and responsibilities, and a plan.
1. Define your objectives
Start by identifying what you want to achieve. Set specific, measurable goals such as increasing applications for key roles, improving employer brand awareness, or building a talent pipeline. Ensure these goals align with your business strategy and recruitment needs.
2. Understand your target audience
Research your ideal candidates by creating candidate personas including their skills, motivations, career goals, and preferred communication channels.
Use data from past hires, industry reports, and candidate surveys to refine your understanding.
3. Craft your employer value proposition
Your EVP should clearly define what makes your company a great place to work. Highlight key aspects such as career growth, company culture, work-life balance, and unique benefits. This message should be central to all marketing efforts.
4. Develop a content strategy
Create a content calendar with themes that align with your EVP and recruitment goals. This could include employee testimonials, career advice articles, company culture videos, and events. Tailor content for each platform and audience segment.
5. Choose marketing channels
Select the right mix of channels where your target candidates are most active. Consider job boards, social media platforms, professional networks like LinkedIn, career fairs, email campaigns, and, of course, your careers page.
6. Implement campaigns
Run targeted marketed campaigns based on specific hiring needs. For example, if it’s October and you know you’re going to need a lot of seasonal workers over the Christmas period, it’s time to go gung ho on advertising those roles.
7. Build a talent pipeline
Create a database of potential candidates through events, job applications, and networking. You can nurture this pool with personalized communication, regular updates, and relevant job opportunities.
8. Measure and adjust
Track campaign performance and adjust tactics using metrics like application rates, marketing channel effectiveness, and candidate engagement with your content (clicks, likes, shares, etc).
7 Recruitment Marketing Best Practices
1. Create a strong EVP
I’ve spoken at the importance of the EVP a lot so I won’t go into again too much here, but taking the time to define yours is an incredibly useful exercise for any org.
Sometimes it’s not pretty, and can lead to some difficult conversation, but it will help you attract and retain the right people.
2. Understand your audience
Marketing can’t happen in a vacuum. Like products, the most effective marketing campaigns are built on a deep understanding of their target audience and their needs
It’s useful to create profiles of your ideal candidates by identifying their skills, values, and motivations.
Use this insight to craft job ads, email campaigns, and content that resonates with them.
3. Build a candidate database
It’s a waste of effort and resources collecting people’s info and not keeping it somewhere such as candidate database software.
Ideally, you should be able to segment them into categories such as role, location, seniority (similar to how CRMs work).
The only thing to note here is compliance with data protection and privacy regulations such as GDPR in Europe and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
4. Be data driven
Recruitment marketing takes time and resources, so it pays to use data available to hone your efforts to get the best ROI.
Use recruitment marketing tools to measure campaign effectiveness and adjust strategies accordingly.
5. Personalize candidate engagement
There’s little point sending marketing roles to data scientists and vice versa. We all receive too many emails as it is, and people will quickly switch off if you send irrelevant information, so personalize any communication as much as possible.
You can use recruitment CRM tools to track interactions and maintain continuous communication.
6. Automate
As mentioned, recruitment marketing is time consuming, so it makes sense to automate certain aspects. For example, a useful ATS feature is automated job posting across multiple job boards.
Other tactics include automated email sequences that nurture passive candidates, automated candidate segmentation, and even AI-powered chatbots to answer frequently asked questions, guide candidates through the application process.
7. Be authentic, consistent and evolve
Whichever channel you choose, or whatever combination you want to go for, always make sure the content is authentic, appropriate, and attention-grabbing.
- Authentic: You can ensure you remain authentic by always thinking about your employer brand and identity.
- Appropriate: Always keep in mind your target audience and personas.
- Attention-grabbing: Do something to stand out from the pack in your own way.
It can be easy to turn into one of those brands who post for the sake of posting or, even worse, try to be down with the kids in a space where they don’t fit in naturally.
Maintain a consistent brand voice while adapting to industry trends and evolving candidate expectations.
Lastly, regularly refresh your content, update your careers page, and refine your strategies to stay competitive.
15 Recruitment Marketing Examples
Recruitment marketing is the opportunity to have some fun and display what makes you unique. These are some of my favourite examples past and present.
1. FIFA
FIFA’s famous billboard advertising a designer for the 2026 World Cup Logo.
2. Microsoft
A cool engineering job ad from Microsoft invites us to solve an equation. I like how they include the salary too (I think it must be quite old!).
3. Webinargeek
Really like this “day in the life of” employee takeover from Webinargeek. The way it was worded it was almost like Tech support was going to be there to help everyone!
Top tip: Before handing them the reins, ensure employees are trained and have guidelines on what to post and how to handle interactions.
4. Dublin Bus
I came across the above recently and thought it was so nice and heartwarming! Everyone across all levels should be celebrated so think about who you may be forgetting. The shoutout was posted on the company page as well as by the CEO.
5. ASOS
@michellejoseph__ First day vibes⚡️ @asos #workoffice #newjobcheck #asoslifestyle #asos #foryou #CinderellaMovie ♬ Aesthetic Vibes - sxldi
First day - celebrate! Been here a year - celebrate! Been here 5 years - celebrate more! ASOS’s first-day TikTok video above is a cool example that will appear to the Gen Z audience the brand wants to market to.
6. Typo
@typo_shop Welcome to Typo HQ #thingsthatjustmakesense #officetour #work ♬ original sound - Typo
More TikTok goodness from Typo with their office tour to attract creatives.
7. Focaldata
Focaldata with a nice piece of educational content from my organization that highlights our team’s expertise and helps them increase the reach of their knowledge.
8. Black and White Zebra
Cool post from my editor, Finn Bartram’s, LinkedIn showcasing the media organization’s creativity and culture. Cool T-shirt too!
9. Reading Room
Digital agency Reading Room highlights some of their work that will also catch the eye of potential candidates too.
10. Tyk
API management startup Tyk sending speakers to an event about a specific technology (Kubernetes).
11. Google
Google’s popular career community is perfect for connecting with potential candidates and advertising roles.
12. Apple
Apple supplies some handy interview tips for those bottom-of-funnel candidates.
13. Triplebyte
Tech recruitment agency Triplebyte showing us how it’s down by jumping on the popular Drake meme.
14. Lego
LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Shanghai turned their hunt for a new LEGO Master Model Builder in an open audition event in China.
15. WestRock
A nice, clear CTA from WestRock on their job ad.
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