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 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 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 are likely looking at 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 may find yourself attracting the best talent for you.
Why is recruitment marketing important?
In the recruitment funnel, recruitment marketing mostly makes a difference at the top of the funnel i.e. increasing brand awareness and enticing more and better applicants to apply.
Further down the pipeline, recruitment marketing can still support you and your recruitment team to close candidates by providing them with more organic glimpses of what it’s like to work for your company and interview tips and guides.
11 Recruitment Marketing Channels
1. Jobs ads
Job adverts are the classic form of recruitment marketing. When it comes to creating them, they need to be both informative and attention-grabbing—not an easy combination as the two are not necessarily compatible.
What I like to do is make sure that the job advert follows a logical flow and use headings to make it easy for candidates to know where to look for different kinds of information (e.g. “Responsibilities and Outcomes” and “About us”).
I also like to use the company values to structure the outcomes of the role (how their role contributed to your company’s mission) in a way that echoes those values as a signal that you truly do live what you preach.
For example, if one of your values is to “deliver exemplary experiences for customers”, or something along those lines, that is something that everyone can contribute towards.
So, under responsibilities and outcomes in a job ad for engineers, you could include something like “Work with the product team in requirement gathering to truly understand what will move the needle towards an even better customer experience”.
It just gives a bit more flavour on what you’re requiring and why than just “requirement gathering”.
Another thing is to think carefully about where you’re posting. Do some research and think about where your target audience hangs out—perhaps there’s a jobs board or a jobs channel. e.g. if you’re looking for designers, check out Dribble (more on this later).
A note on funky job titles
Code whisperers, sales ninjas etc. sound interesting but think about whether they are discoverable.
If someone is looking for a job, would they look immediately for a “code whisperer” or a Software engineer as the first stop? Likely the latter and considering they will have applied to all the other roles with the more “regular” title they may not even look at the creative title at all.
I’m not looking to stifle your creativity—if anything you can mention it in the job description, but think of it as SEO—optimise the keywords that are more used to make sure you get more eyes on the job at least from the title.
After that, the creativity can shine through in the content of the job advert!
2. Outreach message
Be it LinkedIn or other platforms, outreach messages also have to be treated as a form of marketing.
This will help you write more engaging messages rather than the cut-and-dry “job here”.
Again, make sure that your messages reflect your identity as an employer and guide potential candidates through the information you’re presenting to them.
I like to send a few links shortened using Bitly or other link shorteners. You’re likely trying to reach top talent and they need information, but make sure your information is tailored to the person receiving it—especially the role being relevant.
I remember receiving a message offering me a position as a recruitment sourcer, despite being the Head of Talent and not having been a sourcer for at least 6 years. Not a great candidate experience right out of the gate!
Every talent platform will tell you to personalise messages to increase response, but, if you’re sending many many messages a day (perhaps you are working on multiple roles at the same time like I usually am), that may not be possible.
So a quick tip from me is to separate your pool into a few categories e.g. Linkedin people who are “open to work”, or people from a specific background or company, and acknowledge the thing that made them unique in the message. You can build a space or prompt for it right into your recruiting email templates.
It still personalises it to them somewhat and you can more easily send a few messages concurrently.
3. Hiring platform profiles
Certain hiring platforms will work with you to create a page where featuring your company to potential candidates. Typically, they’ll allow videos, links, and mini-pages for all the information you want to highlight.
For a cost, LinkedIn allows you to create a so-called “Life” page, which is a space for you to show off life at your company.
It’s useful for providing more information to candidates, allowing them to organically discover information on the platform where they’re likely to apply for the role anyway.
If your budget can’t accommodate that yet, you can use your company’s LinkedIn homepage to post content aimed at candidates as well as clients.
Other platforms like Hired, SheCanCode, Cord, Haystack, and AngelList also allow you to create a page to show off your company.
Make sure to keep the page alive with relevant information and vary the content so it’s not just “here’s a new job” style posts.
It’s always a good idea to feature some sort of video or “employee highlight” featurette-style content so people can understand what day-to-day looks like for different roles.
While it’s great to hear from the leadership, for most of the really engaged candidates, you will find that information from regular team members would be more valuable to them.
Lastly, highlight your posts to your colleagues so they can share and react to your content. That way it can reach a wider audience including their own talent networks!
4. Social Media
Social media can be a powerful tool but only when used appropriately. It’s important to think deeply about your company and your brand when choosing to invest time in a platform.
I don’t have a winning formula but, if you’re looking for pharma scientists on Instagram, for example, while not outside the realm of possibility it’s likely not the best use of your resources to run a dedicated recruitment marketing campaign there.
However, you can always have a “Life at [Company]” Instagram page—especially if you have a pet-friendly office. That always goes down well on the platform (pay your pet tax!).
Twitter/X is a bit more universal and can be a place where you put out more general content about “life at [Company]” or job posts. In some industries, really outstanding candidates can be found actively participating in the conversations on X.
TikTok, the new kid on the block and popular with Gen Z, has some job posts for junior/entry-level roles, but it’s not proven territory yet.
There isn’t a lot of data or metrics available for actual conversion rates, however, it can be your space to show off your organization’s fun side.
The most cited metric out there is about how Chipotle increased their applicant pool by 7% when they started taking TikTok video resumes in their pilot program, however likely more time will be needed to generate more data.
Getting really niche, depending on the industry or roles, the right candidates may now be on federated versions of the above apps.
The “Fediverse”, as it’s now known, is a collection of open-source and self-hosted platforms that are being used as alternatives to X (Mastodon), Reddit (Lemmy).
They operate like email i.e. we have a lot of providers of email but we can send emails to each other regardless of provider. It’s like being able to see Twitter/X replies inside of a Reddit post.
A lot of cyber security experts, for example, have moved towards these platforms after the shifts in X especially as they don’t want to be in a platform that is under the control of one person.
Regardless of your platform of choice here are some things to keep in mind:
- Keep in mind your candidate persona when choosing the best platform
- Research the most appropriate hashtags and trends and see which ones the talent community is using the most in their own posts or following.
- Make sure you understand any viral trends before you post something that shows you didn’t understand the context (example: look at Digiorno’s #WhyIStayed fiasco).
- See if it’s appropriate to work with influencers - again really industry-dependent but it can be a really effective marketing tactic for both brand and recruitment marketing.
For a deeper dive, check out my article on social recruiting.
5. Email
Email is an incredibly effective form of regular marketing and the same goes for candidate marketing too.
Using your candidate database like a CRM, you can send targeted emails designed to target different types of candidates e.g. to techies you can send info about a new technology your teams are working with or simply new opportunities.
6. Careers pages
Careers pages are underutilised as a channel because not many companies take it seriously or actually update employees, but that is how you can stick out!
A study from LinkedIn found that your website is where candidates go the most to get information about your company, so it’s not just about having your job openings somewhere!
Separate out a space for candidates so they have their own journey—ideally a separate careers site that is easy to navigate to from the homepage. Treat it like a source of leads and invite people to connect or become part of your talent pool.
The Twitch careers page is a good example. I like the fact that they have well-maintained news and updates of programmes and employee highlights as well as the different career paths and what the interview process looks like.
For more on careers pages, read my article how to create an attractive careers page.
7. Review sites
It’s now standard procedure for candidates to look up a company on review sites like Glassdoor, Kununu, or Indeed before applying.
That’s why it is so surprising that companies still don’t see those as opportunities for a more active way of creating a recruitment marketing funnel of candidates who are already engaged enough to look up your company.
Instead, companies often see reviews and testimonials as something “that happens to them” rather than a place where they can increase candidate engagement by showing themselves as caring about the experiences of people in the company.
That’s why you need to make sure that you create and maintain a page where you monitor the feedback you receive.
When you’re first starting out building your profile, ask your current employees or candidates to review their employment experience or candidate journey.
Make sure you keep track of your scores there and respond appropriately to any critiques. Your score is certainly something you can feature to show your employee engagement and happiness.
Glassdoor has a dynamic list of the best places to work; if you can get on there you’re golden!
Also, don’t underestimate the power of Trustpilot and review sites aimed at customers. One time I dropped out of an interview process at a Wellness App after seeing that their Google Play score is less than 2 stars.
8. Recruitment events
There are many recruitment events aimed at different candidate groups. For example, there are recruitment fairs for grads, start-ups, tech-specific roles, etc.
My recommendations when prepping for these are:
- Make sure you jump on and engage with any marketing content made by the organisers and advertise your attendance over social media or during chats with candidates.
- Prepare some fun swag!
- Come prepared with tech (iPad or laptop) in case people want to register to have a further chat with your company.
- Ideally, have a few people at your stand—if you have a recruitment team make sure they’re there, but they also have people from the relevant audience. For example, if you are at a Women in Tech event, have at least one female engineer to chat with people.
- Make sure you follow up with attendees and add them to your talent pipeline to keep them updated.
9. Community outreach
This is where I have found a lot of success, but only by following the rules.
Harking back to what I mentioned earlier about finding where your potential hires hang out, there are spaces like forums, Subreddits, and Discord or Slack communities where professionals of a specific area can gather, share ideas and discuss.
These are great sources of talented professionals who are engaged in their own domain and are looking to keep on top of new developments. What is more, these communities sometimes have a jobs channel where you can post your roles.
One thing to note is to pay attention to the rules about joining. For example, some communities I reached out to don’t allow recruiters to join and it makes sense.
Other times, as I discovered recently, I was able to join because the rule was that the forum was aimed at women only and all our techies at the time were guys.
If you’re not sure, reach out to the organisers and make sure you make yourself available to the community in which you want to take part.
Even if you're not a subject matter expert you can still be an active member and take part in their initiatives, so be prepared to give back.
10. Blogging, webinars, and other forms of content marketing
There are other ways like webinars/blogs/Medium posts for you to put content out there specifically for recruitment, but I’d only recommend them if you have actually something to say.
Don’t post for the sake of posting or to fill a quota!
Most companies use these spaces to educate clients on new product developments or as a source of getting clients, but a webinar or a blog can easily be just focused on your company as an employer.
One of my more successful posts was on the company blog page, where we usually posted about new product/industry developments.
One week I took over and wrote about how I created the recruitment process and why I did it the way I did it. Turns out job seekers really appreciate the demystifying of the hiring process at your company!
11. Open source wiki/Notion
Depending on where your company is in your journey, you may not have an ATS or a careers page. A great alternative is to have an open-source wiki or publicly available employee handbook to give candidates more to explore.
You can either create a microsite or a page from your main site or use a tool like Notion, Obsidian, or Nuclino. Here are a few examples:
- Pento Home (notion.so)
- Welcome Human! - Handbook (hmn.md)
- Monito's Handbook [Public] (notion.site)
- Blendle's Employee Handbook (notion.so)
Wikis are especially useful for featuring information and being transparent with candidates from the get-go about things like your employee value proposition or your recruitment process.
With Notion in particular, it’s also super easy to post pages with open roles.
Creating a wiki is a great fit for those companies that aren't at a stage where they have implemented an ATS that can easily manage a careers page, or companies that have a really well-developed culture that they’d like to show off more.
So this can either be a link on the main website that replaces a careers page, or it can be a link from within the careers page to “Learn more”.
Openness and transparency to candidates at the early stages of the funnel is becoming the norm, which is great to see.
If you are not sure where to start, check out OpenOrg—they’ve amassed a bunch of resources on where to get started with engaging qualified candidates and making your company not just a collection of open positions!
The Recruitment Marketing Funnel
A useful tool pinched from regular marketers and adapted for recruitment marketing is the recruit marketing funnel.
It breaks recruitment marketing into 6 stages and helps you develop and hone your efforts at each stage.
Stage 1: Awareness
This is the top of the funnel, where potential candidates first become aware of your company and employer brand.
This stage involves casting a wide net using various channels such as social media, job boards, career fairs, and company websites.
The goal is to build brand recognition and attract the interest of potential candidates.
Stage 2: Generate interest
At this stage, candidates who are aware of your company begin to develop an interest in learning more about what it offers.
They may explore the company's culture, values, mission, and available job opportunities.
Content such as your careers page, employee testimonials, blogs, and behind-the-scenes videos can help nurture this interest.
Stage 3: Nurture the decision
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.
Engaging content, such as detailed job descriptions, employee benefits information, and interviews with current employees, can be crucial here.
Stage 4: Drive action
This is the stage where interested candidates take action by applying for a position. Clear job postings and a smooth and user-friendly application process will increase the likelihood of this happening.
Remember, even if someone’s rejected here or after an interview or assessment, you still have their details for any future opportunities.
How To Develop A Recruitment Marketing Plan: 6-Step Process
While recruitment marketing opportunities will occasionally fall into your lap, for maximum impact and measurable results, it’s always best to create a strategic plan.
Here’s my process for creating a strategic recruitment marketing plan.
1. Define your EVP
- Craft your employer value proposition (EVP): Define what makes you a unique employer and what benefits and opportunities your company offers workers. This includes aspects like company culture, growth opportunities, compensation, and work-life balance.
- Consistent messaging: Use job posting platforms to ensure that your EVP and employer brand is consistently communicated across all channels, including your website, social media, job postings, and internal communications.
2. Set goals
- Set clear objectives: Identify what you aim to achieve with your recruitment marketing efforts. This could include increasing organic applications, attracting more qualified candidates, and reducing time-to-fill.
- Establish measurable goals: Define specific, measurable goals that align with your objectives and can be tracked automatically by your recruiting system. For example, aim to increase the number of organic job applicants by 20% within six months.
3. Define job descriptions
- Clear and concise titles: Use specific and engaging job titles that accurately reflect the role and attract the right candidates.
- Detailed role descriptions: Clearly outline the responsibilities, qualifications, skills, and experience required. Remember to state how the role can contribute to the organization’s mission, values, and goals.
- Emphasize your EVP: Integrate your company's unique position, benefits, culture, and growth opportunities into the job descriptions to attract candidates aligned with your values.
- SEO optimization: Use relevant keywords and phrases that potential candidates might use when searching for jobs to improve the visibility of your job postings. Good recruitment SEO will lower costs and bring in better candidates to begin with.
4. Identify and Understand Your Target Audience
- Segment your audience: Determine the key demographics, skills, experience levels, and other characteristics of the candidates you want to attract. Consider different segments for various roles and departments.
- Develop candidate personas: Create detailed profiles representing your ideal candidates, including their motivations, career aspirations, preferred communication channels, and challenges. This helps tailor your messaging and strategies.
5. Assess resources
- Budget assessment: Determine the budget available for your recruitment marketing efforts, including advertising, tools, and external partnerships.
- Personnel and skills: Evaluate the skills and availability of your recruitment team and other relevant departments, such as marketing or HR, to support your strategy.
- Tools and technology: Identify the tools and technology needed, such as ATS, candidate relationship management (CRM) systems, recruiting database software, analytics tools, recruitment marketing software, and social media management platforms. Ensure that you have access to the necessary resources or plan for acquisitions.
5. Develop and implement content and channel strategies
- Channel strategy: Identify the most effective channels to reach your target personas, e.g. LinkedIn, job boards, social media platforms, your company website, career fairs, and email campaigns. Optimize each channel for maximum reach and engagement at different stages of the recruitment marketing funnel.
- Content strategy: Create a content calendar with engaging content for different stages of the recruitment funnel, such as blog posts, employee testimonials, videos, social media posts, and detailed job descriptions. Focus on showcasing your company's culture, values, and success stories.
- Make a calendar: Put together a calendar outlining all your recruitment marketing activities for at least a month in advance. Ensure each entry includes the what, where, who, and any deadlines. You can use project management tools like Clickup or Trello for this.
6. Monitor, Evaluate, and Optimize
- Regular Monitoring: Continuously monitor the performance of your recruitment marketing efforts against the set goals and objectives. Use recruiting analytics tools to identify trends and areas for improvement.
- Feedback and iteration: Gather feedback from candidates, new hires, and the recruitment team to identify strengths and weaknesses in your approach. Use this feedback to refine and optimize your strategies, ensuring they remain aligned with your objectives and market trends.
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.
Recruitment Marketing Best Practices
Be authentic
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.
Take a long hard look at yourself and think, do I want to be on Instagram or would I rather spend my precious time elsewhere?
Maybe Insta is your perfect platform or it’s not, the important thing is to not rush blindy in on the new “it” platform—think about where your ideal candidate persona hangs out.
Interestingly, the more niche the position the more the right channels will make themselves known pretty quickly.
Leverage your existing employees
As you can see from the examples above, existing workers feature heavily in recruitment marketing activities.
If your EVP is strong, they’ll be your biggest advocates on reviews sites and will probably appreciate the chance to have a bit of fun too.
Just remember to ask permission and be conscious about asking for too much of people’s time, they have their regular jobs too!
Be data-driven
While it may seem like a lot of ‘colouring in’, marketing is actually highly strategic and data-driven.
If you’re serious about maximizing the potential of your marketing events, set some goals and create a dashboard in your ATS or similar to easily track what’s working and what isn't.
This will help you refine your channels and maximize your ROI.
Have fun mixing it up
You won’t know what will work and what won’t straight off the bat, so there’s no harm in make educated guesses and trying new tactics.
For example, getting offline and attending recruitment events and fairs may seem like a big investment, but I’ve had a lot of success with these in the past and it’s always valuable talking to people in the real world.
If something doesn’t work out, don’t get discouraged, evaluate what could have gone better and keep experimenting.
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