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How to increase your recruitment website’s candidate attraction with a content marketing plan

Planned well and executed strategically, content marketing can be a great tool with which to attract candidates to your recruitment website, to your jobs, and to your brand.

Your content needs to be updated regularly, provide value, and position you and your team as thought leaders. Sharing targeted content is a great way to connect with candidates and build relationships. It might be a candidate’s first connection with you, prompting them to read more/look at your jobs/register their CV/contact you. It helps to build trust and show your expertise.

In order to maximise the success of your content marketing, strategic planning is advisable.   

  1. Who is your audience, what are they interested in?

    Recruitment is a people business – you know your people, it’s a huge part of your job. This is what you need to keep coming back to when you create content. Who are your candidates? What are their drivers? What do they want to know more about? Creating candidate personas can be hugely beneficial. Similar to a buyer persona, candidate personas will allow you to identify and target the candidates you are trying to reach. Always have those candidate personas in mind when planning and creating content.

  2. Define your goals

    What are the goals for your content? Defining your goals before you set out a content marketing plan will help to ensure a successful plan. Your goals will probably include attracting a higher number of quality candidates to your website, strengthening your brand and your brand authority, increasing applications, adding CVs to your internal talent pool, and building relationships and connections, amongst others. Once your goals are defined you can work out how to achieve them through your content.

  3. Key topics

    Deciding what to write about is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for anyone wanting to create content but this is where a plan can help. Holding a brainstorming session during which you think about what candidates will be interested in will give you a list of titles you can schedule in amongst company news items and industry news. The candidate personas you sketch out will help to inform the content topic areas.

    Essentially, everything you write/say/video/draw/photograph should be created with your target audience in mind. Advice pieces are always a winner and they’re heavily searched for. Topics such as CV writing tips, interview techniques and job searching help are popular so give your audience what they want. Industry interest pieces and news relating to your company and/or the industry you recruit in will also attract candidates.      

  4. Content mediums

    Blog articles aren’t the only medium for content creation. Videos, podasts, webinars, social media posts, quizzes, emails, white papers, guides, surveys, infographics, slides – there is a whole host of different ways in which you can share content with candidates and build relationships from your website. Knowing which to use can sometimes be a littler harder and will depend on a number of factors.

    The type of content is a huge factor. A complex subject might warrant a white paper, key information and stats from which can be pulled to create an infographic. A news piece is great in blog form. A video of the recent event you attended might be more interesting than a written account and a webinar could serve a hot topic well.

  5. When, how and where to share

    Firstly, you’ll need to decide how often you want/have time to push content. This could be once a month, a fortnight, a week, a day – whatever fits with your resources. What’s important is not to post content for the sake of getting something new up.

    If you haven’t the time to produce quality content daily or weekly (and not many do), then don’t. Quality over quantity wins every time. In fact, you could actively damage your brand and deter candidates by publishing rushed content that provides little value. Having said that, it is important to post content fairly regularly to boost your SEO as Google gives preference to fresher content in searches.
    When it comes to the ‘when’ it’s also important to factor in seasonal considerations. Depending on the industry this could mean different things but WaveTrackR data consistently shows that candidates are most active early in the year (a new year, new job mentality) and in the autumn (following holidays that allow them to assess their career and as children go back to school).

    Your website should be the primary platform on which to post your content but social media, email and other relevant websites should all be utilised too. If you are very short on time, you might consider content curation – sharing content from reliable external sources that match what your candidates will be interested in. Remember to always get their permission first and link back to the source.

  6. Repurposing is your friend

    Alongside feeling unsure about what to write, one of the biggest content creation blockers is a lack of time. This is totally understandable, especially for SMEs who won’t have a dedicated marketing team. This is where repurposing content really comes into its own. Creating content, publishing it and then stepping away is a criminal waste of the content you’ve spent time creating. Not only will repurposing that content help to ensure it reaches more people, it will save you valuable time and energy creating brand new content.

    Repurposing has the added ability to breathe new life into your content. You can create something new, fresh and engaging from existing material and prolong its life. We all absorb information in different ways so reformatting content into different mediums will enable a wider range of people to find and digest it. It also reinforces your brand’s messaging and boosts the content’s SEO, plus you can drive traffic to the original blog on your website by linking your posts on social media to it. Repurposing for social media or e-newsletters can extend your reach and make the most of your content.    

Planning your content marketing will help to ensure your content is highly targeted, relevant and of value, as well as in the right format and posted in the right place, at the right time. Do it right and you can expect to increase your website’s candidate attraction and increase conversions.

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