[With Examples] Starting Recruitment Marketing Today, and How to Do It

“We are chronically short of people.”
“We get applications, but we rarely find anyone who fits.”
“Turnover rises year after year and we cannot stop good people leaving……”
“Perhaps we simply cannot compete with the name of a large company……”

Do any of these sound familiar?

Competition for people in the recruitment market has grown fierce in recent years, and with it cases where the old ways of hiring steadily stop working are coming one after another. Some HR people have thrown up their hands: “What on earth do we do about this……”

Against that backdrop, recruitment marketing is drawing keen attention as a way to hire strong people steadily. As the name says, recruitment marketing means bringing a marketing view into hiring. an approach that works for small and medium-sized companies as well as large ones Because of that, more and more companies are taking the idea up, and it will become something you cannot do without if you are to survive the recruitment market ahead.

This article explains in plain terms what recruitment marketing is, for anyone who wants to adopt it. We also cover how it differs from traditional hiring, the advantages of doing it, and the steps to getting started, so do stay with us to the end.

1. What is recruitment marketing?

In business, marketing usually means building the machinery for selling a product or a service. Exploring customer needs in order to develop something that sells, improving a product in response to those needs, and researching the market to win new customers are all part of it.

Recruitment marketing applies the thinking and the frameworks established in marketing to hiring. Recruitment marketing treats the company as the product and improves, stage by stage, the process of being chosen by strong people.

In practice that means understanding the needs of your target — the people you want — and putting in place an environment and terms they will be happy with, and building a psychologically close relationship with them through steady communication.

In short, recruitment marketing is the machinery for optimising hiring by raising awareness of the company, communicating what makes it attractive, and turning people into fans you might say.

1.1 How does it differ from traditional hiring?

Hiring has until now put most of its weight on how to choose whom to employ from the applicants who came forward. That made it hard to increase the number of applications at all, or to control what kind of people applied. And because you are selecting from a pie that is already fixed, the pool is limited and the fit is often poor.

Recruitment marketing, by contrast, runs hiring with a single consistent strategy from the awareness stage, before anyone applies, right through to the hire. It gets away from asking how to choose strong people, and the big difference from traditional hiring is that it asks what you should do to be chosen by strong people.

As the thinking behind recruitment marketing has spread through the market, the target in hiring now extends beyond people actively looking for a new job to those not yet in the market — people who are not thinking of moving now but want to at some point, and people who would move for the right terms or for a company they want to join.

1.2 How it differs from recruitment branding

Recruitment branding is easily confused with recruitment marketing. Where recruitment marketing considers how to approach the target you have set, recruitment branding decides what image you want job seekers to hold, and builds the company into a brand by communicating that image strategically.

It goes beyond information about your products and services to put forward your culture and what the company believes in — what kind of society it is working towards — along with the story. If recruitment branding raises how widely the company is known, you can expect more applicants and more enthusiasm about joining.

2. Why recruitment marketing is getting attention

Behind the attention are a shrinking working population, advances in digital marketing, and more varied touchpoints and ways of hiring, all of which have made competition for people fierce.

2.1 A shrinking working population

With fewer children and an ageing society, the working population of 70.45 million in 2020 is forecast to fall to 45.29 million by 2065. The shortage of people is already a serious problem in the recruitment market, and the trend is expected to accelerate.

Adding to the shortage is the rising level of skill companies are asking for. Offers concentrate on a few strong individuals, and competition between companies for them has grown fierce. Securing the people you ideally want will only get harder.

2.2 Advances in digital marketing

Marketing built around mass media — television, radio, newspapers — delivered a single message widely to many people.
As smartphones, tablets, PCs and other digital devices have spread rapidly in recent years, though, the mainstream of marketing has been shifting to digital.

In digital marketing, users can select and go and get only the information they need. To get a response from them, it is not enough to publish information that matches their needs;
the standard approach is now to have the right information ready and stored in advance, so that they can reach it and find it when they need it. For that reason it will only get harder for traditional advertising to be seen by your target.

2.3 More varied ways of hiring

Ways of hiring have grown more varied too. Until now it was usual to advertise through an agent: print, recruitment agency sites, graduate job sites, career change sites.
In recent years, though, direct sourcing — where a company’s recruiters send scout emails straight to strong candidates — and referral hiring through staff and business partners have increased the touchpoints between job seekers and companies. With that, competition to hire has grown fiercer.

2.4 Graduate hiring starting earlier and running longer

Graduate hiring has relied on putting out a burst of advertising when the hiring season arrived, but in recent years that approach alone increasingly risks leaving you behind in the competition. One survey found that one university student in five already has an offer in their third year.

It refers to That is because building a strong connection with students earlier and over a longer period is increasingly seen as one way to raise engagement. Large IT, apparel and telecoms companies hire year-round, and many other large companies have increased the number of hiring rounds a year or started spring and autumn intakes.

So graduate hiring needs year-round activity: running information sessions, speaking at joint events, and building out your web content.
If graduate hiring is giving you trouble, click here please get in touch here.

3. What is the funnel in recruitment marketing?

If you know a little about marketing you may have heard the word funnel. A funnel maps the flow of what a consumer does, from learning about a product or service to actually buying it, onto a set of phases.

A typical marketing funnel runs awareness → interest → comparison and consideration → purchase → repeat. Even if you win awareness among a great many people, the pie narrows from there and only some of them actually buy. Marketing is the work of deciding strategically how to increase the number who reach a purchase, by using effective activity at each phase of the funnel.

The right-hand side of the figure above applies that marketing funnel to hiring.

The flow runs awareness (not yet looking) → interest (actively looking) → application and selection → offer. What you should put across to your target at each phase of the funnel, and why, is as follows.

■ Awareness phase (not yet looking)
The case you make: what the business does, the business model, business strategy, projects, the company’s potential
Purpose: for them to learn about the company and feel interest and admiration
■ Comparison phase (not yet looking)
The case you make: the work and the skill set, how a career there looks, values about work
Purpose: for them to picture themselves doing well and growing after they join
■ Selection phase
The case you make: conveying the company’s daily life — what the workplace is like, the work, members’ personal histories, how close members are to one another
Purpose: for them to understand the company better and feel close to its members
■ Offer phase
The case you make: how you differ from competitors, the culture and the policies, information with nothing hidden
Purpose: to build trust in the company and reassure them about joining

4. Channels for recruitment marketing

The figure above shows the channels that fit each phase of the recruitment marketing funnel. Think of funnel and channel together.

■ Awareness phase (not yet looking)
Channels: job platforms, recruitment events, recruitment services, social advertising
■ Comparison and consideration phase (not yet looking)
Channels: your own web pages, video, social, referrals
■ Selection phase
Channels: interviews, scout emails, social, referrals
■ Offer phase
Channels: meetings, email, informal discussions, networking events

5. Advantages of recruitment marketing

5.1 More applications from strong people who fit well

Recruitment marketing approaches your target group effectively, and in doing so it improves the quality of the pool of people who might apply to you. That means more applications from stronger people, and you can expect the quality of your hiring to rise.

The other effect is a better fit. Applicants who have received the right information steadily through recruitment marketing have often already researched the company before they apply, so a poor fit after joining is less likely. A better fit is also one of the things that decides whether people stay.

5.2 You build awareness among people not yet in the market who could become targets

With the working population certain to keep shrinking, the old approach of advertising a role only when you have one to fill will leave hiring difficult. From now on, winning awareness among people not yet in the market who could become your target matters as much as approaching the target itself.

Someone with no intention of moving today may become a job seeker at any time. What matters is creating a state in which, when such a person does want to move, they remember you: “I would like to go to that company — are they hiring?” or “I would like to talk to that company”. If your day-to-day communication has already put you in the “I know them” category, you can hire from a stronger position than your competitors.

5.3 It reduces hiring costs

Recruitment marketing can be expected to reduce hiring costs for the following reasons.

・More applications from the target group the company ideally wants
・A better fit
・Better retention as fewer people leave early
・The cost of replacing leavers
・Training costs
・Advertising spend (you can design advertising effectively, so the spend is optimised)

Recruitment marketing also has the characteristic that content and knowledge build up. You can repeat trial and error and improve as you go, so it tends to become a stable hiring activity that gives good value for money.

5.4 It helps prevent early leavers

Recruitment marketing lets you make your case to a narrowly defined target group in advance, so you can hire people who fit your company better. Matching companies and applicants more precisely is effective at preventing declined offers and early leavers, and it also holds down the hidden risks that come with poor retention, such as overtime suddenly piling up.

6. Disadvantages of recruitment marketing

6.1 The load on HR grows in the short term

When you first start recruitment marketing, a lot of unfamiliar work appears on top of the existing job — planning strategy, choosing methods — and the load on the HR team can grow too heavy. To get recruitment marketing running well, it matters that you leave the team some room early on, by adding people from outside or contracting work to specialists.

6.2 Results may take time

A new way of hiring takes a certain amount of time to show results.
Social hiring, for instance, depends on the patient work of winning awareness through steady posting, and referral hiring needs you to keep asking staff patiently until they are behind it.
Running recruitment media also needs content to build up. Bear in mind that this kind of hiring work does not produce results straight away, and the key to success is to keep at it doggedly alongside your traditional hiring.

7. How to run recruitment marketing, and the frameworks to use

From here we go through how recruitment marketing is actually run and the frameworks used along the way.

Imamura, NowVillage’s president, also talks about recruitment marketing on our podcast.
If it interests you, do have a listen.
https://reclive.jp/p/116/445

7.1 Start by knowing yourself, your competitors and your target

In recruitment marketing, make the position of your company, your competitors and your target clear, and get everyone involved aligned so that no gaps open up in how they see it. If this part is thin, people hesitate, the message loses consistency and the team can be left in disarray, so take care.

① Know yourself
Start by understanding your own company properly. Grasp it in detail, from the big picture — the management philosophy, the management strategy, the business plan — down to the view from the floor, such as the working environment and benefits. It is best to check how others rate you as well. Ways of getting to know your own company include the following.

• Interviews with staff who have only just joined
• Mixing with people outside, at HR networking events and so on
• Surveys at exhibitions and seminars

② Know your competitors
Next, analyse the companies that could be your competitors in hiring in the same way. This is competitor research, and it covers mainly the following points.

• Who the competitors are
• What their strengths and weaknesses are
• What hiring methods they use
• What case they are making

As the research goes on, you start to see what you have that others do not (your strengths) and what others have that you do not (your weaknesses). Drawing out those characteristics also makes clear what you should be selling about yourself. Use the methods competitors use and the case they make when you come to choose channels and plan content, covered below.

③ Set your target
Compared with traditional hiring, recruitment marketing depends on how efficiently you get your message to the people you want. To do that, define the target and, using what you learned about your own company in ① and ②, make clear what kind of people the company needs and what kind of people you want to come.

7.2 Frameworks (3C analysis, SWOT analysis)

Frameworks such as 3C analysis and SWOT analysis are often used in recruitment marketing.

3C analysis is one framework for analysing the environmental factors around your hiring.

The three Cs are Company, Competitor and Customer, meaning the people you want, and the aim is to consider how your company and your competitors look from the Customer’s point of view, and to use that in your hiring strategy.

SWOT analysis takes its name from Strength, Weakness, Opportunity and Threat, and splits the external environment around you, such as competitors and market trends, and the internal environment, such as your brand value and assets, into positive and negative factors for analysis.

As well as giving you an objective grasp of where you stand, it helps you find things to improve in your current hiring and risks you can expect in future.

7.3 Designing personas

A persona is a concrete picture of a person built from the target’s area of residence, age, gender, leanings and so on. Where the target persona differs by role, set a separate persona for each.

When you set a persona, the point is to describe one single person as concretely as you can. Doing so brings out the problems the target persona wants solved and the needs they want met through their work, which makes it possible to put forward an effective message. Once the persona is finished, remember to share it with the team.

☆★ Set a target persona ☆★
・Biography (age / gender / current role / industry / current salary / where they live / qualifications)
・Personality
・Behaviour
・Channels they normally use
・Reasons for changing jobs, and so on

Related article:
A thorough guide to setting a persona, with examples and the items you need

7.4 Designing the customer journey

Once you have a persona for the people you want, design the customer journey.
A customer journey is the strategic map that analyses the process a job seeker goes through to being hired.

In practice, keeping the persona in mind, you decide and set out what touchpoints you will provide at each phase of the funnel (awareness → gathering information → interest → consideration → selection → accepting the offer) and what message you will deliver. Once you have drawn it up, check how it performs, run the PDCA cycle and review it from time to time.

7.5 Choosing the channels to use

With all that in place, consider and choose the channels to use for each phase of the funnel.
Choosing channels funnel by funnel lets you convey what makes you attractive more effectively against what the target persona, the job seeker, needs.
The figure above gathers, phase by phase, the channels recommended by NowVillage, which consults on recruitment marketing. Do use it as a reference.

7.6 Planning content

Once the channels are set, prepare the content each one needs. Content here includes the recruitment site and recruitment landing pages, articles and video for media, and the creative used in advertising.

Preparing all of that usually calls for a high level of expertise, so almost every company has an external partner.
These days some companies will take on everything from recruitment marketing consulting to producing the creative. It is reassuring to have a supplier you can talk to easily from the planning stage and who will help at the points where the load is heaviest.

7.7 Running the PDCA cycle

Traditional hiring may have left you relying on the memory, experience and instinct of whoever was responsible. Recruitment marketing, though, gives you new weapons: records, trends and objectivity.
Manage and analyse data such as your application rate, website page views, email open rates, attendance at information sessions, interviews held and application rates among referred candidates, and use it to improve.

7.8 Checking how people heard about you

Check how people who come to informal discussions, meetings and interviews heard about you.
If running a survey is difficult, simply asking “Where did you hear about us, or about this event?” is enough.

Once you know which routes work, you can respond — by putting more budget behind them, for instance. You also learn how your activity is reaching your target, which helps you grasp how the market feels and lifts motivation.

※ Running an official LINE account is another activity that adds routes to awareness.
The article below explains it in detail. Do read it alongside this one.
Related article:
Using LINE in hiring: the benefits and some examples

8. Recruitment marketing case studies

The following are real cases where NowVillage has supported recruitment marketing.

8.1 Manufacturing: a manufacturer

We supported the recruitment marketing of a manufacturer with contract manufacturing and OEM businesses rooted in its region.
Alongside job advertising platforms, we ran activity using social to build awareness and win applications.
Using Twitter and Instagram as the route in, we covered the character of the company, scenes from inside it and introductions to staff — things the recruitment site cannot express — and made the case for what the company is really like. We also supported improvements to the website that receives this traffic, and as a result job seekers went from becoming aware of the company to attending information sessions, applying and being hired.

8.2 IT: IT equipment rental

We support the hiring strategy of a company whose business centres on renting mobile phones.
For three hiring targets — interns, graduates and experienced hires — we consult on what case to make, what methods to use and what KPIs to run recruitment marketing against. We also advise on producing a recruitment pitch deck that conveys more about the company than the recruitment site can and support them broadly across hiring.
In the 2022 financial year they met their hiring targets for interns and graduates using job advertising and Wantedly.

8.3 Recruitment: a recruitment agency

We provide total support, from hiring strategy through to delivery, for a fast-growing start-up in the recruitment industry whose main business is placing candidates.
Support with hiring strategy, the design and management of KPIs, and choosing the methods that fit them from among many is what we have provided.
On Wantedly and social they covered what the recruitment site cannot express, showing what the company is like inside, its culture and the character of the people working there, and with that they have been able to hire in a way that supports fast growth.

We also provide total support in recruitment marketing, from strategy through delivery to bringing it in-house. Some companies we support on delivery only, or on in-housing only.
If that interests you, click here do get in touch here.

We have also written up a case study of our own hiring, as a marketing company.
There is plenty there to take away even if you are in a different industry.

A marketing company explains its own recruitment marketing strategy in full

9. The role of HR in making recruitment marketing work

In recruitment marketing, HR is asked to cover a very wide range of roles.

What HR is expected to do
・Persona design
・Customer journey design
・Keep running the PDCA cycle after the work goes live
・Communication with outsourcing partners
and so on

In practice, though, many companies still treat HR as the function that handles routine work such as labour administration and the paperwork around hiring. If you are going to add recruitment marketing from scratch on top of the current workload, it is worth considering outsourcing the non-core work. Firms that specialise in recruitment marketing also hold expert know-how and skills. Another option is to draw on professionals where it makes sense while building up recruitment marketing knowledge inside the company.

10. What is the key to successful recruitment marketing?

Now that the era of employers choosing candidates has given way to one of being chosen by them, recruitment marketing matters more than ever for landing the people you want. At the same time, recruitment marketing often calls for sophisticated strategy and execution, so existing resources can struggle to keep up, and irregular situations can wear a team down until the work simply stalls.

To ease the load on HR and get recruitment marketing on track sooner, more companies are rethinking their traditional hiring methods or handing recruitment marketing to an outside partner. The wish to keep everything in-house as long as possible is understandable, but having a brain trust you can turn to easily from the strategy stage onwards is the key to making recruitment marketing work.

10.1 Recruitment marketing with NowVillage

NowVillage has supported digital marketing for more than 500 companies in total, from listed groups to small and medium-sized businesses.
A dedicated consultant will propose the plan that fits you and support your move into recruitment marketing end to end, in fine detail. Do get in touch.