How to Make Your Candidate Recruitment Marketing Snackable
| By Shannon Smedstad | HR
Pretzels. Chips. Popcorn. Little mini cookies. People love snacks and the snacking behavior, at least within the U.S., is holding steady, with some people calling snacks an integral part of the American diet. Snacks are quick, convenient, portable, easy to consume, fun and–sometimes–we even share our snacks with family and friends.
So, what lessons can recruitment marketers learn from potato chips?
Make HR Content More Snackable
During the recent Talent Management Alliance conference, Ray Malouf, recruitment marketing director at Walmart, talked about “snackable content.” It’s the idea of designing your talent communications so that they are easier for your audience to consume (and digest). Here are a few questions to ask yourself and your team as you review current marketing pieces and plan for the future.
- Consumption: Can candidates quickly and easily understand our message?
- Visual: Are we using good design throughout our marketing collateral?
- Audience: Is our content relatable to our key market segments?
- Message: Is our recruitment collateral too text heavy? Can we say more with less?
- Sociable: Are we creating content that people want to share?
- Usability: Does our content render effectively via social platforms and mobile devices?
- Next time: What can we do differently to make our content more delish and digestible?
Getting HR Leaders to the Snack Table
One thing that I have noticed, during my more than six years in employment branding, is that many HR directors and even some recruiters think that each and every piece of recruitment marketing collateral must include everything. Culture. Job responsibilities. Career path. Photos. Value prop. Company history. QR codes. Quote from the CEO. Video links. Social media icons. Benefits. Testimonials. Tagline. Locations. Contact information. Career site link. EOE statement.
Let’s leave room for some white space!
You don’t need to regurgitate every little-nitty-gritty-detail on every single thing you do. Drive people back to your website with a strong call to action to learn more and dive deeper into your corporate information.
Make Your Recruitment Marketing Easier to Consume
I love quick wins and long term strategies, so here are few ideas for you to chew on. And, if you have any other ideas for making employment branding content more tasty, please share them in the comments below.
- Job Postings: Chances are you still post jobs. To make your ATS postings more snackable, consider replacing long paragraphs of text with shorter, easy to read bullet points, and break up the content with interesting headers and sub-headers that encourage job seekers to continue reading.
- Infographics: These are made for snacking, when designed correctly. How can you take your existing corporate content and make it more appealing? There are many good examples of job related infographics on Pinterest, just search #infographics or #careeradvice.
- Shareable Visuals: While at GEICO, I kept our Creative Services team busy making, what we called eCards. These were .jpeg files that quickly shared a message: Congratulations on your promotion! Visit us on campus. Happy Holidays. Thank you. These branded opportunities helped celebrate moments that matter and moved us beyond just the “we’re hiring” message.
- Videos: When it comes to employer branding, a video says more than a million words. And, for consumers, videos are so easy to … well … consume. Depending upon your budget and corporate guidelines, you could create short videos easily using Google Hangouts, iPhones, Animoto, your in-house team or a third-party.
- Career Sites: Where you can, slice and dice your content based upon key market segments. IT job seekers want IT information, not sales and marketing. Likewise, seasoned professionals want content that relates to them, not early careerists. Creating micro-sites or specific landing pages with vanity URLs make large sites easier to take in.
Well, I’m starting to fear that this post is becoming too long to snack on. It’s starting to feel less like a bag of chips and more like a lunch buffet. I do hope that you’ve gleaned some nuggets of actionable insights and that you’re now thinking about your overall employer brand content strategy, and what you can do different, better.
Did this post make anyone else hungry?
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[…] the market for talent has heated up, it’s given rise to a new segment of recruitment which is recruitment marketing. I’ve talked a lot about how recruiters can take a playbook directly from corporate marketers to […]