In my talk, Digitizing Talent: Creative Strategies for the Digital Recruiting Age, I talk a great deal about taking the playbook directly from corporate marketers to recruit candidates and engage your current workforce. Marketers have been using these tools for product and brand marketing, and adapting them to recruiting and hiring is a great strategy to give your company a competitive edge. I’m going to show you how they can be adapted to develop creative recruiting programs, specifically to recruit and hire passive candidates.

Content Marketing as a Lead Funnel & Branding Strategy in Recruiting

What is it and how can you apply it to recruiting strategy? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. If your audience is passive job seekers, your content would focus on why they should consider your job listing as a better option than the job that they already have.

Instead of pitching your products or services, you are providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues, in this case, getting a shiny new job.

Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing:

• Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
• SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
• PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
• PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
• Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
• Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most content marketing strategies.

The Power of Geofencing to Target Your Reach

Geofencing is literally a virtual fence, which makes it possible to register objects (like smartphones and smartwatches) or persons within a previously selected area. Geofencing is a location-based marketing tool that enables more active consumer focus. There are three ways to track a customer’s location: GPS, Bluetooth, and beacons, and each method finds and targets customers in different ways. And while it’s a relatively new technology, it’s important for marketers to be aware of and understand geofencing in order to help their company’s bottom line.

With 92% of U.S. smartphones capable of responding to geofencing (over 95% of smartphone users have installed a social network on their device), this is a powerful marketing tool that retailers and other location-based companies need to use. Adapting it for recruiting is simply a matter of messaging. With geofencing, one of the most powerful uses is to identify a geographic area (for example, a metro where you’re specifically trying to fill positions) and develop creative job advertisement messaging that will be delivered only to users in the geographic area you’ve identified.

Want to know how (and advanced techniques) to use geofencing in your recruiting strategy? This article has the basics based on using geofencing for sales to consumers; simply replace “sales” with “jobs” and “consumers” to “passive job seekers.”

Going Live with Video on Facebook

Using Facebook for recruiting is a very effective way to reach candidates that are “passive,” or not searching for a job, but open to the right opportunities. Using Facebook posts and ad targeting features, you can connect with these hard-to-reach candidates.

There is so much competition on Facebook, it’s difficult to get traditional posts out there without putting a lot of budget behind them. But the word is that Facebook has been giving video posts a lot of love in the feed, showing them more often than other posts. So video content should be part of your efforts. There are standard (not live) videos that companies can use to give job seekers an idea of what it’s like to work for a specific company.

Tips for Making a Recruiting Video:

• Use a mobile phone with a higher resolution camera.
• Have good lighting on the faces of your subjects (avoid backlighting).
• Hold your phone in the landscape (horizontal) position.
• Try to limit background noise.
• Start fast with a video of employees talking about why they like the company.

Take it to the next level with live video. What if you could connect with potential candidates live and real-time, via video? You could show them what a few minutes on the job are like, introduce some co-workers, or do a question and answer session about a job opening. Facebook allows you to broadcast live videos right in your Facebook feed.  AT&T  Careers (seen below) has some of my favorite Facebook Live videos for recruiting at hiring at the moment. 

How to Use Facebook Live for Recruiting

• Start promoting the day and time of the live session on social media a week before.
• When you’re ready for the event, open the Facebook app on your phone.
• Navigate to the Facebook page you’re posting to, and tap “Publish.”
• Tap “Live Video.”
• Tap the blue “Go Live” button.
• Alert your community and job seekers you’re answering employment questions live.
• Watch for questions and comments to appear below the video feed, and answer them with your voice.

Large companies that are on top of their social recruiting game, like UPS, Target, and Spectrum have already started using this tool. Live video feels more personal and has the added bonus of reaching candidates who would not have noticed or seen a standard job post. The best part about Facebook Live Video is that it costs no money to shoot a video live. It just takes a few seconds to connect with your propsective candidates. 

These creative recruiting strategies are designed not to break the bank, but to reach the best candidates for those hard to fill roles by relying on time-tested digital marketing techniques.