Content Marketing is My Next Recruitment Strategy
In our last class, we focused on content marketing, and I found myself thinking, more than once, “How can I use this when I’m marketing talent acquisition?” Our brand has created and consistently maintains an impressive blog. The posts, though not all directly about aging or senior living, correlate with our overarching theme nicely. Whether they’re about different dining options or dog parks, they leave the reader wanting to learn more about our organization, and wondering what their lives could look like if they were to move to our location.
On my end of marketing, the talent acquisition side, these posts are less likely to appeal to my targeted audience. The people that I’m trying to attract with my content are job seekers, who aren’t interested in the many clubs we offer our residents or reminiscing about a time period they likely weren’t alive to experience. And it was for this reason that I never placed much emphasis on content marketing. I figured the best way to reach the people I’m after is through short ads that draw them to our job postings.
I started to think about the type of content I consume. I love reading blog posts online. In fact, I recently decided to spurge and buy an expensive jacket because of a blog post I read. It was on the impact of fast fashion on the environment, and it explained how responsible brands can make a huge impact on our environment, just by sustainable sourcing the materials used to make their clothing. At the end of the blog post, the author linked all of the points that they’d made in the article to one specific brand: Patagonia. I ended up purchasing their product later that week.
It hasn’t occurred to me before, but after hearing our guest speaker, Marcus Grimm, discuss the importance of content marketing, I realized my short ads should be a piece of my marketing strategy, not the whole pie. I’m fortunate to work for a brand that places a lot of emphasis on values. We even have classes that we offer our employees about our values and how they can use them in their day-to-day work lives. I would imagine these values appeal to a lot of job seekers, especially those that have worked for organizations that don’t advocate the same set of principles.
One of the social media networks I use for recruitment is Linkedin. Linkedin is the perfect platform to test my theory. The platform allows its users to share stories and blogs they’ve read, and these shared stories make up the bulk of what Linkedin users are posting. My plan is to create a blog post on our values and share it on this platform. At the bottom of the blog post, I’m going to link the readers to our careers page, where they can find out more about our other values and learn how they can work for an organization with these standards.
Our teacher, Justin, has told us time and time again, social media is not a marketing strategy, and I think that message was reiterated in our last class. Blog posts help to create substance for our brands, and social media helps to drive traffic to that substance. Content helps increase loyalty to your brand, creating brand ambassadors, especially when the content is meaningful and relatable.
So much of my current online recruitment strategy focuses on candidates who are already in the job market and actively seeking jobs. What I would really like to achieve with social media and our online presence, is reaching those who maybe aren’t even in the job market yet. As our guest speaker put it, I’d like to go after the “completely unaware” and the “problem aware” individuals. Content marketing allows me to better reach those candidates by putting interesting content out there for them, which will in turn, lead them to our job site.
Content marketing seemed daunting and time consuming when we first started our discussion in class, but after learning more about its value, I’m beginning to understand why it is such an essential piece. Although my ads may be helpful in driving my traffic to my career site, once the candidate is there, there isn’t anything else there to keep them engaged. Blog posts, like the one mentioned above, not only will help keep my potential candidates engaged for longer, but it will also help educate them on who we are as an organization, and hopefully, help in convincing them that they want to be a part of that organization.
