How to attract more talent with blogs and content

Do you think advertising jobs on your website is enough to attract talent? 

If your answer was yes, then you’ll be surprised to know there are other ways to attract more talent with blogs and content. 

Job boards and adverts can be great to reach out to candidates who are actively applying for jobs, but only those recruiters who are able to connect with passive candidates will be able to swim gracefully through the talent market.

In the current highly competitive recruitment environment, the need for positioning your employer brand and creating good candidate experiences that cut through the noise becomes stronger. Recruitment is closely related to marketing. If the marketing goal is to increase sales, yours is to increase good hires. How do you do it?

One of the best ways to achieve this is to use content to drive candidates to your website and help to build trust and rapport before they talk to anyone from your company. A good content strategy can lead candidates to your recruitment funnel by:

• Building awareness about your employer brand.
• Sparking interest in your company and bringing them back to learn more about you.
• Overcoming resistance and presenting convincing evidence to overcome the objections.
• Inspiring them to take action and apply.

How to create a good content strategy

It is not as simple as producing a few ad hoc ‘blogs’ on your careers site about how great it is to work for you. Rather than selling your company and potential roles, your content should educate and add value to the target hires. Align your content strategy with what candidates want to know and that is why working for your company is meaningful, interesting and how it aligns with their values and aspirations. 

1. Know your audience

This is the most crucial rule for creating great content. You should know who exactly you are writing your content for. Define your candidate personas 

• What are your ideal candidate’s age, position, title, salary, location, education, experience and social background?
• What are their career aspirations and life goals?
• What frustrates them in jobs (reason for job change)?
• How do they look for jobs (job search behaviour)?
• Where do they look for jobs e.g. social media, referrals, job boards, career sites etc?
• What are their main personality traits?
• What motivates them?
• Who influences their decision?
• What sources of information do they trust?

 2. Build your Employee Value Proposition (EVP)

Once you know exactly what type of candidate personas you are writing for, you need to put yourself in their position and answer the most important question from their perspective: 

What’s in it for me?

This is the foundational element. Ensure your employer brand clearly articulates “who you are”. Don’t just say you offer more than just a paycheque, show it because every company will say that, but not everyone can prove it. 

Get your current employees to talk about their experiences, achievements and anything else they love about you. A video tour of your office to showcase a typical day in the office – nothing engages and inspires better than real life experiences. Include updates on what’s important to today’s job seekers, such as community initiatives, career development opportunities, employee recognition, and flexible work arrangements and create strong employer branding by sharing your company story, values, and the office culture. 

3. Be authentic

Candidates are put off by scripted dialogues and too-good-to-be-true photos. So, keep it real and authentic. Photos of real employees with a genuine smile and the “hmmm…” and “you know” phrases in the free-flowing dialogue resonate with candidates far more than the stock photos of ‘perfect’ employees in those expensive business suits and the impressive poetic dialogues. Being authentic reassures and comforts the candidates, thus creating an instant rapport and trust. 

4. Choose the right recruitment content

After this, you need to infuse all this knowledge into great content. The motive is to develop powerful, strategic content that presents the right message to the right audience. You can choose from the plenty of creative and engaging formats available to present your content.

 As far as possible, increase your interactive content because the recent trend indicates that video content has more impact. According to a report by the Content Marketing Institute, 81% agree that interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content, and 79% agree that interactive content enhances retention of brand messaging.

Regardless of the medium, the content theme must remain consistent with your overall talent strategy. 

5. Promote your content

Now that you have great quality content ready, the next step is to publish and promote it on the most effective channels to ultimately reach out to your target candidates. Whether you are using a niche discussion forum, YouTube, social media sites or influencer marketing, make sure your content is on a platform where you know that your target audience frequently visits. This is how you can drive them to your talent pool. Use analytics to determine the platforms that attract the most traffic, and then develop an ideal mix to distribute your content in order to have the desired effect.

Once you have established contact with your target candidates, continue to nurture them by delivering a targeted, personalised candidate experience, and thus increase conversion.

While you certainly can’t ignore the potential of blogs and content to attract more talent, you should not just get down to churning blogs without a clear vision. Remember the Number One rule of the game – ADDING VALUE. Build your content strategy and plan to keep the content valuable, consistent and compelling to reach the most treasured ‘passive’ candidates.

Work smarter, not harder!

Celebrating 20 years of Wave

Wave is 20 years old this year and to celebrate the occasion, we are releasing 20 blogs about attracting talent.