What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is a practice centered around using analytics to maximize recruitment and retention using strategies marketing, branding, and artificial intelligence to build your brand in the job market. 

When it comes to recruiting and retaining recent college graduates, there are a few specific ways recruitment marketing can help your company stand out. 

How Can Your Company Leverage It?

With so many tools at your disposal, it's important to understand your target audience and cast the widest net in your recruitment efforts. These four strategies can go a long way in helping your company's talent acquisition team recruit and retain the most talented candidates among recent graduates. 

Using Analytics Wisely

In order to generate continuous flow in your applicant pipeline, recruitment marketing uses analytics. These programs run in the background and compile data to inform talent acquisition teams where they're having the most and least impact. If your analytics show that your social media page or website aren't generating enough traffic, find ways to improve or use different strategies. If you want to increase traffic from recent graduates, employ a metric that tells you just how many applicants fit this description and then reach out to those candidates directly. 

You should use these analytics in other ways, too. For example, you might know how many applicants have applied to a specific job posting, but do you have a target number of people you want to interview? Another metric can be utilized to help you increase diversity as well. If your goal is to have a diverse workforce, which is important to today's generation of graduates, you'll want to set a target for attending campus conferences celebrating diversity or have a goal to provide company-wide cultural celebrations to draw in talent from these events. 

Social Media Presence

Offering the largest platform for online users, it's important that your organization take advantage of the opportunities presented by having a strong social media presence. One of the highest traffic areas recruitment marketing analytics continues to show a high ROI for is social media advertising. Companies can use their media platforms to post job fairs, career insight tips with relevant hashtags, and forums for your targeted audience to interact with. 

Social media platforms are a great way to increase visibility but they should also be mindfully created. Your social media platform is a prime location to highlight your company's brand. Studies indicate that today's generation of college graduates are increasingly sensitive to workplace culture so it's important to use your online presence to further your company's mission in a positive manner. Keep posts respectful and culturally relevant.

Company Website Functionality

Another highly visible tool for attracting top candidates is your company's website. In order to compete with recruitment giants, your company's website needs to stand out. Creating a central marketing platform that is user-friendly with adequate tools for job searches is key so make sure the career page is easy to find. Built in AI metrics can help you learn who is visiting your site and what areas generate the most activity, and give you insight for areas to improve visibility.

You should also use your website to showcase your brand. The look and feel of it should be inviting and users can gain an overall sense of your company's values as they browse. This will not only help you attract your target audience but it will also help filter out candidates whose ideals are misaligned. 

Non-traditional Student Populations

While many recent graduates are under the age of 25 and attended college in a traditional manner, don't forget to tap into non-traditional student populations. Statistics indicate that 47% of students currently enrolled in higher education are considered non-traditional. This includes older adults returning to school, people acquiring online degrees, and students graduating from technical and vocational schools. 

If your company hosts career fairs, make an effort to hold events in these arenas. Another useful tool in attracting this sector of college graduates are virtual job fairs, community hiring events, and using your metrics to track applications for non-traditional students and then reaching out to them directly. After all, you're marketing your business and you want to cast the widest net possible. 

Roughly 35% of today's jobs require a college education in some capacity and in 2021, there were over 4 million college graduates in the United States. If your goal is to generate exposure to attract top candidates to fill your company's positions, using proven recruitment marketing strategies could give your company a leading edge in the job market.