Employer content can boost your online visibility and reputation in the employer market. In this blog post you’ll learn about setting goals for your content marketing strategy and how it can be used as a holistic talent acquisition tool to attract and retain the best talent in your sector.
High competition in the employment space means that recruiters have to find creative ways to attract candidates to their organisation. Content marketing is one such strategy. Employers use it to warm candidates to their employer brand and build an audience aligned to their organisation’s values and culture which they can recruit from. In this blog post, we’ll look at goals you can set for content marketing campaigns that will help establish you as an employer of choice—and how to go about achieving them.
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Your employer brand is a communication system for defining and maintaining your reputation as an employer. Because of the word ‘branding’, people tend to think it’s about your look and feel as an employer. In truth, it’s everything that candidates and employees associate with your brand—your look and feel, but also your culture, values and the workplace environment. In short, it’s how your organisation makes candidates feel. Building an employer brand with employer content increases your ability to manage how people feel about you as an employer and helps you to stand out in a crowded market.
To build your employer brand using content marketing, you first need to understand your audience. Employee focus groups are a way to do that and working with an external content marketing partner can help you make the most of this approach. They’ll ask a 5-10% sample of your employees about their experience of working for you and probe into their values, interests and pain points.
A focus groups will look to discover things like:
Employee answers are used to build a ‘candidate persona’, which is a kind of model employee embodying the characteristics of people who do well at your organisation. This helps guide your content marketing so that it hits home with the audience you want to recruit from. If your organisation employs people in different roles such as Software Engineers and Project Managers, you can segment this process to produce content that can build your employer brand with different audiences.
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Candidates are deemed ‘passive’ when they aren’t active in the job market. When we talk about passive candidates in recruitment, we generally mean people who are already in a job and aren’t actively looking for a new role. One of the primary objectives of content marketing is to make yourself visible to passive candidates and warm them to your employer brand so that, when the time comes that they want to change job, they choose your company over competitors.
Creating content that demonstrates thought leadership or offers a glimpse of life at your company can help build trust and authority with passive candidates. You could publish ‘newsjacking’ articles, which are articles where the author comments on the day’s news and how it might impact the industry. Testimonials from existing employees are another way to show passive candidates what your organisation has to offer and what working for you might actually be like. Conducting your own research and producing studies can also hook the attention of passive candidates who might use it to add authority their own work. Making newsletter subscription a mandatory condition of downloading your research can enable you to send your latest vacancies and content direct to the inbox of passive candidates.
To make a real impression with your content, you need to post high-quality on-page content and off-page content consistently. That’s how you move the dial of your careers site search engine optimisation and boost your visibility with passive candidates searching terms relevant to opportunities in your sector. It’s a big job, which is why it’s advisable to work with a content marketing agency who can maintain the flow of content that will build your audience organically and reduce the need for spending on ads when you need to hire new people.
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The State Of The Global Workplace report found that actively engaging employees brought an 18% decrease in employee turnover. Producing content is a way to do that. Making your employees the stars of your content helps form stronger connections with employees and demonstrates the value and impact of their role.
But it goes deeper than that. Conducted properly, an employee focus group can provide you with real insight into what makes your employees tick. Producing content that touches on those things shows employees that their concerns matter. Their responses might even be the spark for changes in the workplace that make it a better place to work. Yu might discover that more information on benefits, inclusion groups or learning and development would be appreciated by employees—producing content about those things can meet that need and show external audiences what’s on offer at your company.
This demonstrates the double-edged benefits that an effective employer content campaign can bring. Because not only can it help attract and engage the most talented people in your industry, but it can also nurture employee engagement that will allow you to develop existing staff and enrich the talent base already at your company.
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Genius Group Limited
The Watermill
Broughton Hall
Skipton
BD23 3AG
01756 701222
hello@thegeniusgroup.co.uk
