How to use engaging content to attract top-notch talent
4 mins, 32 secs read time
Candidate experience is now more important than ever. In the era of social media, where people have the ability to share messages with wide networks with just a few taps and swipes, experience is especially crucial for the people you don’t end up hiring. And those people touch more facets of the business than you may think.
Employer branding and marketing in general are moving rapidly toward more integrated and customized customer experiences. The first part in designing candidate experience programs is considering the attraction phase, or how to start building a dialogue with potential candidates.
The case for content
One of the best ways to enhance your talent acquisition strategy is to use content as a recruiting tool; content will drive candidates to your website and help to build trust and rapport before they talk to anyone from the company.
Creating content around your company culture can also be a great way to help potential hires picture themselves working for you. Often top candidates use company culture as a differentiator when deciding where to apply.
In today’s competitive job market, relying on job postings as your sole recruiting strategy just won’t cut it anymore. If you want the very best talent, you need to have a multi-channel recruiting and employer brand strategy to find, nurture, and convert qualified candidates into hires for your company.
Get it right and your content strategy will attract passive talent to your brand, help to build trust, and enhance your employer brand.
A good talent brand content strategy can also help ensure that those who do apply to your company are better qualified. They’ve self-selected to apply because of what they’ve learned about your company and its culture and values through the content you’ve shared.
Start with storytelling
Storytelling is a great way to make an emotional connection with your audience, which is so crucial for a long-term relationship. Since stories make your audience become a part of your experience, they can associate themselves more closely with your brand and make sure they’re aligned with your values before they apply.
Candidates want to know why working for your company is meaningful, interesting, and aligns with their aspirations. And millennials especially want to work for a business whose values they believe in.
You can use behind-the-scenes insights into a typical day in the office to highlight the benefits of working for your organization. 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.
Engaging content makes the person stop everything to spend time and energy reading and taking in your message. The best way to create it is to try to make an emotional connection with the reader and/or address a specific need.
Authenticity is everything
Focus on being your authentic self and you’ll hit that emotional resonance because authenticity is personal. Many organizations shy away from showing candidates around the office for fear that they might be “giving too much away.” But by giving an office tour, you show transparency into your hiring process and demonstrate that your company has nothing to hide, which should give the candidate a sense of reassurance and comfort.
Behind-the-scenes looks at employee and company life are also great content to highlight for prospective employees. They want to know what it’s really like to work for you. Photos of employees at events, highlights of them on your company blog, even short videos of celebrations at the office are all ways you can feature your organizational culture in an authentic way.
Sharing via social media
In today’s highly social era, people process information, make decisions and, yes, look for employment differently. They have an endless amount of information at their fingertips. They visit sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, company websites, and more. Once you have a well-constructed story in place, you need to distribute it across multiple channels to get it heard. Know the places where your target audiences are most likely to hang out.
If this is challenging for you (and it is for a lot of companies!), this is the exact moment in which Meritocracy steps in, through our proprietary technology.
We’ve come up with a technology that helps candidates cherry-pick the most suitable openings for them to develop their talent. On our portal, technology embraces humanity: These two factors blend together to give the job seeker the best possible experience. Every day we ask companies to describe the profiles of the people they need—the people they’d be prepared to invest in. We model all this data by overlapping individual pieces of information, each containing a specific requirement, giving us a complete picture of the ideal candidate. We study their behavior and potential interests to find them online, wherever they are, to match our clients’ needs.
Tying it all together
We’ve outlined a few of the ways content can help you connect with candidates and offered some approaches to creating and sharing that content. There are a lot of companies that are doing a great job of sharing their employer brand, so spend some time researching and gathering ideas. Remember that anyone can produce content, but to succeed it has to tell a story that begins with your company's culture.
Looking for more branding ideas and inspiration? Check out the How to Create Your Talent Brand eBook.