Do you struggle to find the quality employees your business needs? This is a very common position for small business owners to find themselves in.
Develop Talent Personas
When you started using content marketing to attract customers, you created buyer personas. Buyer personas are generalized representations of your ideal customers. They help you visualize your ideal customer and create content that’s valuable to them. Now, you need to do something similar to attract top employees.
Talent personas are similar to buyer personas. Instead of describing your ideal customers, they describe your ideal employees. To create talent personas, think about the types of employees you’d like to recruit to your company. Involve your human resource department, your front-line managers, and even your current employees in this process.
Build a focused picture of the types of employees you’d like to attract. Your profiles should include things like education, career path, skills, and the behavior and attributes of your desired candidates. Once you’ve completed your talent personas, you can move forward.
Set Recruitment Goals
A key part of any content marketing strategy is goal setting. If you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish with your content, you probably won’t get where you want to be. Write down the recruitment goals you’d like to accomplish with the help of content marketing. Track relevant metrics to measure your progress towards those goals.
For example, if your main goal is to get more qualified applicants into your hiring pipeline, you could measure the number of qualified candidates in a certain time period. If your main goal is to hire top candidates, you could track your offer acceptance rate. If you want to hire top candidates more quickly, you could track time-to-hire.
Create Content for Candidates
With your strategy completed, you can start creating the content that will attract top candidates to your company. This doesn’t mean that you need to start from scratch. A lot of the content you create for potential customers do double duty and attract top candidates.
GE’s #SpringBreakIt campaign is a great example of content marketing that appealed to both customers and potential employees. In this campaign, the company opened the doors to their laboratory to show how they test their advanced materials. Potential customers enjoyed seeing objects get squished, burned, or otherwise destroyed. Potential engineers got an exciting glimpse into what working for GE would be like.
Of course, you can also create content specifically for top candidates. On your company’s blog, write content that gives candidates a sneak peak of your company’s culture. This content helps build your company’s brand, and helps show why your company is unique.
For example, you could write posts about interesting aspects of your company’s culture. You could post videos of events in your office. Blog posts written by current employees about their roles are also interesting for prospective employees. Get creative and show off what it’s like to work for your company.
Promote Your Content
As you probably already know, creating content is only a small part of content marketing. You also need to promote that content to make sure it gets in front of the right readers. Two million blog posts are published every single day, so without promotion, your amazing content will be lost in the crowd. Your ideal candidates won’t even see it, and you won’t be able to hire them.
To make sure your content gets seen, promote it in places where your ideal candidates hang out online. These places may or not be same places where your ideal customers can be found. For example, your customer-oriented content may do well on Twitter, but your employee-oriented content may do better on LinkedIn.
Social media isn’t the only place to promote your content. You can also cross-post your content on sites that your potential employees read, like industry blogs. You can send interesting content to your email list.
Generate and Nurture Leads
Do you have lead magnet content that’s targeted towards your potential customers? They download your exciting e-book, white paper, or case study, and in return, you get their email address. Then, you nurture those leads, and nudge them closer to becoming your customers.
You can do the very same thing to attract top employees. Offer a lead magnet that will be irresistible to top talent in your industry. Then, you can gather emails of people who are interested in working for your company. Just like you’d nurture potential customers, you can nurture these potential employees.
Send them interesting information occasionally. This can include webinars, case studies, or other content that could help their careers. You can send them links to job postings at your company they may want to apply for. This regular contact keeps you at the front of their minds until they’re ready to start job hunting.
Measure Your Results
If you don’t measure your results, you won’t know if your content marketing efforts are paying off. You need to know if your content marketing is attracting the top employees you need. If you’re not getting the right results, you can make adjustments to your strategy.
To measure your results, look back at the recruitment goals you set earlier in the process. If you wanted to get a certain number of qualified candidates in a certain time period, how many did you actually get? If you wanted to hire qualified candidates in a certain amount of time, how long was your time-to-hire? Once you have this data, you can decide if you need to make any adjustments to your content marketing strategy.
Remember, content marketing doesn’t provide overnight results. You may need to wait a few months before you can start seeing the effects of your content marketing.
Have you ever thought about using content marketing to attract top employees? Or, have you already hired great employees with this method? Share your experiences in the comments section below.
