Hiring Plan 101: vacancy-specific marketing

When it’s time to hit the market for talent, your attraction capabilities are hugely strengthened if you treat each role as its own campaign with tailored marketing to support it. Here are 6 steps you can follow to help you leverage vacancy-specific marketing:

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1) Find your vacancy’s USP(s) 💫

First off, it’s crucial to understand what’s actually unique about the role. By identifying and showcasing the role’s Unique Selling Point(s), you can truly stand out from other companies advertising similar vacancies. USPs could include things like enhanced growth opportunities, involvement in significant projects, innovative product development, or the chance to be first through the door in a new team. Understanding what’s unique about your role will help you develop targeted messaging that resonates with potential candidates looking for those USPs. Note: try to avoid leaning heavily on things like competitive compensation packages or flexible work arrangements. Whilst they might enhance your overall offering, they aren’t unique and putting them front-and-centre usually suggests there isn’t too much else about the role worth talking about!

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2) Identify your target audience 🤩

Once you know what’s unique about your role, it’s time to identify who you’re going to tell about it. For example, consider you have a marketing vacancy and you’re looking for a candidate with extensive experience in the B2C space. If the way you’ve described the role and what makes it unique appeals in equal measure to a junior-level social media executive and a seasoned marketing professional looking to step up to CMO, you’re in for a tricky time when it comes to creating any meaningful engagement and narrowing down candidates. Truly knowing your target audience will help you translate the USPs you’ve identified into messaging that speaks directly to that audience – and only that audience.

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3) Tell your story 📖

Now that you know who you’re looking to speak to, consider how best to talk to them. Your messaging around each role should be delivered in a way that suits your audience’s preferred ways of consuming content. Almost every role will include some sort of written job description, but beyond that consider how you might utilise job advertisements*, social media posts, videos, or blog posts to speak to your audience about the opportunity you’re offering. *Note: it’s important to distinguish between a job description and a job advertisement. A job description details the day-to-day responsibilities of a given role, how it impacts your business and the requirements expected of a suitable candidate. A job advertisement ‘sells’ the opportunity as something your candidate should be interested in, without needing to describe the role itself in intricate detail.

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4) Choose the right channels 🚀

Now you’ve got the who and the how sussed, it’s time to nail the where. That is, to say, choosing the right channels to promote each role based on the audience you’re speaking to (and where they’re most likely to be ‘hanging out’). If we take the Gen-Z audience, for example, and you had decided to utilise video as part of your candidate attraction, social media is going to be your biggest ally here; LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok would all be appropriate. If you’re after a more experienced candidate and need experience in a particular area of leadership or strategy, perhaps you’ll have more contributing a blog to an industry-specific publication, running a referral program or even utilising niche job boards built for your audience. Based on what you know about who your audience is and how you want to speak to them, you can devise a plan to appear in the places you know they’re likely to be, with content that will resonate.

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5) Create compelling content 🧲

The content created should be engaging and compelling. This could include job descriptions that highlight the unique selling points of the position, videos that give a glimpse into the company’s culture, or blog posts that showcase the company’s thought leadership in the industry.

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6) Monitor the success of the campaign 📊

The success of the campaign should be monitored by tracking metrics such as the number of applications received, the quality of candidates, and the time to hire. The company should analyse the data to see what worked well and what could be improved in future campaigns.

In conclusion, planning marketing around specific vacancies is essential to attract the best talent during a hiring campaign. By understanding the unique selling points of the position, identifying the target audience, developing messaging that resonates with the audience, choosing the right channels, creating compelling content, and monitoring the campaign’s success, a company can build a strong, capable team.