Read This Before You Blog: 4 Best Practices for Recruiters & Talent Marketers

https://www.phenom.com/blog/recruitment-marketing-guideThere’s no way around it—finding top talent takes work. Lucky for recruiters and talent marketers, there are numerous tools and strategies at their disposal. Even better, one of the most effective ways to reach their target audience doesn’t require a big investment...just some thoughtful content planning.

From email and social media campaigns to search engine optimization (SEO) and sponsored ads, companies have an array of opportunities to interact with best-fit candidates. But one method of recruitment marketing stands out from the rest. In fact, you’re reading one right now (hint, hint!).

Blogs are one of the most transparent methods of communication a company can use to address the needs of their readers and promote their brand at the same time. Performed correctly, businesses can build trust and credibility among qualified prospects to ultimately grow their talent pools. Especially if you consider these compelling statistics:

• Companies that blog increase links to their websites by 97%

• Almost 70% of marketers who blog generate more qualified leads than those who don't

Engage Candidates with Relevant Content

Every company is different, as is the audience it serves and the marketing challenges it faces. To be effective, your blogs need to be customized to the talent pool you're trying to influence and inextricably linked to the marketing goals you're attempting to achieve.

Recruiters and talent marketers who plan ahead have the best chance at creating valuable and relevant content that’s both useful and appealing to job seekers on both their corporate and career sites.

Before you start posting, consider these four best practices to ensure your blogs are on point to attract, engage and convert talent:

1. Establish Realistic, Measurable Goals

The act of creating a goal substantially increases the likelihood you'll achieve it. This is because the goal itself suggests tactics and strategies which move you closer to attaining it. For example, if your goal is to increase the pool of qualified candidates for a given position, you might create a blog telling prospective candidates how to ace an interview or write an effective cover letter. This helps establish credibility and provides a window into the thought leadership of your business, building trust and increasing the odds someone will want to work for it.

If you think carefully about your principal recruiting problems, create goals that solve those problems, and ensure those goals are reasonable and grounded in metrics, you can better create and optimize impactful content.

2. Know Your Audience

Job candidates want to work for competitive companies that offer great benefits, a thriving work culture, and opportunities for career advancement. To persuade them yours is in the running, consider posting blogs that showcase your company’s best attributes, such as engaging employee events. To add authenticity, feature videos, photos, and testimonials from real employees on the job.

To appeal to a specific group of candidates for a particular position, generalized content might not cut it. Instead, create a blog that’s targeted directly to them. For example, if you need to find interns, you could have an employee who previously interned at the company write a blog post about their experience.

The more you know about your audience and their needs and concerns, the more your blogs should answer their questions and solve their problems. Filling in these gaps for job seekers builds trust in your company and increases the odds they'll want to be part of your team.

3. Create An Editorial Calendar

Writing blogs isn't a one-off deal. In fact, most people need to consume 3 to 5 pieces of content before they're willing to engage with a company. In other words, you need to nurture your leads over time.

But that requires a clear, consistent strategy—and the best way to lay out that strategy is with an editorial calendar to plan and organize your blogs around your marketing campaigns. Planning all your blogs in advance will ensure you post the right blog at the right time for the right audience. In this way, you can effectively move job candidates towards the completion of the tasks you want them to complete.

Each blog in your calendar should have several components: the main idea, category, headline, subheading, keywords, call to action (CTA), and publication date. Given the large number of blogs likely to populate your calendar, consider starting with a basic spreadsheet tool, such as Excel or Google Sheets, to stay organized.

4. Measure Your Results

No blogging strategy is perfect out of the gate. Although establishing realistic goals, researching your audience, and organizing the creation and distribution of your blogs is a good start, it's important to continually measure results. For example, a blog with tips on resume writing may seem right for prospective job candidates, but you won't really know how effective it is until you find out how many candidates read it, and what actions they took (like submitting an application) after doing so.

A solid blogging strategy can more effectively engage prospective job candidates, highlighting company strengths and credibility and providing the kind of useful advice and guidance that build trust, increase applications, and expand the pool of available talent.

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