6 Excellent Examples of Recruitment Marketing

The competition for top talent isn’t slowing down — so how can you keep up?

With AI, automation, and machine learning, hiring teams can maximize their time and streamline efforts to turn job seekers into employees. But to stand out in the eyes of discerning job seekers, hiring teams need to shift their thinking from simply recruiting to recruitment marketing. 

Recruitment marketing refers to the tactics and strategies used to find, attract, engage, and nurture talent above the funnel before they apply for a job — effectively transitioning recruitment efforts from reactive job sourcing to proactive talent acquisition. 

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Effective recruitment marketing strategies establish a stellar employer brand, create influential candidate experiences, and help hiring teams attract, engage, and convert job seekers. 

Here are 6 excellent examples of recruitment marketing to inspire your next campaign. 

1. Newell Brands: Using Talent Marketing to Connect with Best-Fit Candidates 

Your career site should give potential candidates valuable information about your employer brand, available job positions, company culture, and more. 

Leveraging your career pages to paint an authentic picture for job seekers about life at your organization — and engaging them with personalized content based on their skills, interests, location, and other preferences — is crucial to creating a candidate experience that converts more job seekers into applicants. 

According to the Director of North America Talent Acquisition & Operations at Newell Brands, “there are a lot of sites out there that just have jobs listed or are focusing more on the company related to the jobs — not so much what the company is, what the culture is, and what the values are.” With more and more people looking for purposeful work that aligns with their own belief systems and goals, using a career site as a mere job board sacrifices the ability to connect to talent on a more meaningful level. 

So how did Newell Brands set themselves apart? They took a marketing approach to their career site by adding engaging content and features like:

• A suggested Spotify playlist for remote workers

• At-your-fingertips lists of inclusive benefit offerings 

• Access to their Leaders Live! podcast to authentically show their brand

• Information on employee resource groups (ERGs)

Once you attract potential candidates to your career site, don’t forget to follow up — similar to how marketing campaigns include nurture emails designed to stay in touch with potential prospects. 

Newell Brands leverages talent marketing campaigns to “meet candidates where they are." By keeping candidates in the loop, you can successfully build an engaged talent pipeline that your team can turn to when new positions become available. 

Learn more about Newell Brand’s approach to recruitment marketing here. 

2. GILGA: Taking Recruitment Marketing to a New Level

Traditionally, recruitment marketing blends recruitment efforts with well-known marketing channels, such as email, social media, and SMS. But GILGA is taking recruitment marketing to new heights with a new spin on traditional campaigns.

GILGA is actor and musician Donald Glover’s up-and-coming entertainment brainchild focused on delivering the “freshest entertainment and art.” To promote available roles across the business, they swapped their website homepage with a single landing page that highlighted open jobs — and instead of using traditional job descriptions, they described each role in one sentence or less.

The landing page itself is akin to a poster or magazine cover with a video at the top, bold fonts, and formatting that is also reminiscent of the list of music released on an album — in essence, it looks nothing like a traditional career site.

To add another layer of non-traditional complexity to this recruitment marketing strategy, they used TikTok to promote the page while also adding a 2-week lifespan for application acceptance for every open role. This added a sense of urgency that helped this unique recruitment marketing effort go viral with almost 7 full days left in the application window.

Although this unique approach may not work for every company, it’s a great example of how thinking outside the box while representing your employer brand can drive awareness and engagement when presented to the right audience.

3. Land O’Lakes, Inc.: Launching Effective Marketing Campaigns  

Having a great career site with personalized content only gets you so far in the race to engage top talent. Land O’Lakes took their approach to recruitment marketing strategy one step further. 

By leveraging AI-powered technology for their “Feed the Nation” campaign, Land O’Lakes was able to reach thousands of candidates less than two weeks after launching the campaign. Through targeted campaigns sent to new talent and existing job seekers, they generated almost 16K site visitors to their dedicated landing page in just 11 days. 

They also sent an email to their existing talent community that drove 48 applications. To push the campaign even further, they designed geo-targeted Facebook advertisements that reached 19,000 potential candidates from key locations, resulting in 162 new leads and 25 completed applications. 

“These results alone made it a successful campaign, but then our CEO shared the landing page on her LinkedIn feed, which amplified our reach even further,” said Dobby Gibson, Senior Manager, Talent Marketing and Employer Brand at Land O’Lakes. “Phenom makes it so easy to create and manage talent marketing campaigns that generate instantly measurable results. It’s very effective.”

Get the inside scoop on this entire campaign and its success in this case study. 

4. Mercy: Pivoting Hiring Efforts to Convert Higher Quality Candidates 

Not all organizations have the ability to fill one position at a time. Some require high-volume hiring that aims to improve three key TA metrics: quality, volume, and speed of hire. 

Mercy — one of the largest multi-state healthcare systems in the U.S. — needed a unified talent experience solution to help them hire for critical positions during and after the pandemic. 

Although their TA team needed to acquire talent quickly, they didn’t want to cut corners. According to Kayla Drady, Director of Talent Acquisition Strategy and Operations at Mercy, their TA team didn’t want “to compromise the quality of hires, because these are the people that are taking care of our patients and our community.”

To support their external recruiting efforts for a more well-rounded recruitment strategy, Mercy started focusing on improving internal mobility processes to drive referrals from existing employees. For positions they couldn’t fill internally, Drady and her team leveraged omnichannel marketing campaigns and virtual events — like remote interview days, career fairs, webinars, and informational sessions. 

To promote these virtual initiatives, Mercy also used SMS campaigns and social media channels to stay in touch with qualified talent and drive more traffic to their career sites. The results? An 11-day decrease in time to hire for nursing positions, and a 26% increase in hires. 

5. Southwest Airlines: Reach New Candidates with Employee Referral Programs 

Although employee referral programs aren’t new, using HR tech to automate the referral process for candidates, employees, recruiters, and hiring managers is an impactful way to improve the experience and outcomes. 
Southwest Airlines took this approach and saw immediate and invaluable results — a 700% increase in employee referrals to be exact. 

On top of leveraging intelligence and automation to deliver a better overall referral experience, Southwest revamped the entire program to achieve impressive results. Here’s how they did it: 

• Designed a compelling rewards program that aligned with the company’s employee recognition strategy 

• Automated internal promotions using campaigns and other tools to spread the word about new referral incentives 

• Encouraged employees to set up profiles which streamlined the referral process for new users 

• Leveraged CRM to streamline communications about new job openings, talent communities, and referral process updates

• Examined referral nurture strategies to convert more referrals into hires, scale the program, and deliver great experiences 

• Hosted referral information sessions to reach a large pool of candidates while maintaining a personal feel 

Learn more about Southwest’s approach to recruitment marketing and how you can mimic their results here. 

6. Marel: Transition from Reactive to Proactive Recruiting  

If you’re looking to improve the candidate experience and create your next recruitment marketing campaign, it’s crucial to switch your mindset. Marel, a leading global provider of advanced food processing systems and services, discovered that if they wanted to achieve its goals for growth, they needed to put the right systems in place. 

Marel wanted to create a scalable system, which also meant they were in it for the long haul. Over two years, Marel consolidated career sites, analyzed applicant drop-off data, and shifted its mindset from reactive to proactive recruiting. 

By “stepping into a candidate’s shoes, we were [able to focus] on what we wanted to know about candidates instead of thinking through a really good candidate experience,” stated Marlies van de Stolpe, HR Director Global Supply Chain at Marel. This approach was supported by detailed data analytics so Marel’s TA team could assess patterns that emerged and make smarter, data-driven decisions to target leads appropriately. 

Marel also implemented more video content to showcase its employer brand, culture, and values, which allowed them to engage candidates more authentically. This seemingly small step creates a large impact and helps create enthusiastic brand advocates that are excited about joining your company. 

Read the full story about Marel and its strategic approach in this blog. 

Leverage These Examples in Your Next Recruitment Marketing Strategy

It’s clear that the traditional approach to recruiting isn’t nearly as effective as recruitment marketing strategies — but making the transition doesn’t happen overnight. Having the right technology to support your team while they shift from passive to active recruitment marketing efforts can be the difference between creating replicable success and another failed attempt to improve TA processes. 

See Phenom in action. Request a personalized demo to discover how Phenom’s AI-powered platform can help you attract, engage, and hire top talent — faster.