Part 2 - Talent acquisition & marketing strategy: An integrated blueprint with technology options

Welcome back to part two of our and strategy blueprint. If you missed Part 1, and are feeling a sense of FOMO (*ahem) you can check it out OVER HERE

I must admit, I'm feeling a bit of nervous 'sequelitis' here. That thing in the movies where the second instalment never quite lives up to the first. That's if anyone actually found Part 1 any good in the first place?!?! 🤔

Overview:

As a reminder, or for those playing catch up, and who would like easy navigation through the story so far:

In part 1, we covered:

• Employer Value Proposition

• Employer Branding & Audience Identification

• Career Site, ATS, and CRM

In this Part 2, we'll look at:

• Content Marketing & Social Media

This was originally going to be a two-part series but it turns out we've a lot to cover under this section so look out for a Part 3 in future, which will cover the below.

• Job Advertising & Distribution

(UPDATE: Part 3 on job  and distribution is now live and can be found HERE)

The fourth and final part will look at:

• Candidate Assessment

• New Start Onboarding

(UPDATE: Part 4 [final] on 'Candidate Assessment' and 'New Starter Onboarding' is now live and can be found HERE)

Content Marketing & Social Media

Oh boy. Where do I even begin with this one? With just a quick look at some of the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile you'll see that I've always been, and still am, a massive geek when it comes to this subject.

This is quite a biggy, so if you want to jump to any parts that are of more interest to you then I've broken this article into the following sections:

1. Brand vs. Direct response (DR)

2. Content. Marketing. Context.

3. Win (candidate) : Win (company) : Win (platforms)

4. Organic vs. Paid

5. A framework for your content

6. Social media management systems (SMMS)

Strap in. Here we go.

Firstly, I totally understand that content goes way beyond just social media. Content fuels everything – career site pages, emails, newsletters, job ads, and descriptions, and display ads to name a few. Content isn't a channel - it's the lifeblood that flows through all channels throughout the whole marketing funnel (see further on) - from awareness to conversions and post-conversion nurturing. That said, social media tends to be one of the more hungrier beasts, so I've put them together for this post. But rest assured, content will be touched on again.

1. Branding vs. Direct Response (DR)

A challenge businesses often face is that stakeholders don't always fully understand the strengths and capabilities of social media content when it comes to and acquisition. This lack of understanding can lead to unrealistic expectations and ineffective strategies. It's essential to recognise the difference between 'long-tail' branding and shorter-term 'direct response' activity. Even though they should always be working in unison, they both serve different purposes.

Long-tail branding refers to the process of building and maintaining your employer brand over an extended period. It involves consistently sharing content and messaging that reflects your organisation's values, culture, and employee experiences. Long-tail branding aims to establish and nurture your company's reputation as an attractive employer, which can help attract talent over time. It can include activities such as sharing materials that have real utility for your audiences. Things that help them and makes their lives easier. Stuff they actually find useful and makes them feel appreciative towards you. This approach is most effective when used for building awareness and fostering interest in your company as a potential employer over the long-term. It's something that should be constantly ticking over in the background. Some may call this 'always-on'.

On the other hand, direct response activities are focused on driving immediate actions from candidates, such as applying for a specific job or signing up for a event. These campaigns typically have a shorter duration and are more targeted in their messaging, focusing on specific job openings or opportunities. DR campaigns are most effective when used for lower-funnel activities, such as driving applications and conversions, and usually require paid media support for them to work. More on this in a moment.

Things can become messy when talent marketers struggle to distinguish between different approaches, fail to consultatively challenge internal stakeholder requests, and make unrealistic promises. For instance, agreeing to post three organic pieces of content on social media with the expectation of filling ten job requisitions in two weeks just isn't feasible and isn't the right approach for this type of request.

When developing a social media strategy for talent attraction and acquisition, it's crucial to strike a balance between long-tail branding and DR campaigns. While long-tail branding helps establish your company's reputation and generate interest, DR campaigns can capitalise on that interest by encouraging candidates to take action. Rather than treating these approaches as separate or competing activities, organisations should integrate them into comprehensive content and social media strategies that leverage their respective strengths to achieve both short- and long-term talent attraction goals. See my attempt below to summarise all of this visually:

2. Content. Marketing. Context.

Many marketers reading this will be very familiar with the well-known marketing cliché, "content is king." A lot will also know the expanded version that includes, " (aka distribution) is queen... and she wears the trousers." Others, who like me, probably need to get out more, may also know the final part, which is "context is emperor."

In other words, whilst creating engaging content is important, it's equally crucial to focus on how you're going to effectively distribute it to your target audiences. All too often, whether I've been marketing agency-side or in-house, I see teams place all their attention and resources on the creative process (the content) whilst neglecting to think about how they're going to get their beautiful creations out to the people that need to see it (the ). And, additionally, how to get it in front of people at the right time, based on the stage in their journey and their mindset at the time (the context).

I'll touch more on cookies, pixels, tagging and events shortly, but having these all connected and firing correctly between your owned digital estate (career site, CRM etc.) and the platforms your content is shared on means tactics such as performance media, which includes programmatic advertising, can play a big part in achieving the contextually relevant distribution of your content... When done well.

For example, imagine someone visits your site, browses around, and then leaves for their favourite news site. A well-crafted programmatic campaign can target them with relevant branding content, such as a useful guide that helps their future career search, providing value, maintaining their interest, and subtly providing positive mental priming towards your employer brand as a future employer of choice.

On the other hand, poorly executed programmatic can have a negative impact. Consider a scenario where a person starts a job application but doesn't finish it. If they are then bombarded with direct response "APPLY NOW!!!" ads everywhere they go online for weeks, the results can be off-putting and brand damaging.

I also fully appreciate that this all seems easy in theory. However, with legacy systems; tech in stacks not able or willing to talk to each other; badly connected owned and paid platforms; corporate nervousness about user privacy; changes to cookies and pixel laws etc., means getting all this to work as it should is often much (MUCH!) more difficult.

In an ideal world, and appreciating what I'm about to say is a bit finger in the air, but when it comes to budgets for content creation and distribution, I'd aim for approx. 60% on the former and 40% the latter... Roughly speaking.

3. Win (Candidate) : Win (Company) : Win (Platforms)

Returning to classic marketing clichés (apologies to those already finding these nauseating), many marketers are familiar with the two-circled Venn diagram. Where one circle says 'what your company wants to say', and the other represents 'what your target audiences want to hear'. Then, where they overlap is labelled "the sweet spot". I've always looked at this and wondered why no one has ever included a third circle titled "how the platforms want you to behave". So allow me to do that right now for your viewing pleasure:

Years ago, I remember listening to a podcast where Michael (Mike) Stelzner (of Social Media Examiner fame) described social media as 'The Hotel California - Everyone is welcome - you're just not allowed to leave.' I know, right? Bloody genius!

Let's cut to the chase with social media platforms. Your eyeballs = advertising revenue for them. Lots and LOTS of advertising revenue. They want you to spend as much time as possible on their apps and sites, and they're not big fans of your little peepers leaving unless the person or company making them do so is paying for the privilege.

So, imagine you have a fantastic piece of content that perfectly aligns with your target audience's interests, framed within the narrative your organisation wants to convey. You share it organically with a call-to-action (CTA) that invites users to 'come to our site to learn more' or, even worse from the perspective of a social platform, 'head on over to this platform's competitor to see the full post, video, reel, story, etc.'

Spoiler alert: algorithms DO NOT like this, and will further strangle the reach of any organic content you're sharing if you do it.

I'll try not to bite the hand that feeds this post's reach, but there's something I feel compelled to discuss regarding organic content on LinkedIn. It's related to social platforms' desire to keep eyeballs glued to their sites.

Here's a common scenario - Talent marketing teams create fantastic content. The creative tells an engaging story based on insights about their target audience's preferences. They share it organically on LinkedIn and simultaneously ask employees to engage with / like it. Dutiful colleagues and leaders oblige, resulting in a post with high 'engagement' but where over 90% of it comes from the company's own employees.

Here's the issue. The algorithm thinks, "Hold on a bloody minute! Company X just shared some content, and loads of people from the same company engaged with it. That's plenty of eyeballs staying on our platform. Let's show Company X's content to similar employees from their own company (with their limited organic reach) next time, so that those folks keep coming back and staying on our site. We can then boast to our other advertisers how many people they can reach with their future ads, to justify continuing to charge them dollar dollar bills to do so. Mwaaaa ha ha haaa!" And thus, an echo chamber is formed.

Don't get me wrong – employee engagement is crucial for shaping a culture-centric-employer-brand. However, in this context, the goal of sharing content isn't internal communications. The objective is typically to engage new talent beyond the walls of your organisation, enticing them to consider working for your company. One way to overcome this issue is to ask employees to share the content forward (basic employee ambassador /advocacy activity) or tag people outside the business in the comments section (only if relevant to the people they're tagging). The challenge lies in the fact that most employees will only like or comment on the post, perpetuating the issue described above.

4. Organic vs. Paid

Having covered 'organic social' quite a bit we need to look at the other side of the same coin - paid.

In the context of social media and content for talent attraction strategy, it's essential to understand the difference between paid and organic efforts, as well as when to use each approach. Additionally, knowing where social media's strengths lie within the marketing funnel can help you create a more targeted and effective strategy whilst better managing the expectations for any activity you promise to run for your stakeholders.

To clarify, organic social media refers to the natural reach of your content without any financial investment. On most social platforms this is ranging from c. 2% - 9%. I.e., If you've 1000 followers and share content without money behind it, then only about 50 people will see it. And you have no control on which 50 those are and whether they're relevant for what you're trying to achieve. Yeah. I know... 😬

Paid social media, on the other hand, involves investing in advertising or sponsored content (aka 'paid media') to reach a larger or more targeted audience. Paid efforts can help you amplify your message, increase visibility, and target specific candidate demographics or job roles with a lot more precision.

For lower-funnel activity, such as driving applications and conversions, social media won't be as effective as other channels such as Google or job boards (although LinkedIn can be an exception to this rule). However, it can still play a supporting role by promoting specific job openings, sharing success stories, and retargeting candidates who have previously engaged with your content or visited your career site.

Continuing the 'pixels and tags etc.,' topic from earlier - Integrating social media with your career site through tracking pixels is crucial for monitoring candidate behaviour as they journey from one environment to another. They allow you to collect data on user interactions, such as clicks, page views, and conversions. By connecting these data points, you can more accurately (though not perfectly) understand how candidates engage with your content and navigate your site.

However, maintaining this connection becomes challenging when candidates leave your career site and enter an Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This is a common issue faced in talent attraction, and it usually hinders the ability to assess the whole candidate journey accurately.

Understanding where candidates drop off or disengage during the recruitment process is essential for identifying potential issues and improving the overall experience. For instance, you may want to determine whether candidates from social media visit your site but don't hit 'apply,' or if they begin their application but fail to complete it. Additionally, if they do complete the application, you'll want to know which stages of the recruitment process they reach if they aren't ultimately hired. This can help answer questions such as "is the quality of applicants we get from social media any good?" If most of them don't make it to interview stage then you might know your answers, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

The more you can connect the breadcrumbs of cross-platform candidate behaviour, the better you can analyse pinch points and potential issues in your marketing efforts and recruitment processes. By probing deeper into these issues, you can identify the root causes and introduce targeted interventions and improvements, and /or redirect advertising spend into the channels that result in greater yields for your desired objectives.

Connecting social media to your career site via pixels and striving to maintain visibility throughout the candidate journey is a vital step in optimising both effectiveness (the results you're after) and efficiencies (the cost of getting them) with your talent attraction strategy.

5. A framework for your content

Before moving on to the final section and wrapping things up, I wanted to share a framework that has been incredibly helpful to me over the years.

In the early days of owning YouTube, Google popularised the content structure 'Hero. Hub. Hygiene.' I've always loved it and still use it today.

As mentioned in my introductory post, my brain likes structure and sequence, making this framework perfect for me. It's an excellent way to organise your content through the marketing funnel. 'Hero' content attracts talent through broad awareness. 'Hub' content draws people closer through consideration. And 'Hygiene' content is for those more deeply engaged, and with greater intent. (It's not always this clear-cut but for simplicity let's just go with it 🤫).

Though this model was new to me at the time, it wasn't a fresh concept in the world of marketing. Think of it as a new dress for the same old marketing party, which a lot of these 'new' marketing models and frameworks tend to be. Long before 'digital' was a thing, this framework was used in print. Take glossy magazines as an example. The eye-catching, high production-value front cover serves as the hero piece - grabbing peoples' attention as they walk past the shelf. It entices them to pick up the magazine, whether it's directly targeted at them or not. They might be part of the 'largest addressable audience' i.e., 'someone looking for a magazine to read.' Similar to your high-production videos you might put out there. They're usually where the most investment goes and are aimed at a wider audience to achieve greater awareness.

The hub content is the celebrity interviews and gossip that changes with each edition. If the Hero piece does its job, it will pique peoples' interest, compelling them to want to read more. In talent attraction, this could be your decent quality user generated content (UGC), which iCIMS (formerly known as Altru) is excellent for (in my opinion), or longer-form blogs about 'a day in the life' of colleagues in your organisation.

Lastly, the hygiene content includes the horoscopes and crossword puzzles – the small yet engaging features that regular readers know where to find and fulfils their needs further. In the context of talent marketing, this could be the infographic about your selection process or interview advice, which visitors to your career site can download as they journey from 'intent' to 'conversion' in your funnel.

Not only has Hero, Hub, Hygiene provided structure for my content marketing, but the magazine analogy has simplified how I articulate my strategies to non-marketing stakeholders in ways they find easier to relate to and understand. I hope it does the same for others reading this.

Social media management systems (SMMS)

Blimey! This post ended up being MUCH bigger then I originally intended. 🥵

Before I let you go I'll quickly cover some of the SMMSs out there, most of which many of you will probably already know so I wouldn't blame you if this is the point where we part company on this one.

For those who would appreciate a high-level overview on a small selection of the main ones out there, I present the below in no order of preference. Like any tech considerations, they all have their strengths and weaknesses. As covered in my last post, be sure to do thorough due-diligence to find the one that best fulfils your business and system requirements:

• Hootsuite: Helps companies schedule, monitor, and analyse their social media presence, with some paid capabilities included. Best suited for small to medium enterprises. I'm not sure if they still profess to cater for enterprise needs but if they do I'd add a "kinda" to that claim.

• Buffer: Also streamlines scheduling and publishing of employer branding content. Ideal for small to medium-sized businesses and has never claimed to be anything more. (It's also a pain to type if you're not great on a keyboard with the 'g' being right next to the damn 'f'! 😳)

• Sprout Social: As above, helps companies plan, schedule, and analyse their social media content to effectively communicate their employer brand. Works well for small businesses and has been venturing into the enterprise space although I don't believe it's anywhere near as sophisticated as the next two. 

• Sprinklr: A comprehensive customer experience management platform that offers social media management, listening, and engagement tools. Best suited for large enterprises requiring a more extensive suite of features and scalability... And with deeper pockets! 

• Khoros: A platform created through the merger of Spredfast and Lithium in 2018 /19. Both where very strong in their fields. The former being similar to Hootsuite and Buffer, whilst the latter was up there with Conversocial (now Verint) in terms of customer service capabilities. What's left is a digital customer engagement platform that combines social media management, online community building, and customer care. Suitable for medium-sized businesses and enterprises looking for an integrated solution to manage their wider online presence.

And that's a wrap for this part of the series. I'll see you soon to cover the final three sections I initially planned to share. Although I aim for them to be just as helpful as this one, they won't be as long. Promise!

Grab the whole summary pack below, which includes high-level overviews of everything across the whole series, and if you're interested in reading the detail I shared in Part 1 then you can find it HERE: