In recruitment, the days of relying on job boards and newspaper classifieds are long gone. Digital marketing is now an essential aspect of the hiring process. Staying up to date on digital marketing recruitment is crucial to enhancing your client portfolio and refining your candidates.

From carrying out a successful digital marketing recruitment campaign with NHS Western Isles, we’ve found that there’s a plethora of untapped digital growth in the recruitment sector. Read on to see how you can form a digital marketing plan that matches up against your business goals.

NHS Western Isles

The rise in social media has forever changed the face of the recruitment market. It’s now easier than ever for brands in the digital space to communicate with potential new employees. Which is why when we were asked lead a social initiative to fill two senior positions within NHS Western Isles, we jumped at the chance.

Red Media were given the task of employing social media marketing and related inbound marketing strategies to help top talent discover the role by drawing them to the NHS website. In only a week we were able to set up the website, graphics, and social media campaign which went on to delivered 6 finalist candidates of the “highest quality.”

Previously, the NHS Western Isles had struggled to source suitable candidates. Traditional methods did not allow them to cut through the noise of competitors, social media was therefore an opportunity to take their digital marketing to the next level. Growing competition in the digital marketing recruitment sector is becoming a concern for many agencies, especially those who are much smaller in size than dominant businesses like the NHS. Three key ways we found to counteract this is are…

Knowing Your Target Audience

With 92% of businesses and 82% of recruiters now on social media, agencies need to work harder to stand out. Consequently, we made sure to work closely with the NHS Western Isles to understand the role, the market and their ideal applicant in order to create personas of potential candidates on which we based our ad campaign visuals and messaging. Most social media channels now enable targeting as narrow as industry, employers, or even job title. By defining your target audience, you can ensure that your campaigns reach the right people in the right place at the right time, thereby increasing your chances of finding the right candidate. It is this level of bespoke service that’s needed to differentiate your company from rival businesses.

Creating a Landing Page

Creating landing pages for your social media campaigns is essential. It is necessary that every job has its own landing page and URL, so that they can be found in Google or other search engines. The pages should be fully optimised for search queries, by including relevant keywords, location and specialisms. Unique landing pages are also required for effective testing. For the NHS Western Isles campaign our team designed and tested two websites, one for each role. When it came to content it was clear that location would be a central focus. The role required relocation, therefore visuals would be important to any prospective candidate. Lifestyle shots of the Western Isles were complemented with effective and informative copy relating to the role.

Paid Advertising

To conquer social media advertising, first you have to ascertain where your target candidates are most active. This is where you will advertise. Choosing the right platform is easy once you have established persona, as it will enable you to make calculated assumptions about what channel will produce the best ROI. Overall social media advertising is a cost-efficient and highly targeted option for reaching the right audience. In the NHS Western Isles campaign, we used a combination of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn paid advertising to deliver tailored ads that appealed to our personas.

Facebook/Instagram ad’s offer an average CTR of 0.9 and are affordable for smaller businesses. LinkedIn tends to be more expensive, however the nature of the platform justifies the spend, as prospective candidates are more likely to engage. We were quickly able to hone our NHS campaign via a strategic plan of testing ad sets then switching budget from lesser performing ads to those that were performing well. With a combination of paid advertising and lead-generating sites which were designed to easily convert traffic into applicants, we were able to find a selection of suitable candidates in under two weeks. Digital marketing recruitment got results at the fraction of the cost of traditional methods, simply because it made the process of applying as simple and straightforward as possible.

Social media marketing has transformed the recruitment process. In under two weeks our NHS Western Isles campaign reached over 70,000 people resulting in 2,200 unique link clicks and 6 final candidates. Through using our experience, creativity and ongoing cooperation with the client, we led a campaign which outperformed all simultaneous digital marketing recruitment efforts. If you would like the same bespoke service for your company look to our social media and digital marketing services. Get in touch today.