Do Your Recruitment Marketing Strategies Make Your Mouth Water?

Yes, you’ve read the title right, it’s time to ask yourself this question and be really honest with yourself.
Do you know if your recruitment marketing strategies are deliciously mouth-watering or are they bland and flavourless? Are they full-bodied and intense so prospective candidates salivate at the prospect of engaging with your organisation or are they flat and stale?
What inspired to me to ask these questions, apart from it being Friday and I wanted to end the week with some creative writing, is that I enjoy reading great marketing copy about wines. In my opinion, great wine marketing copy creates visual flavours in my mind and conjures up a virtual experience that allows me to “taste” the wine without actually drinking it.
[bctt tweet=”Recruitment marketing messages should sound the same as great wine marketing copy says @trevorpvas” username=”ATCevent”]
Recruitment marketing strategies should ideally taste, I mean sound, the same. Let me illustrate with an example – here’s a snippet of a piece of marketing I received from Brown Brothers recently, a winemaker:
Patricia Chardonnay 2011
ChardonnayThe 2011 Patricia Chardonnay fruit was carefully hand-picked into small bins and then whole bunch pressed and settled for twelve hours. It was 100% barrel fermented in new and older French oak barriques.
This is a powerful, intriguing and elegant wine, with multilayered notes of stone fruit, lemon curd and creamy nuttiness. This will age gracefully for five to seven years.
The wine would be perfect with a smoked trout salad with a rich, citrus-infused dressing. During the winter months, a wild mushroom risotto covered in shaved parmesan would be a perfect accompaniment.
The wine has already been awarded 1 Trophy and 7 Gold medals.
So how does this relate to recruitment marketing?

Creating a vision for the candidate

For those of you who are not familiar, wines that are handpicked and whole bunch pressed are scarce, of high quality and have distinctive flavors. By including this bit of information, the winemaker is painting a picture of exclusivity and creating a sense of anticipation for what is to come for the customer.
So the key question here is – do your recruitment marketing strategies allow your candidates to envision themselves working for you and where they will be five years down the road? Are you creating a sense of anticipation with your marketing messages and making them aware of the quality of their future experiences?
Too often organisations are only concerned about fulfilling their bottom lines and they fail to ask the question – what can I really offer my employee (besides the usual perks such as annual leave, flexible working arrangements)? Including this little detail can provide candidates a way of visualising themselves working in your organisation and enable them to “see” how they can actually contribute to their own success and yours. This connection you create can be crucial in helping you snag that superstar candidate.

Being real

Have a read of this description – “This chardonnay is a powerful, intriguing and elegant wine, with multilayered notes of stone fruit, lemon curd and creamy nuttiness” and “this would be perfect with a smoked trout salad with a rich, citrus-infused dressing”. Seriously, can this get us any closer to the actual tasting of the wine?
If we apply the same principles to your marketing strategies, can you honestly say that your messages are as real and as authentic as they can, and should, be? If not, how can you get to that level?
Consider stepping into the shoes of your candidates to figure what exactly are they looking for. Or you can look into creating candidate personas to help you understand your perfect candidate perfectly (to learn more, check out our Human Centred-Design Thinking workshops). Using tech products, such as Video My Job, can also help you create these prospective experiences and enable you to better reach out to these critical talents.
And if you need more, here are some useful resources we have put together from the speakers that spoke at our ATC2015 conference. The theme was “Recruitment is Marketing” where we looked at how can we differentiate our employer brand, get it out there and build interest with prospective employees. These resources are a great way to help you improve your messaging and take them onto the next level.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t just ask what your candidates can do for you, ask what can you do for them says @trevorpvas” username=”ATCevent”]
I hope you get my drift here. Brown Brothers’ little marketing spiel certainly caught my eye and had me thinking about the importance of creating a vision for candidates and being authentic. Not to mention it also had me salivating and wondering if I should add the bottle of chardonnay to my collection.
So will your future recruitment marketing strategies be making your mouth water?
Image: Shutterstock
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