When it comes to candidate attraction in 2024, standing out from your competition is at the front of most recruiters’ minds. You can no longer rely on tried and tested marketing approaches; you need to embrace creative hiring to catch the attention of available candidates and ensure that they choose you over everyone else. Just as candidates need to sell themselves in their applications, you need to sell yourself to make them trust you.
Creativity can be hard to come by when you’re faced with a blank slate, and often it takes some inspiration to get the ball rolling before you start to come up with recruitment campaign ideas. With that in mind, here are some of the best creative candidate attraction ideas for recruiters in 2024 that you can use to kickstart a successful marketing strategy. We will also discuss how to attract talent with innovative recruitment ideas and examples.
The Importance of Creative Candidate Attraction
Before diving into the best creative candidate attraction ideas, it’s crucial to understand their benefits and how they can work for you to attract top talent.
Having an innovative recruitment strategy is vital for staying ahead of the pack in today’s fiercely competitive job market. In Q4 of 2023, 29% of businesses increased their recruitment efforts which showcases a rise in demand for recruitment services and lead generation.
Traditional methods and recruitment strategies will not be as successful as they once were when trying to find top talent. To stand out, your efforts need to be more creative and catch the attention of prospective hires. By doing so, you’ll attract candidates who are looking for unique job opportunities and can tap into a wider talent pool who may have not initially considered your company.
Another significant benefit of creative hiring strategies is that you are more likely to attract diverse candidates. Diversity in the workplace is proven to be an asset as a diverse workforce is more innovative and more productive. Likewise, studies into diversity in the workplace suggest that 62% of candidates would turn down a job role if the organisation did not support diversity and inclusion, highlighting that this is now a major element when attracting candidates in 2024.
Use Tailored Outreach
Outreach is one of the biggest methods of candidate attraction, so we’re going to start our suggestions with creative ways that you can make this more effective.
If you want to make an impression that will stick in a potential candidate’s mind, you need to make them feel as though they’re receiving a bespoke service and are being treated as individuals instead of just another applicant. Tailoring the outreach you send to potential candidates is a simple way to immediately improve candidate engagement, particularly if you go further than just using each candidate’s name in a greeting at the start of every email.
Tailoring outreach means taking the time to research a candidate’s background to find out their interests, job history and any notable achievements or projects. This can all be collated in recruitment tools like SmartRecruiters, where you can compile all of the applicant’s information. You should then reference this information in your initial communication and use this insight to personalise the advice or opportunities you send their way.
Send Video Messages
Whilst there’s a lot you can do with a carefully crafted outreach message, you can have a much greater impact if you use video to attract new candidates instead.
Video is notoriously one of the most engaging formats and is 1200% more effective than other marketing content. So if you’re looking to increase candidate attraction, it’s a great strategy that allows you to get creative depending on the approach you take. You can even use the digital messages you would usually send during outreach as the basis for a script and then adapt this text for each recipient and make it sound more conversational.
There are a variety of benefits of using video in outreach, but one of the biggest is that it instantly makes a potential candidate feel as though you’ve contacted them personally and made a connection, which starts to build a relationship between you immediately. Whilst it’s easy to simply read and ignore an email or LinkedIn message, a video in which you directly address a potential candidate, speak about their specific interests or challenges, and then propose a follow-up conversation is much harder to disregard.
Similarly, companies have begun to use video platforms such as TikTok to reach candidates and tap into a wider talent pool. TikTok is still very new to the social media landscape but is quickly becoming a powerful search engine. Recruitment agencies using TikTok can convey more of their brand and expertise, and can even make videos advertising a job opportunity that will reach a tailored audience and wider talent pool.
Tackle Challenges with Hyper-Personalisation
As previously mentioned, personalised outreach is a key method of successful candidate attraction. As well as using your prospect’s names and talking to them about current or past roles, a creative way to use this approach is to target the challenges they are likely to be facing in the jobs market at the moment.
One of the oldest techniques in marketing is to highlight a problem your target audience has and then offer a solution in the form of your product or services. Based on this technique, this candidate attraction idea involves identifying a pain point that a potential candidate is likely to have and then offering a solution that your recruitment agency offers.
These pain points may include a lack of communication during the recruitment process, an unclear hiring timeline, a time-consuming application process or miscommunication between hiring professionals. On average, just 5 applicants out of hundreds actually make it to face-to-face interviews, which can be frustrating for job seekers.
In order to demonstrate that you can solve these challenges, you must present a solution that offers value to the candidate. This value can just be the removal of that challenge from the recruitment process, but it’s even better if you can think of more benefits that come with your solution as well.
Hyper-personalisation can be used across a range of formats, from email marketing to landing pages, the images or videos you use in your outreach and the direct messages you send. Make sure you do your research beforehand so that you’re targeting the right people with the right challenges, and be sure to refine your approach as you learn what works best.
Create Personalised Landing Pages
Specificity and personalisation are key when it comes to reaching talented candidates and also ensuring that your outreach makes an impact. Instead of just sending prospects job adverts or directing them to a page with all your available roles, create personalised landing pages for each position you are trying to fill that will allow you to provide candidate-specific value and address challenges that are specific to the role and candidate who may be exploring the page.
You’ll also be able to use search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to include relevant keywords on these pages that potential candidates are searching for, helping your agency be found by more people and ensuring that you’re targeting genuinely interested candidates. Using SEO for recruitment is an excellent way to find active job seekers as people are more likely to trust organic search results.
If you need help with implementing SEO into your candidate attraction strategy, Growth Recruits are SEO specialists and know all the best practices and techniques to make search engines love your brand.
Get Creative with Email Marketing Opt-Ins
Email marketing can be used to assist with all kinds of strategies in recruitment, but when it comes to candidate attraction, you want to focus on the incentives you’re offering for signing up to your mailing list in the first place. While you might overlook email marketing in favour of other recruitment methods, targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue for businesses and this also applies to candidate acquisition.
Continuously providing relevant value is the key to an engaging and successful email marketing campaign, so you want to think about what you’re promoting when you’re encouraging potential candidates to subscribe to your emails and whether this is going to provide any value to them. You can then get creative with the kind of value-led opt-ins you create to improve this, such as the following ideas:
- Access to an interactive quiz or survey that provides personalised advice or suggestions on a topic related to recruitment
- The opportunity to select their biggest pain points in recruitment and then access to a downloadable guide providing solutions to each of these
- A resume review service which helps candidates improve their CVs as well as convey their expertise
- Provide exclusive job alerts for your subscribers to make them feel valued
- An invitation to an exclusive webinar or virtual networking event
- Entry into a draw with a reward such as a 1-on-1 career advice session or discounted recruitment services
Retargeting with Paid Social Adverts
Retargeting is an incredibly effective marketing technique for increasing awareness and encouraging potential customers to revisit the websites of brands that they have previously visited. It’s also a useful approach to use in candidate attraction in recruitment to help move prospects down the buyer funnel and start to increase your conversion rates.
In case you’ve not come across the term before, retargeting is a paid social media technique where users who visit and then leave a website receive targeted ads from that brand in the days after their visit. The idea is that this regular exposure will keep the brand at the front of their mind and increase the likelihood that they’ll return to the website intending to make a purchase or inquiry.
You can use retargeting to attract more candidates by setting up ads promoting your services to appear to users who have previously visited the candidate or jobs pages of your agency’s website. Remember to use the techniques we have talked about above to make these adverts as persuasive as possible: target pain points, offer value and try and personalise the content as much as possible.
Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing is a kind of marketing approach that uses unconventional or novel methods to create more brand awareness and boost sales. If you want to do something creative to attract more candidates to your recruitment agency, this strategy is definitely the way forward.
The nature of guerilla marketing means that these techniques can sometimes be considered controversial, so it’s important to identify the line between attention-grabbing and distasteful and make sure you’re on the right side of it. For example, making a claim that your client’s business is better than others is fine, but naming a competitor and highlighting its flaws is not.
Billboards are an ideal format for guerilla marketing, especially if you’re trying to increase awareness of your agency to increase candidate attraction.
If you don’t quite have the budget for that kind of campaign and want to be more hyper-targeted, then paid social media ads (whether images or videos) are also good approaches. Using networks like LinkedIn, you’ll be able to get in front of specific cohorts of candidates working for competitors and get your message across loud and clear. You can see some basic examples of this here.
Employment Branding
Employment branding is a buzzword that is cropping up more and more in conversations around recruitment at the moment. It’s a strategy that a company uses to position and market their business to make them an attractive employer to talented potential candidates and is one of the key things you should be focusing on if you want to take your candidate attraction to the next level.
Employment branding refers to a range of different aspects of a business, such as online reputation, candidate experience during recruitment, company culture and corporate values. For recruiters, a client’s employment branding informs how you pitch a role to a potential candidate and the kind of benefits and experience you can sell to them to get them to consider a position, but it also impacts how a role is advertised which can impact candidate attraction.
Instead of writing basic job descriptions and advertising these opportunities on your website and in your newsletters, use your client’s employer branding and employer value proposition to ‘sell’ the experience of these roles. This will create much more engaging advertisements, which in turn will lead to more candidate attraction.
Also, remember to tailor what you pick out from employer branding with this approach depending on the kind of candidate you are targeting. A mid-level salesperson has different requirements and expectations from a new role than someone at a graduate level, and you’ll make your approach much more effective if you bear this in mind and reflect it in the content you create.
Use Social Media to Attract Candidates
Your presence on social media is a great way to improve your employment branding as you can showcase more of your company’s culture. This may seem trivial but evidence shows that the number of social media users globally increased from 4.72 billion in 2023 to 5.04 billion in 2024. This shows that there is a growing number of people using social media and you can use this to your advantage while working out your candidate attraction strategy.
There are a range of social media platforms that businesses use to convey their brand and attract fresh talent. Recent evidence shows that 84% of employers use Instagram and LinkedIn for recruitment and 86% of job seekers look for jobs on social media. This is unsurprising as they are great platforms for experimenting with creative recruitment methods. You can share helpful content, discuss industry insights, highlight your employees’ contributions and experiences, and even drum up interest for job opportunities.
A great example of a company that does this well is Dell, a technology company based in the US. They regularly post employee testimonials and photos, which showcase their culture and emphasise the value that the company places on its employees. Likewise, they are quick to respond to questions from customers on their social profiles which boosts their user engagement and encourages potential candidates to apply by making them part of the conversation.
Summary
Today’s candidates are harder to find, harder to attract and harder to retain, which is why creativity is crucial in overcoming these challenges and making an impact. The above suggestions all have their roots in the best recruitment practices, and all they need is an innovative spin to help create an approach that will make a drastic difference to your candidate attraction rates.
If you’re a recruitment agency in need of help with your candidate attraction strategy, Growth Recruits is a specialist marketing agency in this industry that can support you with plenty of different approaches. Get in touch to speak with a member of our team about which of our services are right for your business.
