If you’re feeling like you’re too busy finding candidates right now to be worrying about marketing, you’re not alone. But the irony is, good marketing is exactly how you stand out to the candidates you want to talk to!
The solution is to find ways you can get your marketing tasks done with as little time and effort as possible so you can focus your energy on making placements.
Here’s a few time-saving marketing tricks I use daily that should help you maximise the marketing minutes you have.
1. Share others people’s content
If you don’t have enough time to regularly write your own blogs, this isn’t a major issue. Being visible on social media is also about sharing content you like from other people that you respect in the industry.
Sharing relevant content written by others also shows you care about keeping up to date on industry news and the latest trends on the job market.
And if that’s not enough, you’ll also score brownie points with whoever created the content you share, meaning they’re likely to return the favour when you do have your own content to publish. It’s tactics like this that help you reach new audiences, so while it’s a good time-saver, it’s also important to your overall marketing strategy too.
2. Repurpose your own content
Good content takes time to create, so why would you only share it once with your network then leave it to gather dust?
Repurposing your content into different forms (for example, turning it into a podcast, a video or a presentation) will allow you to get a whole lot more out of the work you produce. Where possible, try to create evergreen content that can be reshared time and again without sounding too dated. It’s always nice to news-jack current topics but the downside of this is that content like this is hard to reuse at a later date.
It’s also a good idea to update and republish old content that’s calendar-specific (so Christmas content, etc). Just make sure you revisit and make any necessary edits to make it fit the current situation before you repost. For example, if you’re republishing an article and it’s talking about lockdowns and the pandemic, those parts will need to go.
If you republish the content and update the date to the present day, this is a less time-consuming way to create ‘new’ content than writing a whole new piece from scratch.
3. Bulk-schedule social posts in advance
Using tools like Paiger, or Hootsuite to schedule your social posts in advance is a lot more time-effective than posting individually in real-time. Every time you stop to share something on social media, you’re interrupting the flow of your day, so it’s important to keep these interruptions to a minimum.
Spending an hour at the start of your week to schedule posts throughout the rest of the week will free up your time to focus on the day-to-day tasks you need to keep on top of to place candidates. It also gives you the space to properly ‘get into the zone’ of post creation.
If your budget is tight, Hootsuite also has a free plan, or you can schedule posts directly within some platforms such as Facebook or Twitter for free too.
4. Focus on where your candidates spend time
A sure-fire way to waste time is to spend energy working marketing channels that your target candidates don’t use. For example, a lot of recruiters focus all their time posting on LinkedIn, but that’s not a platform that your best passive candidates use daily – LinkedIn is a space that’s full of other recruiters, not candidates!
Candidate personas are a great way to get to know who your audience are and where they spend their time online (ask your marketer or take a read this blog if you don’t know what they are).
Once you have a better idea of where your audience spends their time online, you can focus your strategy there to maximise results. The main thing is to keep track of your results and don’t be scared to change things up if your audience doesn’t bite. It’s just about learning and improving as you go.
Which takes me to my next point…
5. Drop tasks that don’t bring results
Always keep a close eye on your marketing analytics. Your recruitment software should come with a reporting dashboard that gives you a clear visualisation of what sources are working best for you. And if a platform isn’t bringing you the candidates you need, stop wasting time on it.
Track your recruitment metrics and reflect back at the end of each month to see what’s worked and what hasn’t. Don’t be worried about making mistakes – you’ll never know if a new platform is going to work unless you try, but just make sure you learn from the data so you optimize your strategy moving forward.
6. Use productivity tools and browser extensions
There are loads of great browser extensions and productivity tools out there that are specifically designed specifically to help you stay focussed when you’re busy and need to get things done.
The biggest time-saving tool for me has to be Grammarly, as it constantly scans my writing for mistakes and saves me a lot of time on proof-reading social posts.
It’s a good idea to put a little bit of time into researching and trying out a few new tools to see what ones work for you. The time you put in now will save you a lot of time in the long-run.
7. Ask a marketer for help
It always surprises me how little recruiters and recruitment marketers work together. So much of what you do is inter-dependent, which is why those recruiters who proactively work closely with marketers always get the best results.
If you’re struggling to keep up with your marketing tasks, ask a marketer for help - that’s what they’re there for!
A big part of being a marketer is staying ahead of marketing trends, and this makes your marketing colleagues an excellent source for new ideas on how to stand out to the right candidates in your market.
8. Automate what you can
As a recruiter, any technology that can automate marketing tasks is your best friend. Look into your recruitment software to find out what marketing automation features it has so you can use them to your advantage.
For example, are you running automated email marketing and SMS marketing campaigns? These are just two areas that any good recruitment software should be able to support you with.
f you’re new to the idea of recruitment marketing automation, have a read of the below eBook to find out how you could be bringing automation into your marketing strategy to keep the marketing clock ticking while you focus your energy on your candidates.
