7 Candidate Attraction Strategies to Grow Your Marketing Team

The current job market is dynamic, with millions of candidates in search of roles across industries worldwide.

However, talent doesn’t just come to you – you have to work to secure your candidates. Given that the preferences and priorities of candidates are constantly evolving, you need to be constantly reflecting on, adapting, and implementing innovative recruitment methods to secure the best employees for your business.

In the fast-paced and competitive industry that is marketing, this is no exception. So you need to ask yourself: what are you doing to attract candidates to your marketing team? 

In this article, we delve into what candidate attraction strategies are, their importance, and how you can innovatively implement them to successfully grow your marketing team to a force of top-tier employees.  

What are Candidate Attraction Strategies and Why and Are They Important?

Candidate attraction refers to the process you use to catch the attention of potential candidates and make them more likely to apply for a role at your company. These strategies are the first stage of recruitment and involve businesses creating an environment that is attractive to candidates by having a strong employer brand, offering a competitive salary, and creating a positive workplace culture.

If you’re looking to grow your marketing team, you want to be sure that you’re attracting the best talent possible who will be an asset to your company. Thus, candidate attraction strategies are crucial to making sure that your business will thrive and continue to grow and succeed in the diverse and dynamic industry that is marketing.

Key Considerations For Implementing a Candidate Attraction Strategy

Before you implement your candidate attraction strategy, it’s crucial to reflect on several considerations to ensure that you have the strongest strategy in place for your business. We’ve highlighted the most important of these considerations below.

Understanding What Candidate Attraction Strategies You Already Have in Place

Before implementing a candidate attraction strategy in your company, it’s first important to consider what talent attraction strategies you already have in place, for two reasons.

The first reason is that you can reflect on these talent attraction strategies and identify whether they’re successful or not. If they are, you can continue implementing them or find ways to strengthen them further. If they aren’t, you need to consider whether these strategies can be replaced by better alternatives.

Secondly, scrutinising your existing strategy will help you understand what gaps are missing in your candidate attraction strategies and exactly how many strategies you have in place for attracting talent. With this, you can understand the extent of your efforts to secure top-tier talent and make a comprehensive plan for doing this to expand your marketing team.

Choose Where to Advertise Jobs

Before you implement your candidate attraction strategies, you need to decide what channels you will use. This will help you to ensure that you’re putting your job listing in areas where successful marketers are going to be spending their time, which increases the likelihood of bringing in a pool of potential candidates who will be a great fit for your marketing team. 

Typical recruitment marketing platforms include sites such as LinkedIn, but you may also want to think about what other platforms your potential candidates will be present on and then advertise your vacancies here to increase your chances of finding the perfect candidate. For example, you may wish to use platforms such as Indeed, TeamTailor, or Glassdoor to advertise your marketing role if you know that marketing professionals are often looking for roles on these sites.

Ensure that you’re building your employer brand on these job sites and that you have a presence so that your potential candidates are more likely to spot and engage with you and your job applications. It’s also worth keeping track of the sites that are bringing in your best candidates in the long term, as this can help you to strategically focus your efforts on these channels to try and attract more great candidates. 

Measure Your Candidate Attraction Rate

Your candidate attraction rate refers to how many potential candidates engage with a job listing for your company compared to the number of people who actually apply for that position. A high candidate attraction rate will mean that there’s less of a difference between the number of people who apply for a position in your team and those who view your job advertisement. 

If you have a low candidate attraction rate, this may be a cause for concern, as there’s something about your company or roles in your job listings that is stopping talent from applying. 

Having a high candidate attraction rate means you’re saving costs on your recruitment process and you’re maintaining a healthy influx of candidates. One of the best ways to achieve this strong candidate attraction rate is by implementing good candidate attraction strategies.

Candidate Attraction Strategies To Implement in Your Business

Now that you’ve understood the key considerations to make before building and implementing your candidate attraction strategy, you’ll want to understand the strategies you can put in place to increase the quality of candidate that applies to your marketing team roles. We’ve delved into what we feel are some of the most important talent attraction strategies that you can use in your business today. 

Develop your Employer Brand

One of the most critical talent attraction strategies is ensuring that you have a strong marketing brand. Known as ‘employer branding’, this is a critical element of attracting candidates and is one of the first that you should be focusing on when considering how to develop your talent attraction strategy. 

Employer branding is the image that you create and share with the outside world, including candidates, which showcases what you’re like as an employer. Businesses use employer branding to promote to potential candidates what the experience of working in their company is like through values, employee experience, and the workplace experiences on offer. 

By having a strong employer brand, you’ll be perceived as attractive to potential clients given your appealing reputation, which will increase your chances of securing top-tier talent in your marketing team. Attract your candidates with your employer branding by advertising the positives of your workplace, highlighting competitive remuneration, and other professional benefits such as learning and development opportunities or hybrid and remote working models. 

Use Employee Testimonials to Your Advantage 

Your current and past employee opinions go a long way in helping you to attract talent for job roles. At the end of the day, candidates need to hear how great your company is to work at from people who have had this experience first-hand. 

Getting your previous employees and current employees to provide their feedback on what it was like, or is like, to work in your marketing team will then create a great resource for you to share with future talent. When this is positive, it will be more likely to compel more candidates to apply for your roles. 

Promote Company Values

Promoting your company values is a great way of attracting top-tier talent. Your values are the guiding principles and beliefs that you stand for which shows the world, and future employees, what you are working towards. 

By sharing these with a potential candidate, you’re immediately seeking out an individual who shares your values, and so are attracting the best potential talent for your marketing team. 

If you haven’t yet defined your organisation’s values, or feel that these could be strengthened, we’d advise making this a priority. Having your core beliefs and principles in place makes it much clearer to potential candidates what your company is about and what it values the most, driving them to be involved in your operations.

Keep Your Candidate Application Process Concise

One of the biggest shortfalls that companies face when advertising their roles is a lengthy candidate application process. The longer your candidate application process, the more likely you are to lose potential talent to other competitors, especially if these competitors have much shorter application processes and are quicker to make their job offers to individuals. 

Ensure that you make your application process as speedy as possible, including only the most critical steps to ensure that the candidates you’ve attracted are well-suited for your marketing team. It’s worthwhile conducting a review of your application process to see where you can make efforts to shorten and streamline the overall process. This way, you’re taking proactive steps to keep your candidate application process concise which in turn increases your chances of securing the best talent for your marketing team. 

Create a Flexible and Culture-Driven Work Environment 

A flexible working environment is something that a large proportion of professionals are looking for. Research has shown that 40% of employers have seen an increase in requests for flexible working in comparison to previous years, demonstrating just how much of a priority this is for employees when searching for a role. 

If possible in your company, consider offering the opportunity for your workforce to work in a hybrid or remote way would limit your chances of losing exceptional talent who might view this as a priority. Especially given that nearly half (47%) of all workers prefer to work in a hybrid manner, with a further 11% preferring a fully remote working model. 

Not only this, but company culture has always been a crucial factor in attracting talent. Potential employees want to know that they’re going to be joining a company that has a positive working environment and aligns with their own values. If you have processes or events in your team that illustrate how you foster company culture, make this clear in your job advertisements. 

For example, do you regularly have company lunches or dinners outside of the office, or do you hold events or sessions to promote team collaboration? These are a few ways to nurture a culture-driven workforce that candidates will love.

Utilise Social Media to Your Advantage

Other than advertising your marketing team role on the relevant platforms where your potential candidates will be active, you can also utilise social media to your advantage. 

Social media is one of the most powerful tools for recruitment in our current digital era, and you can use its various platforms to your advantage to store assets that you can use to attract potential talent. These assets include reviews, employer branding, your values, core messaging, and employee testimonials.

45% of job seekers find that searching for roles on social media yields better results compared to traditional job searching methods, with 20% of these job seekers wanting to see more information about potential roles being advertised on social media. So it’s within your best interests to post as much detail as you can about your marketing team role on social media in an attempt to attract the best talent. 

Be sure to develop your social media presence, as this can be crucial to your talent acquisition strategy. Make yourself known on a number of social media platforms, create engaging content, and post regularly, as well as engage with others within the industry. This will build your brand on these platforms and give you a way of advertising your roles better so that you catch the attention of top-tier candidates. 

Think About Using an Employee Referral Scheme

One of the best ways to attract quality talent to your team is by building an employee referral scheme. This means that your current, or previous, employees can refer and recommend former colleagues or friends for vacancies that you’re advertising in your team.

An employee referral scheme is a cost-effective way of attracting talent compared to usual methods for candidate attraction. This is because the candidate in question already has a link to your company given that they are trusted by one of your current or past employees, which means you’re more likely to be attracting top-tier candidates to your company.

Summary

Your candidate attraction strategies are critical methods to implement in your recruitment process that allow you to successfully attract the best talent for your team. We hope that this article has given you the necessary insight that you need to grasp some of the best candidate attraction strategies, which you can then implement to capture the attention of some of the best talent and in turn build a team of quality individuals in your marketing team.

If you’re looking for support with your candidate attraction strategy, take a look at our marketing recruitment services or get in touch with the team to talk about how we can help.