Here are a few ways to think of recruiting as marketing and transform your hiring process:

Branding

In marketing, your brand is everything. It defines the company and helps form opinions about the company. In recruiting, your employer brand is everything. The employer brand defines your workplace, the company culture, and lets job seekers know what to expect.

Branding is one of the most important pieces of successful recruiting. Among executives and HR professionals surveyed for a December 2014 Brandemixreport, 80 percent said they believe employer branding is effective.

Create a strong employer branding by sharing your company story, values, and the office culture. Give job seekers an inside look of what it’s to like to work with you and what is most important to the work culture.

Content marketing

Branding isn’t limited to promoting the company on social media. The best marketers provide useful information and interesting content to their target audience. Content marketing is key to grabbing customers’ attentions and building a strong following. Content builds awareness for the brand, drives traffic to the website, and turns visitors into customers.

Content marketing can do the same for recruiters. Provide job seekers with information they’re looking for. Post job search tips, career advice, and industry news and share other articles that would interest the professionals you want to hire. Content will drive candidates to your website and help to build trust and rapport before they talk to anyone from the company.

Personas

Marketers carefully study their audience to understand their attitudes and behaviors in order to create the right messages. They create detailed customer personas that profile their typical target audience member, detailing their wants, needs, and everyday problems.

To reach the right job seekers, you need to know everything about them. What motivates them? What are their goals? What do they value in a workplace? Draw up the persona of your dream candidate for the job and then target them, based on their wants and needs.

The funnel

Marketing aims to reach customers with the right message at the right time to influence their decisions. Marketers follow consumers through the marketing funnel, which tracks their stages through the buying decision process. At each stage, different messages can help push them to the next stage until they eventually decide to make the purchase.

In recruiting, you need to reach different candidates in different ways throughout the recruiting process. For example, your posts on LinkedIn should aim to get passive candidates interested in your company, whereas on your website, your message should aim to lead interested applicants to apply.

Conversions

Marketing efforts mean nothing if leads don’t convert. It’s all about the conversions. Recruiting efforts don’t matter if you don’t hire the candidate. You need to lead the candidate through the application, interview, and decision process.

Send personalized communication to build relationships with promising professionals to build a talent pipeline. Let the candidate know what to expect from the hiring process and communicate with them the entire time.

By adopting a marketing mindset, you can better target the job seekers you want and recruit top professionals.