Recruitment marketing is all about candidate engagement. How can you attract and nurture candidates to fill your talent pipeline before you even post a job application?

The concept takes its name from inbound marketing, which focuses on providing useful content to prospects in order to attract high quality leads. Only in the case of recruitment marketing, employers are providing brilliant content to job seekers in a cadence and style that drive better engagement.

In an age when unemployment is dropping and job postings are increasing, employers that can build the best brand and candidate experience will have a tremendous advantage in attracting “purple squirrel” level talent. Text messaging is an effective tool to optimize attracting, nurturing and converting talent in your recruitment marketing strategy.

Attracting

Whether you are commuting, working, or relaxing chances are you are being exposed to hundreds of different brands everyday. Text message shortcodes and keywords make it exceedingly simple for active and passive job seekers to express interest in career opportunities at your company whenever they encounter your brand.

This is how it works: your company posts its keyword (i.e. “jobs”) and custom shortcode (i.e. 12345) around hiring events, hospitals, college campuses, restaurants, hackathons…you get my drift. By sending a simple text message with that keyword to your company, candidates put themselves directly into your talent pipeline and are ready to apply when the right career opportunity arises.

Nurturing

You have a great talent pipeline, but there are fewer bigger turnoffs for job seekers than generic email blasts from corporate recruiting systems that advertise a job posting that is not even slightly related to their background. Text messaging is a great way to craft personalized content in a casual tone that shows your candidates you know who they are and that you are actually interested in what they offer.

Nurturing your talent pool at scale with company and product updates specific to their career interests tells them you have them in mind even if the perfect job has not been posted yet. Even the simplest message updating them on a product launch or announcing a new partnership will let your candidates know that you are sincerely interested in keeping them engaged until the next career opportunity pops up.

Converting

You have attracted some amazing talent using shortcodes and keywords, your nurturing campaign has been a hit and increased candidate engagement, and now you are ready to post a new job that will be a perfect fit.

Notifying your talent pool of the new opening via text message is a great route because it offers higher open and response rates, and shorter response times than email or phone calls.

Including a link to your job posting makes it easy for your candidates to learn more about the opportunity immediately and express interest with a simple text of “Y-E-S”

Text messaging is a simple and effective way for you to implement the concepts of recruitment marketing at your company. To learn more about texting for recruiting, talent acquisition and HR teams visit www.textrecruit.com.