Welcome to the millennial age! Where the world is led by tech-savvy individuals with access to all sorts of information and a loaded variety of skills just waiting to be put to use. It's no wonder brand companies struggle to sift through the masses to find the right blend of people best suited for their particular brand. In fact, the candidates often pick the organization they want to work with instead of the other way around. So, employers have to align their marketing and recruiting strategies to attract the people they like.

But how do they do that? How can they use their marketing strategies while searching and onboarding top talent? This article will explain the best way to implement and benefit from Inbound Marketing and Inbound Recruiting.

Inbound Marketing: A Brief History

Here’s one simple answer to all the big problems: Inbound Marketing.

The real question is: what is inbound marketing and where did it come from? Around a decade ago, HubSpot coined this phrase based on the strategies a brand employs to nurture leads and transform them into their brand evangelists.
The inbound marketing strategies call for tracking a new consumer's journey with the brand and keeping them hooked by presenting offers they are sure to like.

The strategy follows several stages meant to explain the path a consumer follows with a new brand. They are attracted to the website, they engage with the brand, they become customers, and thanks to continuously customized offers, they stay loyal and promote the brand.

Marketing inbound methodology

Now, let's talk about how companies can fuse this marketing technique (traditionally aimed at consumers) with orthodox recruiting methods.

Today, the term “inbound recruiting” has flooded the marketing world with inbound marketing ideas at its foundation.

The Dawn of a New Idea: Inbound Recruiting

Inbound recruiting is merely putting together a highly-optimized recruiting strategy to not only attract those looking for jobs but even reach the people who fit the bill but aren't actively seeking employment. These are called “passive candidates.” These passive candidates are currently employed but are still casually looking for other opportunities or at least open-minded to discuss opportunities that might be an even better fit for them than the job they currently hold.

Inbound recruiting is the same basic idea as inbound marketing. Create quality content, tweak the right way to reach the desired audience, and establish a relationship with potential candidates. Allow these potential candidates to get a feel for your brand, environment, identity, and much more. Eventually, they'll be enticed enough to send in their resume.

Recruiting methodology

Let’s take a look at the different aspects of inbound recruiting and its impact on a candidate's journey.

Attract Top Talent

As we said before, the world is moving forward really fast. The 21st century is the age of innovators.

The biggest challenge an employer faces is sifting through a plethora of resumes to find that one ideal candidate. The process can take ages, especially because many applicants do not even meet basic qualifications. Often the frustration leads to quick decisions and the wrong hires, which becomes further time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, since candidates have many more opportunities now, they prefer to bide their time and find firms whose vision harmonizes with their own. Therefore, the right candidate could just as quickly end up at the competitor firm.

Keeping that in mind, companies need to stand out from the competition and present themselves as the dream place for potential candidates. They must look at your company and see their own success reflected back at them.

Reach A New Audience

The best thing about this technique is the lack of a fixed demographic. As a company searching far and wide for talented individuals, it has been made easier to reach all sorts of people. Your company could alter content with specified keywords to attract those looking for career advancement.

You could also target people that aren’t currently looking for employment at all. A company’s reach is greatly increased by investing time and energy in generating a unique strategy based on inbound recruitment.

Employ Recruitment Funnels

An effective recruitment funnel is essentially made of four stages. Consider it a game-plan upon which you can build the rest of your recruitment strategy. Here’s how it goes.

Awareness: The first stage is when initial contact is made. Your potential candidate hears about your company and gets their hands on some information that would encourage further research. This information might come up in a news article, or blog post, or forum.

Interest: In the attraction stage, once you’ve caught a candidate’s attention, you can move onto the interest stage.

The first place they’ll check is social media. They’ll look up your website, subscribe to your blogs and invest time in understanding your vision.
This is when you want to make sure your website, content, and social media posts are all designed to attract candidates. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Application: If things go well, the application stage is next. This is when you’ve successfully convinced individuals to send their resumes. Although bear in mind, just because they’re applying for a job doesn’t mean they’re done searching.

Here, you must continue to nurture their interests by directing content about the company culture, environment and employees.

Action: The last stage is when the candidates are actually going through the interviews and tests to qualify for a job. You can make this process a lot more efficient, fair, and bias-free by implementing absolute transparency about the job description.

Continue reading for further details on how to attract more candidates.

Building Brand Reputation

Candidates begin job opportunity research by studying your company's vision, goals, presentation, and most importantly, company culture. Creating targeted and keyword-focused content or jazzing up your website will help a lot at this stage. High-quality websites are a necessity when looking to attract talent to your company.

Steady traffic of talented and interested candidates begins when you make efforts to augment your brand among talent networks and communities. Of course, successful employer branding isn't the result of a one-day effort. It takes time and patience and many revisions until you start to see marked changes.

First, employers need to polish their digital channels via Search Engine Optimization and running Pay-per-click ad campaigns. Here are more ideas on how brands can effectively attract potential employees.

  • Post job opportunities on job portals like Indeed and Glassdoor.
  • Update your website's career page for active job seekers and create an effortless job application process for them.
  • Create user-friendly websites that consist of a simple-to-use structure where the user can easily find the required information.
  • Create marketing campaigns for social media channels to nudge passive candidates.
  • Comply with GDPR (general data protection regulations) to secure your website. Employees feel more comfortable applying to secure sites rather than unsecured sites.

Implementing this checklist can massively improve your inbound recruiting strategy. Be sure to figure out the best things that work for your brand.

Emphasize your Brand Values to Attract Suitable Candidates

Your emphasis should be on attracting candidates who identify as your company’s ideals. Therefore, you should enhance your Employee Value Proposition (EVP) and magnify your brand values in your digital channels – including your website, social media platforms, or third-party job posting platforms.

Keeping that in mind, you need to personalize your content while highlighting your mission, goals, and company culture and maintaining a consistent brand voice. Trust us: the best way to attract candidates is to put out content that will grab their attention and steer them towards you.

Let Your Potential Candidates Meet their Potential Colleagues

Once you've got a candidate interested, you want to remove any remaining reservations by encouraging them to mingle with future colleagues. To make sure this works, you have to start at home and ensure your current employees are content in their roles with you.

Ensure your environment is one where all your employees are happy and willing to share that joy on social media for recruits to see.

Engage Passive Candidates

According to Workonic's job search survey, 73% of job seekers are passively looking for job opportunities. The best way to nudge a passive candidate is via:

  • Highlighting the brighter aspects of the job opportunity like employee benefits, career growth opportunities, career advancement plan, etc.
  • Summarizing job expectations, responsibilities, skills, qualifications, location, etc., to target a specific group of qualified applicants.
  • Mentioning hard and soft skills in the job posting to give an idea about a job's demands.

On the whole, convincing a passive candidate for a job switch is more daunting because they're already settled and would only switch if the opportunity provides them a ladder for a bigger career jump.

Mobile Recruiting

With the advent of mobile recruiting apps and social recruiting, it would be remiss of you not to take advantage of these different platforms.

Optimize your websites, blogs, and every piece of content that depicts your brand image for mobile. Keep each element of your interface responsive and ensure that all channels lead to mobile-optimized career pages. Furthermore, declutter the whole process by simplifying the job application process, application forms, Call-to-actions (s), etc.

Increase Visibility on Search Engines

All the content writing we've discussed above to attract candidates is only as good if it’s SEO-ranked. Ensure that the content your putting outreaches the desired audience by employing SEO techniques, including long-tail keywords, on-site optimization, backlinking, etc.


With life racing all around you, you can’t sit and wait for the best candidates to walk through your doors. You have to go out and look for them. Implementing this sustainable design of inbound recruiting strategy is the best way to bring skilled individuals into your company's corridors.

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Proactive Search Partners is a Digital Marketing & Recruiting Agency headquartered in Virginia Beach. We help our clients attract talented professionals and new customers or patients they require to grow and maintain stability.

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