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How to Use Content Marketing to Attract the Right Employees

By John Hall, Forbes.com
Special to Online Career Tips

This article was coauthored by, Kelsey Meyer, President of Influence & Co.

Hiring new employees is painful. We’re obsessed with the amazing team we’ve built, so the pain is worth it, but the sad truth is that most employers absolutely hate the hiring process.

We’ve finally found a solution that’s easing the pain: We use content marketing to attract the right employees. We have written dozens of articles going in-depth about our company culture, core values, and overall opinions on the way a business and team should operate. When we started including a few of these articles in the job descriptions we sent out, we saw a major uptick in the quality of the candidates.

After interviewing our most recent group of candidates, we’ve come to a few conclusions as to why this move was so effective — and we’ve developed some tips that will help you reap the rewards as well.

Why It Works

Three central ideas have enabled this content marketing push to work, and they’re thanks to the candidates themselves.

1.     People who disagreed with our core values or quirky behavior self-selected out.

In our articles, we were extremely transparent about our flexible work environment and lack of traditional structure of set sick days and vacation days, and we may or may not have mentioned that we have a douchebag jar for employees to contribute to when they make a possibly offensive offhand remark. If a candidate didn’t like anything about our culture that she read in an article, she didn’t waste her time — or ours — in applying.

2.    People shared the articles with their friends.

People want to share content that makes them look cool (which you can learn more about in an awesome book, “Contagious”). If you’re writing about unusual facets of your company culture or hiring practices, your employees and their friends will want to share your article. How many times have you heard about a job description going viral? Most likely, not many. However, once we included article links in our job descriptions, our traffic to the careers page of our site grew by 200 percent (with most of the traffic driven through Facebook and Twitter).

3.    Candidates came more prepared, which resulted in better interviews.

Because we gave potential candidates some homework to do before even applying and made it easy for them, they went a step further and read more articles that our team members wrote. They came prepared, which allowed for a deeper conversation about our company and their skill sets. It removed surface-level questions and enabled us to ask targeted questions about their opinions on our practices.

Tips to Do This Yourself

Our success was completely built into the new process we’d created — and your company can replicate our success by doing three simple things.

1.    Publish your thoughts in publications your ideal employee is reading.

We wanted to hire entrepreneurially-minded people, so we got our articles published in Under30CEO. If you want to hire agency professionals, you may want to get published on The Agency Post. Target a publication that your ideal employee reads and will respect. This gives you a credibility boost against other companies they may be applying to, and it could pull in other potential candidates who happen to find the article organically on the site.

2.    Write about the things that make you unique.

Don’t rewrite your job description into an article (believe me, editors won’t go for that). Instead, tell a story about the way your values are reflected in your company culture and discuss openly the types of employees you’ve enjoyed working with. Write in a way that can add value to other companies going through the hiring process, as well as allow potential candidates to determine whether they would be a good fit within your organization.

3.   Share your articles with your networks.

Adding an article to a job description is not the final step. Encourage your team to share articles about your company culture on social media. We’ve noticed that our best team members found out about us because they saw something on Twitter or Facebook that a member of our team shared. People sometimes feel uncomfortable recommending friends if they aren’t 100 percent positive the person will be a good fit. Encourage them to share content about your company from a third-party source of the article, rather than the career page of your site, and we guarantee you’ll have more candidates apply.

Take Content Further with Recruiting Partners

The sad truth is that even with the assistance of content marketing to draw the best talent in, most companies still need help. A content marketing strategy, coupled with assistance from a recruiting firm like Objective Paradigm or talentRISE, can be the difference between hiring a dud and your next CEO. Ask these recruitment partners to help distribute the content you publish about your company. They’ll be happy you’ve already done things to make yourself more attractive to employees.

Celebrate your company’s culture and values by sharing them with the world. Not only will you attract candidates who can make an impact on your business, but you’ll also make the hiring process a lot less painful on yourself.

About the Author:

John Hall is the CEO of Influence & Co., a company that assists individuals and brands in growing their influence through products and services ranging from creating and publishing bylined articles to facilitating in residence programs for brands and much more. Influence & Co. is one of the leading providers of high quality expert content to the world’s top publications. Connect with him on Twitter or Google+

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