The term “recruitment marketing” quickly became the recruitment industry’s favourite catchphrase back in 2016. But in reality it’s something all good tech companies have been doing for years. From free smoothies to slides in the office, startups have gained a reputation for inventing weird and wacky ways to attract the world’s best developers.
As the tech world is so competitive, startups have been forced to think up innovative new recruitment methods in order to stay ahead of the curve. So it should come as no surprise that recruitment marketing has also found a natural home in the tech world!
Developers receive hundreds of job offers a year, and setting up a recruitment marketing campaign is a sure-fire way to make sure yours stands out. But how can you attract their attention without swapping your office stairs for a six-foot slide?
As full-time TechSpotters, we know how hard it is to find and hire developers. But after years of trying (and not always succeeding), we have years of experience trying to get their attention!
If we need to reach developers living in a new city or working with an unusual technology, we run specific recruitment marketing campaigns. We test out new content campaigns all the time, for all stages of the recruitment funnel and for both passive and active candidates. Some work amazingly, some fail spectacularly and some have moments of greatness then never work again…
We’ll give anything a go! And sometimes it’s the campaigns you least expect that open up new pools of designers or engage a previously ignored group of IT managers.
If you want to incorporate recruitment marketing into your internal hiring processes, but you’re not sure where to start or need a little inspiration, this blog post is for you.
Here are our five biggest recruitment marketing campaign successes and one giant fail from the past 18 months:
1. We set up a relocation content hub
In order to attract candidates to Barcelona, we set up a blog called Barcelona Startup News.. The blog has grown arms and legs, and now has over 4000 monthly unique visitors!
We now publish all sorts of Barcelona startup-related content there, but the original intent was to showcase Barcelona as a tech hub and attract international candidates to the city. There is still an entire section on the blog dedicated to moving to Barcelona, with the aim of showing candidates what it’s really like to live and work in the city.
2. We shared relocation stories
We have seven different nationalities in the Nederlia office, so we know what it’s like to pick up your life and move to a brand new city. It’s exciting, but also massively nerve-wracking! It’s therefore totally understandable that candidates sometimes need a little reassurance.
In the past, we’ve shared our own relocation stories – as well as stories of candidates we’ve placed – on our blog, in email marketing campaigns and on calls with candidates. Sharing personal experiences creates trust and makes candidates feel like they’re not alone. If other developers have done it, they can too!
3. We spoke to candidates in their own languages
As we have so many nationalities, we can create email marketing campaigns in the candidates’ own languages. Obviously we communicate primarily in English, as they will be working in English and we need to know they can express themselves clearly and understand what’s being said.
But communicating in a developer’s native language makes our approach stand out, and sometimes it can be exactly what’s needed to push a nervous candidate over the hiring line.
4. We undertook in-depth interviews with clients
In order to give candidates already in the recruitment process more information and reassurance, we publish in-depth client interviews. The interviews give candidates insight into their potential new company: how and why it was set up, the onboarding process for new hires, the tech stack, career progression opportunities, etc.
When you join us, you have a fixed agenda, at least for the first few days. The Product Owner walks you through the basics of the app that you’re going to be working on, then you shadow someone for a while, you make changes to the remote repository, and so on. The point is that you start learning from day one.
5. We created infographics and downloadable content
We regularly create infographics, e-books and other downloadable content to attract passive candidates. The more candidate emails we capture, the bigger our network! Last year we designed an extended infographic which looked at the reasons developers move to Barcelona. It resulted in over 150 downloads in the first week! Most importantly, we put several candidates who downloaded the content into the recruitment process with clients.
….we’re not afraid to fail sometimes
As we have #nosecrets, here goes our big fail of 2018. We don’t fail very often, but this one will go down in Nederlia recruitment marketing history. In order to promote Barcelona as a great place to live, we created a series of infographics comparing the quality of life here to candidates’ hometowns. They did not go down well!
We did our best to research costs and salaries (and included our sources), but candidates sometimes felt the information was incorrect. We also massively underestimated developers’ love for their home cities, and received some unhappy replies. A few placements were generated as a result of the campaign, so all was not lost! And we learned some giant lessons along the way. But it won’t be a campaign we repeat any time soon!
Want to know how we source the world’s best developers? Recruitment marketing is only part of our tech recruitment tactics.
