2. Employer Branding: Your employer brand encompasses how your organization is perceived externally and internally. In the context of recruitment marketing, focus on the external perception and appearance. Your employer brand matters. That's first and foremost. Big job boards have been so successful at helping recruiters get tons of applications that it's pushed employer branding to the wayside. But it's now more important than ever.

A strong employer brand will improve the conversion ratio of qualified job seekers into applicants (and ultimately into hires). It does that by providing job seekers with enough useful information about your company for them to ask themselves, "Is this the right fit?"

And that's a critical question, because if it's not the right fit, the result will be high turnover, and we all know how costly that can be. Your employer brand needs to be well-represented on your career site, collateral material, within job descriptions and anywhere that the company markets itself whether for recruitment or otherwise. Young job seekers care about things such as your company's eco-friendliness, work/life balance, etc. - things that are represented through your employer brand.

Remember: Your employer brand must be authentic. Don't try and make it a glossy, picture perfect scene. Make it real. Honest. Involve your employees, make it entertaining, and focus on the audience. If you're targeting a younger generation of job seeker, then how does your employer brand speak to that audience? If you're targeting a specific job category - say salespeople - what is it about your company that makes it stand out?

3. Search Engine Optimization: Marketers are great at using everything at their disposal to reach the right audience. Recruiters need to act the same way. Search engines (primarily Google) have grown in popularity for job seekers. Millions of searches are performed monthly on search engines by job seekers. The job boards know it - and they fight for ranking so that job seekers click through to them.

But what about you? Can a company's career site and jobs show up on search engines and attract traffic?

Yes. Absolutely. Search engine traffic and search engine optimization are a necessary part of any recruitment marketing strategy. One of the challenges is that most applicant tracking systems are not designed to work well with search engines; so the jobs you're posting onto your career site are most likely not getting picked up and ranked well. If that's the case, companies need to look at alternative strategies, such as creating recruitment landing pages that are marketing and search engine driven.

Remember: Search engine optimization isn't the solution to any major recruitment problems, but it is one very valuable recruitment marketing tactic you can use in a larger strategy.

4. Communication: Marketing isn't just about broadcasting your message out. That's advertising, and to some extent search engine optimization (to improve the broadcasting of your message.) But broadcasting alone won't solve your recruitment needs. It will help you bring in more candidates, but if you can't convert the right ones into applicants, does it matter? Increasing the pipeline can be important, but it's not the end of the solution.

Job seekers want more from companies -- more information (think: employer branding) and more interaction. We know that one of the biggest pain points for job seekers is applying for a job and never hearing anything back. Too few recruiters are looking at ongoing, active communication and relationship building as fundamental to hiring top talent.

Recruitment marketing cannot succeed without an increased amount of communication and engagement. That means having a career site that allows people to submit questions, chat, or interact in some way. It means staying on top of status updates to applicants, so they know where they stand. It means blogging and using other social media tools to create a network of people that you're actively in dialogue with, not to actively recruit or push a job posting down their throats, but to truly connect with over time.

Remember: Communication and engagement will improve any broadcast or outbound recruitment marketing techniques that you take on, by increasing the value of those efforts.

5. Re-Marketing: Sales and marketing people know that very few people buy the first time they interact with your company. It's rare that someone receives an email offer, goes to the website and buys right away. It's rare that someone buys the first time you call them on the phone. It takes multiple interactions before a purchasing decision is made.

Why is it any different in recruiting?

It's not. And this is an area where many recruiters are ill equipped to support job seekers and candidates. For example - let's say you post a job ad on a job board. Typically you're asking the job seeker to apply immediately (i.e. make a purchasing decision) or click through to your career site. Those that apply directly are most likely not the best candidates; especially if your job description isn't representing the job and company well. And if they click through to a career site that's dull, uninformative and non-interactive, they're likely to leave and never come back.

Those are lost opportunities.

Re-marketing for recruitment means that you need ways to hook job seekers. Your career site needs RSS and email subscription options, so a visitor can sign up for updates. If you're using recruitment landing pages, think about asking for basic contact information instead of an application, so they can express interest without applying on-the-spot.

Remember: Re-marketing is essential to building relationships with job seekers. And that's essential to attracting and keeping the right ones in the loop for when the right opportunity comes along.

Recruitment marketing isn't complicated. Leveraging principles from marketing and sales, we can easily break down the ideas and look for quick, simple solutions. And it's important to remember that recruitment marketing is a long-term strategy. It's not about hiring someone instantly; it's about building up a reputation in the marketplace, promoting an employer brand and connecting with a growing talent network. Your recruitment marketing initiatives should evolve over time - you test different ideas, track the value and keep re-jigging. It may take some work (less than you might realize!), but it doesn't have to expensive; and therefore any size company can develop successful recruitment marketing strategies.

Article by, Ben Yoskovitz and courtesy of Kenndy Information Recruiting Trends providing leading edge insights and strategies for the recruiting professional