Recruitment marketing
Recruitment marketing is the practice of attracting candidates before they're actively job-hunting — through employer brand content, talent community email, career-page SEO, conference presence. Builds top-of-funnel beyond the open-role posting.
What activities count as recruitment marketing
The category overlaps with employer branding but is more specific about funnel intent. Common activities:
- Career-page SEO: optimizing the careers landing page to rank for “[company] careers” and adjacent queries.
- Talent community newsletter: a monthly email to people who opted in but aren’t currently applying. Updates on the company, occasional role highlights.
- Engineering or design content: blog posts, talks, open-source contributions that demonstrate how the team works.
- Conference sponsorship and presence: senior team speaking at the conferences their target candidates attend.
- Glassdoor / kununu management: responding to reviews, prompting current employees to leave honest ones.
These run independently of any specific open role. The goal is that when a role opens, candidates already know the company.
Why it matters for SMBs
The volume of inbound applications correlates with brand recognition. For a 50-200-person company:
- A team known in its niche gets 100-300 applications per posting from people who heard of them before.
- A team invisible in its niche gets 0-30 applications from cold reach.
Recruitment marketing is the engine that produces the first state. The payback is 12-24 months out, not immediate.
What it isn’t
It isn’t job-board placement (that’s distribution) or social-media posts about open roles (that’s promotion). Recruitment marketing happens between job postings — the steady investment in being known.