Recruitment marketing automation: How to reach top talent with less effort

Ask many savvy business owners what their greatest asset is, and you’ll likely hear that it’s their people more than once. It’s no surprise that recruiting talent has become a very competitive (and critical) part of running a successful organization. In many industries, employee turnover remains a challenge. So, how do you stay ahead and attract the top talent on the market? One way is recruitment marketing automation. 

In this post, part of our blog series on recruitment marketing, our experts cover some ways to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and other tools to streamline hiring processes, better engage with potential employees, and attract and hire outstanding candidates. 

If hiring is one of your top priorities, implementing smart recruitment marketing strategies can help you stand out in a competitive job market and set your organization up for growth. Other articles in this series include:

• Bringing proven marketing techniques to your hiring process
• Writing job descriptions for better engagement
• Improving career web pages
• Overcoming job-ad fatigue

Whether you’re nurturing passive candidates or responding to applicants in real time, keep reading to learn how launching a recruitment marketing strategy that incorporates AI can help you streamline repetitive tasks, giving you the time you need to focus on setting your business apart and building relationships with job seekers.  

What is recruitment marketing automation? 

Automated marketing for recruitment involves using talent acquisition technology, often driven by AI or machine learning, to automate tasks involved with hiring. Often it focuses on everything that happens before the interview, including:

• Promoting employment opportunities (including internships)
• Engaging with passive candidates
• Following up with job seekers and applicants
• Nurturing talent pools over time

The goal of automation in recruiting and marketing is to empower your team to accomplish more and do that work more effectively, all with fewer resources. For example, some of the latest solutions in recruitment marketing software include features that eliminate repetitive tasks (such as writing the same follow-up email 100 times to 100 different candidates) while also helping to ensure that the most qualified candidates never fall through the cracks during the hiring process. In the world of recruiting, there may be nothing worse than losing a potential great employee because you forgot to hit send on an email. 

Recruitment marketing automation helps your team eliminate manual, one-off messages and deliver personal and scalable communication based on candidate behavior, just like any brilliant, modern marketing campaign.

The best marketing and recruiting automation tools allow you to engage with job candidates in strategic and meaningful ways. Other benefits of these solutions include:

• Faster response times that create a better job-seeking experience
• More scalable communications that require less manual follow-up
• Data-driven insights that help your hiring team better track what works and make improvements as needed, so you don’t fall behind the competition

Beyond the reasons mentioned above, talent acquisition automation also benefits job seekers who may be interested in joining your company. 

Why automate candidate engagement? 

Candidates have high expectations

Did you know that 62% of job seekers report losing interest in roles because the hiring process took too long? For better or for worse, we live in a world of instant gratification. The internet and mobile devices have put instant information at our fingertips, wherever we are. Apps like DoorDash and InstaCart mean you can get just about anything delivered to you with a few taps of your fingers. The reality is, we’ve been conditioned out of patience. 

Correspondingly, job seekers today expect the kind of timely, relevant communication they get from brands and services in their everyday life. That means the days of a single email confirmation—and weeks of silence—have gone the way of the paper catalog.

Recruiters are overwhelmed

Depending on the size of your business, your team may manage dozens of reqs and hundreds of applicants, which means personalized outreach is often the first thing to go. There is simply not enough time in the day.

Automation bridges that gap by helping your recruiters:

• Send timely messages based on candidate activity
• Nurture passive talent over time
• Re-engage those who drop off mid-process

You don’t have to sacrifice personalization

You might think that enabling automation means you will lose the ability to create personalized touchpoints—the type of communication that builds relationships and drives interest in your company. However, modern automation tools enable you to tailor messaging based on specific actions, such as job clicks, applications started, emails opened, and more. Done right, automation makes candidate communication feel more human, not less.

4 ways to automate engagement with job seekers

So now that you know the “what” and the “why” of recruitment marketing automation, it’s time for the most critical part: the “how.” Let’s talk about some of the strategies and tactics for how your organization can use recruitment automation in your talent pipelines.

Email nurturing

Setting up workflows that are triggered by behaviors allows you to consistently and proactively engage with potential candidates. This not only makes candidates feel like they are a priority, but it can also be a valuable tool for informing potential employees about the benefits of working at your company. Additionally, using automations triggered by specific behaviors enables you to be strategic and intentional about your communication. Here are some examples of the types of workflows triggered by various behaviors:

• Visited job page but didn’t apply = send role overview + employee testimonial
• Started application but dropped off = send FAQ or recruiter contact
• Applied = send next steps + culture video

For example, a hospital’s hiring team might use an automated recruitment email campaign to nurture applicants for nursing jobs. The first message might feature a “day in the life” video from an RN at the location where the candidate applied to work, another could include a quote from a team lead from that location, and the last might offer a Q&A with a recruiter.

LinkedIn outreach

LinkedIn offers native tools that can help you automate your online communication with potential candidates. There are also other automation platforms (e.g., Expandi or Octopus CRM) that can help personalize and scale outreach without making candidates feel like they’re being spammed. A couple of keys for automated LinkedIn outreach:

• Use dynamic fields (name, role, shared interests)
• Time messages to feel human, not robotic

Here’s an example of what a two-part message flow could look like: 

1. “Hi [Name], I noticed your background in [field]. We’re growing our [team] at [Company]. Thought you might be open to hearing more?”
2. Follow-up: “Wanted to circle back in case this timing is better. Happy to share details or connect you with a teammate if you’re curious.”

Chatbots

AI-powered bots can help you answer questions and engage with candidates in real-time. For instance, SSM Health saw a 99% reduction in the time to schedule interviews by using their chatbot, according to Paradox, maker of the technology the healthcare business is using to automate this part of its interactions with job seekers.

Curious how might you use a chatbot to support your hiring practices? One popular way is to use this type of recruitment marketing automation tool to help answer FAQs (“What’s the salary range?” “Do you offer remote?”) or guide candidates to the right roles. 

Additionally, there are recruitment marketing platforms that include chatbot tools to help you schedule interviews or connect directly with recruiters. The best part is that you can set up these tools to work on behalf of your company 24/7, giving you an advantage since many job seekers research future positions during evening hours or weekends when your hiring staff might be off the clock.

Social media

Automating your social media posts and content can be a smart way to automate recruitment marketing. You can schedule job posts and culture content with tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, or Sprout Social, as well as auto-reply to DMs or comments about jobs. By amending links with UTM parameters, you can track which posts drive traffic to your applications and understand what content resonates most with your audience. You might not think of social media as a recruitment platform, but automation can help you make social media an excellent tool for recruiting employees. 

For example, a nonprofit might use recruitment marketing automation to rotate weekly Instagram stories showcasing various roles. Each story concludes with a call-to-action (CTA) to a recruitment landing page specifically tailored for that department.

What’s next?

Automation doesn’t replace good recruiting—it makes it scale and helps free your team up to focus on their most important tasks. When used right, recruitment marketing automation helps keep candidates engaged, teams focused, and pipelines warm. 

There’s no need to do everything right away. Instead, just start simple. For your business, that might mean creating one email sequence, one automated LinkedIn campaign, and one chatbot to handle basic questions job seekers have when they visit your careers web page. Track what’s working in real-time, and use those recruitment marketing insights to refine and expand your efforts at every step.

Automate without losing the human touch

For over two decades, TBH Creative has helped organizations modernize hiring processes to build better teams with dynamic career microsites, recruitment landing pages, paid ad campaigns, and more. If you’re short on time, struggling to get the results you need from outdated advertising tactics, or are unsure how to get started with automated recruitment marketing, we can help.

Our experts can help you implement recruitment marketing automation tools that engage the right job seekers and streamline your hiring funnel. Let’s talk.