Diversity Recruitment Marketing Strategies & Best Practices

“In order for individuals who come from underrepresented groups or different backgrounds, in order to feel attracted to a company, you have to be able to see that you will be seen there and there’s a place for you,” says Loni Olazaba, the Director of Inclusion Recruiting at LinkedIn.

That right there is the crux of why recruitment marketing is so important, especially for companies who care about diversity recruiting. 

As part of a larger emphasis on recruitment marketing for diversity recruiting, Fairygodboss quested to pull together the best and most effective strategies, best practices, and tools that actually help companies attract underrepresented talent. For support on that journey, we were thrilled to partner with none other than our friends at LinkedIn! 

We were thrilled to have two fearless LinkedIn leaders, Lauren Saunders, the Head of Talent Attraction, and Loni Olazaba, the Director of Inclusion Recruiting, join FGB’s Sr. Director of Brand Strategy, Amiksha Patel, for a live event on Recruitment Marketing for Diversity Recruiting.

This article outlines the event highlights, and features resources that can help companies break down everything you need to know about recruitment marketing and its impact on diversity. 

Continue reading for details.  

What’s the difference between employer branding and recruitment marketing?

Employer branding and recruitment marketing are ways in which organizations can attract talent. Lauren Saunder, the Head of Talent Attraction at LinkedIn, joined the recent Recruitment Marketing for Diversity Recruiting webinar and shared some of the major differences. “Employer branding is how job seekers perceive the company and your company’s reputation as a workplace. It’s tied to the company’s consumer brand and cultural values,” she says. 

“Recruitment marketing,” on the other hand, “is really the practice of using marketing strategies against your employer brand to activate it and reach talent.” Simply put, “employer branding is the what. Recruitment marketing is the how.” 

How important is employer branding and recruitment marketing for diversity recruiting efforts? 

Although a “great employer brand is the key to great recruitment marketing,” says Saunders, recruitment marketing is highly important to attracting underrepresented talent. “In order [for individuals who come from underrepresented groups or different backgrounds] to feel attracted to a company, [they] have to be able to see that [they] will be seen there and there’s a place for [them],” says Olazaba.

Recruitment marketing is how to do that. 

Recruitment marketing is all about creating and delivering the right message at the right time to the right person and from the right person. 

In job descriptions, that looks like leveraging gender-neutral and inclusive language, as well as including perks that underrepresented groups care about. For example, leading UK insurance provider, Zurich, wanted to attract more women. In 2019, they began a year-long test of including language around flexible work policies, which research shows is a primary concern among women and underrepresented job seekers, in 80% of their job descriptions. Within one year, they doubled applications from both women and men, and actually achieved gender parity in new leadership hires. 

Outside of job descriptions, developing and sharing employee stories are a great way to show underrepresented job seekers that they will belong. Qualtrics found that when they share employee stories, they increase applications from women and underrepresented job seekers by 16%.  

With the right recruitment marketing strategies and practices, organizations are able to diversify candidate pipelines, enhance their company’s employer reputation, and attract underrepresented talent.

Why and how do you build candidate personas? 

In the webinar, we talked about how important it is to really understand your audience and tailor messages and outreach strategies to that audience. One way to keep your audience in mind is through candidate personas. 

“Personas are a common marketing tactic to really understand your audience,” says Saunders. Candidate personas are all about putting together basic demographics and needs of the talent you are looking to attract, what they care about, how they job search, and what information they need to hear and see to want to apply for a job. 

What makes personas so powerful is it helps recruitment marketers “check [our] unconscious biases as [we're] writing content or developing marketing materials,” says Saunders.  

When putting them together, Saunders suggests talent professionals think about “how you educate yourself, gather the information, and understand the needs of the candidates and the folks that you're going after. It’s doing that research, diving in asking questions, getting to know people.”

In terms of resources to help you gather information, “your employees are the most valuable resource. Speak with new hires and understand what they wish they knew when they were looking for a job,” Saunders recommends. She continues, “Also, don't forget that your recruiters are an amazing source of knowledge. They are on the front lines and they are talking to candidates every day.”

Formatting-wise, Saunders shares that the format doesn’t really matter. “Your persona development can be as fancy or as simple as you would like to make it.” Some people choose to “go down a very academic part of building out a whole powerpoint deck of amazing personas,” but “you can also write it on the back of a napkin. 

Simply, “Understand the audience that you're interested in, that you're going after, and you're planning to target. Write that down on a piece of paper.” 

How to develop an effective Recruitment Marketing distribution strategy? 

Building a recruitment marketing content distribution strategy is all about meeting candidates where they are and delivering messages that will resonate with your target candidates. 

Saunders recommends companies “look where the gaps are in terms of the people that you're trying to attract. Start with those candidate personas. Think about who's in your audience? Who are you going after? And then how do you think you're doing in reaching that total addressable market that's out there for those candidate profiles?”  

“As we build our channel strategy for Linkedin Talent Attraction,” Saunders shares “we like to think of it with the three R's. 1) Reach, 2) resonance, and 3) reaction. We try to build our strategy to make sure we're hitting each of those.”

Reach is all about meeting candidates where they are. Saunders shares, “how do we make sure that we're working with partner organizations like Fairygodboss knowing that women live in this ecosystem and [FGB has] an incredible member-base. How do we make sure that for every audience that we're reaching out to we've got a presence so that they can find us without having to dig too deep?”

Resonance is all about making sure the messaging compels the desired audience to take a specific action we want them to take, whether it’s join a talent community or complete an application. “As we think of resonance,” Saunders shares, “we mean how does the stuff that we put out there makes sense to [our target audiences]? Does it attract people? Is it interesting? Do people understand who we are when they read our tagline in a post?”  

Saunders shares, “we have to remember there's the active candidate audience and the passive candidate audience.” That’s highly important to remember when building out your distribution strategy. She continues, “you don't want to just reach active candidates and believe in your application system or living in the job board. You really need to be out there listening and operating where the candidates live on a day-to-day basis.” 

Olazaba contributes, “we are humans. Relatability is key. If you can build relationships over time, candidates will remember that sense of belonging they felt from the outreach. When [they are] at a point of looking at a career move, [they are] going to go to with what resonates and where [they]have relationships.” 

How do you measure diversity recruiting and recruitment marketing? What are your KPIs? 

Due to governmental regulations and data privacy, measuring recruitment marketing for diversity recruiting is a challenge.

Olazaba recommends companies focus on the intentionality and putting in place the proper processes that lead to diversity and equity. She says, “what I think is fundamentally important is the intentionality. How do we ensure that we are being intentional in our efforts so that the results are automatically and organically there?” 

In terms of measurements, “one of the things that we do at LinkedIn is we have an intentional process which is our Diverse Slates Program. This is our systematic approach to ensuring that we have a diverse slate of talent at the on-site interview stage prior to making a hiring decision. So, having that in place is that north star,” she says. Continuing, “that is a good checkpoint and it's a good place for ensuring that there is inclusivity in the process.” 

Beyond the diverse slates check point, Olazaba partners with LinkedIn’s leadership, talent, and hiring teams to instill an inclusive hiring approach from recruitment marketing to hire. “Intentionality should be there from the beginning,” says Olazaba. “Having the right understanding and being intentional in every step of the process will organically manifest the numbers or the metric that you're looking for.” 

She adds, “I also think it's really important that leadership, the highest level of leadership, are aligned on the goal to intentionally hire a diverse set of talent for your organization and then have that be the resounding echoing that cascades all the way through down to the recruiter who's having the conversation with the candidates. So, we have a mechanism of systematic approach to ensuring we have a diverse slate of talent in the talent pool.”

As a final thought on metrics, Olazaba shares, “I really want to encourage us to focus more on the fundamentals of the intentionality of this work. If we’re all locked and aligned on the importance of it, and give the right time and the right investment into ensuring that we have an inclusive hiring process, ... the numbers will reach themselves.”

On the recruitment marketing-side, Saunders had similar sentiments about the struggles of measuring recruitment marketing for diversity. Due to EEOC regulations, data privacy concerns, and the sensitive nature of diversity data, “it's really important that you understand and work with your legal teams or whoever else you need guidance from if you're setting up a program like this, especially to understand what you can or can't do,” says Saunders.  

That’s why she recommends reporting on campaign data and not candidates. “We think of [data] in aggregate,” she says. “We're not saying that this woman came from this campaign. We're saying that we did a campaign targeted to women and it generated this many hires.” She adds, “I can't tell you if [the hires are]  women or males.” 

Despite a lack of specifics, Saunders says the campaign data “still gives us some excellent results and we can do a good job at measuring return on investment, which we call ‘influence hire.’ That’s the metric that we tend to gravitate around.”

“What we're really focused on there is when we reach out to audience with a targeted media campaign, for example,... if that target audience is a thousand people, how many people of those thousand people saw the post? That’s how many people you know to measure,” says Saunders. In terms of Saunder’s 3Rs, that’s the reach! “Then, to measure your resonance and reaction, you're looking further down the recruiting funnel to understand if you can connect your posts with your ATS data,” she says. Continuing, “we have it aggregated at a top level and we're able to see through tracking pixels when a candidate passes through the process of advertising. In the same way you [report on] advertising for companies, we can do that with recruitment marketing.” 

She adds ,”what I would say where it gets a little challenging is targeting. There are a lot of limitations on who you can target. But, if you really go broad with your audience and understand what good conversions might look like, over time if you measure that and can measure it consistently you can start to see averages. Then you start to see where you're above or below the line on your campaigns. That's how you can start to optimize and understand success.” 

How can companies in male-dominated industries like technology, finance, or even gas and energy attract women and underrepresented candidates? 

Olazaba shares several ways that companies can begin to attract underrepresented talent. And, it starts with education. “Education is so critical,” she says, “and in this day and age, it’s hard not to be educated.” 

Just as Jennifer Tardy said in What You Need to Know About Diversity Recruiting in 2021, Olazaba recommends everyone “get involved with the [underrepresented] people [you’re looking to attract] both in your current company and externally. The more you are engaged with the community, and you get to know people, and you understand the different perspectives, the better you're going to be able to relate to it.”

Along those lines, Olazaba shares how targeted partnerships can support company efforts. “Learning from partnerships like Fairygodboss and learning from organizations that are dedicated to this cause... is critically important.”

In other words, in order to attract underrepresented talent, companies need to focus on building real, meaningful relationships with members of those underrepresented communities.

In Summary…

After the event, what’s clear is that recruitment marketing is a critical component of a company’s diversity recruiting efforts. What’s even more clear, with the right mindset, strategies, and partners, recruitment marketing for diversity recruiting doesn’t have to be a struggle. 

For companies looking to attract underrepresented talent, there are so many resources available to support your diversity journey -- starting with the Recruitment Marketing for Diversity Recruiting webinar, which you can access here.

What’s more,  check out these related resources around content ideas and examples, holistic strategies, and some recommended tools and partners.

Related Recruitment Marketing Content 

• 3 Recruitment Marketing Content Ideas That Attract Diverse Candidates

• 9 Recruitment Marketing Examples to Support Diversity and Why They Work 

• 9 DEIB Tech Platforms for Recruitment Marketing, Diversity Recruiting, & More

• How Major US Companies are Hiring Women in Tech 

And always, feel free to reach out to us here at Fairygodboss to learn about how our 360-degree approach to employer branding, recruitment marketing, and diversity recruiting can help you attract, engage, and hire underrepresented talent today.

About Fairygodboss

Fairygodboss is an employer branding and recruitment marketing solution that helps companies attract, engage, and hire professional and technical women. Our career community for women, employee reviews, curated content, hiring events, and job platform helps companies enhance their employer brand, develop diversity-focused recruitment marketing, and build diverse candidate pipelines. 

Founded in 2015, Fairygodboss partners with over 150 enterprise organizations like Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Home Depot, and Deloitte to meet diversity recruiting goals and connect with the 15 million women who trust FGB each year to navigate their careers and find their next job.