Peak hiring season may be January, but the end of summer comes a close second. Why do so many people look for jobs in September? Probably because the summer holidays were so fun-packed and stress-free and the thought of going back to an unfulfilling job makes people want to reconsider their options.

So, how can you take advantage of people’s desire to change jobs at the end of summer? Let’s explore how to attract talent in the busy September hiring market.

Tell us your recruitment challenge.

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1. Build a strong employer brand

Employer branding is, essentially, the process of managing your reputation as an employer with the wider world. So that, when passive candidates think about your business, they think only good things. When that happens, you’re in a great position to start engaging them with messages that make them want to come and work for you—rather than your competitors.

An employer brand takes into consideration things like your employer value proposition, your message and tone of voice, the look and feel of your employer communications and the various places along the candidate journey that you can engage your audience. When you put all these aspects in place, you wrestle back control of the conversation around your business as an employer. Essential when you’re competing with so many other employers in the busy September hiring period.

Ask us about employer branding.

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2. Develop an effective media strategy

 Posting your jobs on online job boards used to be the best way to get candidates applying for your roles—and they’re still useful. But, because some of the best ones are now free to use, investing your money across other channels is probably a wiser use of your budget if you want to win the post-summer war for talent.

For instance, mobile advertising is growing in power, simply because so many people spend so much of their time on their phones, so reaching them there with geotargeted messages can prove really fruitful. Another example would be programmatic advertising, which bids for online ad space based on individual users’ browsing history, demographics, and other identifying factors that align them with your target audience.

Ask us about media strategy.

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3. Learn how to become a more inclusive employer

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) are signifiers of an employer that cares about its employees. So, when you demonstrate those qualities within your employer brand messaging, you’ll become more attractive to a much wider range of people within your target audience as you enter your autumn recruitment season.

DE&I has become such an overused catch-all term, however, that it’s not obvious what any of those individual aspects mean without breaking them down into their component parts:

• Diversity means attracting people of different ages, genders, sexual orientations, ethnicities, religions and physical and mental abilities. It’s important because it leads to a richer workforce with broader ways of looking at the world.
• Equitable hiring means giving an advantage to underrepresented peoples to bring workforces into balance in terms of their diversity. Equitable employment means opening up leadership pathways and support networks to underrepresented peoples so that they are able to thrive to the same degree as overrepresented groups.
• Inclusion means making your workplace feel welcoming to people from all walks of life, for instance, making your workplace more accessible to people with disabilities. This is important because it helps you to attract and retain more diverse employees. 

Ask us about DE&I strategy. 

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4. Start a Blog about your workplace

Brand marketing has been successfully using blogging to drive organic traffic to websites so that they buy products for many years. Employers, however, haven’t quite cottoned onto the fact that it can do exactly the same thing in terms of pipelining talent to apply for jobs.

A properly planned and executed employer marketing blog will deliver massively increased numbers of exactly the kind of people you want to employ to your careers website, completely organically (so without any media spend). How? By building what’s known as an internal links network of keyword-rich content.

In layman’s terms this means many different high-quality articles all hyperlinked to each other, which contain the exact search terms your candidates are looking for on Google. Together, they tell Google that you are an employer of expertise, authority and trust (E-A-T), so Google will start to rank your careers pages higher when your target audience searches online.

And the best thing is, it’s not just a seasonal recruitment approach—it’s a long-term engagement strategy that will maintain your visibility throughout the financial year.

Ask us about starting a careers blog. 

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5. Leverage the power of a change of career in your content marketing

Great employer marketing campaigns encourage certain desired audience actions at certain times of year. By theming employer content around timely subjects, you engage the widest possible number of target candidates who are all thinking about that subject at that time.

At the end of summer, this of course means tapping into people’s reluctance to go back to their tired old jobs and their latent desire to start over somewhere else. You can do this across videos, eBooks, whitepapers, online events (e.g., webinars and classes), podcasts, and other platforms. The message simply has to be built around why September is such a great time at your specific organisation.

The best thing about this approach is that you don’t look like you’re desperate for people to join you. Rather, you make them desperate to join you, by showing them authentic content that proves your attractiveness as an employer.

Ask us about content marketing.

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