Throughout 2024, the job market has shifted toward an employer-driven landscape, impacting recruitment marketing and employer brand messaging strategies. Stabilizing hiring rates have led to a more competitive job market, with candidates vying for fewer openings.

On platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, as well as employment subreddits, job seekers express frustration with “phantom job postings,” advertised by employers to build talent pipelines rather than fill immediate positions.

This trend poses both challenges and opportunities for organizations hiring over 1,000 individuals, emphasizing the need for effective talent acquisition strategies to attract skilled workers.

Key Trends Influencing the Job Market

1. Stabilizing Hiring Rates, Dropping Engagement Levels

Hiring rates have stabilized. There have been noticeable decelerations in hiring in the technology, information and media industries, which had seen over 11 percent growth in the last quarter of 2023. While this results in a more competitive job market for workers with fewer viable opportunities compared to previous years, this isn’t a “win” for employers. Employees are less satisfied with their employment, less engaged with their work, less connected to employer purpose and less likely to believe they are cared about as a person at work.

2. Employer-Driven Market

Current market conditions favor employers, providing a broader selection of candidates per role. This increase can put a strain on recruiting teams and screening processes. Some employers are solving this by not reviewing all applicants. Instead, they are conducting cursory reviews or “randomized sampling” of the overall applicant pool. It’s a problematic practice, which can inadvertently introduce bias and discriminatory practices, loss of true diversity and put employers afoul of regulatory compliance in some cases — none of which are helpful to your employer brand.

3. Where We Work

Where we work continues to dominate employment conversations and considerations. Many job seekers refuse to return to the office full-time, despite return-to-office (RTO) mandates from employers either in a hybrid or full-time capacity. Finding balance between employer desire for the return to in-office culture with worker demands for continued flexibility will be a necessity for employers wanting to attract talented workers and retain their current talent.

4. Technology Advancements

Advancements in data analytics and AI are not only shifting the way we work, they’re also reshaping the job market. As more routine and repetitive tasks become automated, the demand for manual, clerical and lower-level knowledge jobs is declining. By contrast, job opportunities in tech-driven jobs in data science, analytics, cybersecurity and machine learning are climbing.

Additionally, deep machine learning is impacting the talent acquisition landscape. An enhanced focus on data analytics has created the ability for employers to streamline talent acquisition processes while gaining deeper insights into prospective employee fit, projected productivity and more consistent engagement; all with an aim of creating more efficient recruitment processes yielding higher quality workers.

Aligning Recruitment Marketing to Candidate Motivations

To address these shifts and maximize engagement with prospective workers to optimize conversion, recruitment marketing needs to align with candidate internal motivations. This is best done utilizing positive psychology principles. Here’s how to do it:

1. High Achievement and Growth

• Messaging: To capitalize on this value, highlight success stories of the organization and teams. Showcase employee testimonials of individual employees talking about their successes and their career advancement and professional development programs supported by the company. Connect how learning and skills development help your team members inside and outside of the office.
• Visuals: Use photographs and b-roll of employees receiving awards, recognition, team appreciation and training. Sharing video of first-person stories of growth and development will be compelling for this value set. For investment real estate company New Western, “Life at New Western” is highly achievement-focused, by design and by the intrinsic values that make up their team. Sharing growth and stories of high performance are inextricably linked, as shown in the example image at left. However, they also demonstrate that you can share recognition with your teams and audiences in a fun, engaging way through their annual awards conference wrap-up video.

2. Create and Promote Flexibility

• Messaging: Understanding how flexibility plays into the demand for remote work is key to creating effective recruitment marketing messaging. Communicate any flexibility in work schedules, remote or hybrid work options and opportunity for autonomy at work. The point is to illustrate trust in your people, opportunities for self-direction and empowerment.
• Visuals: While many companies find sharing “remote work” in visuals to be difficult, this can be achieved relatively easily using an employee-generated content (EGC) campaign. Encourage team members to take and share pictures of their individualized work environments, where they work and empowerment to “work their way” as part of your team. Share how workers connect to each other, whether in an office or remotely, to engage in projects.  GoDaddy shares how, in many cases, this flexibility also promotes belonging in one of the employee testimonial videos found on their Instagram channel – it’s worth a watch.

3. Convey Purpose and Impact

• Messaging: Share the purpose and reason your people do what they do for your organization and the impact that work has for the company and others. Make sure you align skills with strengths and passions to attract new candidates aligned with your company mission as well as help current employees experience peak engagement and productivity. This alignment helps foster a sense of fulfillment and internal motivation leading to “flow.” Flow is a psychological state people experience when they’re performing at their best, fully immersed and satisfied with the work they’re doing. It’s great from an individual perspective and at scale, leads to improved organizational performance.
• Visuals: Use images and team member stories sharing what they see as the impact of their work on the company, their customers and the communities they serve. Remember: since people identify with people and not brands, keep an employee-first perspective whenever possible to maximize impact. EY provides a great example of this with their GDS Corporate Responsibility Lead, Magdalena, who shares the impact of her work and the work of her fellow teammates from the start of her employee testimonial video.

4. Foster Connection and Collaboration

• Messaging: People intrinsically yearn for connectionwith others. To maximize this value and motivate candidates to join your company, show how you build cohesion (how team members bond and work together) and help employees support each other to reach common goals. This involves time spent together, respect, a shared sense of purpose and mutual trust — the components of a harmonious and productive work environment where workers feel a desire to belong and are motivated to contribute to company success.
• Visuals: To maximize the impact of this value, include images and videos of team-building events, working together on projects, celebrating outcomes and social outings. This is another area where the use of EGC can be very valuable and compelling, as Salesforce shares in the image above, highlighting a volunteer day bringing their team together.

5. Emphasize Well-Being and Positive Emotions

• Messaging: People do not live to work. We work to live, so showcase how being part of your company facilitates and enables life. Share how you promote life balance, mental health and a positive work environment. Share testimonials about how this is lived out in the work experience.
• Visuals: Share images of your employees engaging in wellness programs at work, mental health initiatives, employee-generated content of “mental health days,” vacations and paid time off. Recently, Microsoft showcased on their Instagram channel, MicrosoftLife, that there’s more than one way to get into the groove for work (shown left). How can you use your content to reinforce to your team members and candidates that, as an employer, you support and enable them to be fully self-actualized, healthy and balanced individuals?

Practical Exercise: Understanding Motivators

If you’re struggling with how connect candidate values and motivations with your content and messaging, you’re not alone. Fortunately, there’s a psychology exercise called “Moving Motivators” that can help put you in the mind of your candidates. This exercise helps reflect on intrinsic motivators and aligns them with employment.

Step 1: Identify Your (Candidates’) Motivators

Here’s a list of 10 intrinsic motivators:

1. Curiosity: I have plenty of things to investigate and think about.
2. Honor: I feel proud that my personal values are reflected in how I work.
3. Acceptance: The people around me approve of what I do and who I am.
4. Mastery: My work challenges my competence but is still within my abilities.
5. Power: There’s enough room for me to influence what happens around me.
6. Freedom: I am independent of others with my work and responsibilities.
7. Relatedness: I have good social contacts with the people in my work.
8. Order: There are enough rules and policies for a stable environment.
9. Goal: My purpose in life is reflected in the work that I do.
10. Status: My position is good and recognized by the people who work with me.

Step 2: Prioritize the Motivators

For this exercise, put yourself in the mindset of a worker (you are one, after all). Define which motivators are important to you. Place them in order from least important to most important.

Step 3: Connect Motivators to Recruitment Marketing Messaging

Look at your ordered list of motivators. Reflect on whether these are the factors you consider when evaluating job opportunities. If you want to take it further, you can have a sampling of team members in each function complete this exercise. When you’re done, think about how each of these motivators are addressed within your organization.

Now, here’s how to translate these insights into effective recruitment marketing messaging:

Identify Core Motivators Best Addressed by Your Organization

• Curiosity: Highlight projects that involve innovation and research. Show how the company encourages continuous learning and exploration.
• Social Responsibility and Ethics: Communicate how the company’s values align with personal ethics. Share stories of ethical decision-making and integrity in business practices.
• Acceptance: Emphasize the inclusive culture and recognition programs. Use testimonials from employees who feel valued and accepted as evidenced by their engagement and performance.
• Mastery: Showcase professional development programs, challenging projects and opportunities for skill enhancement. Highlight success stories of employees who have achieved mastery.
• Autonomy: Illustrate how employees have the autonomy to influence their work and decisions. Share examples of employee-led initiatives.
• Flexibility and Freedom: Promote flexible working arrangements and the independence given to employees in their roles.
• Social Relatedness: Highlight team activities, social events and a collaborative work environment. Use visuals that show strong workplace relationships.
• Stability and Structure: Communicate the stability provided by company policies, organizational structure and role-related structures. Emphasize how a stable environment supports productivity and well-being.
• Goal Orientation: Show how the company’s mission aligns with employees’ personal goals. Use stories that reflect meaningful work and its impact.
• Achievement and Recognition: Highlight recognition programs, awards, and how the company values and acknowledges contributions.

Tailor Your Messaging

• Update Your Job Ads: Create targeted job postings and advertisements to reflect the specific motivators of your ideal candidates that your company can deliver on through the work experience.
• Create Recruitment Marketing Messaging: Use employee testimonials and stories to authentically communicate how these motivators are met within your company.  Companies like Recruitics, GBS, Exaqueo and The Muse are all readily available to help you create compelling recruitment marketing messaging. To explore additional partner solutions, visit our marketplace. 

Create Visual Storytelling

• Develop visual content: Such as videos, interactive digital marketing and infographics, to dynamically showcase these motivators in action.
• Use a mix of visuals: While video is outperforming other visual content at present, remember not everyone can consume video content. Using a mix helps ensure you can engage the broadest possible audience. There are many tools and partners who can help you develop this. In addition to the vendor and partner solutions listed in the previous paragraph, Zoomforth can help your team enable your employee population to create compelling visual storytelling in microsites using Employee Generated Content (EGC). Willo can also help you capture EGC and doubles as an asynchronous video interviewing tool!

Maintain Consistent Messaging for Your Employer Brand

• Unified Voice: Ensure that all recruitment materials consistently reflect your company’s commitment to supporting employees’ intrinsic motivations. This means maintaining a cohesive tone and message across all platforms. This includes social media, career pages, and job postings both for your career site and on job boards. Catalogue your created content by value and pillar to ensure you’re not over-indexing on one or two values. Have a healthy mix of all of your candidates’ primary motivators and EVP pillars.
• Regular Updates: Keep content fresh and relevant by regularly updating it with new success stories and developments within the company. Continuously showcase how the company adapts to meet the evolving needs and motivations of its employees. Maintaining brand consistency and asset management is critical and this can get more difficult as your program — and team — scales. Tools such as Papirfly, Cliquify and again, Zoomforth, are just a few of the technologies you can leverage to help solve this challenge.  

Conclusion

Incorporating internal motivations and positive psychology into recruitment marketing is a powerful strategy for attracting and engaging talent. By understanding what drives candidates and reflecting them in your messaging, you create a compelling narrative that resonates on a deeper level. Leveraging HR and TA technologies, such as AI-driven tools, video interviewing software and employee experience platforms, can further enhance your recruitment marketing efforts.

As the job market continues to evolve, staying ahead of trends and adapting your strategies to meet the needs of the modern workforce will be key to maintaining a competitive edge. Embrace these insights and tools to create an attractive employer brand that not only draws in top talent but also fosters a motivated workforce.

We want to hear from you! How are you integrating candidate motivation into your recruitment marketing messaging? Let us know or better yet, contribute to our publication!

For more tools to help your employer brand and recruitment marketing efforts, visit our marketplace now. Happy hiring!