A well-planned attraction strategy drives better quality applications, strengthens employer branding and improves long-term recruitment success. Maddie Boardman at Amberjack explains how.
Start with a clear understanding of your ideal candidate
Before launching, take time to define who you’re trying to attract. What skills, values, motivation, and priorities do they have?
Companies that invest in understanding their candidates create more effective attraction strategies.
Strengthen your employer brand
A strong employer value proposition (EVP) is essential in an increasingly competitive market.
Beyond salary and benefits, your EVP should highlight culture, purpose, and opportunities, aligning with candidate priorities like flexibility, diversity, and sustainability.
Regularly reviewing and adapting your EVP ensures relevance to evolving candidate expectations.
Choose the right channels
Tailor your attraction strategy to the digital platforms and event spaces where your ideal candidates are most active.
- Social media & digital marketing: Targeted campaigns on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram can engage candidates where they already spend time… on their mobile phones!
- University partnerships: Collaborating with key institutions ensures access to engaged talent motivated for their next career steps.
- Employee advocacy: Encouraging current employees to share experiences fosters authenticity and trust.
Audit your attraction strategy
An attraction audit helps refine your approach and ensures alignment with candidate expectations. Amberjack suggest considering these key areas:
- Employer Branding & DE&I: A Glassdoor survey found that 75% of job seekers consider workforce diversity an important factor. Your brand should reflect authenticity and commitment to inclusivity through employee stories, transparency, and commitments.
- Career Site Effectiveness: Bright Network’s survey of 14K+ students shows that Gen Z’s biggest priorities for graduate roles are People and Culture (36%), Role Characteristics (28%) and jointly, Remuneration & Advancement, and Company Reputation.
- Channel Performance: Which job boards, social platforms, and outreach strategies bring in the most successful hires? Reviewing past data helps optimise your approach.
Leverage data
Companies that successfully integrate analytics can forecast hiring needs and diagnose challenges, refining employer branding for long-term impact.
Amberjack leveraged labour market analytics to target, attract, and retain candidates for Octopus Energy Services by analysing trends in relation to gender, job titles, and experience. We established the audience and used data to focus efforts on making roles more accessible to talent in challenging locations.
The data showed that only 9% of the labour market was female across all roles. It became clear that our efforts aimed to not only recruit skilled females, but to find and upskill entry level female talent.
During the discovery phase, data-driven insights provide an opportunity to pivot on anecdotal feedback and take evidence-based actions.
Build a strong partnership
If you’re working with an attraction provider, success depends on collaboration.
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Clearly define expectations and deliverables: Provide a detailed brief, outlining essential skills, cultural fit, and hiring goals. Involve relevant stakeholders to ensure alignment.
- Maintain open communication and collaboration: Recruitment is two-way. Updates and feedback help refine the search and prevent delays.
- Ensure alignment on branding, messaging, and goals: Your provider represents your company. Work together to highlight your EVP for a seamless candidate experience.
Prepare your campaign
With tighter budgets and increasing competition, laying the right foundations is critical.
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Set realistic timelines – Map out key stages, including research, content creation, and media planning, allowing time for internal approvals.
- Internal alignment – Ensure all stakeholders are on board with DEI targets and campaign KPIs.
- Use data and innovation to maximise impact – Analyse past campaign data and explore new channels to refine strategy.
- Create authentic content – Candidates want to hear from employees. Use user-generated content (UGC), employee testimonials, and other content to bring your brand to life.
The discovery phase
This is all about defining campaign goals to ensure clarity on what success looks like for your campaign; understanding the EVP and how it can be effectively communicated, and conducting thorough market research to identify opportunities and benchmark against competitors.
Before we set any goals, there are some key questions we need to ask:
- What are your problems?
- What budget do we need to work to?
- What do you need from us, and what can you provide to support successful delivery?
- What are the role requirements, and what are your objectives?
- What are your timelines?
This bridges the gap between client and supplier. The next step is to translate insights into a clear, bespoke strategy that remains adaptable to any challenges.
Optimising your strategy with data
With organisations leveraging AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and automation, collecting the right data points is increasingly crucial. Amberjack’s Attraction team suggest focusing on these key analytics:
Application conversion rates
- Tracking applicant completion rates reveals pain points.
- High visibility but low conversion rates suggest a need to refine job descriptions, enhance employer branding, or simplify the process.
Candidate demographic trends
- Analysing gender, education, and location data ensures attraction strategies align with your targets.
Performance of different attraction channels
- Source metrics, such as applicants and views per source, help determine which job boards, social platforms, and events, deliver the best ROI.
- Monitoring and analysing both labour market and campaign data with purpose is necessary. Once you know the story, you can identify the pitfalls before they appear and keep the data reflecting your success.
Case study: Early careers attraction strategy at Morrisons
Amberjack has partnered with Morrisons for nine years, refining their early careers attraction strategy to address hiring challenges. Recently, efforts shifted to harder-to-fill sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and retail.
Using past data, we refined Morrisons’ university targeting, prioritising institutions based on social mobility, location, and past success rates. This approach helped focus resources, driving quality applications through outreach and campus events.
Collaboration with Morrisons provided deeper insight into their needs, improving candidate quality and hiring efficiency.
Here were our key takeaways from our partnership:
- Better hiring outcomes: More targeting led to stronger, more engaged candidates and increased offers.
- Diversity gains: Female offers rose by 20.3%, with a 53.9% increase in accepted female apprentices. Ethnic graduate offers grew by 17.9%.
- Stronger brand engagement: LinkedIn strategy boosted awareness, increasing followers by 30.5%.
This strategic, insight-led approach strengthened Morrisons’ pipeline while enhancing brand visibility and candidate quality.
Watch Amberjack’s webinar with ISE on Laying the foundations for an Effective Early Careers Attraction Campaign.