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How to Engage Cleared Candidates with Compelling Content Creation Ideas

When competing for candidates with hard-to-find clearance levels and skill sets, it’s crucial to stand out from your competition. For small and mid-sized companies that don’t have an abundance of brand recognition, the challenge can be even greater. So how do you attract these sought-after candidates to your company and win the recruitment game?

Crafting an excellent job description is often just the first step—ensuring it reaches the right audience is where the real work begins. In addition to leveraging niche job boards / resume databases like ClearedJobs.Net to source and attract talent, it’s also crucial to create compelling content that will help you guide top talent through the recruitment funnel, converting prospects into applicants and eventual hires.

From video testimonials to visual job postings, there are numerous creative ways to reach cleared talent with relevant content. When used effectively, social recruitment and content marketing strategies can help you reach new audiences, engage with existing prospects and candidates, and help you seal the deal – landing your next great security-cleared hire.

How Great Content Can Improve Talent Acquisition

Producing content that goes beyond traditional job postings is a powerful strategy for several reasons:

• Enhanced Employer Branding: Share your company’s culture, values, and a glimpse into your workplace environment through engaging infographics, blogs, videos, webinars—the list goes on. Even when presented with one of your job postings, many candidates will look to your careers page and social media profiles for a taste of what you’re all about to gauge their level of interest. Content that showcases your brand and company culture builds a compelling narrative that attracts cleared candidates who align with your organizational ethos.
• Broader Reach and Visibility: Leveraging social media platforms and content marketing techniques amplifies your brand beyond traditional recruitment channels. This expands your reach to passive candidates and allows you to build community with cleared professionals whether they’re looking for a job now or down the road.
• Increased Engagement: Creative content, enriched with visuals and storytelling, is a welcome addition to typical text-based posts and links to job postings alone. By leveraging visuals and engaging narratives, your content naturally garners more shares and engagement, expanding your brand awareness organically. Posting content on social media platforms also fosters two-way communication, enabling direct engagement with your talent community and reinforcing your company’s brand in the security-cleared space.
• Educational Value: Blogs, industry reports, and thought leadership pieces not only attract candidates but also position your company as a knowledge leader in your sector. This type of content is important because it gives cleared professionals relevant content to engage with even when they’re not looking for a job.
• Improved Candidate Quality: By providing comprehensive insight into your brand and company culture, you’ll attract candidates who are well-informed and genuinely interested in the opportunities your company offers. This is a win-win for prospects and recruiters because it gives job seekers enough information to self-select out as well, helping to clean the deck of applicants who would have eventually dropped out.

By consistently producing engaging content, you’ll not only strengthen your recruitment efforts but also establish long-term relationships with candidates who may become future brand advocates and employees.

Engaging Content Ideas to Try

Not sure where to get started? Consider creating the following types of content to enhance your employer brand and connect with top talent:

Visual Job Postings

Transforming traditional text-based job postings into visual content can significantly increase their appeal. Try creating a short video job posting that includes key details from the job description like the title, required years of experience, key duties, and a few attractive benefits. The key is to capture attention with visuals, so make sure to include your own high-quality or stock footage of job search imagery. This is not intended to replace job postings, but gives you a visual element to share that will likely lead to greater attention and more link clicks.

Check out this example to see how a traditional job description can be brought to life with video:

Behind-the-Scenes Content

Behind-the-scenes content offers a glimpse into your company’s culture. This can include videos or photo series showcasing team-building activities, day-to-day work environments, or special events. Such content humanizes your brand and helps candidates visualize themselves as part of your team.

Testimonials and Success Stories

One of the most impactful types of visual content is employee testimonials. These can be short videos or infographics featuring quotes from current employees. Testimonials provide authentic insights into your workplace, helping potential candidates understand what it’s like to work at your company. Highlighting success stories also showcases the career growth and opportunities available within your organization.

Live Q&A Sessions

Host topical webinars or live Q&A sessions on social media or platforms like Zoom. Invite current employees to discuss their roles, career paths within the company, and answer questions from potential candidates in real time. Other topics for live streams might include your hiring process, tips for transitioning military and veteran candidates, and security clearance topics.

Career Development Tips

Offer practical career advice and tips through blog posts, webinars, or infographics. Topics could include resume tips, interview strategies, and industry certifications relevant to security-cleared professionals.

These content examples not only highlight your employer brand and company culture but also provide valuable information and insights that resonate with security-cleared candidates. By diversifying your content strategy and leveraging creative approaches, you can effectively engage potential hires and differentiate your organization as an employer of choice in the competitive cleared job market.

Leverage Your Content Across Different Platforms

As you create engaging content, think about how and where you can repurpose the content you’ve spent time putting together. Your personal and company social media profiles/pages are a natural fit for posting content, as they encourage interaction and sharing. But platforms like LinkedIn, Meta, and X are not your only outlets for sharing the content you develop. Make the most of your content by leveraging it in multiple places:

• Your Career Site and Job Board Profiles: Be sure to include content like high-quality images, infographics, embedded videos, blogs, and testimonials on your website’s career page. Go beyond the standard About Us verbiage and show, not tell job seekers why they should come to work for you. If you’re a ClearedJobs.Net job board customer, optimize your employer page by including a video that will engage cleared candidates.
• Email Campaigns: Integrate your best content into your email outreach campaigns to stand out in crowded inboxes. Include videos that introduce your company’s mission and values, articles that showcase employee success stories, or infographics that summarize benefits and perks. Varied content in emails increases engagement and drives click-through rates.
• Candidate Follow-up and Networking: Repurpose content to help you follow up and maintain engagement with candidates in your talent pool. Whether you’re keeping prospective hires interested for future roles or you’re staying connected with contingent candidates who have signed letters of intent, share relevant content like a blog post or video from time to time. This proactive approach nurtures relationships, strengthens connections, and ensures candidates feel valued and not forgotten throughout their journey with your organization.

ClearedJobs.Net Can Help You Create and Amplify Content

At ClearedJobs.Net, we understand the value of attracting and engaging security-cleared talent with compelling content. But we also recognize that creating quality content can be time-consuming. To support your efforts, we provide several ongoing opportunities to help you showcase your employer brand and job opportunities.

Share your insights and expertise and let us worry about the finished product. These are all free opportunities to participate in:

• Interview with a Recruiter Blog Series: Set up a call with our team to answer some questions about your company culture, hiring process, current opportunities, and your favorite job search tips. We turn it into an Interview with a Recruiter blog post on our site and share it in our job seeker newsletter (with 100K+ opt-in security-cleared recipients) and via social media.
• Guest on Our Podcast: Join us on an episode of our podcast, Security Cleared Jobs: Who’s Hiring & How, to discuss your company. It’s a great brand-building opportunity to brag about your culture, tell our listeners why they should come work with you, and plug your hiring needs. We blast out your episode to all the major podcast platforms and share it everywhere we can with our community of security-cleared job seekers. You can even embed the episode player directly on your site for easy listening.
• Military Monday Webinar Series: Engage with our transitioning military and veteran audience by participating in our Military Monday webinar series, which livestreams to LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube. We work with you ahead of time to pick a job search topic that is relevant to transitioning military, so you’ll be prepared for the questions our host asks you during the live webinar. It’s live but can be shared as video content indefinitely.

We amplify all of these through our social media channels and job seeker newsletter, reaching a diverse audience of cleared professionals seeking new career opportunities. Contact us at [email protected] to participate with us.

Engage, Inform, and Attract Top Talent

Creating and leveraging compelling content is not just a strategy but a necessity in today’s competitive landscape of recruiting security-cleared candidates. By crafting engaging content like videos and insightful blogs, and participating in interactive webinars, employers can effectively showcase their employer brand and attract top talent. Embrace these content-driven strategies to stand out, engage candidates authentically, and build lasting connections that drive your recruitment success.