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Attracting top early careers talent isn’t just about posting job adverts and hoping for the best – it begins with a clear strategic foundation. A well-planned Attraction campaign drives better quality applications, strengthens employer branding, and improves long-term recruitment success. But how do you build a strategy that truly resonates with the next generation of talent?
We’re exploring a structured, strategic approach that spans the entire Attraction lifecycle. Each phase is crucial in shaping a successful campaign that is data-led, targeted, and adaptable to changing needs.
Start with a Clear Understanding of Your Ideal Candidate
Before launching any campaign, take the time to define who you’re trying to attract. What skills, values, and motivation do they have? What are their priorities – career development, workplace culture, or flexibility? Companies that invest in understanding their candidates – through surveys, market research, and persona mapping – create more effective recruitment strategies.
Strengthening Your Employer Brand
A strong employer value proposition (EVP) is essential in an increasingly competitive early careers market. Beyond salary and benefits, your EVP should highlight your culture, purpose, and growth opportunities, aligning with candidate priorities like flexibility, diversity, and sustainability.
Regularly reviewing and adapting your EVP ensures you stay relevant to evolving candidate expectations leading to:
- Higher applicant conversion and offer acceptance rates – A clear, compelling EVP attracts and engages the right talent from the very start.
- Improved diversity – Widening participation begins by tracking DE&I representation helping to build an inclusive, culturally aligned workforce.
- More efficient recruitment and stronger retention – Reducing time-to-fill and cost-per-hire creates a sustainable hiring process.
By investing in employer branding and a strategic foundation, companies can attract, engage, and retain top early-career talent.
Choose the Right Channels
Selecting the right channels to reach early careers talent is critical. Rather than taking a broad approach, tailor your strategy to the digital platforms and event spaces where your ideal candidates are most active. Consider:
- 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 direct access to engaged talent motivated for their next steps in their career.
- Employee advocacy – Encouraging current employees to share experiences fosters authenticity and trust.
Audit Your Current Early Careers Attraction Strategy
An Attraction audit helps refine your approach and ensures alignment with evolving candidate expectations. Consider 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 a commitment to inclusivity through employee stories, transparency reports, and genuine commitments to DE&I.
- Career Site Effectiveness: Bright Network’s survey of over 14K students shows that Gen Z’s biggest priorities when it comes to looking for a graduate role are… a company’s People and Culture (36%), Role characteristics (28%) and jointly, Remuneration/Advancement, and Company Reputation & Image. Ensure your recruitment marketing material showcases an authentic employee voice and provides transparency,
- Channel Performance: Which job boards, social platforms, and outreach strategies bring in the most successful hires? Reviewing past data helps optimise your approach for better reach and engagement.
Leverage Data to Strengthen Your Strategy
In today’s competitive hiring landscape, labour market analytics and data-driven recruiting allows organisations to optimise hiring processes and enhance talent Attraction. Companies that successfully integrate labour market analytics into their recruitment efforts can forecast hiring needs and diagnose challenges, such as high turnover, and refine employer branding for long-term impact.
We leveraged labour market analytics to target, attract, and retain candidates for Octopus Energy Services by analysing market trends in relation to gender, popular job titles, and experience levels. We established the client’s audience and used data to focus our 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, so it became clear that our efforts aimed to not only recruit skilled females, but to find and upskill or train entry level female talent for these roles.
During the discovery phase, data-driven insights like this provide an opportunity to pivot on anecdotal feedback and intuition and take evidence-based actions, ensuring a tailored and effective recruitment strategy.
Build a Strong Partnership with Your Provider
If you’re working with an Attraction provider, success depends on clear collaboration. These three key factors can ensure an effective partnership:
- Clearly define expectations and deliverables: Provide a detailed brief, outlining essential skills, cultural fit, and hiring goals. Involve all relevant stakeholders to ensure accuracy and alignment.
- Maintain open communication and collaboration: Recruitment is a two-way process. Regular updates and feedback loops help refine the search process and prevent delays.
- Ensure alignment on branding, messaging, and goals: Your provider represents your company in the talent market. Work together to highlight your EVP for a seamless candidate experience.
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 data-driven approach helped focus resources effectively, driving quality applications through direct outreach and campus events.
Collaboration with Morrisons provided deeper insight into their talent needs, improving candidate quality and hiring efficiency.
Key takeaways:
Better hiring outcomes – Despite fewer applications, a more targeted approach 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. By focusing on clear expectations, open communication, and brand alignment, business can build recruitment partnerships that drive long-term success.
Practical Steps to Prepare Your Campaign
With tighter budgets and increasing competition, laying the right foundations is critical. Here’s how to get started:
- Set realistic timelines and milestones – Map out key stages, including research, content creation, and media planning, allowing time for internal approvals.
- Internal alignment – Ensure all stakeholders are on board, particularly with DE&I targets and campaign KPIs.
- Use data and innovation to maximise impact – Analyse past campaign data and explore new channels to refine your strategy.
- Create authentic, engaging content – Candidates want to hear from real employees. Use user-generated content (UGC), employee testimonials, and other engaging content to bring your employer brand to life.
The Discovery Phase
The discovery phase is where we lay the groundwork. 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 development opportunities and benchmark against competitors.
Before we set any goals, however, 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 information bridges the gap between the client and the supplier. Once a solid foundation is in place, the next step is to translate insights into a clear, bespoke strategy that remains adaptable to any challenges that arise.
Optimising Your Strategy with Data
With organisations increasingly leveraging AI-driven insights, predictive analytics, and automation, collecting the right data points is more crucial than ever.
Key Analytics to Focus On:
Application conversion rates
- Tracking how many candidates complete applications versus those who start can reveal pain points in the process.
- High visibility but low conversion rates suggest a need to refine job descriptions, enhance employer branding, or simplify the application process.
Candidate demographic trends
- Analysing gender, education, and location data ensures Attraction strategies align with your DE&I targets.
Performance of different Attraction channels
- Source metrics, such as applicants per source and views per source, help determine which job boards, social media platforms, and events deliver the best ROI.
- Monitoring and analysing both labour market and campaign data with purpose is key to transforming the foundations of your Attraction campaign. Once you know the story, you’d like to tell your campaign from start to finish, you can identify the pitfalls before they appear and keep the data reflecting your success.
Conclusion
Setting your campaign up for success is about more than just filling roles – it’s about building a sustainable, long-term talent pipeline. By combining data-driven insights, a compelling employer brand, and a clear strategy, organisations can attract the right candidates while reducing costs and improving retention.
Defining who you want to hire, what makes your employer brand stand out, and where to reach your audience ensures a targeted, results-driven approach. Now is the time to refine your strategy – are you ready to take the next step?
