High-impact Recruitment Marketing Strategies to Attract Top Talent in 2025
Attracting top talent in 2025 will be more than just offering competitive salaries and benefits; it will be about creating an engaging, mission-driven brand that resonates with candidates on a personal level.
Startups and smaller companies especially need to position themselves strategically, as they often compete with larger companies that have the advantage of brand recognition and resources.
That said, they can turn this challenge into an opportunity by using high-impact recruitment marketing strategies to highlight their unique values and company culture, making themselves more appealing to today’s purpose-driven workforce.
To learn more about how small companies can market themselves to recruit top talent, I spoke with Christine Orchard, Head of Marketing at Arc.dev, a remote hiring talent platform.
We discuss the most effective recruitment marketing strategies companies can adopt to stand out to top candidates. We’ll look at key tactics like making your mission a central hook and using social media tools like LinkedIn to not just share authentic stories about the work you’re doing, but also build a strong digital presence.
When combined, these recruitment marketing strategies create a brand that doesn’t just sell a product or service, but also tells a story about the impact potential employees can have by joining your team.
Let’s jump right in, shall we?
markonmag: Thank you for your time! Can you share with our readers a little bit more about yourself - your role in your current company and what you do on a day-to-day basis?
Sure. I'm currently the Head of Marketing at a remote hiring platform called Arc and I've been with Arc for five years. We're a small marketing team. So I like to say we're small, but mighty because there are three full-timers and two freelancers.
I would say we're mostly in the growth side of marketing - a little bit of brand, a little bit of product. We also spend a lot of our time making a lot of content and implementing SEO strategies. And on LinkedIn, our team also does a lot in terms of building our personal brands and our company. So we do a little bit of everything.
markonmag: When it comes to hiring for your team, what are some of the biggest challenges you face?
Applications from everyone, everywhere
So I've been leading the team for five years.
I think that when it comes to remote hiring, the benefits and the drawbacks are the same as a company that’s looking to hire anyone in the world. And that’s the fact that you’ll get applications from everyone around the world.
How do you find the needle in the haystack?
How do you find the right match?
It doesn't matter if you're hiring in-office or remotely. It's just that the problem becomes more apparent when you're hiring remotely.
markonmag: How do you then address this issue of having too many applications?
A well-written job description (JD)
Your JD needs to be really good.
And what I mean is you need to know exactly what you're looking for as a hiring manager. Make sure it answers these questions:
What is the job that needs to be done?
What are the specific tasks?
How are you going to track the right people for that role?
Know how to filter for the right people
Even though I'm the Head of Marketing, I think it's very important that I know how to do the role a little bit myself. It can't be a role I know 0% of, because that won’t help me hire well.
So usually, what we do is that when we test a new marketing channel, I'm personally out there testing. Let's say paid ads, for example, I will be part of the testing and experimentation phase so I can really be clear about whether is this channel good for us as a company.
And this really helps me gain some knowledge I need to filter for people with the right knowledge and expertise.
Showcase what it’s like to work with the team
Marketing and recruiting are very similar, actually. The marketing and HR departments should work more closely with one another because you need the marketing team to market your company culture.
The marketing team can help the HR department market things like:
What do you guys do?
What are you guys great at?
Do I check the right boxes of what it means to be the right fit boxes of what it means to be a good fit and the best talent on your team?
Myself, thefounder, and a few people in the company are really busy in this regard because we are very active in creating. This actually very helpful with recruiting because people can see what we're doing.
Not only can they see the work we're doing, but they can also decide if we’re cool and they’ll see signs of what it would be like to work with us over at Arc.
markonmag: I'm sure you've worked with many startups around the world. What are some of the biggest challenges startups have when it comes to marketing themselves to attract the best talent?
Salary
Startups are competing with the big companies for the best talent. And it's especially true with engineers, right? And I know this because we’ve been helping companies find engineers for so long help.
Let's say you're a US-based startup, and you're competing with Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, all these companies that are getting the best talent. The best ones are going to the big companies with big salaries.
So they're not gonna win in terms of salary necessarily. They might offer something competitive, but it might not be the highest in the market.
Reputation
They're also not going to be as well-known, nor will they be as secure. Because a startup is not something that you can guarantee is gonna be around in say two or five years.
So startups basically have the issue of how do you then attract somebody to join a great engineer, a great marketer? How do you do it? So I think that comes down to helping sell the mission and the thing that you're doing.
1) markonmag: So, how then can startups market themselves to recruit market their organization’s mission and make it the hook?
We talked about LinkedIn as a social media marketing channel for that. But more than that, what LinkedIn really is, is a space where you can share - What is your mission? Why are you building this thing? Why is it cool? And how can you be part of that change?
“Show candidates they’ll make a real impact. People want to join a team where they can actually do work that matters.”
So I think that's the way that companies do win. It’s really just finding a way that resonates with the people. Look at the situation and ask yourself who are you targeting?
If this is a mission that resonates with those people you have a better chance to get them interested in your startup. Not everyone's gonna be your target audience or join your company, but those that do that's where you wanna focus.
markonmag: Right. Do you have any tips on how startups can do that to sell your mission to people?
Yeah, obviously I'm a big proponent of just having a space where we feel comfortable recruiting. So that would be LinkedIn in the case of many companies.
So a lot of times, you’ll encounter situations where a hiring manager will need to hire someone in two weeks. And if you don't have any mission, you won't have the materials you need to market your startup or to sell your company as the ideal place to work for top talent. You’ll probably just go out there, post something on LinkedIn, and hope for the best.
I would say that when you're starting a company and you're the founder, you need to build this in as something you're doing from day one - to constantly share your mission and share what you believe.
Activewear brand ASRV shares sketches of the brand’s collection on LinkedIn to talk about product launches and document the journey.
While I think that founders know it’s important, they also need to have someplace where that content can live. Even if it's say, an old Medium or LinkedIn post, you can point to that when it comes down to looking for marketing material that can be used to sell your company’s mission when hiring somebody.
So start thinking about recruiting as something more than just something you do when you need to do it. But it's something that you should be doing a little bit all along by sharing the deeper meaning behind what you do. And this is something that we've done when we were hiring for our engineering team.
Arc’s post on Notion helped attract new hires to the engineering team.
I recall seeing a Notion post where the Arc engineering team just created a document and shared what they believed in and how they worked.
Our Head of Engineering actually took, let's say two, or three hours to polish it up and post it. But that particular piece of content really helped to attract engineering talent even today!
Several engineers who interviewed with us for our internal team have said that the Notion article was what got them interested in working at Arc to begin with.
Content like that doesn't have to be LinkedIn, it doesn't have to be your blog, but it has to live somewhere that could be discovered. People need to discover what you believe in and why they would want to work there.
2) markonmag: Very interesting way of recruiting people, never really thought about it before. You also said that it’s ideal that people skip big job boards and go to more specialized spaces, right? How do you find them?
Okay, so if you think about marketing in general, do you approach hiring with a spray-and-pray approach? I mean, I guess you can.
LinkedIn is always going to be there as an option. Or the big job boards in different countries too. Those will always be readily available options and have always been considered as the go-to channel.
MKT1 has a dedicated job portal for B2B tech marketers.
But if we're talking about matching the ideal candidate to the ideal job role, you should go to specialized communities or specialized talent platforms that have the kind of candidate you're looking for.
Nowadays, there are a lot of communities or newsletters that are very targeted towards very specific types of professionals. Let's take B2B startup marketers for example. There's one where I'm a paid subscriber, MKT1! They have a job board that's very specific to B2B tech marketers.
So if I were hiring a B2B marketer, because I'm a reader, right? I would be like, oh, hey, I probably would want to post on that because that has all the readers who are all B2B marketers and I'm hiring one.
Arc helps companies find remote talent globally.
I would rather go there versus post on LinkedIn, which is posting to everyone, every marketer out there. Or, if you have a specialized talent platform like Arc, we help you find global talent. We cover very specific areas of specialization like B2B and e-commerce, or the country. We help hire markets like Latin America or the Philippines a lot.
So go there! Go to these specialized locations. You're going to start with a better source of candidates. And then you're going to ideally be able to find the best match from that source. So that's what I think works the best.
3) markonmag: Nice! So something else you were talking about is the use of referral incentives to get your team to tap into the networks to bring people in. How successful has that been for, you know, yourself or any of your clients?
When companies are just starting out, they might not have culture quite figured out yet. But let's say you're at a point where you're like 20 people. I would say when you're at that point, you’ll really need to care about cultural fit.
I think culture is everything for companies.
You're at 20 people, you've got this culture that you really like and you want more people like that. And it doesn't always have to be culture fit, new hires could also be a culture add. These are people who have something that they know outside that they bring to the table.
In our company, for example, when we were at 25 people, we were having this problem of finding like-minded people to join our company. So we started a referral program and we basically offered anyone in the company who had referred their friends an Apple product of their choice.
Literally! You could pick anything that Apple sells. Anything.
We didn't make it about money. So instead of saying, hey, we'll offer you $2,000, we try to make it kind of fun.
I think the average cost ended up being around two to $3,000 US dollars. That's the cost. And I think it worked pretty well at that time because I remember we had three or four hires that came in as a result of referrals.
And that year, we only made six or seven hires. So that's a pretty good portion of people that came in as referrals. So you're doing the referrals because you know that people have, again, peers or friends who are similar.
You're bringing in culture fits or those culture adds and you just have the right incentive that makes it fun and you make people want to use their social capital to get people to come to the company.
markonmag: I feel like this is one of the more successful channels as well! Our current SEO director is a friend of mine. We were in the same batch at university and met in the student council.
Did you get Apple products?
markonmag: I got a thousand bucks.
It's pretty good!
You could definitely use money. It’s really about making the referral program more top of mind for our teammates.
markonmag: Definitely! And the funny thing is that he actually ended up referring five other people and all five of them turned out to be great. So I kept joking that my CEO should give me a commission for every person he refers.
Exactly! And this drives home the point of how important your first hires are. That first team is super critical so setting the right culture.
These are the people that are going to refer people for the future, the future team.
4) markonmag: You were talking about paid trials as well. Where are the best places you feel are great places to market these assessments? Slso, what are some of the best practices?
Hiring freelancers
Let's say people sometimes have trouble with deciding if that person's a good fit. And I think there are two ways you can decide they're a good fit.
You can either hire them as a freelancer or you can do a paid assessment.
In terms of hiring a freelancer, you can hire them for a one-off one-month project. Say, for building out a content landing page. This lowers the barrier for each side.
For the company, if the freelancer doesn’t turn out to be a good fit, it’s easy to move on. For the freelancers, if the company culture is not aligned with their values, it’s easy for them to move on as well.
And if it's a good fit, you can then go ahead and convert them a full-time employee at your company.
Using paid trials
If you know for sure you need this hire to join your company as a full-time employee, you can give them a paid assessment to make sure that both sides are a good fit for each other.
You could only know by seeing someone's work.
And for them, they can also see what kind of work is expected of an employee at a company they are applying to. This prevents a misalignment of expectations.
We created these assignments, or let's say projects, based on the type of work we need help with internally. These projects will be made to feel as close as possible to the actual work they would be doing.
We then add them to a Slack channel with our team. So, say it's in the marketing team. You'd work with the other marketing teammates and be encouraged to ask questions. This way, we can learn a little bit more about you.
So we look out for things like how someone asks questions, do they even have questions, or do they just turn in their work and you just say nothing? At Arc, we want someone who's a little more collaborative and is asking questions along the way.
For our paid trials, we just try to like to mirror how it would be to work as much as possible and pay them for their time.
We did this when we hired our SEO strategist a few years ago. So back then we had an SEO strategist who had just started writing a few articles for us. We paid him for a few articles to kind of see how he's how he's going.
At that time, we were with an SEO agency and their performance was tapering off. We knew we wanted to bring it back in-house.
So here we are with this SEO freelancer whom we can vibe well with. AND, he's creating some great content! We ended up making the full-time hire because we felt more confident that he was the right the right person.
markonmag: Thank you for those insights! We’ve pretty much come to the end of the discussion. Do you have final pieces of advice you want to share with the readers?
Hiring full-timers can be a bit more rigid
A few years ago, I might have jumped to hire another full-timer as my go-to hiring option. But I think it makes our team a little bit more rigid.
Especially in today’s uncertain market where VC funding has been down. It's harder in the tech space we're hiring in because of limited budgets. If we were so insistent on hiring full-timers, our options will be very limited.
With the world as it is right now where remote work has become big in recent years, I'm very excited about using freelance hiring.
Think about whether or not you really need a full-timer
Hiring is also more competitive.
But we want to make sure that our teams are more resilient. And to be more resilient, we just built a smaller team. And if I need to do something that really doesn’t warrant a full-time hire, I'm more likely to use freelance talent than I used to.
So I would just encourage companies to pause for a moment when they're thinking about hiring.
Do you actually need a full-timer?
Or could you create a really great process that can then be used to outsource the work to a freelancer?
Within our content team, for example, we do work with freelancers for some of the execution, although the strategy is still in-house.
And obviously, I'm pro remote. Our whole team is remote-first.
Just question yourself in terms of what you need. What would be the best for you right now? And you probably want to review that every year to make sure your team is as resilient as possible.
Marketing and recruitment - the ultimate combination for top talent
In 2025, recruiting top talent will demand more than traditional hiring practices; it will require startups to actively market their mission, culture, and opportunities in a way that resonates deeply with candidates.
By focusing on high-impact strategies shared by Christine — making the company mission a core selling point, building a genuine online presence, and tapping into specialized networks—companies can attract skilled professionals who align with their goals and values. These tactics not only help in drawing interest but also ensure that new hires are motivated and ready to contribute meaningfully from the start.
Ultimately, recruiting in today’s competitive landscape is about creating an authentic, engaging brand that stands out. With the right approach, even emerging companies can compete with larger players and build a workforce that’s ready to drive growth and make a lasting impact.
