Have you noticed some of the new outreach and marketing being done to attract candidates to King County? There is a small, creative team within the Department of Human Resources’ Talent Acquisition team who are creating tools to support centralized outreach and marketing. Some of those tools include social media blocks that we released for Mental Health Awareness Month, which you may have seen online.

The team’s efforts were designed to bring visibility and voice to county-wide recruitment with coordinated messaging at no cost to departments. Examples include advertising on El Rey radio in February and a yearlong marketing campaign at the ShoWare Center. The team also created the billboard below that ran for the month of February and is running again in 10 locations for the month of July. All of these efforts are meant to keep King County in the conversation for people looking for their first or next career opportunity.

Recruiters are using social media blocks developed by the team to increase our outreach and marketing using a visual image/story as part of job postings on LinkedIn. The team has built over 180 unique images for recruiters to choose from along with creating a user guide on how to post jobs (you can even set them up in advance to launch on a specific date). To assess the effectiveness of this program, the team developed an eight-week contest where 30 recruiters opted to participate by posting on LinkedIn with the tools and we saw dramatic results. The contest resulted in an over 130% increase of  applicants with 748 identifying LinkedIn as their source for finding and applying for a job at King County.

What can employees and hiring managers do to support the outreach and marketing work?

We are currently working on a method to make the images available to employees outside of the recruiter role. In the meantime, you can work with your recruitment team by going to LinkedIn to “like” or “repost” their recruitment post. This simple task of “echoing” their post creates an added ripple and expands the networking effort to your network (and often beyond) – exponentially increasing the visibility and reach. 

We know that best practice in recruiting using social media is to include personal stories and to use images to attract the viewers to stay longer. Check in with your department’s HR to learn more about their recruitment efforts. We encourage you to include #IworkforKingCounty and #GoPublic, and to add a personal note where you can when posting. Thanks for living the “We are one team” value!