Recruitment Marketing 101: Using Social Content to Attract Talent and Build Employer Brand as an Early Stage Startup

In the make-or-break early days of a startup, nailing your recruitment strategy is paramount. But attracting top talent requires more than just posting job descriptions - it calls for a creative, high-impact content marketing approach.

We sat down with John Kim , co-founder of the recruiting marketplace Paraform , to learn his secrets for using content to efficiently identify, engage, and hire amazing teams from day one. Paraform is trusted by leading startups like and more - and they are power users of Assembly's content marketing tools.

Assembly is a powerful end-to-end platform to draft, plan, and schedule social media content. We help companies like Mercury, Runway, Modern Animal, Beehiiv, and more using Assembly to manage their social content like magic.

I've noticed that a lot of early stage founders and teams heavily promote their jobs on LinkedIn and use it as the main place to recruit. How should companies think about utilizing LinkedIn or content to get the word out about jobs?

There's this term called recruiting marketing. From what I've seen, companies that do that really well create enough noise that people look at it, right? A lot of Series A or Series B companies, for example, get all their team members to share it in a fun way. Not just like, "Hey, we're hiring 10 engineers, join my team," with a link. There's always a bit of creativity involved.

One great example is from Command AI (fka CommandBar) . When they were recruiting, they highlighted the story of how they hired their founding engineer or their first operator. That story became interesting enough to go viral and people shared it.

Pocus is actually one of our customers as well; they do content pretty well. I like how they approach it, getting each person who joins the company to reflect on their first year and things like that, and then saying “Hey, by the way, we’re hiring”. 

So, getting more creative with it, not just sharing for the sake of it.

Good examples of these creative recruiting solutions would be highlighting how you've already hired great people, getting your team to share their own stories of joining, rather than just listing perks or talking about funding and investors, which can be a bit tacky because everyone can say that. It's more about the fundamentals and who else you'll be working with. If you spread that message, I think that would be good recruiting. 

Do you have companies or founders that you often reference or follow for content inspiration?

Yeah, good question. On LinkedIn or Twitter, there's a company called Antimetal . I've noticed they do a lot of unconventional things. It's not just traditional blogs and sharing them, but they think outside the box. I remember seeing something they did called "slice as a service," and it’s like a SaaS thing. They started delivering pizzas to their friends at startups or places like Sequoia. And I think it created a lot of noise. *In fact, it generated more than $1m in revenue!

Antimetal's product is one of those things that is broad enough where if they hit enough people and just funnel them into their website, people will book demos. So I think it's smart, like because that's how they do top of funnel, I think it's smart to just go to the numbers. 

Another example is Pocus, which we've talked about already. I think the founder and a few people on their team do content really well. They're pushing this notion of product-led growth, not just through cold emails or spam, but by intentionally growing based on signals from how people use their product. They write blogs, host podcasts or webinars, often partnering with industry leaders in that space. I think they did one with someone at Ramp, and they did one with someone at Amplitude, and they repurposed that one interaction with those guests, because it’s hard to get those guests, right? And they repurposed that into blogs, and then they turned that into videos, and then they also turned that into webinar links. They do well in terms of distributing that content

Can you tell me how you plan out what content you'll be posting? Do you use a content calendar? And what pillars are you focusing on?

We use Assembly for our content calendar. When we plan content, I think about a lot of things, but it always goes back to what we are trying to do as a company, not just get numbers. Of course, we have two sides of the marketplace. We have recruiters, and we have companies that are hiring. So depending on what we are aiming to do, we also think on a weekly basis. That’s why content calendars and content management is so important for early stage companies, because it’s not like you plan out the year, right? It's like every week things change. So you need to be able to dynamically allocate things and plan very well. 

So for example, if we're focusing on recruiters, I think a lot of recruiters resonate with other successful recruiters on the marketplace. So what we would do is we would plan out the content calendar in a way where, first we need to talk to that recruiter who made the hire on the platform and made money. And then we need to turn that into a blog piece. And then from that, we need to turn that into a LinkedIn post and somehow have that very well organized. So we would plan using the content calendar, you know, for example, like, on this day we would post. So like working backwards, when do we need to meet the recruiter? And if you have a lot of recruiters making money on our platform, which is the case, sometimes it gets hard to organize that.

That's where I think organizing content and scheduling with Assembly, is superb.

Paraform works with a similar ICP as Assembly, and hiring is honestly top of mind for most companies. Why is recruiting and content so important?

Existing knowledge shows that, there's reasons for why companies are successful. And if you look at the top reasons, the number one thing people usually say is luck and timing. And then the number two thing is team. And then there's like funding and like a few others.

And if you look at the number one reason, which is timing, it's largely luck, right? It's, I would say sometimes out of your control. 

And then the second and most important thing being, team, in that study, that's 100% within your control, right? I think, then you can otherwise understand that out of the things you can control, the most important thing you can do to make a successful, build a successful company is recruiting.

And that has resonated with me a lot. So when I think about recruiting, it is the number one most important thing a company should always think about. And it's not, you know, a lot of people underestimate how long it takes and how much effort it takes to recruit good people. So front-loading that expectation and work and just thinking about it a lot always helps. And there's always that term, “always be recruiting”, right?

In order to get timing right at scale, you need some distribution through content and volume when it comes to outbound. Our strategy intentionally keeps the top of the funnel more open. It might differ from some enterprise SaaS, which tends to be more personalized. It’s hard to predict these signals and there’s so many random reasons why someone might try our product, we keep it open.

That's why content distribution and outbound is so important to think about.

At Assembly, we help make building a content engine for companies easy - the end to end process to schedule, post, and analyze your social media content. Follow us here on Assembly for more interviews and breakdowns.