So, how exactly do we define recruitment marketing?
Let’s start with a simple definition…
Recruitment marketing is the combination of strategy, tactics and touchpoints that impact the entire recruiting process including sourcing, engagement, hiring and on-boarding.
Modern marketers in recruitment agencies can deploy a number of tactics including job boards, email, text messaging or social media; all based in an organisational strategy to drive more hires through engagement.
In other words: intelligently communicating with candidates about relevant jobs when time is right
Recruiting has seen a pretty dramatic shift in the past few years. A new contingent workforce paired with technology advances has made some strategies and tactics antiquated and ineffective.
Candidates had long been seen as a commodity; always available and exceedingly easy to dismiss. But as the game has changed, so too has the dynamic between candidate and recruiter. Today we must reach candidates at scale, but remain highly personal while doing so. This seemingly impossible task is far more achievable than you might imagine, but can only be accomplished if a shift away from old school thinking is made.
This page will walk you through the strategies, tactics and technologies that new school recruitment marketing pros need to understand to pull ahead of the pack. While we aim to cover the basics and provide a framework to build upon, marketing is an ever-changing beast, and new methods, techniques and dynamics are being developed all the time. To stay at the leading edge, we’d recommend diving into resources like marketingprofs.com.
Recruitment Marketing Overview
The term recruitment marketing is rather self-explanatory: it’s simply the marketing tactics and strategies a candidate will encounter during the recruitment process.
But what does that really mean?
It may be easier to think of recruitment marketing as all the touchpoints a candidate will have with your agency throughout their career lifecycle; every step from sourcing to assignment or redeployment.
A touchpoint is any interaction a candidate may have with your business. It could be applying for a position, receiving an email or filling out paperwork during onboarding. Every touchpoint should align with the overall strategy that a recruitment agency has committed to.
A touchpoint is any interaction a candidate may have with your business. It could be applying for a position, receiving an email or filling out paperwork during onboarding. Every touchpoint should align with the overall strategy that a recruitment agency has committed to.
A recruitment agency’s employment brand can be described as how people outside of your agency perceive the experience of working with your business. How do people – more specifically, potential candidates – judge the quality and effectiveness of your services? Anyone in the public eye can tell you that an outsider’s perception of a situation often isn’t reflected in the reality of that situation – gossip magazines have a lot to answer for.
While your recruitment agency isn’t likely to be featured on the cover of Who Magazine, you should nonetheless be working to narrow the gap between perception and reality, and making both positive. Key to doing this is to create a strong brand. Your employment brand should be one that clearly communicates your organisation’s values and culture, and tells a candidate what makes your agency stand out from the rest. It should outline exactly why they should choose you for their job search.
Today the most successful recruiters are those that recognise jobseekers as their most important resource, and work hard to demonstrate that recognition. This focus on the candidate will, over time, see the reputation of an agency become synonymous with quality and effectiveness. Every recruitment agency has an employment brand, including yours. The effort put into curating that brand will have as big an impact as anything on your long term success.
3. Assess the big picture
You’ve defined your brand and ideal customer, but now it’s time to take a step back, and remind yourself that you are but one of a galaxy of businesses working within the recruitment space. How does your brand fit into the market at large?
Assessing where you fit into the market means gathering intel. First you must look inward, and analyse what your customers are buying. Check the most popular roles, and identify any trends in your customer’s needs. Perhaps an industry is crying out for a certain skill set, or is being transformed by automation. Using these trends to predict tomorrow’s needs will allow your agency to focus its attention on finding and supplying the right candidates into the future.
After this introspection, look outward. Who are your main competitors? And what do they offer? You can only stand out from the crowd if you know what they’re wearing. Identify your major competition and find out what they see as their USPs, then use this intel to either do it better, or do it differently. If you spot a gap in the market – a sector which is criminally underserviced – find out whether you could morph your brand to fill that gap.
4. Create a visual identity
When people talk ‘branding’, they inevitably talk about the visual stuff that customers use to identify a business. And while these visuals are just a small part of the greater brand that an organisation needs to put forward, they are nonetheless vital in conveying its message. As simple as the bitten apple or the sneaker swoosh might be, they have developed into incredibly powerful visual tools.
The choices made when creating your visual identity can have a surprising effect on how a potential candidate or customer views your organisation. Certain colors, shapes and words generate different emotions, and understanding the underlying psychology of these choices is essential in getting your visual identity working for you.
- Color palette: Your color choices should be made with color psychology in mind (green is peaceful and healthy, orange is friendly and cheerful, blue is strong and trustworthy, etc.). If your current color palette doesn’t align with what you want your brand to be, take the time to make the switch.
- Typeface: Two fonts which encapsulate your brand and complement each other should be chosen. Again, your choice should be based upon what we understand about how typefaces will make your audience feel
- Logo: It’s likely that you already have a logo, but does it fit with your new color and typeface choices? A professional designer (like those found on Dribbble) will be able to guide a redesign that captures the feelings that you’re trying to generate.
Once your visual identity has been formed, a branding guide must be produced. This document is your brand’s bible, and ensures that your visual identity is consistent in every piece of communication you produce.
Developing a Strategy
Marketing strategy.
To many, that’s just one meaningless word followed by another, which, when combined, form something even more meaningless. So let’s break it down.
Think of strategy as:
The plan to achieve a big goal or company aim
And marketing as:
Promoting and selling your products or services
Recruiters have a fairly unique challenge on their hands, as they not only have to develop a strategy that speaks to potential clients, but also one that speaks to potential candidates.
So marketing strategy is the plan you set in place to promote and sell your recruiting services. Recruiters have a fairly unique challenge on their hands, as they not only have to develop a strategy that speaks to potential clients, but also one that speaks to potential candidates.
How do you go about developing such a multi-faceted marketing strategy?
Identify your touchpoints
When do you currently make contact with your candidates and clients? If this is a difficult question to answer, your current strategy should be seriously rethought. Good marketing strategy is built upon consistent, quality communication, and having clear contact procedures in place.
Making contact with prospects when they first engage with your organisation or checking in with existing consultants every Friday should be processes that are written into the DNA of your agency, not tasks that your team can opt in on if they so choose.
Strategically target your activities
Where do new candidates/clients come from? Where should they be coming from? Consider your target candidate and client, and how best to go about reaching both groups.
Depending on your ideal audience, the perfect marketing channel could be email, social media, print advertising, setting up a stall at industry events or encouraging word of mouth.
Use the right tools
Which marketing tools do you need to help execute your strategy? As technology becomes smarter, previously time-consuming and laborious tasks are being made far easier, and in some cases are being entirely automated. The tools you choose will be guided by the scale of the strategy, and your willingness to innovate. We’ll take a deeper look at marketing tech in the next section, but for now, ask yourself:
- Do you require basic tools, like those for website or brand development?
- Are you ready to utilise marketing-specific tools for things like email, text messaging, job distribution, etc.?
- Would less traditional marketing channels like social media influencer, branded content and AR/VR technologies hit your target market?
- Do local paid sponsorships make sense for your organisation?
- Do you understand the need to measure and analyse your marketing efforts, and which tools will best help you to do so?
Measure and Analyse
As the last dot point above notes, the proof is in the pudding. There’s no point in committing to a marketing strategy if you can’t figure out how effective it is. As such, your strategy needs to be measured and analysed, and clear goals must be put in place from the outset.
Exactly how you measure the strategy’s effectiveness will largely be up to you, but may be steered by the tools that you choose to use, and the analysis they offer up. The most important question however, is relatively simple: What would you see as a good ROI?
Using the Right Technology
Good recruitment marketing relies on the use of good technology. With digital marketing now making traditional marketing all but obsolete, it’s important that a recruitment agency educates itself on the best tools to use, or brings in experts who can put the right tech and processes in place.
Website
A 2015 study by Verisign found that 9 out of 10 consumers relied on the internet to locate and evaluate goods and services, while Profitworks noted that 93% of all business purchase decisions begin with a search engine. According to those numbers, without a website popping up on that search engine you’re left selling to just 7% of the market.
The key to gaining access to that lucrative audience is to build a professional website that has been search engine optimised (SEO). Hiring a professional to construct or reconstruct your site is an investment that will pay itself back handsomely in time.
It’s also vital that you use a website tracking tool, like Google Analytics, that enables you to measure and analyse the performance of your site. Keep your website professional around to act on the insights that are generated.
Marketing tools
So which marketing-specific tools should your agency be looking at? The aim of any tool should be to minimise the amount of laborious, repetitive work that a recruiter has to do. Instead, your recruiter should be focusing on providing unmatched service to their candidates and customers, allowing them to build meaningful and lasting relationships.
With that in mind, your marketing tools should automate the small stuff. Provided your ATS is well managed, basic communications like emails and text messages can easily be personalised to each recipient and sent out automatically. In fact, even highly personalised content can be automatically constructed for individual candidates if you use automation.
These marketing tools can be boiled down to three broad categories
Marketing Automation
A broad term that covers software designed to help you more effectively market through multiple channels online and create complex internal workflows. Marketing automation typically involves email, text messaging, workflow automation and segmentation. Some of the classic B2B players are Marketo and Pardot, also industry specific recruitment automation tools cater to the needs of an individual market.
Email and Text Messaging
Somewhat of a subset of marketing automation, tools like TextUs, MailChimp, and Constant Contact allow you to form and send out bulk yet personalised messages to whichever segment you have in their system.
Analytics
While automation and email software will offer in-built analytics, the insights are usually limited. The likes of Google Analytics and Adobe Marketing Cloud can help to give you a better understanding of your marketing performance.
Your ATS!
While it is criminally overlooked by many recruiting agencies, your own database is as good a source of talent as any. The major benefit of pulling candidates from your own ATS is that you already have a relationship with them – and if you’ve been executing your recruitment marketing properly that relationship will be good! While achieving a well-functioning database is only possible by setting down rigorous structures and procedures, doing so can be a windfall for your business. A well maintained database can result in more placements and better engagement with candidates from an ATS.
Measurement
As we’ve already noted, perhaps the most important step in recruitment marketing strategy is to measure and analyse its performance, and adapt the strategy based on the insights generated. This must be done both before you develop your strategy (to form a baseline from which you can aim to improve), and after the strategy has been put in place (to develop and adjust to change as required).
Three different aspects of your performance must be measured in order to form a complete picture of your situation.
- Internal processes: Use your ATS to understand key recruiting process metrics like placement rate, time to fill and candidate source.
- Website: Google Analytics allows you to understand how traffic interacts with your site, and where conversions (content downloads, job applications) have come from.
- Engagement: Email metrics like open/click/apply rates allow you to assess how effective your outbound communication is, and the contribution that marketing can make to the funnel. Digital marketing efforts like social media ads offer up a wealth of engagement information that can guide your strategy into the future.
Recruitment, like most other industries, is undergoing a period of massive change. Perhaps the difference for recruitment is that the level of change is amplified, as it must navigate all the changes of every other industry it deals in.
But by understanding the value of good branding, the importance of solid strategy, and the role of technology in delivering both, your agency will be perfectly placed to not only adapt to this continual change, but thrive in it.
Reaching candidates as scale, but remaining personal all the while. It’s not impossible. In fact, it’s more achievable today than it has ever been before. It simply requires a commitment of resources, a pragmatic approach, and a willingness to innovate.