The Marketer's Guide to Recruitment - Part One

So you want to market your recruitment agency. Brilliant! We love to hear it. It’s the 21st century. The digital age. We’re in a completely unprecedented state of affairs. While a lot of other industries have adapted, I feel recruitment has been somewhat slow on the uptake. With the exception of the biggest companies, most agencies let their digital marketing fall to the wayside. 

And I get it. Recruitment has been around for hundreds of years, why fix what ain’t broken? But with the ever increasing over-saturation of the market, making yourself visible has never been harder. Every candidate in your phonebook is being reached out to by someone else. 

So now you’re thinking; what exactly is marketing when related to a recruitment agency, and how do I do it?

Let’s start with the what. 

Recruitment marketing focuses on inbound marketing; letting the customer come to you. The goal is to position your brand well enough that you can nurture your candidates before they even apply for a role. 

You’ve heard of the sales funnel? It’s okay if you haven’t, I’m here to walk you through it. The sales funnel maps the process of taking a stranger and converting them into a loyal customer. It plots the journey they make, and helps marketers to understand what their pain points are, each step of the way. 

For recruitment, that means the candidate journey. Putting your name out there before they reach the application stage, and building the trust so they choose you over someone else. 

So how do you do it?

KPIs. 

First, start with defining your goals. What metrics can you look at that make the most sense for your company? I’ve found impressions to be a valuable metric to look at, being an indication of how many people our brand has been placed in front of. 

Some other examples of metrics you could look at are:  

  • Website traffic
    • If it’s not obvious, this is the amount of people coming to, and from, your website. You can use Google Analytics to monitor this. Though, I will say, Google Analytics is a large time investment to learn. Your website provider should have some basic analytics for you to look at, however. 
  • Search engine data
    • Google Search Console is the basic hub for anything Google search engine related. Here you can see impressions (the amount of people who have seen your webpage), clicks (the amount of people who have clicked on your link), and keyword position (how high up in Google you are for specific keywords). 
  • External links
    • Free backlinks tools like Ahrefs Backlink Checker will allow you to monitor how many pages have linked back to your website. The more backlinks you have, the higher you’re likely to rank in Google, and the more people are likely to find you. Remember not to use dark SEO tactics like buying backlinks, because Google’s crawlers might spot this as spam and take your site from its index. 
  • Social media mentions
    • Much like backlinking, social media mentions can increase your page’s visibility. If you’re posting a picture of an event, be sure to tag people from the event into it. They might even share it. 

Finding Your Audience

Once you know what you need to measure going forward, it’s time to figure out who you’re marketing to. You might be thinking at this point, “don’t be ridiculous, I already know who my target audience is”. Good, that’s super important to what we’re going to be discussing. 

Now I’m going to ask you to take that target audience and break it down. If you’ve ever heard of a buyer persona, you’re a step ahead. But for those of you that haven’t, let’s talk shop. 

A buyer persona is a representational character of a segment of your audience. Say you’re selling bean-filled dice, like a regular, well-adjusted person. You know the kinds of people that buy dice, the market you want to target, but what else do you know? Take their ages, genders, job roles, incomes (all of which I hope you have), smush them together with their likes and dislikes, and then give your new friend a name. 

Here we have Murph ‘The Square’ Mulligan, our potential customer at the ‘awareness’ stage of the funnel for our bean dice. 

From this, we can start to personalise content to him specifically, making it much more likely for your audience to engage. 

Content 

Far from the final step in the process, but definitely an important one. If you walk no further, all the previous effort will have been for naught. 

You’ve set up your metrics, you’ve gleaned an insight into what your candidate’s want, now you have to act on it. Content creation is both as easy and as hard as it sounds. If you have ideas, then it’s as simple as putting them to paper. But if you don’t, no worries. 

Just do some research.

You’ve got your buyer persona; use it. Find people that fit that segment and take a look at what they do online. What do they like? What do they engage with? Use Google trends to find out what’s being said about your keywords, or Answerthepublic to see the questions that people ask. 

You need to channel your inner teen and go spiralling down a social media rabbit hole. Scroll through hashtags, jump from page to page. The only way to truly find out what kind of content your audience wants is to be your audience. 

Once you’ve found the questions they ask, and the areas they’re curious about, it’s time to get creative. 

It’s okay to start off with simple things if you’re still finding your feet. Content creation isn’t easy, and can be a daunting task. But the sooner you start thinking out of the box, the sooner you’ll start drawing attention. 

Go forth and market, young padawan. I’ll see you in the next instalment of ‘The Marketer’s Guide to Recruitment’.