In today’s digitized environment, recruitment companies find themselves facing
new challenges every day. The ongoing pandemic initially had a significant impact
on hiring and hence on the financial performance of recruitment agencies. While
hiring has recently picked up in many countries, recruiters have had to reinvent
ways of working and interacting with clients and candidates. We have set out to
catalogue noteworthy marketing challenges and their solutions that recruitment
agencies employ when pursuing growth in an increasingly competitive and rapidly
changing environment.
Standing out from the crowd
There is competition — too much of it. When an HR personnel or hiring manager
looks for recruitment agencies to help them find that unicorn candidate, hundreds of
recruitment agencies come up on Google search. Many of their competitors are
offering the exact same service and may be drowning out their pitch to any potential
client. Our research suggests that many invest little in building their online brand
and visibility on search engines. Making you stand out from your competitors is a
challenge recruitment agencies need to address.
Building your brand can help differentiate you from competitors
Building your brand is a straightforward way of combating some of the challenges
that recruitment firms face. A good place to start is to outline your company values
and emphasize on the work culture in your company.
As a recruitment company, you want to stand out from the crowd, so a key
question that needs to be answered is how different is your way of operating from
the rest. If people know more about your company and the kind of people who will
be helping them find jobs, they are more likely to trust you, and therefore choose
you. Brand communications are therefore key to invest in, which includes your
website, social media, email communications and content.
Increased dependency on CV databases and job boards, and the associated costs
As the internet has become the dominant channel for all job applications, recruitment
agencies have had to revert to job boards and online CV databases to find candidates.
More and more job boards and CV databases are moving to take advantage of
this dependency by increasing fees or introducing measures like surge pricing. This
is particularly the case in markets dominated by a few large players such as Seek in
Australia. Some of the leading agencies have already started to reduce fees paid to such
third-parties job boards and implemented new strategies to forge stronger bonds with candidates through investment in paid media.
Diversifying candidate sourcing strategies needs to be an ongoing strategy for recruitment firms in order to keep costs under control. Digital marketing, including paid media and social media will continue to play a vital role in such strategy.
Marketing automation can help save a lot of time and money
Marketing automation platforms can really help recruitment agencies streamline a lot of business processes, saving costs relating to administration with employees getting to spend their working hours doing more productive tasks.
Here are a few example of tools recruitment firms should explore to enable a more effective
marketing program:
Email marketing: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Salesforce Pardot, Mailchimp, Hubspot
Social media amplification: Sprout Social, Hootsuite
Brand monitoring: Brandwatch, Google Alerts
Public Relations (PR): Meltwater, Prezly
Analytics: Google Analytics
SEO: SEMRush, Moz
Website personalisation: Thunderhead, Salesforce Journey Builder
Artificial Intelligence: job match technology
There aren’t enough candidates with the skills an advertised job needs.
As more businesses reconfigure their existing systems to go digital, the call for talent - especially in tech - has continued to grow amid travel restrictions and reduced mobility due to the pandemic. If it were easy to find the right candidates, a recruitment company’s client companies wouldn’t need to hire them. Jobs that are tasked to recruitment agencies usually require skills or qualifications that are not readily or widely available. Or that company may not yet have the brand power or reputation to attract the desired candidates.
Another example is that it is one thing to find a candidate to fill out an entry level position, but finding an experienced data scientist or CTO willing to take a new position is an entirely different beast. Hence, recruiters need to be equipped with the tools they need to find the talent out there that may not be actively applying for jobs.
Use digital marketing to better promote your job listings.
While we wish there was a magic solution that instantly connected the job with the ideal candidate situated in another corner of the globe, the next best thing to do is to advertise your listing as much as possible. Maybe the ideal candidate is somewhere out there and also happens to be looking for a job at the moment, but he is simply unaware of your platform and the listing.
To raise awareness, you can start by investing in your digital assets. Improve your website’s user experience and content, and also optimise it better so that it ranks higher on search engines.
An effective content marketing strategy requires content that will appeal to clients and candidates as they progress through the sales and application cycle. People want to know different things at each stage, and your content needs to reflect that. Content should also be tied to the personas that you are trying to attract. With evergreen content so widely available, agencies need to shift focus to specific target audiences and design content to help teams connect and build relationships with the decision-makers and talent that you are looking to attract.
Establish a social media presence — which is essentially a must-have for recruitment agencies. Agencies need to build an active Linkedin strategy so that they can effectively reach out and engage with their target audiences. Platforms like Glassdoor offer the opportunity to build your online reputation through online reviews. Experienced agencies also use their own employees to drive advocacy through content sharing, conducting online surveys, webinars and events to build their brand and attract new clients and candidates. Lastly, social media can be used to push out the company’s content and navigate the traffic back to their website.
If you want to find out more about how to optimise your marketing program for your
recruitment agency, you can contact cmoCre8. We are a marketing consultancy
based in Singapore with extensive experience in helping recruitment agencies
perfect their marketing programs and implement marketing technology programs.
The founder of cmoCre8 is the former Asia-Pac Chief Marketing Officer of one of
the leading recruitment agencies globally, so you can trust us to take your
recruitment agency to the next level through marketing!
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