When we talk about marketing, we normally think about customers.
Who are we trying to reach?
What do they want?
What makes us different?
What does our website say about us?
And are we making it easy for somebody to take the next step?
But when a business is recruiting, many of the same questions apply.
The audience is different, but the principle isn’t.
A prospective employee is looking at your business and deciding whether they want to be part of it. They are forming an opinion about you long before they walk through the door for an interview.
That makes recruitment a marketing issue too.
Having worked in recruitment myself, including at gap personnel, I’ve seen this from the other side.
There's obviously a commercial need to fill vacancies, but recruitment isn’t simply about putting a job online and waiting for applications to arrive.
There are two sides to it: the employer who needs the right person and the candidate who needs a good reason to choose that employer.
And sometimes I think we concentrate so much on the first that we forget about the second!
The recruitment market is changing again
There are finally some signs of improvement in the UK recruitment market.
Temporary billings also rose for the fifth consecutive month.
But that doesn’t mean recruiting has suddenly become easy.
Overall vacancies were still falling and the number of people looking for work continued to rise.
The report also pointed to continuing uncertainty among employers.
Only 62% of the employers it surveyed expected to recruit during the following three months, while its measure of employers expecting staff levels to increase rather than decrease remained close to a record low outside the pandemic.
So we have businesses being cautious and candidates being more considered about their next move.
That makes the way an opportunity is communicated even more important.
A job advert is still an advert
It sounds obvious, but plenty of job adverts don’t read like adverts at all.
They read like somebody has opened an internal job description, copied it and pasted it onto a recruitment website.
“The successful candidate will be responsible for…”
Then comes a long list of everything the business wants.
Qualifications.
Experience.
Responsibilities.
Targets.
Systems.
Reporting lines.
Somewhere in all of that, we forget the person reading it is asking a fairly straightforward question:
"Why would I want to work here?"
That doesn’t mean dressing up an average job with clever wording or making promises the business can’t deliver.
It means giving people the information they actually need.
What will they be doing?
What does it pay?
What are the hours?
Where is it based?
Is there flexibility?
What is the working environment like?
What sort of team will they be joining?
Is there an opportunity to develop?
Candidates obviously need to understand what you expect from them.
But they also need to understand what THEY can expect from YOU.
Good marketing looks at something from the audience’s point of view.
A good recruitment advert should do the same.
Your employer brand exists whether you’ve worked on it or not
“Employer branding” can sound like something that belongs in a large corporate HR department with a sizeable budget behind it.
It doesn’t.
If somebody sees your vacancy today, there is every chance they won’t apply immediately.
They’ll have a look at you first!
They might visit your website, look at the company’s LinkedIn page, search for you on Google, read reviews or have a look through your social media.
They are trying to work out what sort of business you really are.
Your recruitment advert may describe a friendly, progressive company where people matter, but what happens if the rest of your online presence tells a completely different story?
It’s exactly the same issue businesses have with customer marketing.
You can say whatever you like about yourself, but people will look for evidence.
Your employer brand isn’t simply the paragraph you write at the top of a vacancy. It is the impression somebody forms from everything else they find.
The candidate journey is a customer journey
This is probably one of the biggest crossovers between recruitment and marketing.
Businesses spend a great deal of time trying to improve customer experience.
Make the website easy to use.
Respond to enquiries.
Remove unnecessary steps.
Explain what happens next.
Follow up.
Yet some of those same businesses create recruitment processes that do the complete opposite!
Lengthy application forms.
No acknowledgement.
Weeks without an update.
Multiple interview stages for relatively straightforward positions.
No salary information.
No feedback.
Sometimes there is no response at all
When candidates were asked what would improve the process, some of the most common answers were clearer job descriptions, faster feedback, simpler online applications and better communication about what happens next.
Those aren’t particularly complicated changes.
And they aren’t only HR issues.
Every interaction somebody has with your business either adds to or takes away from the impression you are trying to create.
The people you don’t employ still matter
If one vacancy attracts 50 applicants and you employ one person, another 49 people have still had an experience of your business.
Some may apply to you again.
Some may know somebody you would like to recruit in the future.
Some could become customers
And some will tell other people what dealing with your company was like.
You can’t give everybody the job and nobody expects you to.
But acknowledging an application, setting realistic timescales and letting somebody know when they have been unsuccessful really shouldn’t be too much to ask. Afterall there's a person at the other end of the application.
That is easy to forget when you are dealing with dozens, or hundreds of them.
Automate the admin, not the relationship
AI and automation are inevitably becoming a bigger part of recruitment.
Used properly, I can see the benefit.
Technology can help with repetitive administration, organise applications and speed up parts of the recruitment process.
But faster doesn’t automatically mean better.
For me, the point of using technology shouldn’t be to remove as much human contact as possible.
It should be to remove some of the administration so there is more time for the human contact that actually matters!
Recruitment is, after all, about people.
A system can send the acknowledgement - it shouldn’t be expected to build the relationship.
Recruitment agencies are marketing in two directions
This is something I understood very quickly when I worked within recruitment.
An agency doesn’t have one audience.
It has two.
You need employers to trust you with their vacancies, but you also need candidates to trust you with their careers and livelihoods.
You can’t build one side successfully while neglecting the other.
If you’re telling a potential client that you can find the people they need, then your candidate network, reputation, communication and ability to attract good applicants are all part of what you’re selling.
Candidate marketing isn’t simply the bit that happens once the vacancy has been won.
It is part of the reason an employer should choose the agency in the first place!
I think that can sometimes get lost when the focus is understandably on business development, targets, vacancies and filling jobs.
Candidates can start to look like the delivery mechanism.
But, truth is, they aren’t!
Without candidates who know you, trust you and want to deal with you, what exactly are you offering the employer?
So what does your recruitment marketing say about you?
You don’t need a huge employer-brand campaign or a massive budget to improve your recruitment marketing.
I’d start by looking at what you already have.
Read your latest vacancy as though you know absolutely nothing about the company.
Does it make you want to find out more?
Search for your business and see what a candidate finds.
Have a look at the careers section of your website on a mobile phone and try applying for one of your own jobs.
Most importantly, look at whether the experience matches the business you present to customers.
If your marketing talks about being approachable but candidates struggle to get a response, there is a disconnect.
If you say people are important but applicants hear nothing for three weeks, they are unlikely to believe you.
And, if your website presents a modern, ambitious company while your recruitment adverts look as though they haven’t changed since 2005, that tells a story too!
Recruitment marketing isn’t about making a mediocre job sound exciting. It's about communicating a genuine opportunity properly, giving the right people a reason to consider you and making sure the experience that follows lives up to what you said in the first place.
Final Thoughts
Marketing is about attracting the right audience, building trust and making it easier for people to take action.
Recruitment really isn’t that different.
The candidate might not be buying your product or service, but they are making a decision about your business.
And whether they accept the job, turn it down, apply again in the future or tell somebody else about their experience, that decision has an impact on your brand.
Your recruitment process is part of your marketing.
It is worth finding out whether it is helping your reputation ........or quietly damaging it.
Next Steps......
If your recruitment, website, social media and wider marketing are all saying slightly different things about your business, it may be time to look at the bigger picture.
The Small Marketing Company helps small businesses put together practical marketing plans that join the dots, without unnecessary jargon, oversized campaigns or budgets that don’t make commercial sense.
If you’d like to talk through what your marketing is currently doing, what isn’t working and where the gaps might be, get in touch.
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