Is recruitment marketing the responsibility of marketing or HR?
Sophie Skilton - 20 February 2022
Recruitment Marketing is your reputation among your workforce and your employees’ perception of you as an employer. In recent years, it has become more important and studies suggest that it has a huge impact on the quality of your business’ staff. For instance, in a recent survey, 86% of respondents said they would leave a business that has a bad reputation with employees or the public.
Recruitment marketing is especially crucial to small to medium businesses, as it can make or break the calibre of your staff. Successful recruitment marketing can give you up to a 50% cost-per-hire reduction.
To get the best candidates for your vacancies, it is not enough to create an engaging brand story around your products and services. To attract the best employees you also need to stand out as an employer.
Who should be responsible for your recruitment marketing?
Having established what recruitment marketing is and its importance, the next challenge for small to medium businesses is to decide who should be responsible for it.
Businesses are often conflicted about who is best to take care of their recruitment marketing. To help you decide if this should be your marketing department, human resources team, or managerial responsibility, here are some ideas on how to do recruitment marketing.
1. Map out and understand your company’s values
To have a powerful employer brand, you need to understand what your business needs, and what type of working environment you want to create. Once you work this out you can start to think about your company’s values and who you could employ that shares this vision.
For example, at Wagada, we realised the most important values for us to have when working with clients are: Flexible, Honest, Human, and Passionate. With these values and our approach clearly mapped out, we look for people who share this vision when making hiring decisions.
This part of your recruitment marketing is a task for your management, company directors, and senior staff. For values to be genuine and have an impact, it is critical that the people responsible for the business and making the decisions are behind them.
2. Get the word out!
Once you have created meaningful values and objectives for your business it is no good keeping them to yourself, shout about them! 52% of candidates look at a business’ website and social media, so conveying fun and engaging employer branding on these platforms will incentivise applicants.
Recruitment marketing can be done in many different ways to create engagement and get your message across. Showcase the fun side of working at your business on social media to spark applicants’ interest and also create blogs that give insight into your brand values and culture.
As well as impressing prospective job applicants, this strategy can also impress clients. People want to buy from people. Demonstrating your company’s story and personality will help you appear welcoming and understanding to clients, which is just one of the many benefits of recruitment marketing.
3. Work on your recruitment marketing continuously
Once you have created a message and company values you are proud of and are marketing it successfully, it is important to sustain it and also look for ways to improve it.
It is not as simple as posting a few nice pictures on Instagram or getting a ping pong table for the office (although we do have one of these at Wagada!). What you post online needs to be a true reflection of your company and employees need to feel respected and listened to.
This can be something for everyone in your team to work on. Human resources are of course incredibly important when it comes to supporting employees, however, having a team and senior staff who look out for one another can make a massive difference.
Start your recruitment marketing campaign today!
Once you have got everyone in your business behind your recruitment and work on it continuously, you will find yourself attracting desirable candidates for vacancies and impressing your clients.
For more advice about recruitment marketing, employer branding and how to convey your business’ story, get in touch with our friendly team, we would be happy to help!
