Roundtable: The rising value of the recruitment marketer

The recession, the need to innovate and the need to remain competitive have given rise to the importance of marketing departments within recruitment companies. words and pictures by Sarah Marquet
Mon, 26 Jan 2015

The recession, the need to innovate and the need to remain competitive have given rise to the importance of marketing departments within recruitment companies. words and pictures by Sarah Marquet

The role of a marketer within a recruitment company has evolved into more of an information manager. This was one consensus reached by recruitment industry marketing professionals who participated in a recent roundtable event hosted by Recruiter editor DeeDee Doke.

Rising value

FiveTen Group head of marketing Adam Nicoll believes no other function in a recruitment business is as important — except possibly the finance department — in respect of information management responsibilities. 

“Our stock has risen hugely in the past decade, certainly in the last five years,” Nicoll said.

The group agreed the marketer’s value has significantly risen in an industry heavily affected by both changes in communications such as social media and greater competition for candidates and clients. 

Meridian Business Support head of marketing and digital media Jo Lee explained that marketing is now a strategic function.

“When I started, marketing didn’t have a voice… now it’s much more of a strategic role. I’m on a senior leadership team now,” Lee said.

Strategies shaped by the need to account for and save money mean that marketing departments know which avenues of getting their message out perform best and what return on investment (ROI) has been achieved. Job board spend is one such channel under the spotlight.

As Sinead Canny, Morgan McKinley head of marketing, UK and EMEA, said, it is being able to prove ROI and using data to back up activities that adds credibility to their roles.

Nicoll said in the past, as a marketing strategy, “recruitment companies just chucked lots of money at job boards and that was kind of it”.

Now, through meticulous recording of data, marketing departments can see how many placements are made against money spent on each particular job board or outlet.

Planned approach

Post recession, Lee noted, Meridian takes a much more planned approach to how it uses job boards: “Everyone was just posting absolutely everywhere. It was there so we were doing it. Now what we do is, we slice up all of our contracts so we know exactly what ROI we’re getting for advert posting, CV searching — what the pure margin is.”

At FiveTen, Nicoll said they also take a more integrated approach. “All marketing elements in the mix all react — it’s all joined up, and it’s all integrated, and they all rub off one another. So if your job advertising is strong, and your PR is strong, your website will get good traffic. If your website has good traffic, your job ads will get a better response because people kind of know you’re worth it.”

At the end of the day, it is through good marketing that a company can clearly differentiate itself from its competitors.

“The product of a recruitment company is a CV,” Nicoll said. “The CV doesn’t differentiate you … because candidates often register with more than one agency. So how do you make yourself different? That comes down to marketing.”

Canny agreed, saying marketing should be getting the “best candidates to apply for our jobs first.

“If you want to cut it down to basic level, candidates are our product. If we don’t have candidates, we don’t make fees; the business doesn’t survive.”


Roundtable participants

Sinead Canny, Morgan McKinley head of marketing, UK and EMEA 

Francesca Elford, Idex Consulting marketing manager

Jo Lee, Meridian Business Support head of marketing and digital media 

Adam Nicoll, FiveTen Group head of marketing

Glenn Southam, Staffgroup marketing manager

Robert Woodford, founder, principal consultant and director, GKS Associates 

Tenille Woodford, Human Capital Investment Group group marketing manager 


Putting a diversified marketing strategy into action

In a highly competitive market, diversified marketing strategies are necessary to differentiate between recruitment businesses.

At Morgan McKinley, for example, there is a huge push on bespoke content, Sinead Canny said. Employees are actively encouraged to regularly write blogs which are then posted to the company’s website and pushed out through LinkedIn and Twitter.

Blogs about issues such as skills shortages can be pushed out as alternatives to job ads and more appealing to readers, particularly passive candidates. Canny said the blogs had made a massive difference to traffic to the company’s website.

“I wouldn’t say it’s ground breaking but what it allows you to do is rather than putting jobs through LinkedIn, it allows you to post an interesting blog on LinkedIn which may attract passive as well as active candidates, because blogs are more likely to be read by a larger audience rather than ads which are for your fairly active, job seeking people,” Canny said.

She said the blogs had made a massive difference to traffic through the company’s website.

Another innovative approach was designed by a relatively new consultant at Staffgroup. As marketing manager Glenn Southam explained, the consultant, who had a passion for cars and who was working within the automotive design niche, set up a chat forum for people working in or with an interest in that niche. It now has 3,000 to 4,000 active and interested members. Once a week, that consultant will round up the news and send a group email, rather than sending the people jobs everyday.

“He’s in his industry, he knows what candidates want … he has the passion for it … he’s connected with them at a level they want,” Southam said.

Southam said others in the company have tried similar approaches, but not every attempt is successful. However, it has certainly worked for that individual consultant, who is now one of the top billers in the company, Southam said.


Staffgroup’s Glenn Southam said marketing success, although led by people in dedicated roles, also comes down to individual consultants. 

“It was once a marketing department’s responsibility to push the brands and the individuals’ [consultants] brands and now it’s just shifted down the whole company to the consultants. It’s their responsibility to do the marketing for themselves, for their jobs and for the company.”

Those circumstances create brand issues, as most around the table agreed, because consultants, particularly younger ones, do not devote the necessary care into the writing of job ads.

FiveTen’s Adam Nicoll said: “The younger guys in contingency recruitment businesses just don’t get it [the writing of a good ad], don’t get the importance of it and you can see that the difference between a search consultant and a contingency recruiter is enormous.”

The mass posting of job adverts is generally to blame, the marketers agreed.

Morgan McKinley’s Sinead Canny said that technology had made the logistics of posting, amending and removing job adverts from multiple locations and job boards easier. However, more attention had been paid to detail in traditional print advertising. She said before job boards, when placing an advert in the Financial Times, for example, it could take 50 rounds of amends before the ad was considered ready for print. “You did not sign off a job advert with a missing comma or full stop,” she said.

Some argued that the dual needs of getting the ad out quickly and maintaining the company name’s external presence were to blame. However, marketer Robert Woodford of GKS Associates suggested that some such problems might stem from a marketing department’s lack of involvement in their company’s recruitment strategy.

In the past, he said, a marketing department was the buffer between bad content going out or not, which is no longer the case. He said he thought few companies were testing the writing skills of prospective consultants before hiring them.

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