With rafts of redundancies and widespread recruitment freezes across the country, recruiters are increasingly looking to reverse marketing — where a candidate is put forward speculatively to prospective employers — as a means to drum up new business.

“Because the market is how it is at the moment, there are good people out there,” Shelley Pinto, director at Fashion & Retail Personnel, told Recruiter.

Pinto, who uses reverse marketing to fill senior-level roles among her fashion clients in the £70,000-£80,000 bracket, said: “Because we have a relationship with our clients, we will ring them up and say we have a candidate who has been working for the past five years with one of your competitors and they are looking for this amount of money. Sometimes we create vacancies. That happens quite a lot.”

According to Emma Entwhistle, head of recruitment services at IT specialist Crimson Skills, recruiters would be ill advised to reverse-market just any candidate. Entwhistle restricts the practice to candidates that are known entities and ones with good references and niche IT skills, such as project and program managers, technical architects and developers.

“We would normally market a candidate who would become a sponsor or advocate for us in the future. Within IT, we would market a candidate more at the senior end of the development lifecycle who would go on to become a hirer themselves.”

Entwhistle’s approach to reverse marketing requires input from the recruiter, candidate and the client. “We produce a 3D CV. We put together a front page on a CV that gives a client a three-dimensional view of a candidate. The candidate’s observations of where their experience is, along with our personal opinion, are supported by references or testimonials from a client. Initially, we would have a telephone conversation, and the documents endorse that. We would approach the competitors and think of who would be interested in this person.”

In vulnerable markets such as automotive, where car maker BMW has recently laid off 850 agency workers in Cowley, Oxfordshire, candidates such as heads of business units and general managers who are able to move immediately can drive business activity, says Guy Liddal, managing director at MTS Services.

Just as important as the candidate is the client, according to Liddal, who says it is imperative that recruiters looking to implement reverse marketing build good relationships with clients. This even stretches to recommending candidates who are not registered with Liddal’s agency, but would represent real talent and provide added value to the client, he said.

“My clients would expect an honest answer about the suitability of a candidate and for us to be consistent across the whole piece. That is what they are paying us for.

“You cannot turn reverse marketing into a business process and hope to generate business without demonstrating consistency to the client. In reality, you can only do a certain amount of it. You can’t create jobs everywhere.”