What Is Recruitment Marketing? Most of What You See Is Not It.
In competitive talent markets, trust is built through facilitating connection and collaboration, sharing expertise, and moving someone to a better, more exciting reality—so they can feel safe and confident making one of the biggest decisions of their li
1-minute read (+2:21 video)
Strategically? Tactically? Within the context of actual contribution to the business?
What does recruitment marketing look like?
Ask any of those questions to most people outside (and inside) of recruiting and you’ll likely hear crickets.
The problem: You can’t value something when you have no F’n clue what it is and what it’s for.
As a result, the recruitment marketing playbook typically looks like:
Purchase programmatic ad software.
Spray and pray your jobs to job boards.
Run job ads on LinkedIn (and maybe on some of the other large candidate-facing sites).
Run “we’re hiring” email sequences and send out vanilla employee stories to your database of uninterested candidates. Call these “nurture campaigns”.
Optimize for number of applications (aka volume metrics).
And if you’re lucky enough to get a small amount of employee participation, you might be using employee advocacy software that allows your employees to easily share content from your “content library” of bland culture stories and PR announcements.
The point of marketing is to build trust with an audience.
In competitive talent markets, trust is built through facilitating connection and collaboration, sharing expertise, and moving someone to a better, more exciting reality—so they can feel safe and confident making one of the biggest decisions of their lives.
How is anything in the standard RM playbook helping to achieve this?
The amount of money that recruitment marketing teams are funneling to software companies to distribute invaluable information to the wrong audiences for the sake of “something is better than nothing” is crazy.
If you’re in this position, take a step back. Look critically at your strategy, what you’re truly hoping to achieve, and where you’re allocating your dollars. I can all but guarantee there’s a misalignment.
I get it. You operate in a “butts in seats, yesterday” environment. But if you want to achieve real brand awareness and actual trust that translates into a lower volume of higher quality conversations for your recruiters, you need to fundamentally change your approach.
Because right now, the only ones winning are the software companies. And they’ll continue propagating this strategy—selling you on views and applications and fancy analytics dashboards—so you keep paying them.