Revolutionary Recruitment Marketing: Manifesto For Change

The industry is facing a number of key challenges:

• Recruitment marketing is dominated by a small number of niche advertising agencies, most of which have little or no exposure to other areas of marketing. This creates a bubble in which there is very limited sharing of new expertise and tools.
• Relatively low recruitment marketing budgets are not attracting the investment of suppliers at the same rate as other areas of marketing.
• There are very few dedicated recruitment marketeers within employers. Buying decisions are mainly made by often-overstretched HR Managers with limited direct marketing experience.
• Recruitment marketeers are expected to cover a wide range of disciplines and responsibilities, including: building a careers website; managing an ATS and CRM; facilitating email marketing; using social media; developing employer branding; etc. These are responsibilities would fall under their own dedicated manager in almost every other major area of marketing.
• There is no official ‘Recruitment Marketing Institute’ or broadly accepted accreditation to keep standards high. The few training courses that do exist typically focus on the absolute basics, designed for industry newcomers.

Our mission at Talent Nexus is clear: to bring about a global step-change in recruitment marketing best practice.   We thought we would use our first blog post as Talent Nexus to set out the first stages of our roadmap to this goal, and how you can be involved:

ONE: Introduce unprecedented transparency to the agency marketplace. The majority of advertising agencies are currently receiving large revenues from ‘agency commission’, which is recieved when the agency places large orders with some media owners. This creates a situation where there is a conflict of interest, as the best performing media channels may not be those paying the highest commission to agencies.

Our first steps: We will always be completely transparent about our agreements with all parties involved. This will be reported to our clients regularly, and wherever a decision is made between media channels, we will make clear the incentives offered to our agency by all parties. We will aim to reach agreements with media channels to allow us to publish aggregate commission recieved at certain intervals; possibly quarterly.

TWO: Bring the ‘best of’ other industries into our service offering. Programmatic Advertising and Inbound Marketing are the first two to be launched, but there will be plenty more to come.  We will provide the recruitment industry with cutting-edge technologies and methodologies.

Our first steps: Our sister agency Calibrate Digital already deliver best-in-class services in ecommerce and B2B marketing. We are committed to introducing new approaches into recruitment marketing. Our first two major service areas are both taken largely from non-recruitment marketing, namely programmatic advertising and Inbound employer branding.

THREE: Be uncompromising in putting data at the forefront of our remit as your digital marketing agency. This isn't just about adding Google Analytics to your website. It's about ensuring that you have the technology and training to access, understand and interpret key recruitment marketing data.

Our first steps: We are currently investing heavily in a piece of data visualisation technology. This will allow us to provide our clients with a dashboard that pulls data from multiple channels, for example their ATS (or CRM, or job board platform), their website analytics, and marketing channels such as aggregators and Adwords. We hope to release further details soon.

We’ll be publishing much more information on each of the areas above in the months to come.  If you would like to be kept at the forefront of recruitment marketing best practice you can subscribe here or follow us on LinkedIn (we promise to just send you the good stuff - no emails for the sake of emails).

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