Developing an effective marketing strategy for your recruitment agency may seem an elusive task. After all, you live a busy life – calling clients, recruiting candidates, working the job – it’s an endless cycle and while you know you should be developing your marketing plan, most of the time just getting a social post up on LinkedIn may feel like a victory.
While these tactics may win you some likes and comments, are they really moving the dial and providing meaningful return on investment? With a little bit of planning and marketing best practice, any recruiter or agency owner can develop marketing ideas that will drive more candidate registrations and client inquiries – you just need to work smarter, not harder!
Here are 7 recruitment agency marketing ideas to help grow your business:
Create a social media plan
As a recruiter you are likely adept on social media platforms and access them multiple times a day. We need to remember, however, that our customers are not using these channels in the same way that we are, so simply posting to gain visibility and stay top of mind isn’t enough.
Be deliberate with your actions. What is the goal you’re trying to achieve through social media? Is it to attract candidates with job adverts? Engage with your audiences to enhance your brand awareness and reputation? Or to drive traffic to your website where they may access a piece of content or better yet, ‘convert’ as a client or candidate lead? Likely your goal would be a combination of all three (or more!), yet the content we are typically creating lacks a vision for what we want our audiences to do. By developing a social media plan, you can be deliberate with your actions, developing a variety of different kinds of posts with an intent of eliciting different responses to meet your goals.
Develop your content on a weekly, or better yet, monthly basis by investing a bit of time up front, then using a social media posting tool to automatically push out your posts at the time of day that your audiences are most likely online. Not only will your posts be more thoughtful in intent, but you’ll be more likely to get them live, allowing you to focus your attention on the other pressing activities in your day.
One excellent tool that makes the posting process easy and more efficient is Paiger which automatically creates social media posts from jobs or content on your website plus curates third party content to share. Better yet, you can scale this across your recruiter base, helping you exponentially grow your content visibility across your recruitment consultants’ social networks.
Consider your medium
By now most of us have figured out that a social post with some visual element performs better than one with only text, particularly on LinkedIn for example. While it may seem obvious that imagery grabs peoples’ attention, you’re also playing to the platform’s algorithms that prioritise rich media and therefore serve up this content in your audiences’ feeds. Video performs particularly well, not only on social media but within search engines like Google. Enhancing your website landing page or blog post with video content sends signals to Google that this is valuable content, and is one of the 200+ SEO ranking factors.
While high-production video content can certainly have its place, it’s no longer a necessity thanks to the accessibility of video production tools. Audiences today value authenticity over polish, and impactful videos can be created without a big budget. The key is to focus on the medium and what you want the video to convey. Whether it’s recording a quick message or repurposing existing content into video format, prioritise delivering value. Most importantly, determine the metrics you’ll use to measure success—such as engagement, leads, or brand awareness—and keep your content concise, ideally under a minute or no longer than three minutes.
Maximise your existing content
The idea of creating lots of new content may seem daunting, but you’d be surprised at what content you likely already have at your fingertips. If you collect testimonials or case studies from clients, consider turning them into social posts. If you have a client pitch on PowerPoint, consider re-working as a summary of services that you can share on your website or social media. Chances are, you have a lot of content already that you can repurpose in your content strategy.
It’s also best practice to ‘sweat’ your assets. If you’ve written a blog post, consider what nuggets of information (statistics, quotes, lists etc.) that you can repurpose in an infographic, video or quote. Ideally you should be engaging in the ‘rule of five’, where each piece of content you’re creating can be repurposed in at least five different formats – newsletters, social posts, quotes, lead magnets, videos etc.
Use AI as an Enabler, Not a Replacement
AI can be a powerful tool to enhance your recruitment marketing efforts, but it’s important to approach it as an enabler rather than a replacement. When used strategically, AI can help automate repetitive tasks, streamline processes, and provide valuable insights into your audience. For example:
- Content Suggestions: AI tools can analyse trends and suggest topics that are likely to resonate with your audience, saving you time during the brainstorming phase.
- Email Personalisation: AI can help tailor email campaigns based on recipient behaviours, improving open and engagement rates without requiring manual intervention.
- SEO Optimisation: Tools like AI-powered keyword analysers can recommend strategies to improve your search rankings, aligning content with audience needs.
However, relying solely on AI without clear goals or a human touch can backfire. Generic, AI-generated content often lacks the authenticity and personal connection your audience craves, and without strategic oversight, AI-driven campaigns can lead to irrelevant or tone-deaf messaging.
The key is to use AI to amplify your efforts—streamlining workflows, uncovering insights, and scaling your reach—while ensuring that human creativity and emotional intelligence guide the strategy. This balance allows you to maintain the personal touch that builds trust with clients and candidates while leveraging AI to enhance efficiency and results.
Focus your efforts
A mistake that too many of us make is that we think we need to be omnipresent on every social channel, whether it be LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SMS, Whatsapp, Flickr…the list goes on! But too often we are spreading ourselves thin by trying to be everywhere instead of focusing on those channels that bring us the best return.
Think about your audience personas and where they are ‘hanging out’. Is that C-level client really going to interact with your company on Instagram? The reality is that it takes a lot of work to develop and engage a following and your time can be better spent elsewhere if it is not providing return.
The 80:20 rule holds fast here – spend 80% of your time on those channel(s) that bring you return and 20% ‘testing out’ new channels and initiatives to help you optimise your efforts going forward. It’s great to develop a testing mindset in everything you do, but this involves digging into the data and analysing what is actually working.
Now, there is one caveat: social sharing has a positive impact on your website SEO, so ideally you are sharing your content on different social platforms. However, by using a social scheduling tool as mentioned above, hopefully this process can become more efficient.
Reactivate your database
We tend to be focused on getting new customers, often forgetting the gold mine that we may already be sitting on! Even though that candidate wasn’t the right fit for a job a year ago doesn’t mean that they would not make a great candidate today. Or better yet, since the average UK employee moves job every four to five years (and every two years for millennials), revisiting those clients where you have placed candidates a couple of years on can be an excellent source of job order creation!
While it is best practice to be calling on these clients, you can also leverage database marketing to reactivate and uncover potential business opportunities. Developing a newsletter programme that provides valuable insights to your different audience groups (at minimum developing separate newsletters for candidates and clients), is an excellent first step, however, marketing automation programmes allow you to create specific messages to your audiences and serve them up based on how they interact with your communications. For example, those individuals who interact with or click on a link in your email (showing interest) can then be served up a second email a few days later with a message to match their stage of the sales funnel. If they engage with that message, they get a further email with a ‘consideration sales funnel’ message (and so on). This allows you to constantly nurture and ‘warm up’ these customers whilst allowing your recruiters to focus their attention on leads that are most likely to turn into customers instead of relying on cold calling.
Dive into your data
With so much data at our fingertips, where do we start and what does it really mean? If you are regularly posting on LinkedIn, you’ve likely noticed that it shows you how many people have liked your post, or if posting a video, how many have watched. While this data can start giving you some insights on what content people are engaging with, it doesn’t provide any meaningful insight into whether it is having a positive effect on your business growth. (And note, don’t be fooled by the number of people viewing your video, as LinkedIn counts a ‘view’ as anything over 3 seconds!)
Google Analytics should be your go-to platform to see if your marketing is working, providing you a host of insights including how much traffic is coming to your site, where the traffic is coming from, what content your audiences engage with (and how), when they’re arriving on your site and whether they are converting into customers (by registering or applying for a job and/or requesting more information as a client). This insight in invaluable and not only demonstrates whether your marketing is delivering return, but also allows you to develop insights that can help you optimise your practices.
For example, did you know that recruitment website traffic typically peaks on a Tuesday (or sometimes Wednesday)? Yet we are scrambling on a Friday afternoon to write our job adverts because we ‘think’ that candidates are searching for jobs on the weekend – they’re not! Having this insight can help you develop your job posting strategies that match your candidate behaviours.
Google offers a host of training videos on how to set up and use Google Analytics, but if you would like a free review and consultation, contact Thrive and we’d be happy to walk you through and help you focus on the most meaningful data to drive growth.
These are just a few recruitment agency marketing ideas and there are loads more where these have come from! If you’re interested in learning how Thrive helps our clients leverage strategic recruitment marketing, get in touch!