4 Things To Do Before Hiring a Marketer for Your Recruitment Business

While marketing has always existed in recruitment, a strategic approach to it is far from the norm. But, thankfully, this is changing.

Opinions of, and investments in, strategic marketing had taken a positive turn before March 2020, but over one year on, the demand for marketing expertise is increasing significantly as people are beginning to believe that the days of cold calling as the main source of business are coming to a close.

If you have decided to invest in marketing, and are considering hiring a recruitment marketer, we’ve detailed four things to consider before you read a CV.

Define your business objectives

Before you start to look for a marketer, ask yourself what your business objectives are.

Are these written down? Are they agreed at board level? Is the entire business aware and working towards these defined objectives? 

If you don’t have business objectives, it is incredibly tough for a marketer, no matter how experienced, to establish marketing objectives that are meaningful. 

By meaningful, we’re referencing increasing brand awareness within your target audience(s), increased customer engagement across relevant channels and ultimately increased revenue (it’s not mythical, we promise).

If you have business objectives defined already, this is a great place for a marketer to formulate a strategy to help you achieve these. 

Do some research

If you don’t have a marketing background, you are not likely to be the best person to direct your marketing strategy. No offence to owners, CEOs and MDs, but your time is better spent elsewhere.

It is easy to assume that you know what marketing is, but we can’t emphasise this enough: if you have never worked in marketing or studied marketing, do some research. You need to get an understanding of what marketing can and can’t do within the constraints of your business.

Marketing is vast and if you approach hiring a marketer without properly researching what marketing is, you can expect to face problems, and the marketer will be left looking for their next job.

There are countless examples (not just in recruitment) of marketing job descriptions and marketing job adverts that are unrealistic.

These are unrealistic in the expectation of what a single person team can achieve, but also how experienced in marketing that one person needs to be.

Adam Nichols sums up this common lack of understanding nicely. 

For us, it’s too common for non-marketers in recruitment to think one person can do SEO, social media, email marketing, graphic design, content writing etc. etc.

This is simply impossible.

If you can only hire one marketer, and your budget is small, focus on a very limited number of marketing initiatives and the channels you use. And, be honest with the marketer from the offset that the remit is limited due to budget constraints.

Do the maths

Once you have grasped that marketing is a big thing, with lots of moving parts, do some maths to get a realistic feel for how committed you are and what you can afford to invest. If you have made the decision to hire a marketer before doing the budget sums, please stop!

Whether you include the marketer’s salary (pension, holidays and additional trimmings) in your marketing budget for the year or not, you have to have a budget. 

If the salary of the marketer is the marketing budget, again, stop. What are they going to use to ‘market’ your business?

There are common things that every recruitment company should incorporate into their marketing budget, but first you need to decide what the top-level budget is and then work down from there, covering the priorities first.

Use revenue to guide you

There are no golden rules on what you should invest in marketing. But look at it this way, if you want to grow your business, the more (of the right) people that know about you, and have a good experience when engaging with you, the more likely you are to achieve the growth.

Start with 3% of last year’s revenue.

If you are a business owner, you’ll probably already know what the figure is - but if not, speak to your CFO, finance department or accountant, and figure out your revenue or estimated revenue.

Figures of 5% - 10% of revenue are suggested in sweeping estimates across sectors, but we know recruitment is unique and we feel that that would result in some scary numbers for many a recruitment business owner.

 

Once you know how this makes you feel about an investment in marketing, you can go from there with an open mind, and an idea about what level a marketer you can realistically hire, with a budget in place for them to use.

Whatever level of marketer you hire, it’s likely that they’ll need additional support. As discussed above, a marketer is not an SEO expert and a graphic designer and website developer and a social media manager etc. 

The costs can add up quickly, but that’s why you need to set a budget as a starting point - so you know where you can go from there.

Decide if hiring is right 

You know where we’re going with this bit. 

Hiring a marketer isn’t easy, there’s lots to think about and then there’s finding the right person.

We do encourage you to hire at least one internal marketer for your recruitment business, but sometimes it might not be the first thing you need to do. 

It could be beneficial to work with a recruitment marketing agency to develop a strategic approach, before bringing in a marketer to drive the direction forward from within.

We work best with clients that ‘get marketing’. This usually means that they have some internal presence but realise that building an entire in-house marketing team isn’t feasible. A full team of the right mix of skills and experience is a tough ask, and requires a lot of time to build.

The realistic outlook is that you will need both an internal presence and some outsourced support. The ratio or balance between the two is something we’ll leave to a future post.

If you want to talk to one of us about any of this, contact us today and we’ll be happy to try and help you get your ducks in a row before you write that all important job advert.