Every part of Ben Gledhill’s Recruitment Marketing career has taken on a natural progression. Ben, who’s currently the Head of Resourcing at Yodel and a Rally Recruitment Marketing Mentor, got his start out of college as a recruiter consultant.
“After a little bit of time doing that, I naturally fell into internal recruitment doing direct sourcing and writing job adverts. I started to use this new tool that just came out called LinkedIn that’s kind of grown a little bit big now,” Ben jokes.
How Did You Become a Recruitment Marketer?
Over the years, as candidates, job vacancies and organizations changed, Ben became more and more involved in Recruitment Marketing. He thinks of Recruitment Marketing as using consumer marketing strategies to help his company recruit talent.
“That can be something as simple as tailoring a job advert to suit the audience better. It can be content marketing, or it can even be something as big redeveloping a career site,” Ben said.
What is a Typical Day Like in Your Role?
Ben uses Recruitment Marketing to help the recruiting team with “candidate vacancy hot spots.”
“We might need to do a little bit of content marketing or targeted advertising for Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn,” Ben explains.
Recruitment Marketing is a fast-paced discipline, evolving rapidly just like consumer marketing, so Ben does a lot of research to stay current.
“There are strategies that may have been released today that were very different to yesterday. So, it’s really important to make sure that you keep up to date with trends and always look for what’s next,” Ben recommends.
What would you consider biggest challenge for companies working to adopt Recruitment Marketing?
Ben says he gets this question a lot during speaking engagements. He breaks it down into two fundamental parts: Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing.
“Employer Branding is a way of amplifying what it is like to work at your organization and you do that through Recruitment Marketing. I think a lot of people think that Recruitment Marketing is just a job advert and it’s really not. Everything that I’ve learned and everything that I do comes from the consumer marketing world and everything in the consumer world is driven by that emotional connect,” Ben said.
He has a great example that makes the role of both Employer Branding and Recruitment Marketing in any organization easy to understand.
“There’s a reason why you buy a certain type of perfume or you buy a certain type of handbag. It’s because you built an emotional connection with that brand. I think in Recruitment and Employer Branding, it’s important for organizations to understand that,” he said. “I think a lot of companies are a little bit unsure of what Recruitment Marketing is and I think when they really realize how easy it is, they’ll probably kick themselves . Any organization can create a Twitter account. They can ask someone to write a blog. It’s almost a bit of an education piece in discovering how easy it can be,” Ben added.
Ben’s ability to easily explain the ins-and-outs of the industry, coupled with his experience, make him a welcome addition to the Rally Recruitment Marketing community.
