Who owns Recruitment Marketing? Where should it sit within your organization to be most effective: under Marketing or under Talent Acquisition?
There is no one right or wrong answer here: every company has a unique set of hiring goals, budget, hierarchies, culture and internal processes that will contribute to what works best for your Recruitment Marketing function.
I’ve personally had the unique opportunity of working in a Recruitment Marketing position that rolled up to TA initially, but that now rolls up to Marketing. And today, Rally community, I’m excited to share my experience and the pros and cons I’ve noticed of having Recruitment Marketing sit under Marketing vs. Talent Acquisition.
My Career Path: From HR to TA to Marketing
I’ve been with my current company for eleven years. Here’s what that journey has looked like:
- For 7 years I was part of the Learning and Development team
- In 2015, I transitioned into a role as Program Manager for a brand-new onboarding program that focused on the new hire employee experience
- In 2016, I moved into a newly formed role as Candidate Attraction Manager – and entered the Recruitment Marketing space for the first time!
As Candidate Attraction Manager, my focus is on understanding our employee value proposition, telling our story internally and externally, and creating consistency across platforms and messaging to create a strong employer brand to drive quality candidates to join us.
Recruitment Marketing under Talent Acquisition
When I first began in this role, I was sitting on our global TA team. I immediately saw the talented, hard-working recruiters as my customers and I was inspired to enable them through building content, experiences and brand awareness that would help them reach and land top talent. Here were some other advantages, as well as challenges, from my time rolling up to TA:
ADVANTAGES:
- You’ll experience the day-to-day challenges of your recruiters which will help identify strategic priorities
- You get more visibility into longer-term hiring strategies
- You’ll have a better understanding of how the team is performing against hiring targets and metrics
- You’ll uncover what resonates with candidates through first-hand recruiter encounters
- Your access to the recruiting team is seamless and efficient
CHALLENGES:
- It can be difficult to balance priorities due to limited bandwidth as one person often supports an entire team –it’s hard to be all things in supporting an employer brand (social, digital, candidate experience, metrics) from strategy through to execution
- You have less insight into the Marketing’s team strategy, approach and brand narratives
- It can be tough to build the business case for enhanced recruitment related technology, tools or programs – the budget is usually more friendly on the Marketing side
Recruitment Marketing under Marketing
Under TA, I worked closely with the marketing side of the house and after seeing how much of that expertise and knowledge is needed to elevate our Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketing campaigns, my role moved under that organization. Now, after having been on the Marketing team for a little over a year, I’m happy to share some insights on the benefits and challenges of being aligned to this function too:
ADVANTAGES:
- You’re able to leverage resources aligned to communications, creative assets, digital platforms and analytics more easily
- You’ll likely have more visibility into what is happening throughout the entire organization both internally and externally
- It’s easier to repurpose work already happening within the team because you’ll be more aware of what your marketing peers are producing
- You’ll have more access to expertise around marketing and communications principles and best practices
CHALLENGES:
- It can be challenging to stay as connected to recruiters and hiring priorities
- It might be difficult to ensure Marketing continues to keep Recruitment Marketing priorities front and center, given it’s one objective among many on this team
- Sometimes customer and industry content tends to take priority given that it aligns to revenue-generating goals
As you can likely tell from my list of pros and cons, there are a number of great things – and challenging ones – associated with sitting on either team.
One major learning from my experiences that I’d like to leave you with though is that regardless of which team you’re on, try to build strong partnerships with the other team. This way you can work together to leverage each of your expertise and knowledge areas to be more effective at attracting great talent to your organization! Best of luck!