If you’re reading this, you already know that Recruitment Marketing is an exciting space to work in for a number of reasons:
Recruitment Marketing is still relatively new for most organizations, which means that many functions, programs and strategies are being built from the ground up. It’s fun to get in at that stage!
Further to that, there are also huge strides being made every year to move the discipline forward. There are so many advanced tools and tactics used in traditional marketing that are rapidly being transferred over and translated to suit Recruitment Marketing aims and audiences.
Recruitment Marketing is also a nice area to work in because it is an in-demand and hybrid area of expertise. Recruitment Marketers are starting to be quite sought after since there are so many organizations beginning to hire for Recruitment Marketing jobs, but only a limited number of people with direct experience in the space.
In short, it’s a really great time to consider a Recruitment Marketing career, and this post will share the info you need to know as a Marketer, Recruiter or Human Resources practitioner to transition over into Recruitment Marketing.
My career journey and takeaways
The insight I share in this post comes from my own personal experience.
I started out my career as an agency recruiter and then academic recruiter, before moving over to a Marketing role when I started working at Calendly. After some time, I was promoted into an Employer Brand Manager role at Calendly, which combined my experience from Recruiting and Marketing together. More recently, I’ve actually switched back to the Marketing team, but I still retain quite a few Recruitment Marketing responsibilities.
As I moved from team to team, I noticed that there were certain skills and pieces of knowledge that transferred really well between functions. However, I also noticed that there were some gap areas that I had to fill in during the switches too.
My aim for this blog post is to provide:
- A better understanding of the skills and knowledge you can leverage in Recruiting, Marketing and Human Resources to land a Recruitment Marketing role.
- Insight into the areas you may need to focus on to enhance your know-how to make you a more qualified candidate for a Recruitment Marketing job.
What Marketers can leverage to land a Recruitment Marketing position:
Communication skills
As a Marketer, you’ve developed strong communication skills through copywriting across content types and platforms. These communication skills are equally important to Recruitment Marketing. You’ll know how to define key messages and write suitable copy for different audiences, channels and content types. Strong communications will convince candidates to take action.
Tools and platforms knowledge
You can’t work in Marketing without building a proficiency with a range of tools and platforms. For instance, having a strong knowledge of email marketing platforms or social media management tools will translate over well. You’ll use the same types of tools, or ones that are very similar but with a Recruitment Marketing focus, to achieve success for your campaigns.
Campaign management know-how
As you know, there’s a learning curve with marketing. Learning how to execute well on a goal-based campaign will take time. And campaigns are just as important in the Recruitment Marketing space as they are in the corporate Marketing world because once an organization’s employee value proposition and creative direction is defined, campaigns will help you reach your audience and get results.
What Marketers need to learn for Recruitment Marketing job:
The recruiting funnel
While you’re already familiar with the sales funnel, as a Recruitment Marketer you’ll need to learn the stages of the recruiting funnel. The recruiting funnel will help you understand what your content goals should look like across the candidate journey.
The organization-specific recruiting process
You will also need to intimately understand how your organization’s recruiting process works end to end. You will need to learn things like, what does the referral process look like? What about the pre-screen and interview processes? And, what do we do with silver medalist candidates in the ATS? Without this type of knowledge, you won’t be able to identify weak areas that can be improved to boost candidate experience and apply rates.
The candidate mindset
Candidates will likely be a new audience group for you. You will need to learn what interests them, what their pain points are and what channels to use to reach them. Defining candidate personas is a great first exercise to gain some familiarity and effectiveness here. You can interview recruiters and top performers that sit within high-priority roles at your organization to learn who you’re targeting.
Recruiting channels
As a marketer, there will likely be some specific recruiting channels that you’ll need to gain familiarity with for the first time. Examples of this include Indeed, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, The Muse and other role specific channels (GitHub and AngelList would be two examples for technical talent, for instance). Of course, there are also in-person channels to consider too, like meet-up events, sponsored conferences and talks, recruiting fairs, open houses and more. In Recruitment Marketing we tend to use more channels than Marketers use, so there can be a lot to learn upfront and manage on an ongoing basis.
The skills Recruiters and HR professionals can leverage to land a Recruitment Marketing role:
Communication skills
As a recruiter and HR professional, you probably spend most of your day practicing strong verbal and written communications, which translates over to Recruitment Marketing. Being able to get your point across verbally will help you convince your team that certain projects make sense and will help with project management once you’re off and running.
From a written perspective, all of those job descriptions and candidate communications you have created mean that you’re probably a pretty decent copywriter already. Plus, since you have a strong understanding of candidate pain points, you’ll know how to write content that really speaks to the candidate’s perspective.
Candidate experience knowledge
After spending time in the recruiting seat, you likely have a strong understanding of what makes for a good and bad candidate experience. You’ll be able to assess your company’s hiring process to identify and address gaps. You’ll know what information candidates need and where things can be improved to see better results from the candidates you’re targeting.
Relationship-building abilities
One of the core skill sets of a recruiter and human resources professional is that you can form and maintain great relationships. This is still really important in Recruitment Marketing! Today, more than ever, a robust Recruitment Marketing strategy involves a candidate lead nurture program. Most organizations need to find a way to keep silver medalists and other contacts in their database thinking of their employer brand, so they’ll apply again in the future. Since you’ve built and managed relationships throughout your career, you’ll have a good idea of the type of content to include in lead nurture campaigns to keep candidates interested in jobs with your organization on an ongoing basis.
What Recruiters and HR professionals need to learn for Recruitment Marketing:
Campaign building
For a recruiter or human resources professional who’s never done any marketing, understanding the nuts and bolts of marketing campaigns is going to be really important. You will hear a lot of buzzwords initially that can make this sound really complex, but as you do a bit of research it soon won’t sound so intimidating!
Marketing campaigns are essential to know about so that you can target specific candidate groups, get your employer brand out on the market and drive results (applications, leads, event attendees, etc., depending on your objectives).
A great way to learn here is to see if you can shadow a member of your Marketing team who actively oversees campaigns to learn how they do it. Look for a step-by-step guide that breaks down how a marketing campaign works – and then just sub out the word ‘customer’ for ‘candidate’!
Performance metrics
Once you know how to run campaigns, the next thing to learn will be understanding the progress of your programs and campaigns through analytics and reporting. The goal here is not only to track and interpret all the data, but also to find a clear way of communicating progress to your team and any internal stakeholders. To learn more here, you can take a look at the Rally Blog for some Recruitment Marketing specific measurement guides, as what you measure will look a bit different from what your Marketing team is measuring.
Here are a few blog posts that might help:
- How to Analyze Your Next Recruitment Marketing Campaign Like a Pro (Template Include)
- How to Use Google Analytics to Improve Your Recruitment Marketing Performance
- This is Personal: It’s Time to Demonstrate the Value of Recruitment Marketing
Tools and platforms
Lastly, there will be some new tools and platforms to wrap your head around. For example, you will need to learn how to use social media ads as well as a social media management tool. This learning is a lot easier to take on because sites like Skillshare have a ton of online classes you can leverage. Vendors will also often have demo videos you can watch, or a note to their team should have a Sales person or Account Manager sent over asap to offer you personalized support as needed.
I hope you find this information helpful. Best of luck on the journey to landing your awesome new Recruitment Marketing job!
Rally note:
Think that there might be a need for creating (and stepping into!) the first Recruitment Marketing role on your current team? Take a look at this blog post by Tricia Goose from Appian to learn how she succeeded in doing just that: How to Create a Recruitment Marketing Role at Your Organization.
