What Recruitment Marketing budget do practitioners need to do their best work and enable their companies to compete for top talent? What salary do recruitment marketers make and how is the effectiveness of their efforts measured? And what does the current spending and planned investments in Recruitment Marketing say about the future of this growing profession and vital talent acquisition strategy?
These are some of the most popular questions we receive from the Rally community, and today we’re excited to share the answers! Over 500 practitioners took our latest Rally Recruitment Marketing Job & Salary Survey to tell us the size of their budgets and teams, how they’re utilizing their resources and where they expect Recruitment Marketing investment to go in 2022-2023.
Specifically, we asked practitioners who work in-house for employers to tell us about:
- Salaries: Recruitment Marketing salaries in-house, including base compensation and bonuses.
- Advertising: Recruitment advertising, job boards and events.
- Campaigns: Recruitment Marketing campaigns, programs and activities (“what else do you spend money on to market your company as a great place to work that’s not covered by the other budget categories?”)
- Services: Recruitment Marketing/employer branding agencies, contractors and professional services.
- Technology: Recruitment Marketing technology (NOT including your ATS).
Here’s are the results of the 2022 Rally Recruitment Marketing Job & Salary Survey, by spending category and company size:
The survey results show that the median Recruitment Marketing budget across all spending categories and across all company sizes is $718,400 annually. In the specific categories of Advertising, Services and Technology, the median budget is $382,700, which is an 81% increase over our first survey conducted in 2019!
When compared to our 2019 Rally Recruitment Marketing Job & Salary Survey, these results paint a clear picture of progress in many areas of Recruitment Recruitment — yay! Let’s dive deeper into what this progress really means, both for the future of our field, your career and your Recruitment Marketing strategy.
1. More budget is being allocated to Recruitment Marketing
Practitioners expect their budgets in the next year to increase 25-35%.
What this means
More companies are seeing the clear-cut positive effects of Recruitment Marketing, defined as applying marketing strategies to promote the value of working for an employer in order to attract, engage, recruit and retain talent to meet larger talent acquisition goals.
Another reason for higher Recruitment Marketing budgets is the current state of the talent market, where everyone’s competing for the same small supply of top candidates. This means more expensive job advertising, more hiring campaigns and events, the need for a greater amount of employer brand content and other cost inflators.
However you spin it, Recruitment Marketing budgets are going up. You can use this data as proof to justify asking for higher budgets at your own organization, emphasizing that it’s necessary if you want to avoid being drowned out by your competitors, and especially because job advertising alone is not enough to attract top talent today.
2. Recruitment Marketing teams are growing
25% of practitioners plan to increase the size of their team.
What this means
Similar to larger budgets, bigger teams point to a growing belief in Recruitment Marketing strategy as a driver of recruiting results.
Just as we’re seeing within the Rally community, the career opportunities are there! Practitioners are being headhunted, they’re switching companies to be in roles focused on Recruitment Marketing and we’re seeing a surge in the number of Recruitment Marketing and employer branding jobs being posted.
An Important Message to Talent Acquisition Leaders, CHROs and CEOs: If you want to attract top Recruitment Marketing and employer branding professionals to work at your company, you’ve got to give them the budget, resources and support to succeed! One of the biggest reasons a recruitment marketer will leave your company or not accept your job offer is if they think that RMEB is not important to you. The practitioners in our community want to do their best work, and they need support to make it happen!
If you haven’t already, sign up for our Rally Recruitment Marketing newsletter for new job openings every week, as well as fresh content from us and other leaders in our community.
3. Employers of all sizes are prioritizing Recruitment Marketing
Even smaller companies are investing in Recruitment Marketing and offering budgets for salaried practitioners.
What this means
Regardless of your company size or budget, Recruitment Marketing needs to be a priority if you want to successfully attract and recruit today’s talent. No matter how small you are, or what industry you’re in, you’re already competing for talent with companies using Recruitment Marketing — and investing in social and digital recruiting yourself is the only way to stay competitive.
For employers with fewer resources, investing more in Recruitment Marketing could also mean:
- Appointing one person on the talent acquisition team to spend half their time on Recruitment Marketing, or sharing the role across your team members
- Hiring a consultant or an agency to develop and implement a Recruitment Marketing strategy, as your budget allows
- Prioritizing areas of Recruitment Marketing likely to produce the most ROI in the shortest time possible – especially important for small teams!
Lori’s recommended focus areas for teams wanting to produce more results through Recruitment Marketing with little-to-no budget.
4. More employers are hiring outside Recruitment Marketing help
Larger employers are leveraging Recruitment Marketing agencies to scale up.
What this means
For teams wanting to take their Recruitment Marketing to the next level, but struggling with limited time and resources, outside agencies can offer the helping hand you need.
Instead of paying for the salary, training or downtime that often comes with bringing on a new team member, you can hire an agency with proven expertise to take the reins and start producing results much more quickly.
Even short term, hiring an agency can be the perfect support figure to help you break through obstacles, reach a time-sensitive goal or get you to a place where you can afford (both in money and time) to bring on a new salaried team member.
5. Leaders are recognizing that Recruitment Marketing is more than just job advertising
More practitioners have a budget line item for Recruitment Marketing and employer branding strategies beyond traditional job advertising.
What this means
The tide has finally shifted! Recruitment Marketing is maturing to use the full suite of marketing and branding capabilities to attract, engage and recruit talent, beyond just advertising. More leaders are also recognizing the full scope of what recruitment marketers do, which is attracting candidates to employers as much as jobs themselves.
Hopefully, this means we’ll start to see more practitioners getting support for and using employee advocacy programs, award programs, EVP refreshes, content overhauls, careers site redesigns, social media campaigns and other strategies proving necessary to create an employer brand that attracts top talent.
More recognition also bodes well for getting support for bigger budgets and developing professionally, especially in combination with using data from tools like Rally Inside, setting goals that leaders can get behind and a reporting process that they can understand.
You can do your part to push Recruitment Marketing outside the bounds of job advertising by pitching employer branding work in a way that highlights how you’re still supporting your company’s larger talent acquisition goals, such as by using the method pictured here.
Rally note: For everything you need to plan, measure, analyze and benchmark a winning Recruitment Marketing strategy, and show to leadership the impact you’re making on talent attraction, download our free Recruitment Marketing Measurement Kit.
6. Recruitment Marketing technology budgets are increasing
28% of respondents plan to spend more on Recruitment Marketing technology in the coming year.
What this means
Recruitment Marketing technology no longer just refers to ATSs. Teams are realizing the much wider range of tools now at their disposal to support and improve their strategies, especially in areas like programmatic advertising, nurture campaigns, candidate experience and talent engagement.
If you have yet to expand your tech toolkit beyond your ATS, there’s never been a better time! Gem, PandoLogic, Jobvite and Clinch, a PageUp company — all gracious sponsors of our RallyFwd virtual conference on May 11 — are doing amazing work making tech solutions to some of Recruitment Marketing’s most pressing challenges — and are perfect places to start your search.
We’re also doing our part to expand technological capabilities in Recruitment Marketing with our new analytics & benchmarking tool, Rally Inside. Engagement with your content is one of the most important indicators of your talent audience’s attitude towards your employer brand, and Rally Inside helps track, measure, benchmark and report on engagement data across all of your Recruitment Marketing channels.
Sign up for Rally Inside for FREE today.
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Overall, the results from the 2022 Rally Recruitment Marketing Job & Salary Survey is great news! More employers are investing in Recruitment Marketing, in-house teams are getting bigger, there are more job ads calling for specialized practitioners and more leaders are understanding the full scope of our roles. Plus, the broader community is growing, with more agencies and vendors offering solutions to make Recruitment Marketing and employer branding a truly strategic advantage for employers.
For more data to help you stay current with the evolving state of Recruitment Marketing, and talent acquisition in general, check out our Complete List of Resources to Inform your Recruitment Marketing Strategy.
