Marketing a recruitment agency is as crucial as marketing just about any other company. Finding the best candidate might be the main part of their job, but it is their clients, the employers, who hire them to provide support in identifying qualified people for a given vacancy.
At present, the recruitment market is heavily saturated. It’s estimated that there are around 7000 recruitment agencies in Australia alone. Naturally, the main aim of any marketing strategy for a recruitment agency would be to stand out from the crowd and attract more reputed, loyal and long-term clients.
So, how can a recruitment agency market their company to attract prospective clients?
Marketing is not all about lucrative job postings
Indeed, a recruitment agency is all about job postings – but that, alone, does not attract more clients because a recruitment agency serves employers, not job seekers.
The revenue for a recruitment agency comes from their clients. So, if they do not position themselves as a top leader in their industry, their competition will, in all likelihood, beat them out and lure in prospective clients.
Let me put this in perspective: There are many employees in my company and the need to hire a new candidate only arises in two situations – when someone resigns or when it’s clear that we need someone new to ease the workload of existing employees or expand the company in other areas.
So, job postings, alone, are not a strategy to market the services of a recruitment agency.
Make a solid marketing plan and define your aims
If you’re responsible for the marketing operations of a recruitment agency, think about what their marketing goals are and about how you want to achieve these.
The worst thing you can do, in this process, is work on the fly and submit ad hoc strategies. Recruitment agencies are a sort of niche market and you really need to think about what matters to their target audience.
Targeted call campaigns are a good strategy
While I prefer not to use the term ‘cold calling’, call campaigns, high targeted ones at least, are still very much an effective strategy in the marketing and sales world.
This strategy not only helps you keep in touch with existing clients, enhancing their customer experience, but it also helps you find new clients, especially if you adopt an intelligent and targeted approach.
Before you start, remember that it doesn’t hurt to have information about the prospect you’re calling.
Focus your advertising on Reddit
Due to its unique features and potential for advertising, Reddit is generating a lot of buzz in the marketing industry, with 430+ million active users.
Reddit is a site that allows people with similar interests to share and view links. As a marketer, it allows you to target your ads to highly specialised audiences, making it a platform well-suited for marketing recruitment agencies.
If you want to know more about how you can use Reddit as a strategy in your marketing efforts, I suggest you check out my post. You will be able to read a bit more and understand why that it’s fruitful to focus your advertising efforts on Reddit if you want to reach a decent audience without spending too much.
Build client personas
This step is to help you build a picture of exactly what the recruitment agency’s clients and job candidates are like.
Client personas give you a clear picture of the diversities in their target audience. Once you have the basics, try and add finer details to this profile because the more the details, the better. If done well, this will guide your marketing decisions in the right direction.
Start with existing clients and even survey some to gather more data – you can even make use of certain tools to assist you in this process. Such efforts will help you understand important details like where these clients tend to appear online and other tidbits of data you will find incredibly useful.
Execute your recruitment agency marketing plan with vision and confidence
This is just a snapshot of what I believe are good strategies to market a recruitment agency, although there are plenty of other tactics that could work just as well for you.
Just remember, survivor bias is real, so, your ideas can work for you even if they didn’t work for someone else!