Recruitment marketing agency for staffing and recruitment firms

What is a recruitment marketing agency?

A recruitment marketing agency applies marketing techniques to hiring people. Instead of posting a vacancy and waiting, it builds a campaign: a clearly defined audience, an offer that appeals, ads on the channels where that audience actually is, a landing page built to convert into applications, and daily adjustments based on what comes in.

The difference with a classic recruitment agency is fundamental. A recruitment agency sells you candidates, per placement, for a fee. A recruitment marketing agency builds the system with which you bring in candidates yourself - and that system stays yours.

For a staffing or recruitment firm there is an extra layer. You are not the end employer. You sell people to client companies. That means convincing two completely different audiences, with two different stories, through two different channels. Most agencies offering “recruitment marketing” only serve the candidate side. We do both.

Recruitment marketing, labor market communication, employer branding and job marketing - what is the difference?

These four terms get used interchangeably, even by agencies that should know better. The distinction is simple once you look at the time horizon and the goal.

We do recruitment marketing and job marketing, and we use employer branding where it makes the campaigns cheaper. What we do not do is spend six months on a brand story while your vacancies sit open.

• Employer branding is about your employer brand over the long run: what you stand for, why someone would want to work for you. It rarely produces an application this month, but it makes every other effort cheaper.
• Labor market communication is the broader discipline: all communication that positions you as an employer, towards active and passive candidates, current employees and alumni.
• Recruitment marketing is the measurable, campaign-driven application of all that: ads, funnels, sourcing, follow-up, with numbers per euro spent.
• Job marketing or vacancy marketing is the narrowest slice: putting one specific vacancy in front of the right people.

How do you serve candidates and clients at the same time?

A staffing or recruitment firm only grows when both sides keep moving. Plenty of candidates without clients is a database. Plenty of clients without candidates is a problem. That is why our system consists of two engines that can run independently.

• JAM (Job Acquisition Machine) fills the candidate side: Job Marketing Campagnes, AI Sourcing and Multi-Channel Job Distribution to 15+ job boards.
• CAS (Client Acquisition System) fills the client side: ICP Outreach to companies that are demonstrably hiring, a B2B advertising engine and CRM automation.
• You do not have to start with both at once. Most firms begin with whichever side hurts most right now.

What results can you expect, and how soon?

Every number below comes from campaigns we ran ourselves, not from an industry report.

• Giant Leap Recruitment: 200+ qualified account managers in 90 days, at €8.96 per candidate.
• Bureau In Techniek: 107 technicians in 90 days, at €30.51 per candidate.
• UBN Uitzendbureau: 82 applicants in 3 weeks.
• Job Marketing Campagnes deliver up to 85% more engagement than a standard job post and up to 4.5x more reach than traditional recruiting.
• For 78% of our clients, suitable talent is ready within 48 hours through AI Sourcing, with 3.2x higher conversion on the talent approached.
• CAS delivers 5 to 20 qualified client leads per month.

What does recruitment marketing cost - and what does doing nothing cost?

The honest comparison is not “what does an agency cost”, but “what does an open vacancy cost”.

The Dutch Recruitment Kengetallen Onderzoek - conducted by Intelligence Group together with Compagnon, Werf& and the Academie voor Arbeidsmarktcommunicatie - found an average cost per hire of €3,818 in 2020, against €4,088 in 2019. The same study showed that agency recruiters needed 46 days on average to fill a vacancy, and that agencies actually filled 59% of their vacancies - against 87% for corporate recruiters. So four out of ten assignments produced nothing.

That is where the real money sits. An unfilled assignment costs you not only the margin, but the client relationship as well.

What we do differently: we work on a monthly or annual retainer with a one-off implementation fee at the start, and the agreed lead volume is guaranteed. If a campaign does not deliver the promised number, you do not pay for the shortfall. On top of that a 7-day delivery guarantee applies. That forces us to only start where we can genuinely deliver.

How do you choose a recruitment marketing agency?

Seven questions you should ask any agency before you sign.

• Do you work for staffing and recruitment firms, or for employers? That is a completely different craft. An agency that works for end employers does not know your double audience.
• Who owns the campaigns, the data and the talent pool if we stop? If the answer is not “you”, you are building someone else's agency.
• What do you steer on daily - reach or applications? Reach can be bought. Applications cannot.
• What happens if it does not work? Keep asking until you get a concrete answer.
• Can you deliver clients too, or only candidates? At most agencies the answer is: only candidates.
• How fast does the first campaign go live? Weeks are days too many when your vacancies are open.
• Can I see numbers from a firm like mine? Not from a corporate, not from a webshop - from a staffing, contract staffing or direct hire firm.

Sources

• Recruitment Kengetallen Onderzoek 2021 - Werf&
• Werving van een werknemer kost gemiddeld €4.494 - Werf&