Choosing a recruitment marketing agency

Ten questions

• Do you work for staffing and recruitment firms or for end employers? An agency that works for employers does not know your double audience of candidates and clients.
• Can I see numbers from an agency like mine? Not from a corporate or a webshop, but from a temp staffing, secondment or search & selection firm.
• What is the total monthly cost, including ad budget? Media is almost always a separate line.
• Who owns the campaigns, ad accounts, dashboards and talent pool if we stop?
• Do you steer daily on reach or on applications? Reach can be bought, applications cannot.
• What happens in a month without results? Keep pushing until you get a concrete answer.
• How quickly is the first campaign live?
• Who does the work — the team from the sales meeting, or somebody else?
• Can you deliver clients too, or only candidates?
• What do I have to keep doing myself?

Red flags

• Reports about reach, impressions and views, without applications or placements.
• Campaigns and ad accounts registered in the agency's name instead of yours.
• An annual contract with a notice period before a single result has been delivered.
• Cases without numbers, or numbers without context — "more applicants" is not a result.
• Benchmark figures without a source, or a recent year stamped on an old study.
• One message for candidates and clients at the same time.

How to compare proposals fairly

Agencies charge in different ways, which is why quotes are rarely comparable. Convert everything back to the same number: what does one qualified applicant cost me, and one placement?

• Add fee and ad budget together into one monthly amount.
• Divide that by the number of applications the agency realistically promises.
• Ask about the lead time to first delivery, not to the first campaign.
• Ask who carries the risk if nothing is delivered.

Where we stand

We work exclusively for temp staffing agencies, secondment firms, search & selection firms and recruitment agencies — not for end employers. We work 100% no-cure-no-pay with a 7-day delivery guarantee, and all campaigns, accounts, dashboards and the talent pool you build remain yours.

Numbers from our own campaigns: 200+ account managers in 90 days at €8.96 per candidate for Giant Leap Recruitment, 107 engineers in 90 days at €30.51 per candidate for Bureau In Techniek, and 82 applicants in 3 weeks for UBN Uitzendbureau.