Recruiters need to move fast to secure talent that allows their organisation to outperform competitors. In an increasingly tight labour market, recruiters are fighting to win the best people – and many are turning to recruitment marketing to attract and convert the talent they need.
But what exactly is ‘recruitment marketing’ and why should organisations be implementing it?
Recruitment marketing optimises each touchpoint you have with a potential candidate – careers site content, social media, emails and personalised job ads – to convert jobseekers and passive candidates into applicants. With these channels optimised and automated, recruiters can spend less money on advertising roles – while still getting the same number of applicants. This steady flow of applicants means recruiters can have their pick of talent which feeds into high-quality talent pools.
How does recruitment marketing save you $$$?
Recruitment marketing is based on the principles of marketing automation and content marketing. Well-utilised in the marketing world, 68% of marketers use marketing automation, according to recent HubSpot research, and 79% of top-performing companies have been using marketing automation for three or more years.
Recruitment marketing adopts the same approaches that your marketing team may already be using: but instead of appealing to potential customers, recruitment marketing optimises each touchpoint a potential candidate has with your organisation.
Just like a customer journey, a potential candidate discovers your SEO-optimised career site, is served personalised content based on their browser cookies, applies for a role and is nurtured with regular communications. At each stage of this journey, recruitment marketing is optimising these touchpoints with best-in-class marketing tactics. Consider the statistics below:
- Marketers using automation software generate 2x the number of leads and are 2x as effective.
- Organic SEO performs about 5.66 times better than paid search ads.
- Businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost of 33% less than non-nurtured prospects.
- Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.
- Video content is 50 times more likely to drive organic search results than plain text.
Using the above statistics as a reference point, we assume that recruitment marketing can make your recruitment channels 2x more effective in converting visitors to applicants.
With an effective recruitment marketing system in place, your recruitment channels are optimised to convert visitors to applicants, which allows you to spend less on advertising open roles. We predict that recruitment marketing can make your advertising channels 2x more effective, which allows you to reduce your advertising spend by 50%, resulting in significant savings.
For some organisations, this 2x increase in conversion rate prediction may even be conservative. One organisation using PageUp Recruitment Marketing achieved a conversion rate of 51% – a 5x increase in effectiveness on the industry average conversion rate of 8.5%
Let’s break it down further
If we consider the cost of advertising roles on job boards and maintaining a career site, the cost to secure an applicant for a role (Cost Per Applicant or CPA) can be high. In the marketing world, this is referred to as Cost Per Lead or CPL. In marketing terms, CPL is determined by taking the total advertising expenditure for a campaign, and dividing it by the total number of leads the campaign generates. The final number is the amount it costs to acquire each lead in that campaign.
Marketing campaigns with a high CPL are generally undesirable – often they are not optimised to reach the right audiences, or they may not have a compelling Call To Action (CTA), which means these campaigns receive low numbers of conversions. Campaigns with a low CPL are desirable: they are targeted and engaging, and are able to successfully convert high numbers of visitors to leads.
With recruitment marketing, the same principles apply. If your careers site or job boards are not optimised to convert visitors to applicants, your CPL – or in this case CPA – will be high. If your recruitment channels are optimised to convert visitors to applicants, your CPA will be low. Recruitment marketing can optimise your recruitment channels so that you can spend less on advertising – while still getting the same amount of applicants. We predict that recruitment marketing can increase your conversion to applicant rate by 2x, which can in turn allow you to reduce your advertising spend by 50%, resulting in significant savings.
How does that translate to dollars?
Recruiters need to present a strong business case based on tangible ROI to convince decision makers to invest in recruitment improvements.
Using the reasoning and marketing statistics above, this calculator will tell you exactly how much you can save with an effective recruitment marketing system in place.
To help hiring teams cement their position, we’ve created an interactive ROI calculator which clearly demonstrates the value of recruitment marketing in dollar value. Not only will your findings get stakeholders on side to improve processes, it will also help you make an informed decision about your future hiring strategies. This calculator helps prove to decision makers that recruitment marketing can provide serious returns. Try it out yourself!
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