Recruiters can do everything! Can’t they? Well, maybe - but if you’ve ever heard the phrase ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ then you might have an idea where I’m going with this. The question I’m bringing to the table is that in today’s market, is it really practical to keep recruiting 360° recruiters?
There are so many duties that were once part of a 360° recruiter’s workload that are now full-time jobs in themselves. Combine this with the hectic day-to-day of recruitment and things quickly begin to look more than a little unmanageable.
But re-modelling your entire team at once is equally counter-productive, so let’s start with one incredibly beneficial change: the introduction of a recruitment marketer.
The role of the recruitment marketer is to bring all of your current marketing together into a streamlined process.
A recruitment marketer’s role is primarily to coordinate and extend your reach. It used to be the case that recruitment marketing was about writing up a limited amount of ad copy for newspapers.
But nowadays, not only does ad copy have to take into consideration the likes of SEO, it also has to be distributed intelligently to reach many different online channels.
Ideally, all recruitment copy will be personalised by the recruiter as it still has to stand out from numerous other adverts for that same job, whilst also reflecting the company brand and tone.
And that doesn’t even take into consideration how you measure and analyse the response rate. So it’s safe to say, a lot has changed!
So to summarize, your business could hugely benefit from having someone on the team who can handle the following:
1. Producing good job advert/web copy and SEO
These two go hand in hand. It’s no use to have a website with great SEO pulling in loads of traffic if the copy is terrible and unprofessional once they land on the page.
Similarly, there’s no point in having some top notch copy sitting on a website if no one can find it!
Having both maintained at a high standard will massively increase the volume of traffic and click-through rate on your recruitment website.
2. Managing social media
It's not just about posting out content across your social media platforms, but also knowing where your niche audience is and how to reach them. This involves devoting some necessary time and effort to researching when and where to post in order to achieve the best results.
3. Blog
Having a blog for your business is great for creating authority, nurturing brand awareness and improving SEO. The more solid, valuable content you provide, the more you reassure clients and candidates alike that you know what you’re talking about.
Like it or lump it, recruiters aren't marketers, so employing a marketer with a specialised skill set means these things won't just get done, but they’ll get done well.
A recruiter will struggle to make their job ad copy stand out from the crowd in the way an experienced marketer would. So having a skilled writer to poof-read and contextualise all job ads, and research new strategies will massively improve impact.
Also, the sharing of these ads in researched, optimized places rather than just everywhere and anywhere is likely to improve the quality of the candidates applying for your jobs. Analysing what works and what doesn’t enables you to get smarter with your spending, allowing for better returns and an increased efficiency. Furthermore, analysis of which adverts are struggling allows you to focus on pushing that advert to the right channels.
The key here is that recruiters still have to do their part in building up personal profiles and networks, but there is also a separate role doing this on behalf of your agency as a whole. And the cherry on top is that, as one of the most competitive candidate sectors, there are a wealth of digital marketers who are online and available for hire.
We've created a job description template that includes all the important (and often forgotten) skills, objectives and attributes that you should be looking for when hiring a Recruitment Marketer onto your team.
Download the template below and tailor to make this the best hiring decision you'll make for your team!