Can Recruiters and Marketers Work Together?

For years now, this blog has been shouting about how important great marketing is to the recruitment process. In a noisy candidate-driven market like we’re seeing now, we all need to be thinking like candidate-centric marketers more than ever if we want to stay competitive.

But despite their close interdependent relationship, it’s true that recruiters and recruitment marketers still tend to work completely separately from one another when tackling day-to-day business. In fact, I’m pretty sure most recruitment marketers would say their team don’t completely understand – or appreciate – the contribution they make to the hiring process every day (which is why this blog is so popular!).

Finding a way for recruiters and marketers to work more aligned with each other’s workloads is something that should be top of the agenda for every forward-thinking recruitment team. A solid recruiter-marketer working relationship will open up a whole new level of candidate attraction, streamline the hiring process and increase placements as a result.

With this in mind, we thought we’d share some ideas on how recruiters and marketers can work better together to achieve the best results possible. Here’s what they are…

Understand why you rely on each other

You can’t attract top talent nowadays without good marketing and you won’t make placements without great recruitment – it’s as simple as that!

It’s likely you got into marketing because you like writing, you appreciate the impact of the written word and you understand the importance of making things look good to your audience if you want to get results.

It’s also likely that most of the people you work with got into recruitment because they’re great talkers, not writers! And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. The important thing is to respect that there’s a level of interdependency there and also to recognise the brilliant opportunity to capitalise on each other’s strengths to achieve better results.

Learn from each other  

One great thing about marketers is they’re always one step ahead when it comes to trends and technology, and the recruiters on your team should benefit from this. A great recruitment marketer will always keep their recruiters ahead of the curve – you just have to talk to each other!

Marketers naturally think about their audience with every single action they take, and recruiters can learn a lot from this candidate-centric approach. Any recruiter who stays candidate-focused at all times will have better relationships with their candidates, build a more positive personal brand and just generally be a better recruiter.

Likewise, it’s important to appreciate that the recruiters you work with are speaking to candidates every day so they know your marketing audience better than you ever could. Show your team that you appreciate this by asking their opinion about the sorts of needs, desires and challenges your target candidate market experience every day and let this influence your content strategy.

By openly recognising each other’s strengths in this respect, your recruiters will feel better understood and appreciated as experts in their niche (which they are!).

Use each other’s skills to achieve better results

Is a member of your team struggling to fill a particular role? There’s no better way to earn kudos with your recruiters than in offering to help them out with a challenge like this!

Whilst they understand their candidates better than anyone, you have the technical knowledge to show them how to use data to inform their decisions and focus their recruitment efforts in the right places. Combine your super powers and you’re sure to knock those placement targets out the park!

Here are a few practical ways you could propose combining your skills with the recruiters on your team to get better results:

1. Offer to create recruitment marketing/candidate personas that your team can use to recruit for hard-to-fill positions. Essentially, you need to ‘change your bait’ for each different type of candidate you’re looking to attract, and a lot of recruiters forget this.
   We have an eBook on this that includes a free persona template tool for you to use too.

2. Offer to do an audit of their existing recruitment process and provide solid data on whether their time is being channelled in the right online spaces. For example, what’s their job ad conversion rates on their go-to job board? Could they have more success if they advertised elsewhere? Whilst marketing is very data driven, recruiters still tend to rely on gut feel and a case of ‘but this is how I’ve always done things’. Use data to show them what they could achieve if they learn from results like marketers do.
3. Offer to do a social media audit of their social profiles to make sure they’re offering the best impression of themselves online. Candidates scope out recruiters’ profiles just as much as much as recruiters scope out theirs’, so it’s important they come across well.
4. Show them how to segment candidates within their recruitment CRM and send personalised marketing emails that’ll keep their candidates engaged and alert them to new relevant opportunities.

Align your goals

One of the main reasons that recruiters and marketers work so separately is that their KPIs aren’t always explicitly aligned, so you’ve no real reason to take interest in each other’s targets and how these contribute to the business’s wider goals.

However, the reality is that your daily activities do impact each other, and the more clarity both parties have on this the better.

If this is something you think is preventing you from working closely with your team, speak to your manager about how you can better align your goals with the rest of your team so they can see and appreciate the hard work you do and how it contributes to their recruitment process.

This eBook can help you align your recruitment and marketing goals and get your team to make more placements by working together: