4 Top Sales & Marketing Tips for Recruitment Agencies to Grow Business

By Abhishek Kathpal | Updated 10 January, 2023 | 14 mins reading time

Recruiters look best when they are either buzzing on the phone with candidates or meeting clients. Marketing initiatives no matter how important gets missed out from the daily activities of recruiters. The website gets ignored, social media remains restricted to the occasional live job and brand recall of your recruitment business along with individual recruiters get diluted every day.

No alt text provided for this imageWhen you expect your recruiters to take out dedicated time for marketing activities

Marketing is no longer restricted to clients but also candidates. Positioning yourself as a thought leader in the space is the key and the only way to differentiate yourself from the competition. While the daily hustle of recruiters keeps the business ticking, how do we make the funnel of jobs and candidates more predictable in the months to come. How do we give our business leverage in the mid and long term, apart from the daily hustle of recruiters?

If you are determined to support your recruiters in the mid-long term, it’s time to get strategic about marketing. There are a bunch of ways to target clients and candidates using traditional business development and tech-enabled methods. There are both qualitative and quantitative ways to add your prospective clients and candidates to your pipeline. So the recruiters never have to slow down on the candidate calls and client meetings

Four Proven Ways to Get Leads & Grow

#1 Account-Based Marketing

It’s important to map the key target accounts for the next 3-6 months, well in advance. Narrowing the target accounts to 5-6 prospects and using the traditional rule of 7 to attack each account. The rule of seven is one of the oldest concepts in marketing. Although it is old, it doesn't mean that it is outdated. The rule of seven simply says that the prospective buyer should hear or see the marketing message at least seven times before they buy it from you. Over the course of 4 weeks, sales teams connect with their target list of prospects through mailers, by phone, by email, in person and with social media. An account-based targeting approach over a concentrated period of time is highly effective will make your people and business stand out in front of the competition. This can increase the chances of getting an appointment by 90%

No alt text provided for this imageRule of 7 enables your team to reach out to your audience from several directions increasing your chances of making a sale

#2 Social Media:

Being active on social media gives you the opportunity to reach out to a wide range of personas and have meaningful interaction. It’s important to identify which are the social media platforms where your target audience hangs out. If you are hiring for UX/UI Designer roles you must be seen participating on platforms like Dribble and Behance. This would change to platforms like Kaggle and Stackoverflow if your target market is data scientists. These are strong communities where you’ll find not just your active and passive job seekers but also hiring managers. Ideally, social media initiatives should be done by recruiters themselves to build their own markets. Tools like Hootsuite and Buffer publish can be used to schedule, manage and monitor social media with spending not more than 30mins in a week.

#3: Personalised E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a traditional but effective way to generate interests in your potential clients and candidates to engage with you. However, the conversion of cold emails to the first call has now fallen from 5% in 2011 to 0.3% in 2021. Most clients and candidates would simply ignore any emails which look non-personalised. On the other hand, the concept of ‘Basho emails’ might not be applicable for recruitment business too because the ticket size might not be that much for you to spend 3 hours daily to write 6 emails. Products like LongList.io can be explored to find candidate data with one click and send personalised emails in bulk. The personalisation won’t be as in the depth as in Basho emails but it would stand out in comparison to the majority of usual bulk recruiting emails. This can result in increasing your PRR (Positive Response Rate) to 15%. A healthy PRR can enable your recruiters to do 1 extra deal every month.

#4 Promoting thought leadership

Hosting or sponsoring events are a good way to get physically in front of your potential candidates and clients. Events that focus on just hiring don’t tend to do well as passive talent would not turn up for such events. Hiring focussed events don’t work very well if you are trying to engage multiple clients. However if with the help of industry leaders you could drive interesting topics and Q&A sessions. It’s an effective way to create non-transactional relationships with potential candidates and clients, while you position your team as thought leaders in the space. Arrows Group for example has been working on a podcast series with industrial experts. They are creating some quality content for their potential candidates and clients and creating genuine curiosity in the offerings.

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