What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is a term that’s often used by talent acquisition experts, sophisticated recruitment marketers and industry thought leaders, but for many, this term remains a mystery. With that said, if you’re unfamiliar with this latest buzzword, take solace in the fact that, while the term “recruitment marketing” may be a bit new, the practice is anything but.

That’s because recruitment marketing is simply recruitment evolved.

To punctuate this point, let’s consider recruitment in it’s recent historical context. If we look back to a time before recruitment was primarily carried out online, we see that talent acquisition professionals would typically attract top talent by posting their open positions in the local classifieds. Success, in this case, was easy to measure. You paid the cost of the advertisement for each time it appeared in the paper, and the talent came through your door to apply.

Over the years, we’ve seen this process change--first classifieds moved online with job boards, which eventually evolved into job aggregators and social networks.

Today, there’s a seemingly innumerable amount of options at every talent acquisition professionals disposal to attract top candidates, but with one noticeable caveat. Talent acquisition professionals today no longer operate from the advantageous position we once did. That’s because we now find ourselves in a candidate-driven marketplace where the best job seekers have options and therefore tend to shop out their skills to the company they deem best.

The shift in technology surrounding the advertising of open job positions, coupled with a movement to a candidate-driven jobs marketplace, has forced recruitment from a reactive business function into the proactive business driver known as recruitment marketing today. With that said, recruitment marketing is the act of recruiting by way of using marketing best practices to engage with and attract leading talent to fill open or future positions.

Recruitment marketing, therefore, incorporates elements of content marketing, job advertisements on job boards and aggregators, search engine marketing, social and mobile recruiting, career sites, display advertising, banner advertising, recruitment events, retargeting campaigns, television ads, radio spots and seemingly every other facet of the digital and traditional marketing spaces. In other words, recruitment marketing is simply marketing that supports recruitment efforts, or job advertising in short.

A good recruitment marketing strategy, then, takes into account a number of these practices to acquire top talent for open roles, or to build talent pipelines that organizations can recruit from in the future when new positions become available.

While this post lays the foundation for the question, “what is recruitment marketing,” the subject itself can hardly be boiled down into one simple article. That’s because, while the basic tenets of recruitment marketing have essentially remained the same since the term’s inception, the practice is constantly being changed and refined as talent acquisition professionals begin to analyze and measure their strategies in a more meaningful way.

So, it’s more important than ever to keep updated on recruitment marketing insights and industry news, and the Recruitics’ blog and newsletter are great places to start. Over the past year, we’ve been building our blog out with a litany of resources for recruitment marketers of all skill sets and levels, to help you keep up with this ever changing landscape.

Sign up for our newsletter today to get this content, and more, delivered directly to your inbox.