Recruitment & Staffing marketing
Marketing to clients and candidates without one page doing both
Recruitment is genuinely two-sided. Clients and candidates need different messages, different channels and different offers, and which side is scarce flips with the labour market. Most agency marketing is built as though only one of them exists.
Measurement
What we report on, and what we ignore
Sessions are not on this list. These are the numbers that tell you whether the marketing is producing customers.
- Placements made, split by permanent, contract and temporary
- Gross profit per placement, and total gross profit by source
- Time to fill, measured from brief accepted to offer accepted
- Shortlist speed: hours from brief to first credible candidate submitted
- New client briefs won, and the share that become repeat clients
- Candidate registrations that are genuinely contactable and correctly tagged
- Applications per live vacancy, read as a diagnostic rather than as a success measure
- Fill rate on roles accepted, and roles declined because they were not winnable
- Source of hire for every placement, so owned channels are separated from paid access
What usually goes wrong
Where recruitment marketing tends to fail
Recruitment is the only sector on this site with two customers who need entirely different marketing. A hiring manager and a software engineer are not two segments of one audience; they are two markets that happen to meet inside your business.
Which of them is hard to reach changes with the labour market, sometimes within a single quarter. A plan that cannot swing between the two sides will be pointing the wrong way for roughly half of its life.
- One website is trying to serve two opposite audiences.
- A candidate wants to search vacancies, see salaries and apply in under a minute. A hiring manager wants evidence you can fill a difficult role, an idea of your fee structure and a reason to call rather than use the agency they already have. Most agency sites compromise into something that does neither, usually with a homepage aimed at clients and a job search bolted on. The fix is structural: two clearly separated journeys from the first click, each with its own navigation, proof and call to action.
- Job aggregators keep the candidate relationship you paid for.
- Vacancies get syndicated, applications arrive through a third party, and the agency ends up paying repeatedly to reach candidates it has already met once. That is a rational trade when it is a choice and a slow problem when it is the whole strategy. The counterweight is owned candidate demand: job pages that rank on their own, a registration route worth completing, and a database tagged well enough that the next role can be filled without buying access again.
- The reporting counts applications and the business runs on placements.
- Applications are easy to increase and mostly uncorrelated with revenue, because a hundred unqualified applicants for a specialist role produce nothing but screening hours. The numbers that matter are placements made, time to fill, gross profit per placement and how often a client comes back. Until the reporting reaches those, every marketing decision gets made on a metric that can be doubled without any commercial effect at all.
- The market turned and the plan did not.
- Candidate-short and vacancy-short markets require opposite emphasis. When candidates are scarce the work is attraction, employer stories, speed of reply and being visible where a passive candidate spends time. When vacancies are scarce the work is client acquisition, proof of fill rate, and defending margin against agencies discounting to stay busy. Agencies that keep running last year’s plan discover the problem two quarters late, which in this sector is most of a cycle.
- Everything is contingency and nothing is committed.
- Working three roles on contingency against two other agencies means most of the effort is unpaid by design, and it rewards speed over judgement in ways nobody enjoys. Moving even part of the book to retained or exclusive terms changes the economics entirely, and it is a marketing problem as much as a sales one: it needs published evidence of specialist depth, a clear description of what a retained process delivers that a contingency scramble cannot, and a brand a hiring manager is willing to commit to in advance.
Search behaviour
What your customers are typing
Client side: looking for an agency
Small volume, high value, and made by someone who already has a vacancy they cannot fill.
- recruitment agency for engineers
- best staffing agency for warehouse workers [city]
- specialist finance recruitment agency
- agency to hire software developers
- temp agency for hospitality staff near me
Client side: terms and how it works
Research before a first call. Whoever answers these plainly gets to set the expectation for the negotiation.
- recruitment agency fees percentage
- contingency vs retained recruitment
- what is a rebate period in recruitment
- how much do staffing agencies charge per hour
- how to write a job brief for an agency
Candidate side: finding work
High volume, transactional, and where aggregators compete hardest. Job pages have to earn their own visibility.
- warehouse jobs [city]
- part time accounting jobs near me
- remote python developer jobs
- weekend nursing shifts [city]
- graduate marketing jobs [city]
Candidate side: advice and salary
Where a passive candidate is reachable long before they apply for anything. Rarely covered well by agencies.
- average salary for a project manager [city]
- how to answer why are you leaving your job
- is it worth using a recruitment agency
- notice period rules when changing jobs
- cv template for engineering roles
These are examples of how customers in this market search, drawn from keyword research and from the questions that come up on sales calls. They are illustrative, not a volume claim — the actual demand in your area is something we size before recommending anything.
Buying behaviour
How your customers actually decide
Strategy follows this, not the other way round. Everything on this page is downstream of how the decision genuinely gets made.
- A hiring manager under pressure calls the agency that filled the last difficult role, and if there is not one, they call whoever demonstrably works in that niche. Generalist positioning loses to a specialist here more decisively than in any other professional service, because the buyer is judging whether you already know the people they need.
- Clients test with a role rather than a decision. The first brief is usually a trial, frequently one that other agencies also have, and everything afterwards depends on the quality and speed of the first shortlist rather than on anything said during the pitch.
- Terms get scrutinised closely: fee percentage, rebate or guarantee period, exclusivity, and what happens if the candidate leaves. These are where negotiations stall, and publishing how your terms work removes a conversation that otherwise consumes the first call.
- Candidates choose on responsiveness above almost everything else. A consultant who replies the same day, tells the truth about salary and gives feedback after an interview earns a candidate who comes back and refers others, in a market where the default experience is silence.
- Candidates also judge the roles themselves before they judge the agency. Vacancies without a salary, without a location, or reposted for months tell an experienced candidate that the agency is fishing, and they stop applying to anything from that source.
- Both sides check the individual consultant, not just the agency. A named recruiter with visible knowledge of a sector is the reason a passive candidate takes the call and the reason a hiring manager forwards the brief, which makes consultant visibility a commercial asset rather than a personal indulgence.
Where the money goes
The channels that earn their place here
In priority order for this business, not a menu. Anything not on this list is something we would need a specific reason to recommend.
Job pages that get indexed, and expire cleanly
An agency site publishes and removes hundreds of pages a month, which is a technical problem before it is a content one. Getting live roles crawled quickly, marking them up correctly, handling expired vacancies without leaving dead pages behind, and keeping thin duplicates out of the index is what decides whether your own vacancies compete with the aggregators syndicating them.
Client-side pages built around the niche you fill
Hiring managers search by discipline, sector and city, not for recruitment services. Pages that name the roles you place, the salary reality in that market and the process a client should expect reach a small number of high-value buyers, and they give consultants something credible to send after a cold approach.
Consultants visible in their own niche
Passive candidates and hiring managers both respond to a named person who evidently knows the market, and neither responds to an agency logo. A small number of consultants posting salary reality, market movement and hiring observations produces more inbound on both sides of the desk than the company page ever will.
The database as an asset rather than a graveyard
Candidates you have already met are the cheapest source of a placement and the fastest route to a shortlist. Segmented alerts by discipline and location, a market update worth opening, and a re-consent process that keeps the data usable turn a static list into something that fills roles without paying for access again.
Client acquisition aimed at a known list
The companies worth working with in a given niche and region are a finite list, and targeting by industry, size and job function keeps the agency in front of them between briefs. It matters most in the part of the cycle when vacancies are scarce, which is exactly when most agencies cut the budget that would have won the next client.
The website
What the site has to do for this customer
- Two clearly separate journeys from the homepage: one for hiring, one for finding work
- Job search that is fast on a phone, filterable by location and discipline, and does not demand registration to browse
- Salary shown on vacancies wherever the client permits it, because candidates filter on it first
- An application route that takes under two minutes, with file upload that works from a phone
- Consultant profiles by specialism, with a direct contact route and evidence of what they place
- A client page that states fee structure, rebate terms and what a retained process involves
- Registration and data handling explained in plain language, including how long a CV is kept
- Sector and salary content that gives a passive candidate a reason to visit before they are job hunting
Constraints
What the rules allow, and what they do not
Employment advertising is regulated in every market this sector operates in, and job copy is where the risk sits. Wording that implies a preference on age, sex, nationality, disability, religion or another protected characteristic can be unlawful even when unintended, and phrases that feel harmless in an advertisement are the ones most commonly challenged. Requirements differ by jurisdiction, and the agency and the hiring client can both carry responsibility.
Candidate data is personal data in bulk, and it often includes information the law treats as sensitive. Obligations typically cover what a candidate is told at registration, the basis for holding a CV, how long it is kept, who inside the agency can see it, whether it may be sent to a client without permission, and how a deletion request is honoured. Marketing sits inside those rules rather than beside them, so list building, alerts and re-engagement campaigns all have to be designed with them in mind.
Advertising a vacancy that does not exist in order to collect CVs is a straightforward integrity problem and, in a number of markets, a regulated one. The same applies to reposting a filled role or advertising a role the agency has not been instructed on, all of which are also the fastest way to lose the trust of the candidates you most want.
Several jurisdictions license or register employment agencies and businesses, and some now require pay ranges in advertisements or restrict questions about salary history. These rules change more often than most marketing rules do, so we build the site so that adding a required field is straightforward, and we flag anything that looks like an obligation to check with your own advisers.
Client confidentiality applies to briefs as much as to placements. Naming a client, describing a hiring programme or publishing figures usually needs written permission, and confidential searches are confidential for commercial reasons the client takes seriously. Confirming what may be published stays with the agency and its own legal advisers.
Questions
Questions we get from this industry
Should we market to clients or candidates first?
Whichever side is scarce right now, and expect that to change. In a candidate-short market the shortage of people is what stops you billing, so attraction and speed of response earn more than client acquisition does. When vacancies dry up, the reverse is true.
The practical answer is to keep both programmes alive at different weights rather than switching one off entirely. Rebuilding a candidate pipeline from zero when the market turns takes far longer than keeping a reduced version running.
Are our job pages worth optimising, or should we just use aggregators?
Use aggregators, and stop relying on them as the only route. They are effective, and they place a third party between you and the candidate, which means paying repeatedly to reach people you have already met.
Job pages that get crawled quickly, carry correct structured data and expire cleanly give you applications you own. That rarely replaces paid distribution, and it changes the cost of every role you work after the first.
How do we compete when three agencies get the same brief?
By being first with a credible shortlist, which is usually an operations question rather than a marketing one. The fee tends to follow whoever submits the right people first, so anything that shortens the path from brief to submission is worth more than an additional channel.
The longer answer is to reduce how often you are in that position at all. Specialist depth, published evidence in a niche and a clear case for a retained process are what move a client from three-way contingency to something committed.
Our consultants will not post on LinkedIn. Is that a problem?
It is a real cost, though not a fatal one. Both candidates and hiring managers respond to a named person who obviously knows a market, and an agency page does not carry the same weight.
If consultants will not write, the workable compromise is that they talk and someone else writes it up for approval. What does not work is inventing a voice for them, because their own network notices immediately.
What should we actually report to the board?
Placements, gross profit and time to fill, segmented by where the candidate and the client came from. Those are the numbers the business runs on, and they are the ones that justify or end a marketing budget.
Applications, traffic and follower counts belong in the working detail, not the board pack. They can all be increased without a single extra placement, which is exactly why they mislead.
Find out what is realistically winnable in your market
A strategy call is a working session on your recruitment business specifically — your area, your competitors, the searches that matter and what it would take to compete for them. If we do not think we can move it, we will tell you.
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Last updated · Reviewed by Zubair Afzal