Organizations realize that in a competitive landscape, it is critical to be continuously in front of the target audience and that recruiters will not necessarily have the skills or bandwidth to achieve this. So, we see more companies have the function of recruitment marketing. While the job of the recruitment teams is to identify candidates and sell them the value proposition, recruitment marketing should help make the audience aware of the opportunities.

In current state, recruitment marketing in most cases is used only for execution and the buzz word for these teams is usually social media. I believe, the main purpose of the recruitment marketing is to be an inbound marketing team. Content should be a top priority of the recruitment marketing teams. The value of inbound marketing and content is long lasting and it also ensures that new channels are uncovered and newer ways are found to take the message outwards. Instead, much of their time is spent on advertising and not necessarily marketing. Look a bit deeper and it can be noticed that recruitment marketing as a function is treated as an execution team rather than a strategic partner. The moment objectives are number of applications and conversions, recruitment marketing becomes short termed, highly tactical and focuses on advertising as a means to get more applications.

The value of a recruitment marketing to the talent acquisition should be marketing and not recruitment. And there is more to marketing than media buying. Focus should be on inbound marketing, turning the career site into a channel, social media and out reach. Recruitment marketing should be measured similar to marketing. However, as of now recruitment marketing is bit confusing. There are some important questions for which I think the answers are still not very clear. For ex: whom should the recruitment marketing team report to? Should they have budgets? To what extent should the team have decision making? Some companies have the recruitment marketing reporting to marketing and some TA. I don’t know for sure which is right, but I believe reporting to TA might be a better option. For sure, that is where the money will come from and this function finally serves TA. It will also help Talent Acquisition to understand and appreciate the value of recruitment marketing better. It is then the real value of recruitment marketing will be realized, EVP will reach the target audience and create engagement that will ease the job of a recruiter.