Recruiting vs. Recruitment Marketing: What’s the Difference?
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“Recruiting” seems to be the buzzword on everyone’s tongue in B2B business circles these days. With so much focus on recruitment, it’s only natural that recruitment marketing has also become a hot topic.
While the two terms are similar, they’re not interchangeable. In fact, this common misconception can cause businesses to focus their efforts in the wrong place, waste time, waste energy, and waste money.
Here is a breakdown of the two terms and what they look like in action.
Recruiting
Definition
Recruiting is a process where a company focuses its efforts on building a relationship with an individual prospective employee. This involves anything you do to attract that specific person and prompt them to accept the job.
In Action
Recruiting works best when done organically, but that doesn’t mean without intention.
Let’s say your company is looking to fill a specific role, so you attend a local networking event and meet several people who could be good candidates. You then get their contact information and follow up with them after the event to solidify the connection and let them know about the open role. If they’re interested, they then enter the interview pipeline, and you eventually offer them the job.
Notice in this process, you’re focused on getting specific people into specific roles. Each step is building a relationship with this person in a way that is intentional but not desperate. This is recruiting in action.
Recruitment Marketing
Definition
Recruitment marketing is a more advanced concept. Recruitment marketing is an ongoing process where a company works to build a brand and its story as an employer. This is done using a lot of the same strategies used in traditional marketing.
In Action
Authenticity is important in any type of marketing, but in recruitment marketing, authenticity is critical. Potential candidates don’t want to hear how great your company is. They want to see proof.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to attract recent graduates for entry-level roles you have. While your recruiting team attends job fairs, sends emails, and sets up interviews, your marketing team works to flesh out your careers page, and creates and deploys relevant content about who your company is for various channels.
All of these things are traditional marketing procedures, but they are used to enhance your company’s employer brand and help you appear as a great place to work instead of working to open and close deals. Notice this is all done without directly talking about how great you are to work for.
Putting the Two Together
At the end of the day, both recruiting and recruitment marketing function together to help your company land top talent. Thinking of recruiting as the sales team working to close deals and your recruitment marketing team as your marketing team supporting them. If one is weak, the other will suffer. A robust recruitment marketing strategy makes your recruiting team’s job easier because their work reinforces and proves what the recruiting team says.
Have questions about developing a recruitment marketing strategy to enhance your recruiting efforts? Our team of recruitment marketing experts is here to help. Contact us.