Recruitment Campaigns And Awkward Questions

Recruitment campaigns are designed to gather suitable candidates from a wide range of candidates. But who pays who for what and who gets what with whose money? For many recruitment service providers, this is a tricky question that they would prefer not to answer.

The success and value of many recruitment services is measured in terms of clicks. When job boards get a lot of clicks, they are seen as valuable. However, clicks on recruitment campaigns do not necessarily turn into candidates and therefore the customer's attention is often preferably drawn elsewhere. "Look how many clicks!" is much easier to put into practice than "Look how many good candidates!" Let's take a closer look.

A Typical Traditional Recruitment Campaign:

• A client buys a recruitment campaign for a job vacancy from a service provider
• The client pays extra to keep the job advertisement at the top of the job list for a while
• The client expects and hopes to receive candidates 
• The success of the campaign is measured in terms of clicks

Let's look at a traditional recruitment campaign in terms of costs. Who pays and what? 

Who pays for the advertisement and the recruitment campaign for the vacancy? At the same time, she or he will also pays: 

• Potential candidates for the competitor
• The service provider's own advertising and branding as a reliable and effective expert as a recruitment service
• The service provider's own successful activities

When an interested candidate comes to view a job of interest to a client, they will often also look at other similar jobs placed next to the client's own advertisement. Because they are similar, they are very likely to be competitors. With one click, the interested candidate has moved on to look at the adjacent job ad, and the client has just managed, perhaps inadvertently, to pay an employee to their competitor with their own ad. No company would sell its own product by putting a competitor's alternative product next to its own. However, in recruitment this is often standard practice. 

When a customer's job vacancy is shared on social media platforms, the service provider's logo is displayed alongside it. In other words, the client is promoting the service provider and creating an image of the service provider as a trustworthy partner for other operators. This means that the customer pays for the marketing of the service provider when looking for a new employee and at the same time brands the service provider with its own brand.  

If an interested candidate clicks on the client's advertisement, there is much more to read. It is the clicks that add value to the service provider, and the client creates it by bringing visitors to the site with his ad, whether or not he actually hires the employee he needs.

Who Gets What?

• The client gets a place on the service provider's service and visibility in the list of corresponding job advertisements 
• The competitor gets visibility right next to the client's advertisement and possibly even a good candidate who was paid by the client with his advertisement
• The service provider gets free branding and advertising for itself on social media and client channels, paid for by the client. The service provider also received clicks on its own content and added value for itself regardless of the success of the client

A Recruitment Campaign Can Be Done Differently

It is possible to do recruitment differently. As a starting point for a good service, the client must be able to trust that the value of their recruitment campaign goes directly to its real purpose: to attract good candidates for themselves and ultimately to successfully hire good talent. The recruitment campaign should generate interest in the right candidate and turn into an encounter where the client has the opportunity to talk directly to the person they want to hire. The client's recruitment campaign should not be used to promote the service provider's own brand without asking. The client should be confident that the candidate they are looking for will not, with the help of the service provider, wander off to look through dozens of other similar jobs from competitors to buy recruitment help for themselves. The value of a recruitment campaign should be measured in terms of good candidates and successful hires, not clicks. 

Fortunately, this other kind of recruitment already exists today. We have fixed the flaws in the recruitment process and tested it with thousands of campaigns. No wonder our clients get on average seven times more candidates than traditional methods. At the same time, they get access to our software for free. You can read our customer stories here.

If you are interested in working with us, get in touch!