State of Recruitment Marketing 2018: 5 Key Takeaways

February 28, 2018

Nada Chaker

State of Recruitment Marketing 2018 - 5 Key Takeaways

We surveyed over 550 companies, collecting information from sourcers, recruiters and C-level executives for our annual State of Recruitment Marketing report.

Their answers gave us some surprising - and not-so-surprising - insights into how companies intend to approach this function in 2018.

We’ve put together 5 key takeaways from the study in this blog post, but for a deep dive into the story and supporting data, you should download the full report. It’s available here, in the Beamery Academy.

Download the State of Recruitment Marketing Report 2018.

1. Recruitment Marketing is a priority

Talent Acquisition teams know that it’s simply not enough to rely on reactive recruiting anymore. They have to be proactive, build relationships and nurture candidates before they even have a vacancy for them.

Recruitment marketing gives them the tools to do just that: build an employer brand, and a strategy to attract candidates and engage with them at scale. So it is no surprise that, when asked if recruitment marketing is a priority for their organisation this year, 77% of companies answer yes.

Is Recruitment Marketing a priority for recruiters this year?

2. This new priority has impacted how companies operate

Companies who prioritize recruitment marketing tend to make different choices.

For one, they are planning for higher Talent Acquisition budget increases: a total 45% raise, compared to only 23% for companies who do not consider recruitment marketing a priority this year.

These companies also tend to use software differently: 29% of them use Recruitment CRMs and Marketing platforms for recruitment marketing activities, compared to only 18% for companies who will not prioritise recruitment marketing this year.

3. Companies are facing a skill gap

Some of the data collected in the survey suggests that recruiting teams may be facing a skill gap when it comes to marketing. For example, planned budget increases will be mostly directed at marketing campaigns and technology upgrades, with far fewer resources directed at hiring recruitment marketing specialists.

This raises the question of whether companies are approaching recruitment marketing in the right way. For instance, will an increase in spend for marketing campaigns be as effective without marketing specialists to drive those campaigns?

Many recruiters seem to be aware of the issue: More than 30% are worried about their lack of expertise and experience with recruitment marketing, particularly content creation for campaigns.

4. Core best practices are still missing

Perhaps linked to the skill gap in recruiting team, is the issue of missing recruitment marketing best practices.

A good recruitment marketing strategy needs a numbers of elements to support it, and it seems like a few of them are still missing from talent acquisition teams’ toolkits.

For instance, 79% of recruiters feel like their email nurture campaigns are far from the level of personalization or sophistication that they should be at.

Teams also seem pretty ambivalent about the state of their employer brands. Only 35% of them agree that their company has a well-defined and consistent brand across all recruitment content.

My company uses sophisticated email marketing, with personalization and automated workflows

5. Proactive sourcing is becoming the norm

Proactive sourcing is definitely becoming the norm: currently, 83% of companies source proactively.

companies that source proactively
However, the benefits that should come from proactive sourcing are not fully realized yet: only 46% of respondents have visibility on how many candidates are in their pipeline at any given time, for example.

That will not change until teams build a solid process around proactive sourcing: what benefits they should expect from it, how they will capture them, what processes or technology they will need for that, among other things.

From these five takeaways, we can see that, while there have been some changes already in the practice of recruitment marketing in Talent Acquisition teams, the bulk of is yet to come. We’re certainly looking forward to them. Exciting times for hiring!