Strengthening employer branding, a new work-at-home site, improving the candidate experience, integrating AI and automation into the process and, at the same time, hiring managers clamouring for more candidates. Your first 100 days as a recruitment marketer with a new employer can be overwhelming. Will you run full-fledged campaigns right away or take time to analyse first? The pressure is on, but you don't make the real impact by running straight away. We asked experienced recruitment marketers for their best advice.
Don't run, stand still
Recruiters and hiring managers welcome the arrival of a recruitment marketer and stand at your desk asking you to bring in more candidates for their vacancies. The temptation is then great to immediately run and hurl campaigns into the world. Yet according to Esmée Maton - Global Employer Brand & Recruitment Marketing Specialist at Royal HaskoningDHV - and Pien Wezendonk - Recruitment Marketer at Flynth adviseurs en accountants - that is not the best way to start.
Esmée says: "When I joined Royal HaskoningDHV four years ago, I was the first recruitment marketer. I immediately started doing all kinds of operational work, such as running campaigns, when I would have been better off taking a step back first. Determining where real attention is needed and what we actually make an impact with. Talking to employees. If I were to do it all over again, I would take more time for this instead of applying quick band-aids. Because you don't always stick those quick band-aids in the right place. If there are not enough responses to a vacancy, it can have all kinds of causes. For instance, poor findability, an inferior vacancy text or an application form that is too long. So you don't always have to throw a campaign (and thus money) at it, because sometimes the cause of the problem lies elsewhere."
Pien joined Flynth in October and thus had the perfect timing: "I dove straight into the data. How are the current campaigns performing? What is striking about the statistics of the work-at-home site? And how are the job boards contributing to recruitment success? Through this comprehensive analysis, we had exactly the right input for our 2025 annual plan."
Pick the low-hanging fruit
By taking that step back, you regularly discover where the quick wins are. According to Esmée, there are often gains to be made at vacancy level: "Even though this year we will experiment with low-threshold recruitment without a CV and motivation letter, for the time being the vacancy text remains the central point of recruitment. I regularly see vacancies consisting of long pieces of text or that are not pleasant to read. A strong structure of the page, variation between text and visual elements and vacancies written from the candidate's perspective make your vacancies much more attractive. The same applies to job sites. These should be easy to find and user-friendly."
Ilse Bevelander - Junior Advisor Labour Market Communications at Flynth Advisors and Accountants - adds: "By not making empty promises, but instead being very concrete in your expressions, you can also make a difference. The 'competitive salary' and 'good fringe benefits' are cliché and meaningless. Candidates nod off if you don't make this concrete and that is a shame."
Engage stakeholders in recruitment marketing
Recruitment is a field where ad hoc queries, urgencies and short notice play a big role. If hiring managers expect the inbox to fill up with candidates because of a quick vacancy campaign, they will come out cold.
"Hiring managers and recruiters almost always want their vacancies filled today rather than tomorrow, but marketing - and therefore recruitment marketing - needs a long-term view. Candidates don't apply after seeing one ad. You have to plant seeds in them and that takes time. If I were to start again as a recruitment marketer now, I would put even more time into internal stakeholder management. In doing so, it is important to find out who your stakeholders are and what information you need to give them. It doesn't work to tell the same story to everyone. I now try to put them in an applicant's shoes and leave out all the jargon. That makes for a better understanding of what employer branding and recruitment marketing entails and delivers," says Esmée.
Make the most of the resources you have
Doing what works well and being smart with time and budget is what the recruitment marketers at both Flynth and Royal HaskoningDHV advise. At Flynth, they see that moving image works well, especially in employer branding campaigns. Pien says: "We embrace the possibilities AI offers in this regard. For instance, we recently created animated images with AI tooling. This is how AI adds value in our recruitment marketing." Ilse adds: "With AI, we can design our processes more efficiently and search for and process information faster. This in turn gives you more time for creative processes. So the knife cuts both ways."
Esmée has a similar experience when it comes to using video effectively: "We find that videos don't always have to be so slick. Lately, we sometimes record videos ourselves and they actually do very well, probably because they feel much more authentic. For example, we recently recorded a job pitch. Just with a smartphone and edited it ourselves. We posted this video on Linkedin and it performed best of all our videos in terms of visibility: 10,000 organic impressions!"
Speaking of content creation and making the most of what is already there, Esmée has another valuable piece of advice. "Find collaboration with the corporate marketing department. They often have larger teams and already create a lot of great content. Content that you can make suitable for employer branding or campaigns with some minor adjustments. That way you don't have to reinvent the wheel," Esmée points out.
Work with recruitment funnels
"Many parties mainly push job ads, but with the high competition between employers and the low number of active jobseekers, in our opinion this is not enough. We focus heavily on the recruitment funnel, guiding candidates step by step through their orientation process. That way, we achieve more results," says Pien.
Esmée especially stresses the importance of responding in a low-threshold way. "Only when you deploy soft conversions do you tackle recruitment in a marketing way. Without soft conversions, candidates have only 2 choices: to apply or not to apply. That threshold to apply is really too high for many people. You need to make it easier and non-committal. I think this is indispensable, which is why we are going to do a pilot where we redirect people to a landing page with no vacancies, but with the option to schedule an introduction with someone from the team. Without the intervention of recruiters. I am very curious to see what this will yield. Of course, you do need the right tooling to set up soft conversions and to be able to monitor what it actually yields. We use RMA software for that," said Esmée.
Starting smart as a recruitment marketer
In summary: as a recruitment marketer at a new organisation, it's a good idea not to dive straight into the operation, but to analyse what is needed first. This way, you immediately check whether the basis is sound and you can pick up the first quick wins.
Be sure to also pay attention to your internal stakeholders and see how you can make the most of your available time and budget, e.g. by collaborating smartly with corporate marketers.
Finally, a recruitment funnel with soft conversions is indispensable to generate your ultimate goal - applications.
These insights will help you make the most of your first 100 days. So: don't rush, but thoughtfully build a recruitment marketing strategy that really makes an impact.
