What is the best choice when it comes to implementing your recruitment marketing strategy? Do you choose a media agency or handle it in-house using software? If you look at this question with a financial perspective, the choice is immediately clear. Then go for recruitment marketing automation software. This will save you a lot of money!
Recruitment marketing: through an agency or in-house?
Many employers know it by now: candidates don't come knocking on your door! You need recruitment marketing to fill vacancies. But then the question is: how do you go about implementing it? Do you go for handy recruitment marketing software? Or do you engage a marketing agency to help you?
Taking control yourself, real-time insight into your campaign data, easy lead generation, automating follow-ups, and always engaging with your target audience. These are all reasons why more and more employers are making RMA software central to their recruitment marketing strategy. But perhaps the most important reason of all is money. You can actually save a lot of money by organising your recruitment marketing yourself using technology, rather than outsourcing it to a media agency.
5x saving on recruitment costs with RMA software
By putting RMA software at the heart of your recruitment marketing strategy, you save on agency costs, separate agency costs from your media budget, save on time and productivity and remain flexible to change your recruitment marketing budget in the interim.
1. Software licence costs vs. hiring a marketing agency
If you outsource your recruitment marketing campaigns to a media agency, you pay for the purchase of ads on the channels (media budget) and the hours the agency needs to work. Think about setting up and monitoring campaigns, dashboarding and analysis and consultation with the client. Usually at least 30% (but regularly as much as 50%) of the recruitment marketing budget goes to these agency costs. A lot of money!
If you compare that with software licence fees, it is clear that you can make huge savings. MrWork Leads and Jobs, for example, starts from €1,099 per month. Assuming hourly rates of marketing agencies of at least €100 (more often going towards €150), you can buy up to 10 hours from a recruitment marketing agency for the software licence fee. And what do you get for 10 hours? Maybe one recruitment campaign, whereas with RMA software you can run as many campaigns as you want.
2. Run more campaigns more often? With software your fixed costs stay the same
This brings us directly to the next financial advantage of RMA software compared to a media agency: you can separate the fixed costs from the number of campaigns you run or the media budget you use. With a media agency, you have to deal with agency costs that grow along with your advertising budget and/or campaigns, whereas with software you can run as many campaigns as you want for the fixed licence fee. This makes RMA software a scalable choice.
3. Save time and increase team productivity
At first glance, it might seem as though your recruitment (marketing) team will spend more time implementing your recruitment marketing strategy themselves, but nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to automation, their work actually becomes easier and faster. With smart RMA tools, you can launch campaigns with just a few clicks, spend less time coordinating with others (such as your contacts at a media agency), automatically follow up on and screen recruitment leads, and have everything clearly organised in a single platform. So, you actually save time with RMA software.
This puts your recruitment (marketing) team in control and frees them up from tasks that can be automated. As a result, they can focus on the work that really requires a human touch: delivering the ultimate candidate experience and making the right match between candidate and vacancy. The result: you can achieve more with smaller teams.
4. Stay flexible with your recruitment marketing budget
A partnership with a recruitment marketing agency often consists of annual or multi-year contracts in which you commit to buying recruitment marketing activities from them for X amount of money. Does something change in the organisation or in the market, lowering your recruitment needs? If anything is a waste of your recruitment budget, it is spending money on things you don't need (anymore).
With RMA software you are in control. Pausing a campaign, switching off channels, shifting the focus by redistributing the advertising budget, it takes only a minute. This way, you make optimal use of your recruitment marketing budget and no money is lost on unnecessary actions and campaigns.
5. Make the most of your media budget
Finally, with RMA you make sure you get the most out of every euro of your media budget. In many recruitment campaigns, the crux is still conversion. The reach and number of clicks of the campaign are fine, but no applications come in... This can be solved with lead generation tooling, because it significantly lowers the threshold to respond. This makes it much easier and more non-committal for candidates to get in touch and they do. We often see conversion rates of 1% to 3% rise to 5% to 10% by using RMA software.
What’s more, with RMA, you can get to know talent much earlier on – even if they aren’t necessarily looking to apply just yet, but are simply exploring their options. This is where so-called ‘soft conversions’ come in. (WhatsApp pop-ups, webinar invitations, asking questions via chat, etc.) You then stay in touch automatically and build talent pools of engaged, high-quality candidates. With these talent pools, you can subsequently ensure the necessary inflow into your ATS. In short, with RMA you get much more out of your media budget!
Example cases of cost savings with RMA software
What is the real benefit? Switching from working with a marketing agency to managing it yourself with recruitment marketing automation software? We show it through two different case studies.
Case 1: corporate organisation with a large recruitment budget
The recruitment team of a large corporate with 14,000 employees outsources their recruitment marketing to a media agency. The total cost: €450,000 per year. Over 30% of this consists of agency costs. Around €135,000, in other words. If they switch to RMA software, they save - with an extensive configuration including ATS link and content library, many users, automations and target groups and a high inflow requirement - more than 50% on those agency costs. Nice enough, but if their recruitment marketing needs grow in the coming years, those software costs will remain virtually the same. Even tastier!
Case 2: SME with 300 employees and 25 branches
The recruitment and marketing team of an SME organisation with 300 employees and more than 25 offices in the Netherlands now works in a decentralised way with various media agencies and other parties that help execute recruitment marketing. Adding up all those agency costs adds up to a lot!
When they switch to RMA software, they create a single platform on which they centralise all their recruitment marketing activities. This toolkit thus acts as an engine for the ATS, as it can be used for campaigns, lead generation, performance optimisation and analytics and talent pool building.
As a result, they save thousands of euros on agency fees. Not to mention the time they save by organising everything centrally (around 75% time savings) instead of having to coordinate with all kinds of local partners all the time. And they generate 30% more inflow than before they started working with RMA software. So triple the profit!
Still count on recruitment marketing advice
We understand that you also use a media agency for their recruitment marketing expertise. That's why at MrWork we offer not only software, but also support and advice from our recruitment marketing specialists. Each customer has its own customer success manager who thinks along, answers questions and proactively suggests improvements and new possibilities. This gives you the best of both worlds: control + advice from experts.
Do you want to save on your recruitment marketing costs? Let our experts take a look and run the figures for you.
