This is how to make room for RMA in your recruitment budget: 5 practical tips

Whether you work as a recruitment consultant with an intermediary or as a corporate recruiter with a direct employer, there's no getting away from it: finding candidates is becoming increasingly difficult and therefore more expensive. Recruiters are therefore looking at innovative solutions to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their strategy, with RMA being a promising option. But then the question arises: how do you free up budget for this? In this blog, we give you 5 concrete tips that will allow you to start using recruitment marketing automation, without tapping into extra euros.

Tip 1: Save on inefficient job boards

Many organisations traditionally use job boards in their recruitment, even though this does not always (anymore) produce the desired results. Although job boards are still the main search channel for active jobseekers, the percentage of these active jobseekers who actually find a job via job boards is declining. At the same time, social media is actually emerging as a channel for finding a new job.(Werf&)

In addition, via job boards, you only target those actively seeking work, which is only 13.5% of the workforce. (Q1 2025, Intelligence Group) So you won't reach the vast majority of your target audience via job boards.

"A large part of our job applications come in via social campaigns. Good targeting allows us to reach and activate our target group in a very targeted way. In addition, recruiters indicate that the quality of applicants has increased since we run our campaigns with RMA software. We used to hire 2 to 3 people per month, now there are 7 to 9 per month." - Thom Oudhuis, recruitment marketer at The Selection

Analyse the conversion figures of job sites carefully and cut or reallocate budget to channels that do generate high-quality applicants, such as social media campaigns. This way, you reach active and latent jobseekers, you maintain flexibility and you can measure exactly what the results are. With RMA software, you can easily and quickly set up and monitor these kinds of campaigns yourself, even without extensive marketing knowledge.

Tip 2: Bet on retargeting rather than new clicks

You put time, effort and budget into bringing in traffic to your jobs or work-at-home site. But did you know that on average 96 out of 100 visitors do not take any action? They look around, maybe click on a vacancy, but leave without applying. And then you lose them... Unless you manage to reach them again.

Retargeting helps you get more out of your existing traffic. Think of candidates who watched your employer branding video all the way through, but then didn't click through. Or website visitors who viewed a job page, but then left your site again. By targeting this group again - via social media or display ads - you increase the chance that they will take action.

Retargeting is not only smarter, but often cheaper than buying new traffic each time. You reach people who already know your brand and often pay less per click. With the right tooling, you can largely automate this process so that you get more return on your existing budget.

Tip 3: Automate time-consuming tasks

Recruitment teams still spend a lot of time on repetitive work. Posting vacancies manually on multiple channels, tracking status updates, following up leads or running reports. These are tasks that are important, but also take up a lot of time. And that while you would rather use that time for interviews with candidates or advising hiring managers.

By automating processes, you can easily grab profits here. Think about automatically running campaigns, setting up communication flows for talent pools or automatically screening candidates. This way, you ensure that all processes go through without having to do anything manually each time.

Ultimately, it will take you less time to fill a vacancy, allowing you to handle more vacancies as a team than before. You need to call on external hiring or recruitment less often, which gives you budget space to invest strategically in, for example, marketing automation.

"If we didn't use RMA software, I would have to really immerse myself in the subject matter to set up and manage recruitment campaigns myself. Or we would have to hire someone who already has this knowledge. Now RMA does this for us and I can spend my time on things where I make a difference." - Friso Visser, Lead Recruitment Marketer Benelux at Wortell

Tip 4: Deploy soft conversions to lower your cost-per-hire

Not every potential candidate is ready to apply immediately. In fact, some 96% of your website visitors who have viewed a job page leave your site afterwards. Without applying. Candidates take their time for orientation and need several touchpoints (contact moments) with your employer brand and vacancies before they are ready to click that application button.

If you only offer the option of traditional job applications, you are missing out on a lot of potential candidates. They disappear into anonymity even though they have expressed interest in you as an employer. With soft conversions, such as newsletter subscriptions, job alerts or asking questions via Skype, you do get in touch with this latent target group. You can then dispel their doubts, answer their questions and further fuel their enthusiasm, so that they still decide to apply for a job.

With that conversion boost, you suddenly have a lot more candidates in your pipeline for the same media budget. Your cost-per-hire drops and that is exactly the money you can use to set up those soft conversions, for example with the help of recruitment marketing automation.

Tip 5: Get more out of your existing talent pools

Almost every recruiter has an untapped goldmine: the candidates you already know. Think of applicants from previous vacancies, ex-employees or people who once showed interest but then dropped out at the last minute. Instead of constantly pumping money into new outreach, this is an opportunity to recruit smarter and cheaper.

The crux, though, is in actively managing those talent pools. Without regular contact, the data ages, the contact is diluted and interest in you as an employer disappears. Prevent this by staying in the picture, for example with relevant updates, a peek behind the scenes or tips & tricks aimed at their field of expertise.

When the time is right (read: a suitable vacancy becomes available), you can draw from these talent pools when recruiting. You already know the best candidate for the job and so you no longer need to invest in recruitment campaigns or other recruitment channels.

This dramatically reduces your cost-per-hire and those saved euros are perfect for RMA software, making retention easier and keeping it scalable.

Improve without extra budget

In short, you don't need an extra recruitment budget to add RMA to your recruitment strategy. By making smarter use of your existing resources, you can integrate recruitment marketing automation into your strategy step by step. By spending your euros on the most effective channels, saving time, increasing conversion and having an active talent pool, chances are you can do with even less budget.

Wondering where you can make the most profit? Spar without obligation with a specialist from MrWork.