weareprominence2

Launching The BotSpot: Marketing a New Supply Chain Podcast

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 10:03:27 GMT

Overview

Marconi Associates is a specialist search and growth partner operating within the robotics, AI and automation space across the global supply chain sector.

They work closely with high-growth, technology-led businesses, supporting them to build commercial teams and scale internationally.

As part of their next phase of growth, Marconi identified an opportunity to strengthen their brand and build deeper relationships within their market through long-form, insight-led content.

They set out to launch a podcast that would engage senior leaders across robotics, automation and supply chain technology, creating a platform for conversations, insight and brand building.

Prominence was engaged to support the concept, creative direction and launch of the podcast.

The Challenge

The podcast needed to do more than simply exist - it had to represent Marconi’s position in the market and resonate with a highly senior, niche audience.

Key challenges included:

Defining a clear concept and identity for the podcast that aligned with Marconi’s brand and market
Creating a name that felt relevant, memorable and connected to the supply chain technology space
Ensuring the podcast appealed to senior stakeholders (CROs, founders, investors) rather than a general audience
Translating a complex, technical industry into engaging, accessible content
Designing a visual and editing style that felt premium, modern and professional
Avoiding generic “recruitment-style” content and positioning the podcast as thought leadership
Building a structure that allowed content to be repurposed across LinkedIn, YouTube and future channels
Creating a launch approach that built anticipation and positioned the podcast as a high-quality brand initiative

What We Did

We led the full concept development, creative direction and launch planning , ensuring the podcast was built with clarity and purpose from the outset.

This included:

Brand discovery and strategic planning
Facilitated a discovery session to define audience, tone, positioning and content direction, ensuring the podcast aligned with Marconi’s wider growth objectives

Podcast naming and concept development
Supported the creation and refinement of The BotSpot, ensuring the name felt aligned with Marconi’s market, memorable, and relevant to the world of automation, robotics and supply chain technology

Brand identity and visual development
Designed the podcast logo, colour palette and overall visual identity, creating a look and feel that aligned with Marconi while giving the podcast its own distinct presence

Podcast cover and platform branding
Created podcast cover artwork for platforms such as Spotify, along with co-branded YouTube banners to ensure a consistent and professional presence across all channels

Creative direction and visual identity
Defined a podcast style that felt sleek, professional and minimal, with a focus on high-quality production, clean design and subtle branding

Podcast format and production guidance
Advised on structure, filming setup and content delivery, including camera angles, conversational format and environment to ensure a premium, in-person feel

Video editing and snippet strategy
Developed a consistent editing approach for podcast clips, including clean full-screen visuals, subtle branded subtitles, multi-angle camera cuts and short-form snippets optimised for LinkedIn and social

Social media mock-ups and content templates
Created mock-ups of podcast snippets and social assets to visualise how content would appear across LinkedIn and other platforms, ensuring consistency and quality from launch

Pre-launch and launch content
Created pre-launch and launch animation concepts to build anticipation and introduce the podcast to Marconi’s audience in a structured, professional way

Brand integration and consistency
Ensured the podcast remained clearly connected to Marconi Associates through subtle co-branding such as “Powered by Marconi Associates”, maintaining consistency across all touchpoints

The Outcome

The result was a podcast launch built on strategy, clarity and brand alignment - not just content production.

The final output:

Established a clear and credible podcast concept aligned with Marconi’s positioning
Developed a distinct and professional podcast brand, including logo, colour palette and visual identity
Delivered a suite of branded assets across Spotify, YouTube and social media, including podcast covers, banners and content templates
Created a consistent, high-quality visual and editing style for podcast content and snippets
Positioned the podcast to appeal to senior, global decision-makers
Enabled content to be repurposed across LinkedIn, YouTube and future marketing channels
Strengthened Marconi’s ability to build relationships and visibility within their niche market#
Provided a scalable framework for future episodes, campaigns and brand activity

The BotSpot is now positioned to become a core part of Marconi’s marketing ecosystem, supporting thought leadership, brand building and long-term growth.

Launching Melium Link in Dubai to Enable Global FMCG Executive Search

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:51:50 GMT

Overview

Melium Consulting is a specialist executive search firm operating across global manufacturing, supply chain and commercial transformation within the FMCG sector.

With a strong European client base, Melium identified increasing demand for senior leadership hiring across APAC and the Middle East. Clients expanding into these regions required access to transformation-ready leaders, but existing search models were limited by geography and time zone constraints.

To address this, Melium launched Melium Link, a Dubai-based hub designed to connect Europe, APAC and the Middle East, enabling a more seamless and responsive approach to international executive search.

We were engaged to support the end-to-end launch of this new service and location, ensuring clear positioning, strong market visibility and a cohesive go-to-market strategy.

The Challenge

The launch needed to achieve more than a standard office announcement. It had to clearly communicate a new strategic capability to a senior FMCG audience.

Key challenges included:

Positioning Melium Link as a strategic solution rather than a geographic expansion
Translating a complex global hiring challenge into a clear, compelling narrative
Ensuring messaging resonated with both multinational FMCG brands and regional growth businesses
Creating a distinct sub-brand that complemented but differentiated from the core Melium identity
Aligning all content and visuals with Melium’s modern, advisory-led positioning
Creating consistency across multiple channels including web, email and LinkedIn
Building immediate credibility in new markets

What We Did

We led the full launch strategy, messaging and content execution, ensuring Melium Link entered the market with clarity and impact.

This included:

We led the full launch strategy, brand development and content execution, ensuring Melium Link entered the market with clarity and impact.

This included:

Launch positioning and narrative
Defined a clear market proposition centred on Dubai as a strategic connector between Europe and APAC, reinforcing Melium’s ability to deliver seamless, transformation-led executive search
Brand identity development
Created a distinct visual identity for Melium Link that remained aligned with the core brand while introducing a more regionally relevant and progressive feel. This included logo variations, colour palette and application across digital assets to ensure immediate differentiation and recognition
Press release and insight article
Produced a flagship launch press release designed to communicate the commercial rationale, highlight regional market demand and position Melium as a specialist partner in global FMCG leadership hiring
Content aligned to S-CAP™
Embedded Melium’s proprietary model into the messaging to reinforce a strategy-first approach to executive search rather than traditional recruitment
Email campaign (EDM)
Developed a targeted campaign to announce Melium Link to clients and candidates, focusing on market opportunity, speed of delivery and access to leadership talent
LinkedIn content and social rollout
Created supporting social content including branded banners and launch visuals to amplify the announcement, drive engagement and build awareness across Melium’s network
Launch animations and visual assets
Designed motion and static assets to support the rollout, ensuring the launch felt premium, modern and consistent across all touchpoints
Messaging consistency across channels
Ensured all outputs maintained a consistent tone, structure and positioning aligned with Melium’s brand and audience expectations

The Outcome

The launch of Melium Link successfully established a new platform for international growth and market expansion.

The final output:

Positioned Melium as a truly global executive search partner across Europe, APAC and the Middle East
Introduced a clear and differentiated sub-brand with strong visual identity and consistency
Clearly articulated a strategy-led approach to leadership hiring
Delivered a cohesive, multi-channel launch campaign spanning press, email and social
Strengthened credibility with both multinational FMCG brands and regional businesses
Supported increased visibility and engagement across key target audiences

Melium Link now provides a scalable foundation for delivering faster, more effective leadership hiring in high-growth markets, fully aligned with Melium’s core proposition of Transformation Delivered.

Client Feedback

"We were initially hesitant to engage an external marketing partner, having always managed activity in-house. However, the team quickly built trust through their preparation, strategic thinking and clear ideas from the outset.

Over the past 12 months, the impact has been clear. Our brand is now consistently recognised as focused and differentiated, with both clients and external contacts commenting on the clarity and quality of our content.

The team operates with a level of attention and ownership that makes you feel like a priority at all times. We look forward to continuing the partnership as we scale further."

Case Study: Growing a Social Care & Social Housing Recruitment Brand

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:43:57 GMT

Overview

First for Support is a specialist social care recruitment agency operating across Hampshire and Dorset, with ongoing national expansion. They place both temporary and permanent staff across residential care, supported living and complex care environments.

When they approached us, they had strong operational delivery but their brand, website and digital presence did not reflect their quality or ambition .

The Challenge

First for Support faced three core issues:

No clear brand identity, with inconsistent messaging and visuals
An underperforming website that was not optimised for search or conversion
Limited digital visibility across search and social platforms

Despite being an award-winning agency with strong word-of-mouth referrals, their online presence was not generating consistent inbound opportunities.

Our Approach

We delivered a full brand, website and growth transformation, focused on long-term scalability and visibility.

1. Brand Positioning and Messaging

We refined their tone of voice into something:

Warm, people-first and supportive
Clear, professional and compliance-led
Reflective of both care values and commercial capability

This aligned with their core proposition: Empowering people, supporting services, changing lives.

2. Website Redesign and Build

We rebuilt the website from the ground up:

Modern, clean design aligned with the care sector
Clear user journeys for clients and candidates
Structured service pages covering temporary, permanent and executive search
Integrated trust signals including compliance, awards and testimonials

The result is a site that not only looks stronger, but actively supports conversion and credibility.

3. SEO, GEO and AEO Strategy

Using the SEO brief , we implemented a structured search strategy:

SEO
Targeting high-intent keywords such as social care recruitment and support worker roles
GEO
Focusing on Hampshire, Dorset and expansion regions including Devon, Wiltshire and Manchester
AEO
Structuring content to perform in AI-driven search and answer engines

This ensures the business is visible not just in traditional search, but across emerging discovery channels.

4. Ongoing Social Media Management

We introduced a consistent, value-led content strategy across both the company page and the founder’s personal brand.

Content focuses on:

Sector insights
Candidate engagement
Brand storytelling
Building trust and credibility

Alongside this, we implemented an ongoing content and blog strategy to support the website.

This includes:

Monthly blog articles targeting high-intent search queries
Location-focused content to strengthen geographic visibility
Structured content designed for AI-driven search and answer engines
Continuous updates to keep the website active, relevant and authoritative

This ensures the website is not static, but constantly evolving to support SEO, GEO and AEO performance over time.

The Results

Since launching the new brand, website and content strategy, First for Support has seen:

A significant increase in online visibility across both search and social
Consistent growth in audience engagement and brand awareness
A stronger and more professional digital presence aligned with their reputation
Improved positioning to attract both clients and candidates

The Impact

This transformation has:

Elevated First for Support from a referral-led agency to a digitally visible brand
Positioned them as a credible specialist in social care recruitment
Created a scalable platform for growth across new regions and services

Most importantly, their digital presence now reflects the reality of their business. High quality, people-first and built on trust.

Key Takeaway

By aligning brand, website, search strategy and social content, we built a foundation for sustained growth rather than short-term wins.

A Full Brand & Website Build for an Agribusiness Executive Search Firm

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:55:45 GMT

Who

Well Rooted Search

Where

Operating across the Americas

Business Size

Founder-led recruitment business

Industry:

Agribusiness / Crop Inputs / Commodities

Background

Well Rooted Search is a specialist executive search firm focused on the agribusiness sector, supporting leadership hires across crop inputs, commodities and the wider agricultural supply chain.

Founded by Charles Higgins, the business was built on a genuine passion for agriculture, shaped by his background growing up around farming and his experience within agribusiness recruitment.

Launching as a new, independent brand, Charles needed a clear identity that reflected both his industry credibility and relationship-led approach , while positioning the business as a long-term, trusted partner within a highly specialist market.

The Challenge

As a new brand entering the agribusiness recruitment space, Well Rooted Search needed to establish credibility quickly within a niche, relationship-driven industry.

The key challenges were to create a brand that:

Reflected the agricultural roots and industry authenticity of the business
Positioned the company as a serious, long-term executive search partner , not a typical recruitment agency
Avoided generic recruitment branding and corporate clichés
Balanced professionalism with a grounded, human approach
Translated effectively across website, LinkedIn and outreach materials
Created a strong first impression ahead of launch

The brand also needed to feel enduring and credible , with a tone that would still resonate in 5–10 years.

Our Solution

We began with a detailed brand discovery process to understand Charles’ background, values, target market and long-term vision for Well Rooted Search.

From this, we developed a clear brand direction centred around agriculture, relationships and long-term thinking , before exploring multiple creative routes.

Our solution included:

Designing multiple logo concepts, refining towards a clean, agriculture-led identity incorporating wheat and root-based symbolism
Developing a colour palette inspired by the agricultural lifecycle - deep greens, harvest golds and earthy tones
Selecting typography that felt clear, structured and non-corporate , avoiding overly stylised or “recruitment-heavy” fonts
Creating a full brand guidelines document to ensure consistency across all touchpoints
Designing LinkedIn banners, social media assets and email signatures to support launch
Producing website mockups (Homepage, About, Contact and sector page) to demonstrate how the brand translates digitally
Applying real-world scenarios across social posts and website layouts to bring the brand to life

Throughout the process, we worked closely with Charles, iterating based on feedback to ensure the final output felt authentic to both him and the market he operates in.

Deliverables

Logo suite and brand mark
Brand colour palette and typography
Full brand guidelines document
LinkedIn banners and social media assets
Email signature designs
Website mockups (Homepage, About, Contact, Content page)

The Result

Well Rooted Search launched with a clear, confident and highly differentiated brand within the agribusiness space.

The final brand feels:

Credible and industry-native
Grounded and relationship-led
Structured and professional without feeling corporate
Built for long-term positioning rather than short-term marketing

This has enabled Charles to:

Launch with a strong and consistent presence across LinkedIn and outreach
Clearly communicate his niche and value proposition
Build trust quickly within a relationship-driven market
Establish a brand that reflects both his background and long-term vision

The brand now provides a solid foundation for:

Website development
Ongoing marketing and content
Client and candidate engagement

Recruitment Marketing Case Study: Insight Report

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:50:41 GMT

Introduction

In late 2023, Beyond Recruitment, a leader in New Zealand’s recruitment industry, sought to amplify the reach of its renowned Economic and Labour Report. The 2023 report, marking its 9th edition, offered vital insights into New Zealand’s economy, labour trends, and forecasts for the year ahead, with expert commentary from one of the country’s leading economists.

Beyond Recruitment saw the opportunity to share these insights and engage directly with decision-makers across various sectors through a webinar. The goal was to showcase the findings while reinforcing Beyond Recruitment’s position as an industry thought leader.

Challenge

After the pandemic, online event fatigue made it harder to capture attention for digital events. Beyond Recruitment faced the challenge of driving strong attendance while ensuring the event would reach a highly targeted audience of business leaders and industry decision-makers.

Solution

Having worked with Beyond Recruitment for over 10 years as their marketing agency, Prominence knew exactly how to create a strategy that would make an impact. Together, we devised a plan that would not only boost registrations but also foster high engagement throughout the campaign.

Targeted Email Campaigns: We kicked off with a series of strategically crafted email communications. The messaging focused on the exclusive value of the webinar and the relevance of the Economic and Labour Report for businesses across New Zealand. The emails showcased how the insights would provide actionable information for navigating the year ahead.

Streamlined Registration Process: To maximise sign-ups, Prominence designed a simple, user-friendly registration page on Eventbrite. Multiple touchpoints—including event countdowns and reminder emails—kept potential attendees engaged and motivated to register.

Interactive Webinar Format: The webinar itself took a more dynamic approach. Instead of just a standard presentation, Beyond Recruitment incorporated a Q&A session where attendees could ask questions and engage directly with the economist. This real-time interaction kept the audience engaged and deepened the value of the event.

Exclusive Content and Incentives: o make the webinar even more compelling, Beyond Recruitment offered attendees exclusive early access to the full Economic and Labour Report—well ahead of its public release. This added incentive encouraged more registrations and made the event feel like an opportunity that attendees couldn’t afford to miss.

Strong Call-to-Actions: Throughout the campaign, we maintained a clear and compelling call-to-action: register to gain first access to invaluable insights from one of New Zealand’s most respected economists.

Result

The campaign yielded remarkable results, surpassing expectations on multiple fronts:

20.98% increase in webinar registrations compared to previous years.
32.1% more attendees than the previous year attended.
74.4% increase in downloads of the report, expanding its reach to a wider audience than ever before with the help of a social media campaign.

The success of the webinar also sparked significant media attention:

Radio New Zealand and Newstalk ZB both covered the report, broadcasting it to national audiences.
MSN picked up the story and pushed it out via its newsfeeds.
Major outlets like BusinessDesk and the Otago Daily Times also ran with the report.

Now, as Beyond Recruitment looks ahead to the release of their 10th Economic and Labour Report in 2025, the 2023 report continues to be a powerful touchstone, reaffirming their position as a trusted authority in New Zealand’s economic and recruitment landscape.

Recruitment Marketing Case Study: Social Media

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:41:57 GMT

Background

In 2024, Bespoke Careers proudly celebrated 20 years in business. Committed to maintaining their position as a global industry leader, they aimed to align their mission of inspiring and connecting talented individuals worldwide with a dynamic social media strategy. Their focus was on creating insightful content, sharing valuable knowledge, and boosting their market presence.

Introduction

In March 2024, Bespoke Careers, a leading architecture and design recruitment agency partnered with Prominence to devise and deliver a comprehensive social media strategy.

Operating from seven global hubs in the UK, Australia and the US, the business had a strategic focus to be the global leader in architecture and design recruitment.

Challenge

The challenge for Prominence to increase brand visibility and engagement in a crowded digital landscape. The strategy focused on creating unique, engaging, and value-driven content that resonated with the target audience. It was also designed to build a stronger connection with followers, increase trust, and enhance brand authority by sharing knowledge, providing industry insights and highlighting the role Bespoke Careers plays in giving back to the industry.

Solution

The Prominence team engaged in strategy sessions with each office to gain a comprehensive understanding of the business and the unique characteristics of each region. This collaborative approach allowed us to capture the nuances critical to tailoring an effective social media strategy.

With these insights, we developed a plan to deliver consistent and accurate messaging while offering a diverse mix of content that aligned with the organisation’s objectives. The recommended strategy included:

Value-Adding Carousel Posts: Informative and engaging slides to share actionable insights and thought leadership.
Industry Facts: Highlighting key trends and statistics to position the brand as a knowledgeable authority in the field.
Event Promotion: Showcasing events across all locations and maximizing attendance at Bespoke Careers-run or sponsored events through targeted outreach.
Hot Job Highlights: Featuring a curated selection of roles to demonstrate the variety and quality of opportunities managed by the business.
Article Promotion: Sharing in-depth articles to provide valuable insights, foster engagement, and enhance credibility within the industry.
Video Content: Leveraging video to showcase success stories, highlight industry trends, and provide dynamic and engaging updates across platforms.

This balanced content mix was designed to enhance audience engagement, build brand credibility, and support business growth objectives across all regions.

Result

By the end of 2024, LinkedIn social media performance saw significant growth, with impressions rising by 46%, post reactions increasing by 12%, and comments surging by 57%.

Savvy Recruitment: Rebrand & Website

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 13:34:53 GMT

Introduction

Savvy Recruitment UK is a specialist recruitment agency focused on connecting top talent with roles in the media, creative, and digital industries.

They offer tailored hiring solutions for companies while supporting candidates in finding their ideal career opportunities.

Background

Founded 15 years ago, Savvy Recruitment underwent a management buyout in 2024, leading to the appointment of a new Managing Director. As part of this transition, the company embarked on a rebranding initiative, including the launch of a new website to align with its evolving vision.

Challenge

Operating in a highly competitive and complex market, we identified key areas of focus:

This includes:

Brand Refresh: Redesigned and revitalised the Savvy brand, creating a cohesive visual identity and a comprehensive set of assets for future communications
Service Clarity: Collaborated with the senior leadership team to refine and clearly define core service offerings, ensuring accurate and effective market messaging
Website Development: Led the website project in partnership with Shazamme, overseeing the design of mock-ups for all key pages, crafting compelling website copy, and optimising SEO to maximise visibility and engagement

Solution

Brand Refresh: The new brand identity strengthened Savvy Recruitment’s market presence, enhancing recognition and credibility. The cohesive visual identity and comprehensive asset library ensured consistent and professional communication across all platforms, including social media and email marketing
Service Clarity: A clearly defined suite of core services improved internal alignment and external messaging, resulting in more targeted marketing efforts, stronger client engagement, and increased candidate trust
Website Development: The newly launched website delivered an improved user experience, increased organic traffic through optimised SEO, and provided a compelling platform to showcase Savvy’s expertise. The strategic design and content effectively positioned the company as a leader in its sector

Additional Marketing Outcomes

The website has been well received by both clients and candidates, with a 20% increase in website visitors

Organic search and social media engagement consistently exceeds 90%

We have been working with Caroline for a few months and couldn't be happier with the work but also the process. It's been such a fun, collaborative and easy process and that's all down to Caroline and her teams efficient and friendly way of working.

If you are looking for a marketing team that will really listen to what you want out of it while respecting your time then get in contact with Caroline!

Ellie Cree,

Managing Director, Savvy Recruitment

Why Authentic Employer Branding Will Define U.S. Recruitment Success in 2026

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 10:58:47 GMT

Across the U.S., the recruitment landscape is shifting faster than most companies can keep up. Talent scarcity, regional competition, and evolving jobseeker expectations have created a new reality for businesses trying to hire effectively. In 2026, success in recruitment is no longer measured by how many people you reach. It is defined by the quality and consistency of your employer brand.

In this environment, authenticity has become the single most important factor in attracting and retaining great people. Candidates are no longer persuaded by slick visuals or generic brand promises. They want honest stories, proof and confidence in the knowledge they want to know exactly what working for your business feels like.

Authentic employer branding is what builds that trust, and it is what separates those who hire well from those who struggle to keep pace.

At Prominence, we help recruitment teams and talent leaders across the U.S. uncover, shape, and share employer brands that are real, consistent, and powerful. Through strategic consulting, content creation, and recruitment focused digital marketing, we transform internal culture into a competitive advantage that drives hiring success.

The New Employer Branding Reality in the U.S.

The way Americans search for and choose employers has changed dramatically in the past five years. Candidates begin their journey long before they fill out an application. They research, compare, and judge companies based on their online presence. Reviews on Glassdoor, Google Reviews, G2, social media content, and word-of-mouth referrals all combine to create a picture of your employer reputation.

When that picture feels inconsistent or unclear, candidates move on. U.S. jobseekers have options, especially in high-demand industries like technology, healthcare, construction, and professional services. Even entry-level and frontline roles are being influenced by employer brand perception.

The problem many companies face is not visibility but  credibility . Candidates can easily tell the difference between a manufactured message and an honest representation of company culture. In a transparent hiring market, authenticity has become the foundation of trust.

What Authentic Employer Branding Means

Authentic branding means your internal reality matches your external message. It means employees feel empowered to speak honestly about their experiences, and candidates can see and hear those voices across multiple channels.

A few key markers define authenticity in today’s American market:

Employee-driven storytelling.  People trust people, not slogans. U.S. employers that highlight real team members, complete with personal stories and behind-the-scenes content, create stronger emotional connections.
Consistent messaging across touchpoints.  Your Glassdoor rating, your careers site, your LinkedIn page, and your job descriptions should all sound like the same company. Consistency builds recognition and confidence.
Transparency around key topics.  Pay, equity, inclusion, and flexibility have become essential decision-making factors. Sharing progress and acknowledging setbacks is far more credible than avoiding the topic altogether.
Clarity of purpose.  Candidates want to know the “why” behind the work. Employers who communicate a clear sense of purpose and values attract people who align with them.
Evidence of community and belonging.  Whether through team events, community groups, volunteer initiatives, or staff testimonials, proof of real connections within the organization makes your brand believable.

When these elements come together, employer branding becomes more than marketing. It turns into a strategic business tool that improves engagement, advocacy, and retention.

Why The Timing Matters

2026 is the year when U.S. employers can no longer treat branding as a background function. Employer reputation now directly influences hiring outcomes, talent pipeline stability, and even customer perception.

Several factors make this especially true right now:

Pay transparency legislation  is forcing companies to publish salary ranges in multiple states, changing how compensation is discussed and compared.
AI-led job matching  is amplifying how digital reputation influences candidate interest. Poor review scores or inconsistent messaging can automatically work against your brand in algorithm-driven search.
Generational expectations  are shifting. Gen Z professionals value honesty, transparency, flexibility, and shared values far more than perks or corporate prestige.
Competition for remote talent  means U.S. employers are no longer only competing locally. A strong, authentic presence is essential to stand out nationally.

For recruitment teams, this new reality presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Done right, employer branding can sharpen your organization’s identity, improve candidate conversion, and empower employees to become advocates.

How Prominence Helps U.S. Employers Build Authentic Brands

Prominence has spent more than a decade helping recruitment teams and talent leaders define, develop, and communicate their employer brand. Our work with clients across the globe has proven one key truth: effectiveness comes from clarity, not complexity.

We help companies move from uncertain messaging to powerful storytelling through five connected steps.

1. Brand Discovery and Definition

Authenticity begins with understanding. We start every engagement by working closely with your leadership and HR teams to uncover the core of your employer identity.

Through discovery workshops, surveys, and focus groups, we explore how your people describe their work experience. We analyse what differentiates you in your industry and what themes matter most to your ideal candidates.

This process results in a clear, data-backed Employer Value Proposition (EVP) - the foundation of every story you tell. It describes what your company offers employees that truly matters to them.

2. Visual and Verbal Brand Alignment

Once your EVP is defined, we bring it to life through tone of voice, messaging frameworks, and visual consistency. This ensures every future piece of communication feels recognisably you.

For U.S. audiences, we tailor language and imagery to align with local expectations while maintaining the uniqueness of your culture. Whether you are a national employer or an international business hiring regionally, we make sure your brand speaks naturally to American candidates.

3. Recruitment Marketing Campaigns

Authenticity gains power when it reaches the right people. Prominence designs multi-channel campaigns that transform your employer brand into measurable attraction.

Our recruitment marketing strategies are built with:

Data-led audience segmentation and targeting.
Paid advertising campaigns across LinkedIn, Meta, Google, and programmatic channels.
Organic social strategies that build long-term engagement and community.
Campaign analytics that track engagement, conversion, and ROI.

Each campaign emphasises storytelling, not sales. We craft engaging narratives around your employees and your purpose so that candidates see themselves within your culture before they even apply.

4. Content Creation that Connects

Prominence’s creative team specialises in developing content that humanises your brand and builds trust. From blog series and social videos to thought-leadership articles, internal culture pieces, and visual campaigns, our work puts your people at the centre.

We help you develop consistent content streams such as:

Careers site blogs highlighting authentic employee experiences.
LinkedIn posts authored by team members rather than the corporate account.
Short-form video stories that showcase real working environments.
DE&I and community initiatives that show your culture in action.

All content is created to reinforce your EVP while engaging both potential candidates and current employees. This creates alignment between external attraction and internal engagement.

5. Careers Site and Channel Optimization

Your digital platforms are often a candidate’s first real interaction with your brand. We ensure they communicate clarity and purpose from the first moment.

That includes optimizing navigation, copy, and calls to action on careers pages, as well as aligning brand messaging across social profiles and recruitment platforms. Every step is guided by data and real candidate behaviour insights.

We also incorporate user experience (UX) testing and accessibility reviews to make sure your content speaks to the widest possible audience.

6. Partnership Models That Fit

Employer branding and recruitment marketing are ongoing, not one-off exercises. Prominence offers flexible partnership models to support U.S. businesses of all sizes.

Our models range from project-based brand audits and launches to fully managed retained marketing partnerships. Many of our clients treat us as an extension of their internal team, allowing them to access our strategic and creative expertise without increasing headcount.

This flexibility makes it simple to scale brand activity based on your hiring goals and business growth.

Examples of Impact

Across global markets, Prominence has helped companies reposition their employer brand for stronger attraction and retention results.

For growing agencies , we have built content strategies that turned recruiters into personal brand ambassadors and improved inbound candidate quality.
For corporate talent teams , we have created EVP-driven campaigns that reduced cost per hire and improved engagement on careers channels.
For international clients , we have developed employer brand frameworks that equip regional offices to deliver consistent but locally relevant messages.

These outcomes are achieved through a blend of creativity, analytics, and industry knowledge - the combination that sits at the heart of everything we do.

Why Prominence

What makes Prominence different is our recruitment focus. We understand both the commercial and human sides of hiring. Our team consists of marketers who have worked directly within recruitment agencies and in-house talent teams, so we speak the same language as our clients.

We also bring a global perspective with deep understanding of what resonates with U.S. audiences. This enables us to help American employers benchmark against international standards while maintaining local authenticity.

The Opportunity for 2026

The next twelve months will reshape recruitment marketing in the U.S. Employer branding is no longer a nice addition to the hiring process; it is a fundamental business function.

As regulations increase, technology advances, and jobseekers become even more selective, authenticity will determine whether organizations attract the talent they need or fall behind competitors who tell their story better.

Brands that invest in clarity, consistency, and creativity today will define tomorrow’s recruitment success.

Prominence is here to guide that journey - helping employers move from talking about culture to truly showing it, and from guessing what candidates want to proving that their organization delivers it.

Taking the Next Step

If your team is ready to enhance your employer brand and bring authenticity to every stage of the candidate experience, the Prominence team can help.

We combine strategy, content, creativity, and digital performance to create employer branding that is honest, human, and tailored to the U.S. market.

Start building the employer brand your future hires are already looking for.

Connect with us to discuss your goals, challenges, and opportunities for 2026. Together, we can make authenticity your brand’s strongest advantage.

FAQs: Authentic Employer Branding in the U.S.

1. What does authentic employer branding mean?

Authentic employer branding means showcasing the genuine culture, values, and experiences within your company - not an idealized version. It focuses on consistency between what employees experience internally and what candidates see externally.

2. Why is authenticity important in U.S. recruitment?

U.S. candidates value transparency, inclusivity, and purpose. In a competitive job market, authenticity helps employers build trust, improve reputation, and attract candidates who genuinely align with their mission and culture.

3. How does employer branding impact hiring success?

A strong employer brand improves candidate attraction, engagement, and retention. When job seekers understand your values and see proof of them, they are more likely to apply, accept offers, and stay long term.

4. What are the biggest employer branding trends in the U.S. right now?

Key trends include a focus on transparency around pay and progression, real employee storytelling, DE&I visibility, and the use of social platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok to show culture in real time.

5. How can companies make their employer brand more authentic?

Start by engaging your employees in the process. Share real stories, use genuine imagery, and ensure career site and social content reflect actual experiences. Consistency across all touchpoints is essential.

6. What challenges do U.S. employers face with brand authenticity?

Many struggle with inconsistent messaging or disconnection between corporate and employee perspectives. Building authenticity requires internal alignment, active listening, and willingness to show progress rather than perfection.

7. How can Prominence help with employer branding in the U.S.?

Prominence partners with recruitment teams and employers to uncover, define, and communicate authentic brand stories. We deliver strategy, content, and marketing campaigns that make your culture visible and engaging to the right talent.

Launching a new vertical within an established brand

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 09:24:28 GMT

The Client

Industry: Tech

Introduction

In 2024, an established recruitment brand with a strong reputation in its core market identified an opportunity for growth in the United States. While the business had built significant brand equity within its existing specialisms the Founders felt they needed an additional revenue stream, they recognised a clear gap in the US market for a dedicated, insight-led vertical focused on a high-growth sector.

The objective was clear: successfully launch a new vertical within the existing brand framework without diluting brand equity and while positioning the company as a credible authority in a competitive US landscape.

This wasn’t a startup. It was a strategic expansion. And it needed to feel intentional, premium and powerful from day one. It was a risk.

Challenge

In the US market, competition was in this new vertical was strong. Established specialist recruiters already dominated the space, and breaking through the noise required more than a simple announcement.

The new vertical needed:

Clear positioning
A distinct value proposition
Rapid awareness among decision-makers
Immediate commercial traction

All while staying aligned with the master brand.

Solution

With a deep understanding of the brand’s heritage and ambitions, we developed a structured go-to-market strategy designed to build authority, generate demand and create early momentum.

Strategic Positioning & Messaging

We began by defining the vertical’s Point of Difference. This included:

A refined value proposition specific to the US audience
Vertical-specific messaging pillars
A clear articulation of the problems this new division would solve

The messaging balanced two key elements:

Established credibility from the parent brand, and specialist focus within the new sector.

Brand & Digital Alignment

Rather than creating a disconnected sub-brand, we designed a vertical identity that sat confidently within the existing brand architecture.

This included:

Dedicated landing pages tailored to US audiences
Vertical-specific content hubs
Case-study-style thought leadership pieces
SEO-optimised sector pages targeting high-intent search terms

The website became the central authority platform for the new vertical.

Targeted Outreach Campaigns

To build rapid visibility, we launched a coordinated outreach strategy:

Segmented email campaigns targeting US hiring managers
Insight-led content campaigns addressing sector-specific challenges
LinkedIn thought leadership from senior consultants
Retargeting ads driving traffic back to sector landing pages

The focus was not on hard selling, but on demonstrating expertise.

Authority-Led Content Strategy

To accelerate credibility, we developed:

US-focused industry insight reports
Salary benchmarking content
Market commentary articles
Downloadable gated assets to capture new leads

This positioned the vertical as a knowledge leader—not just a service provider.

Result

The launch delivered strong early momentum and established the vertical as a credible player in the US market.

Within the first six months:

Significant increase in US-based website traffic to the new vertical pages
Strong growth in qualified inbound leads from target sectors
Multiple retained assignments secured within the first quarter
Expansion of the US talent network through gated content downloads

Most importantly, the new vertical began generating consistent revenue within its first year, proving the strength of the strategic launch approach

Healthcare Recruitment Agency: Ad Overhaul, Brand Build and Automation Wins

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 16:01:57 GMT

Who: WESolutions

Where: UK (national and international hiring)

Business Size: 30+ person team

WESolutions is a healthcare recruitment agency specialising in both international and domestic nursing and AHP hires. As our first UK client, they were already doing high-volume recruitment, but their marketing setup was holding them back.

They were investing heavily in Facebook advertising with no visibility on spend, targeting or outcomes. They had no brand guidelines, no SEO, and no organic content - which meant their paid media wasn’t getting the support it needed.

The team also faced two big challenges:

A high volume of unsuitable candidates, including many who didn’t meet UK qualification or visa criteria
Tough competition when hiring domestic nurses, with no clear brand differentiation

The Challenge

Take control of Facebook ad spend and boost candidate quality
Create a brand presence to help attract domestic talent
Improve the performance and visibility of their website
Reduce the volume of compliance questions and repetitive candidate queries
Deliver content that supports both international and local hiring goals

Our Solution

Strategic Brand Development

We started by building from the ground up.

Created brand guidelines to establish consistency and elevate the look and feel
Held regular in-person meetings to understand the team, their tone and their challenges

Paid Media Management

We stepped in to completely take over and optimise their ad performance.

Took control of Facebook ad campaigns and restructured targeting and creative
Reduced spend while improving quality of applications
Set up remarketing to nurture warm traffic

Website and SEO Transformation

Their website was refreshed to serve as a lead-gen machine.

Rewrote and optimised the full site with a focus on SEO
Built targeted pages for key candidate groups including nurses, AHPs and physios
Introduced two SEO-driven blogs per month to build authority and relevance

Automation and Candidate Experience

We streamlined key touchpoints to improve candidate flow and team efficiency.

Implemented automation to clean their candidate database
Set up workflows to handle compliance forms and pre-screening questions
Added a custom chatbot to manage high-volume FAQs

Content and Brand Engagement

We introduced initiatives to help the brand connect with both local and international audiences.

Launched a ‘Nurse of the Month’ campaign to recognise standout candidates
Produced a video series answering key candidate questions like visa requirements and relocation tips
Rolled out ‘random acts of kindness’ campaigns to spark conversation in domestic nursing settings
Hosted webinars covering the most frequently asked questions by candidates
Created candidate and client case studies to showcase the real-world impact of their work

The Results

Positioning

A brand that speaks directly to healthcare professionals
A team positioned as both experts and people-first recruiters

Engagement

Stronger ad performance with lower spend, meaning more quality candidates
Page 1 rankings for key search terms
Videos, webinars and case studies that resonate with candidates at every stage

Productivity

Candidate qualification and compliance questions now handled through automation
Recruitment and marketing teams freed up to focus on value-driving tasks

Testimonial:

If you are a new recruitment company and looking forward for tremendous support with Highly trained professionals, I would recommend, Prominence. They have the solution for the problems you would have never even encountered.

...one of the safest hands in digital marketing and leads management when it comes to recruitment business.

We are about to finish tenure of two years with them, and we have saved significant costs around the marketing and have got double the results.

Thanks prominence and Amber, It is always pleasure doing business with you.

Karan Shah – WESolutions

Just HR: End-to-End Business Launch (Japan)

Fri, 27 Feb 2026 13:28:38 GMT

The Client

 Who: Just HR

Industry: Human Resources Recruitment

Location: Japan

Project Scope: Full business launch

Timeframe: Approx. 3–4 months

Just Search Group identified an opportunity to launch a specialist HR recruitment brand in Japan, creating a dedicated offering within the group.

Just HR was established under the Just Search Group, requiring a clear position within the group structure while developing its own identity, messaging, and market presence.

The brief was to launch the business from the ground up, with everything built from scratch to ensure credibility, consistency, and alignment from day one.

The Objective

Launch a new HR recruitment brand under the Just Search Group
Clearly position Just HR within the group structure
Define a distinct value proposition and messaging
Build a complete digital presence from the ground up
Create strong foundations for marketing and business development

Our Solution

1. Brand Positioning & Messaging

Worked closely with Just HR and the wider group to define purpose, positioning, and audience
Developed brand messaging and narrative from scratch
Ensured tone and language were appropriate for the Japanese market
Created clarity between the group brand and sub-brand

2. Brand Identity & Visual Direction

Developed a visual identity aligned with the Just Search Group brand architecture
Ensured Just HR had a distinct yet clearly connected presence
Created consistency across all brand and marketing assets

3. Website Strategy, Content & Build

Designed the website structure from scratch with clear user journeys
Wrote all website content from scratch, tailored to the HR market in Japan
Built content with SEO, GEO, and AEO considerations in mind
Designed and launched a modern, professional website

4. Marketing & Launch Assets

Set up LinkedIn presence and launch content
Created templates and assets to support consistent communication
Supported initial go-to-market activity

5. Foundations for Growth

Implemented analytics and tracking from day one
Built a scalable digital platform to support future campaigns
Ensured the brand and website could evolve as the business grows

The Outcome

Brand Launch:

A fully launched HR recruitment brand under the Just Search Group
Clear positioning within the group structure
Immediate market credibility

Digital Presence:

Complete website launched from the ground up
Purpose-built content aligned to the Japanese HR market
SEO-ready structure supporting long-term visibility

Business Impact:

Just HR launched with clarity and confidence
Strong foundations for marketing and business development
A platform built for long-term growth

Key Outcome

By building the brand, messaging, and website from scratch, Just HR entered the Japanese market with a clear identity, aligned positioning, and strong digital foundations. The end-to-end launch ensured credibility, consistency, and scalability from day one.

Just Legal: Website Rebuild with Multi-Partner Delivery

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:41:03 GMT

The Client

Who: Just Legal

Industry: Legal Executive Search & Recruitment

Location: Japan

Timeframe: Approx. 5 months

Background

Just Legal required a website that better reflected how the firm operates and presents itself in market. The existing platform and content were no longer fit for purpose, and there was an opportunity to lift the overall quality of the digital presence.

In addition, the website needed to clearly support both English and Japanese audiences in a consistent and considered way.

The project involved rebuilding the website on a new platform, updating bilingual English and Japanese content, and introducing original video content to support credibility and engagement.

This required close coordination across multiple external partners, while maintaining a clear point of accountability for delivery.

The Objective

Rebuild the website on a new platform
Update and align English and Japanese website content
Deliver a consistent bilingual experience across the site
Integrate original video and interview content
Coordinate delivery across multiple external partners

Our Solution

1. End-to-End Project Management

Led the full project from briefing through to launch
Acted as the central point of accountability
Coordinated designers, developers, bilingual content contributors, and an external videography partner
Managed timelines, approvals, and dependencies

2. Bilingual Website Rebuild

Rebuilt the website on a modern, scalable platform
Structured the site to support clear English and Japanese navigation
Ensured parity across bilingual pages without duplication
Improved usability and flexibility while retaining brand familiarity

3. English & Japanese Content Update

Reviewed and updated existing English website content
Aligned messaging to reflect Just Legal’s senior, advisory-led positioning
Worked with Japanese language specialists to refine Japanese content
Ensured content was locally appropriate rather than directly translated
Aligned intent, depth, and emphasis across both language versions

4. Video & Interview Content Integration

Worked with an external videography company to capture on-site footage
Coordinated leadership interview filming to feature across the website
Planned video placement across key bilingual pages
Integrated video content seamlessly into the site experience

5. SEO, GEO & AEO Foundations

Implemented SEO best practice as part of the rebuild
Optimised headings, metadata, and structure across both English and Japanese pages
Built content to support search visibility and AI-driven discovery

The Outcome

Website & Platform

New bilingual website launched on a modern platform
Improved structure, performance, and content management
Clear navigation across English and Japanese pages

Content & Media

Updated bilingual content across priority pages
Original video and interview content embedded throughout the site

By the numbers

42% increase in overall website traffic following launch
32% increase in traffic to Japanese-language pages
41% increase in visitors to Japanese-language blog content

Delivery & Collaboration

Multiple external partners coordinated under a single delivery model
Reduced complexity and time burden for the client team

Business Impact

Stronger first impression across domestic and international audiences
Website now supports business development and long-term growth

Key Outcome

The bilingual website rebuild demonstrated the ability to manage external partners, deliver bilingual digital platforms, and produce a cohesive, high-quality outcome for the client.

Old Website

New Website

Future Education: Google Ads Case Study

Thu, 26 Feb 2026 11:26:02 GMT

Introduction

In October 2024, Future Education, a prominent recruitment agency specialising in the education sector, collaborated with Prominence to optimise their Google Ads strategy for attracting top-tier candidates in the South London region.

With over 20 years of experience and an experienced team, the agency is a trusted name in the local education sector. Despite operating in a highly competitive market, they excel in sourcing and placing educators in schools across South London.

Background

The business is highly respected, and although well-known in their sector, face an ongoing challenge of attracting educators who they can place into temporary and permanent roles in primary, secondary and SEND school settings. Along with competing with other agencies, the education sector faces staff shortages and a lack of new talent entering the sector.

Challenge

Prominence faced the challenge of conducting a comprehensive audit and assessment of Future Education's existing Google Ads presence, with the goal of providing actionable recommendations to enhance response rates and improve the quality of applications received.

Solution

The Prominence team provided several strategic recommendations to Future Education and implemented the following updates and ongoing enhancements to their Google Ads campaigns:

Streamlined Ad Structure : Reduced the number of ads from over ten to three (Primary, Secondary, and SEND) to optimise budget allocation and improve targeting accuracy.

Enhanced Tracking and Reporting : Updated ad tracking and configured goals in Google Analytics to ensure precise measurement and reporting of responses.

Optimised Keywords : Refined keywords to better reach the target audience, while expanding negative keywords to minimise unplaceable responses.

Improved Ad Performance : Adjusted search keywords and headlines to increase click-through rates and attract higher-quality candidates.

Budget Realignment : Reassigned the budget based on campaign responses, reducing clicks and impressions but significantly

improving the quality of responses.

Result

Over a two-month period, the campaign generated over 150 responses, with more than half evaluated by the Future Education team as highly placeable candidates.

What AEO Writing Looks Like in Practice for Recruiters

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 11:26:55 GMT

Answer Engine Optimisation can sound abstract until you see how it applies to a real recruitment website.

In practice, AEO writing is not about producing more content. It is about improving how information is structured, prioritised and explained so that it can be clearly interpreted by both users and modern search platforms.

Starting with real recruitment questions

Effective AEO writing begins with the questions clients and candidates already ask, such as:

What sectors do you recruit for?
Do you work on retained or contingent roles?
How does your recruitment process work?
What markets do you operate in globally?

These are not marketing questions. They are buying questions.

AEO brings these conversations onto the website in a clear, structured way.

Structure over volume

AEO-friendly recruitment pages typically:

Open with clear explanations rather than taglines
Use descriptive subheadings aligned to intent
Separate services, sectors and processes logically
Make key information easy to extract

This structure helps search platforms understand the page and helps users find answers quickly.

Direct answers build trust

Many recruitment websites prioritise positioning statements over explanation. AEO shifts the balance towards clarity.

This includes:

Clearly explaining fee models
Outlining how assignments typically run
Stating who the agency is best suited for

Transparency strengthens trust, particularly for senior or international recruitment.

FAQs as an AEO asset

FAQs play a central role in AEO when done properly.

Strong recruitment FAQs:

Reflect real client and candidate language
Provide direct, specific answers
Sit naturally within service and sector pages

These sections are frequently used by search platforms when generating summaries or answers.

Supporting global visibility

For agencies operating across the UK, Europe and APAC, AEO reduces ambiguity by clearly explaining:

Where you operate
How global and local services differ
What markets you specialise in

This clarity is increasingly important as AI platforms surface global results.

FAQs: AEO writing in practice

What recruitment pages benefit most from AEO writing?

Service pages, sector pages, homepage content and FAQs.

Do we need to create lots of new content?

No. AEO usually focuses on improving existing content.

Will AEO make our website sound generic?

No. It improves clarity while retaining tone and positioning.

How long does it take to see results?

AEO supports gradual improvements rather than instant wins.

Konstrukt: Podcast Launch & Brand Growth

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 16:25:12 GMT

The Client

Who: Konstrukt – Construction Recruitment Specialists

Where: New Zealand

Business Size: Fewer than 6 team members at project start
Timeframe: 2022 – ongoing

When Konstrukt first partnered with Prominence, they were a small but ambitious business of fewer than six team members with big plans for growth. They wanted to strengthen their brand presence, attract top recruiters, and become a recognisable voice in the construction recruitment market across Europe.

Prominence supported them across multiple areas, from launching their podcast and refreshing their brand identity to running personal branding training and providing ongoing digital marketing support.

The Challenge

Limited brand awareness in a competitive recruitment market
Existing brand guidelines were inconsistent
No clear platform to showcase industry expertise or thought leadership
Needed to position themselves as both a trusted recruitment partner and an employer of choice
Required a consistent marketing strategy to grow their digital footprint and support business development

Our Solution

1️⃣ Podcast Launch: Leaders in Construction

We helped Konstrukt create and launch their industry podcast, Leaders in Construction, from concept to execution.

Developed the podcast marketing strategy
Built a dedicated podcast page on the Konstrukt website
Managed editing, and publishing of fortnightly episodes
Designed social content for each release, including multiple snippets of key content
Provided hosting guidance and for podcast host to ensure delivered in the best way

The podcast quickly became recognised across the construction recruitment market and is now a powerful networking and brand awareness tool, helping Konstrukt connect with clients and industry leaders.

2️⃣ Brand Refresh & Design Support

As part of their internal growth campaign, we refreshed and streamlined Konstrukt’s existing brand guidelines to bring consistency and professionalism across all marketing touchpoints.

Simplified and modernised colour palettes, fonts, and templates
Designed key collateral including EVPs, capability statements, and pitch decks
Branded a salary survey used as a business development tool to start new client conversations and generate leads

This design work reinforced their position as a confident, forward-thinking brand in the construction recruitment space.

3️⃣ Personal Branding & Team Engagement

To strengthen individual presence and amplify brand reach, we ran personal branding training for the Konstrukt team.

Delivered a tailored session on creating authentic, engaging LinkedIn content
Provided practical strategies for increasing visibility, connection-building, and consistency
Supported ongoing content ideas and engagement tactics

The Konstrukt team are highly active on LinkedIn, with excellent engagement across their personal profiles, driving strong brand recognition and trust in the market.

4️⃣ Ongoing Digital Marketing Support

We continued to manage and support Konstrukt’s marketing efforts to keep momentum high.

Managed social media content calendars and posting
Wrote blogs to support SEO and thought leadership
Created targeted email campaigns to engage clients and promote their podcast

This consistent activity has maintained strong visibility, supported their business development goals, and amplified the reach of the Leaders in Construction podcast.

The Results

Podcast:

Leaders in Construction established as a recognised industry podcast
Strengthened relationships with clients and industry leaders through authentic, insightful conversations

Brand:

Streamlined and cohesive brand identity aligned with growth goals
Professional collateral suite supporting recruitment and sales

Engagement & Awareness:

Significant increase in team engagement and visibility on LinkedIn
Increased brand awareness and inbound opportunities through consistent marketing activity

Supply Chain Recruitment: Launching a New Recruitment Agency

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:57:33 GMT

Who: Chain Reaction

Where: Melbourne, Australia

Business Size: 1-person business

This recruiter was launching her own brand after years of working within the supply chain industry and building a trusted network across the UK and Australia. With a strong personal story and reputation in the supply chain sector, she wanted to make a big impact from day one.

She approached Prominence to help bring her vision to life with a launch that would stand out, followed by ongoing marketing support to grow her presence and credibility.

The Challenge

Create a strong brand from scratch that reflects her personal story and professional edge
Build a website designed to convert with great UX and clear messaging
Deliver a launch plan that created buzz and positioned her as a key player
Maintain visibility post-launch through social media content

Our Solution

Brand and Launch Strategy

We started by developing clear foundations that would set her apart.

Created brand guidelines to shape her tone and visual identity
Advised on and reviewed her website structure, UX, and content
Developed a launch plan designed to activate her network and generate attention

Website and SEO

To ensure the site could be found and would convert visitors, we:

Reviewed all copy and user journey to ensure best practice
Built an SEO strategy around her supply chain specialism
Created launch content that aligned with search opportunities and her story

Ongoing Marketing Support

We continued to support the business as it grew.

Created regular social media content that showcased her expertise
Wrote case studies and blogs to support thought leadership
Designed ad hoc collateral including capability statements and branded materials

Deliverables

Brand guidelines and messaging development
Website review and SEO recommendations
Launch content and activation plan
Social media content creation and scheduling
Case studies, blogs and capability statements

The Results

Positioning

A strong personal brand aligned with her professional niche
Messaging that balanced expertise and authenticity

Engagement

Best engagement we've seen for a small business
Over 10% click-through rate on average across social media
A consistent flow of valuable content keeping her top-of-mind

Productivity

Marketing handled without the need for in-house resources
Scalable support that grows with the business

Launching a New Recruitment Agency

The Growth Consultants: Rebrand & Website Launch

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:20:15 GMT

The Client

Who: The Growth Consultants – Sales & Marketing Recruitment

Where: Bristol, UK

Size of Business: SME, less than 10 heads
Timeframe: Approx. 3 months

CThe Growth Consultants wanted a brand and website that genuinely reflected their personality and values. Their existing website and branding didn’t feel aligned with their team or audience. They also needed guidance on digital strategy to boost online visibility.

Old Brand

The Challenge

Had previously hired a junior marketing executive who didn’t understand the recruitment market.
Brand identity didn’t showcase the team’s personality or values clearly.
Website navigation, sitemap, and user experience were confusing for visitors.
Limited pages and poor content structure hampered SEO, including local (GEO) and voice search (AEO) optimisation.
Social media presence was underperforming, lacking engagement.

Our Solution

1️⃣ Brand Discovery & Mock Ups

Travelled to Bristol for a hands-on brand discovery workshop and content session.
Defined brand personality, tone, colours, fonts, and audience segments by exploring other work Prominence has done, as well as competitors both from a likes and dislikes perspective
Delivered 4 initial logo concepts, fonts and colours
They were happy with initial mock ups but we ran 2 collaborative sessions to finalise the look and feel which ended up being a combination of different mock up options

3️⃣ Website Design, Sitemap & UX

Recommended a revised sitemap focusing on user journeys, new pages to showcase recruitment expertise and logical content flow.
Designed page layouts with clear calls-to-action and intuitive navigation.
Added new pages targeting high-value keywords to improve SEO, including local (GEO) and AI optimisation (AEO).
Created Figma mock-ups to visualise the look and feel and get sign off before working with a developer to implement.
Managed the project to ensure everything worked and was aligned mock ups

4️⃣ Social Media Management

Took on ongoing management, creating branded templates and posting regularly.
Encouraged consistent engagement with the target audience.
3-5 posts a week, a mixture of industry insights, hot jobs, team shout outs, humour / memes

The Results

Brand:

A brand that showcases their values that people can relate to
Moved away from being too corporate
Consistency across all touchpoints including social, website, email and collateral

Website & SEO:

New website within approx. 3 months with improved UX and content structure.
Added pages and SEO strategy aligned with GEO and AEO best practices.

Social Media Performance (3 months):

(+58.5%) Impressions
(+29.2%) Reactions
(+20%) Comments
(+175%) Reposts

Case Study: Building Thought Leadership Through Market Insight in Life Sciences Recruitment

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 14:29:19 GMT

Who: On Q Recruitment

Where: Australia (national market focus)

Business Size: Specialist life sciences and medical technology recruitment agency with 10+ team members

Partnership: Multi-year marketing partnership

On Q Recruitment is a specialist recruitment agency operating across the life sciences and medical technology sectors. With a growing team and strong industry connections, the business wanted to further establish itself as a trusted authority within a highly technical and regulated market.

As part of a long-term partnership, Prominence supported On Q Recruitment with consistent, insight-led marketing designed to build credibility over time. Rather than focusing solely on job advertising, the strategy centred on thought leadership, market data and ongoing communication with clients and candidates.

The Challenge

On Q Recruitment needed to:

Strengthen its reputation as a thought leader in life sciences and med tech recruitment
Provide clients with meaningful, data-backed market insight
Support business development with assets that opened senior-level conversations
Maintain consistent marketing activity over multiple years
Build long-term brand recognition in a competitive specialist market

Our Solution

Annual Life Sciences & MedTech Salary Survey

We worked closely with On Q Recruitment to create and evolve a flagship annual report.

Planned and delivered a comprehensive Life Sciences & MedTech Salary Survey each year
Structured the report around real market data, trends and commentary
Designed the survey to support both lead generation and client conversations
Ensured consistency and evolution year on year to build recognition

Over time, the salary survey became a cornerstone of On Q Recruitment’s market positioning and a widely recognised asset in the industry.

Ongoing Thought Leadership and Content

To extend the impact of the salary survey, we delivered consistent content throughout the year.

Managed ongoing social media content aligned to market insights and industry topics
Produced regular blog content tailored to the life sciences and med tech market
Delivered monthly EDM campaigns sharing insights, updates and reports

The EDM programme achieved consistent open and click-through rates of 10%+ , reinforcing strong engagement with the On Q Recruitment audience.

Deliverables

Annual Life Sciences & MedTech Salary Survey
Salary survey planning, content and design
Ongoing social media content
Monthly EDM campaigns
Blog content tailored to the life sciences and med tech market
Long-term thought leadership strategy as part of a multi-year partnership

The Results

Positioning

On Q Recruitment became well known in the market for its annual salary survey
Strong association between the brand and high-quality, data-backed insight
Increased credibility with senior clients and industry stakeholders

Engagement

Consistent EDM open and click-through rates of 10%+
Strong engagement across social and blog content
Increased visibility through regular, insight-led communication

Business Development Impact

Salary survey used as a key tool in client conversations and pitches
Strengthened trust and authority in competitive situations
Improved inbound interest driven by thought leadership
Ensured credibility, consistency, and scalability from day one.

Curamoir Healthcare: Brand Refresh & New Website Launch

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:52:45 GMT

The Client

Who: Curamoir Healthcare

Industry: Healthcare Recruitment

Location: Australia

Team Size: Approx. 15 people

Timeframe: Approx. 3 months

As Curamoir Healthcare continued to refine how the team operated and engaged with the market, there was an opportunity to bring greater alignment across the brand, website, and digital presence.

The objective was to modernise the look and feel, ensure consistency across channels, and create a website that clearly communicated Curamoir’s approach, values, and expertise while supporting long term visibility and growth.

The Objective

Refresh the brand to feel modern, confident, and consistent
Align the website and social media presence
Rewrite website content to clearly articulate Curamoir’s value proposition
Build strong SEO foundations with GEO and AEO in mind
Improve clarity, usability, and structure of the website

Our Solution

1. Brand Refresh & Visual Alignment

Refined the existing brand to create a more contemporary look and feel
Updated colours and visual styling
Ensured consistency across website, social media, and marketing assets
Retained brand familiarity while elevating the overall presentation

2. Website Strategy, Sitemap & User Journeys

Reviewed client and candidate user journeys
Designed a clear, intuitive sitemap
Structured pages to support clarity, engagement, and conversion
Created a framework that supports future content and growth

3. Content Rewrite & SEO Foundations

Rewrote website content to clearly communicate Curamoir’s services and approach
Ensured tone was professional, human, and aligned to the refreshed brand
Built content with SEO, GEO, and AEO considerations in mind
Structured copy to support search visibility and AI driven discovery

4. Website Design, Build & Insights

Designed a modern website aligned to the refreshed brand
Developed clear page layouts with intuitive calls to action
Created mock ups to visualise the site prior to build
Managed the build and launch process end to end
Implemented Microsoft Clarity to gain real insight into how users interact with the site, including scroll depth, navigation paths, and engagement behaviour

The Outcome

Brand & Consistency:

A refreshed, modern brand presentation
Strong alignment across website and social media

Website & Content:

New website launched within approx. 3 months
Clearer structure, navigation, and messaging
Content aligned to SEO, GEO, and AEO best practice

Performance & Insight:

15% increase in website traffic following launch
Improved engagement across key pages
Clear visibility into user behaviour to support ongoing optimisation

Business Impact:

Stronger and more consistent first impression
Improved discoverability and usability
Website now supports credibility, engagement, and business development

Key Outcome

The brand refresh and new website delivered a modern, aligned digital presence for Curamoir Healthcare. With rewritten content, measurable traffic growth, and user insight tools in place, the website is now a strong, data informed platform that supports ongoing marketing and business development.

Old Website

Case Study: BRD Search (Finance & Data Recruitment)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:22:30 GMT

Who: BRD Search

Where: Thames Valley and West London, UK

Business Size: Founder-led recruitment business

BRD Search is a specialist recruitment agency focused on permanent and fixed-term Finance and Data roles. The business was created to challenge traditional recruitment models by prioritising transparency, strong client relationships and long-term value over transactional, volume-led recruitment.

After years working within established recruitment firms, the founder was launching BRD as a new, independent brand and needed a clear identity that reflected his experience, values and approach from day one.

The Challenge

As a new brand entering a competitive Finance and Data recruitment market, BRD Search needed a strong foundation that would support credibility and growth.

The key challenges were to create a brand that:

Clearly differentiated BRD from generic Finance recruiters
Balanced professionalism with approachability
Reflected values of honesty, transparency and human connection
Worked consistently across social media, web and client-facing materials
Avoided feeling overly corporate or overly playful

The brand also needed to support BRD’s focus on specialist Finance and Data roles without appearing transactional or volume-driven.

Our Solution

We began with a full brand discovery workshop to understand the founder’s background, values, audience and long-term vision for BRD Search.

From this, we developed a clear brand strategy and explored multiple creative routes before refining the final direction collaboratively.

Our solution included:

Designing multiple logo concepts exploring different interpretations of the BRD mark
Developing colour palettes that felt modern, confident and professional
Creating a distinctive logomark inspired by data, analysis and search, incorporating subtle visual cues such as bar chart and magnifying glass motifs
Testing the brand in real-world scenarios through social media post mock-ups
Refining tone of voice and visual direction based on detailed feedback

This ensured the final brand felt authentic, credible and aligned with BRD’s positioning.

Deliverables

Final logo and logomark
Brand colour palette and typography
Brand guidelines document
Social media post templates and mock-ups
Visual assets for use across website, proposals and marketing materials

The Result

BRD Search launched with a confident, credible brand that reflects its values and market positioning.

The final brand feels modern, trustworthy and human, helping BRD attract high-quality candidates and build long-term client partnerships from the outset.

The brand guidelines now support:

Website design and development
Social media content
Client proposals and presentations

BRD Search is positioned to grow with a clear, recognisable identity that supports its long-term vision.

Executive Search Agency: Brand Elevation and Thought Leadership

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:17:35 GMT

Who: Melium Consulting

Where: Based in London, hiring into Europe (FMCG Sector)

Business Size: <5 person team

This executive search firm specialises in high-level placements across the FMCG industry in Europe. With no internal marketing in place and a previous attempt to hire a junior that didn’t work out, they were unsure how to approach marketing in a way that aligned with their niche and senior-level audience.

They engaged Prominence to provide end-to-end marketing support and quickly began seeing the benefits of working with a recruitment specialist who understood their goals from the get go.

The Challenge

Build a credible, executive-facing brand, building on basic foundations of a logo and colours
Establish consistency and professionalism across all touchpoints
Enable thought leadership to support long-term relationship building
Create marketing materials that win business and build trust
Launch a steady flow of content with minimal time input from the client

Our Solution

Marketing Foundations and Brand Creation

We laid the groundwork with a brand that reflects their executive audience.

Created professional, refined brand guidelines
Developed tone of voice and visual identity aligned with senior stakeholders

Content and Collateral Creation

We delivered a wide range of on-brand, business-winning assets.

Branded market insight reports and whitepapers
Candidate shortlist documents tailored for high-level roles
Case studies showcasing success stories in the FMCG space
Email campaigns focused on thought leadership and industry insights
Social media strategy and execution

Thought Leadership and Relationship Marketing

We positioned the brand as a credible voice in the industry.

Regular, insightful content sharing across social and email
Focus on nurturing long-term relationships over short-term wins

Deliverables

Brand guidelines and tone of voice development
Social media management and content scheduling
Email marketing strategy and execution
Market insight reports and whitepapers
Candidate shortlist templates and visual upgrades
Client and candidate case studies

The Results

Positioning

A polished, executive brand that reflects their market and audience
Increased brand credibility and memorability

Engagement

Consistent content marketing that sparks conversations
Multiple instances of positive feedback from industry contacts and clients on brand and collateral
Direct business wins attributed to high-quality marketing materials

Productivity

Marketing taken off the founder’s plate
A clear, ongoing strategy that supports business development and brand growth

Brown Strategic Search Partners (Executive & Leadership Search)

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 15:09:29 GMT

Who: Brown Strategic Search Partners

Where: UK (operating globally)

Business Size: Founder-led executive search firm, launch business

Brown Strategic Search Partners is a premium executive and senior leadership search firm, With over 20 years’ experience across both agency and in-house recruitment, Carlton launched the business to deliver a more strategic, partner-led approach to executive search.

The firm specialises in senior leadership and executive appointments across Financial Services and Corporate Functions within large, global organisations. From the outset, the brand needed to reflect the level of seniority, trust and discretion expected at this level of hiring.

The Challenge

As a new executive search firm entering a competitive market, the brand needed to feel established, credible and premium from day one.

Key challenges included creating a brand that:

Reflected seniority, credibility and discretion
Felt premium and executive-level without appearing cold or overly corporate
Clearly differentiated the firm from traditional recruitment agencies
Balanced corporate credibility with a founder-led, personal service
Provided a strong foundation for future website development and thought leadership

The brand needed to instil confidence with senior stakeholders while supporting long-term growth.

Our Solution

We began with a detailed Brand Discovery Workshop to fully understand the founder’s background, values, target market and long-term vision for the business.

From this, we developed multiple brand routes, allowing the founder to compare styles, refine direction and arrive at a confident final identity.

Our work included:

Exploration of brand positioning, tone of voice and differentiation
Development of multiple logo and visual identity routes
Refinement of colour palettes, typography and imagery style
Creation of brand assets that would work across digital and client-facing materials

Project Timeline

This project moved quickly and efficiently due to clear direction and collaborative feedback throughout.

18 November – Brand Discovery Workshop to define positioning, audience, tone of voice and visual direction
23 November – First-stage logo and brand concept options shared
2 December – Final logo direction agreed following refinement
8 December – Final brand guidelines delivered, including social media mock-ups

Deliverables

Multiple logo concepts with different typographic and colour approaches
Final primary and secondary logo suite, optimised for light and dark backgrounds
Premium colour palette led by deep blue with subtle gold accents
Clean, modern typography to reinforce clarity and credibility
Imagery guidance aligned to a high-touch, realistic corporate style
Full brand guidelines document
Social media mock-ups to demonstrate the brand in real-world use

The Result

Brown Strategic Search Partners launched with a sophisticated, premium brand that reflects its executive-level offering and Carlton’s personal credibility.

The brand successfully communicates:

Trust and professionalism
Strategic thinking and leadership expertise
A personal, partner-led approach

The final brand guidelines now provide a strong foundation for website design, client materials and future growth, positioning the firm confidently within the executive search market.

SEO Information

SEO Title: Executive Search Brand Launch Case Study

Meta Description: How Prominence delivered a premium brand launch for an executive and leadership search firm, balancing credibility, discretion and a partner-led approach.

URL Slug: /case-studies/executive-search-brand-launch

Brand Refresh, Thought Leadership and Recruiter Attraction in Engineering Recruitment

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 16:46:00 GMT

Who: Alexander Associates

Where: Kent, UK

Business Size: Established engineering recruitment agency with 20+ team members and multiple specialist divisions

Alexander Associates is a well-established engineering recruitment agency operating across multiple divisions, with a growing team and ambitious plans. As the business evolved, its brand and marketing activity needed to better reflect its scale, values and position within the engineering recruitment market.

Alongside elevating their external brand, the business also wanted to invest in thought leadership, improve diversity representation within engineering, and strengthen their employer brand to support recruiter hiring. They partnered with Prominence to deliver marketing that supported both market positioning and internal growth.

The Challenge

Alexander Associates needed to:

Refresh their brand to align with their growth stage and multi-division structure
Strengthen positioning within the engineering recruitment market
Deliver meaningful thought leadership that reflected real industry challenges
Improve diversity and representation through authentic, value-led campaigns
Create a compelling employer brand to attract recruiters
Launch a new division with clear market messaging
Increase engagement and conversions across digital channels

Our Solution

Brand Refresh and Positioning

We delivered a brand refresh aligned with the agency’s scale, maturity and future direction.

Refined brand visuals and messaging to reflect a multi-division business
Ensured consistency across website, campaigns and content

Women in Engineering Thought Leadership

We designed and delivered a flagship thought leadership programme focused on representation and visibility in engineering.

Created a dedicated Women in Engineering page and content hub on the website
Produced a podcast series exploring careers, leadership and challenges in engineering
Delivered a supporting video series
Launched the She’s an Engineer campaign, profiling key women across the engineering sector

This activity positioned Alexander Associates as an active contributor to industry conversations, not just a recruitment supplier.

Employer Brand and Recruiter Attraction

To support internal growth, we built a clear and compelling employer brand.

Developed an EVP aligned to culture, values and progression
Created a dedicated Work For Us page on the website
Delivered a recruiter attraction campaign aligned with the EVP
Generated multiple recruiter applications through the campaign

Personal Branding and Division Launch Support

We supported consultant visibility and business growth through targeted initiatives.

Delivered personal branding sessions across two offices
Helped consultants align personal profiles with the wider brand
Planned and delivered an email marketing campaign to support the launch of a new divisio n

Deliverables

Brand refresh aligned to business growth
Women in Engineering website hub
Podcast and video series
She’s an Engineer profiling social media and email campaign
EVP development
Work For Us website page
Recruiter attraction campaign
Personal branding workshops across two offices
Email marketing campaign for new division launch

The Results

Positioning

A refreshed brand aligned with the scale, ambition and values of the business
Clear differentiation across engineering recruitment, thought leadership and employer branding

Engagement

Social media engagement increased by over 25% year on year
Strong engagement across thought leadership, personal branding and campaign content
Increased visibility and credibility within the engineering community

Website Performance

Increased website conversions driven by clearer messaging and improved user journeys
Campaign and content pages actively supporting candidate, client and recruiter enquiries

Hiring and Growth Impact

Multiple recruiter applications generated through the Work For Us campaign
Successful launch of a new division supported by targeted email marketing
A repeatable framework for recruiter attraction, team visibility and long-term growth

Driving & Logistics Recruitment Case Study

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:25:37 GMT

Candidate Attraction, SEO, Brand Refresh and Lead Generation

Who: Driving and logistics recruitment agency

Where: Midlands, UK (multiple offices)

Business Size: SME recruitment agency, 30+ heads

The agency specialises in high-volume recruitment for drivers, warehouse staff and packers across the Midlands, operating from multiple offices and supporting a wide range of clients with ongoing staffing requirements.

Having been established for over two decades, the business had strong market presence and relationships, but its brand and marketing materials had become dated and inconsistent across offices. At the same time, the agency was facing increasing challenges around candidate attraction, changing pay expectations and internal growth.

They partnered with Prominence to modernise their brand, strengthen marketing foundations and support both external growth and internal hiring.

The Challenge

The agency faced several interconnected challenges:

Candidate attraction and engagement, including low attendance at interviews
Difficulty articulating changes in pay expectations to clients resistant to rate increases
A need to generate more inbound leads in a competitive, high-volume market
Inconsistent branding and collateral across multiple offices
A dated brand that no longer reflected the scale or professionalism of the business
The requirement to attract and train rookie recruiters to support growth

Our Solution

We delivered a joined-up recruitment marketing approach focused on clarity, consistency and practical outcomes.

Brand Refinement and Collateral Alignment

We fine-tuned the agency’s existing brand to modernise its look and feel while retaining familiarity and trust built over more than 20 years.

This included:

Refreshing visual elements to feel more current and professional
Aligning branding and messaging across different offices
Updating marketing collateral to ensure consistency across sales, candidate and internal materials

This gave the business a clearer, more cohesive presence across all touchpoints.

SEO and Website Optimisation

We improved website structure, content and conversion points to support organic visibility and enquiry generation. This included optimising existing pages and ensuring content aligned with how candidates and clients actually search.

Content and Campaign Activity

To support both marketing and sales conversations, we created content designed to reflect real market conditions.

This included:

Blog content addressing candidate availability and market pressures
A regional salary guide for drivers in the Midlands, used to support client conversations and explain changes in pay expectations
Content designed to give consultants data-led talking points rather than opinion

Email and Social Marketing

We delivered ongoing email and social activity to improve engagement and consistency.

This included:

Candidate-focused email marketing to maintain contact and improve engagement
Social media content promoting roles, insights and employer branding
Campaigns designed to encourage action, not just awareness

Recruiter Attraction

To support internal growth, we delivered a recruitment attraction campaign focused on individuals with sales experience.

This included:

Messaging aimed at career changers and entry-level recruiters
Creation of a dedicated “Work for Us” section on the website
Content to support conversations around training and progression

The Results

Over a six-month period, the agency achieved:

A 10%+ increase in organic website traffic and conversions following SEO improvements
More than 50 qualified leads generated from the regional salary guide
Improved candidate engagement across email and social channels
Stronger, more confident client conversations supported by data-led content
A modernised, consistent brand used confidently across all offices

Outcome

By combining brand refinement, SEO, content, email and campaign activity, the agency strengthened candidate attraction and lead generation while giving consultants practical tools to navigate changing market conditions.

Marketing became a consistent support mechanism across offices, reinforcing credibility, improving engagement and supporting both delivery and growth.

SEO Information

SEO Title: Driving & Logistics Recruitment Marketing Case Study

Meta Description: How a Midlands-based driving and logistics recruitment agency improved candidate attraction, modernised its brand and generated over 50 leads through SEO and content-led marketing.

URL Slug: /case-studies/driving-logistics-recruitment-marketing

Construction Recruitment Agency: Podcast Launch

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 14:25:08 GMT

Who: Konstrukt

Where: UK, hiring in Europe

Business Size: <6 team members at project start

Timeframe: 2022 – ongoing

The Challenge

Limited brand awareness in a competitive recruitment market
Existing brand guidelines were inconsistent
No clear platform to showcase industry expertise or thought leadership
Needed to position themselves as both a trusted recruitment partner and an employer of choice
Required a consistent marketing strategy to grow their digital footprint and support business development

Our Solution

Podcast Launch: Leaders in Construction

We helped Konstrukt create and launch their industry podcast, Leaders in Construction , from concept to execution.

Developed the podcast marketing strategy
Built a dedicated podcast page on the Konstrukt website
Managed editing and publishing of fortnightly episodes
Designed social content for each release, including multiple snippets of key content
Provided hosting guidance to ensure the podcast was delivered effectively

Brand Refresh and Design Support

We refreshed and streamlined Konstrukt’s brand identity to bring consistency and impact.

Simplified and modernised colour palettes, fonts, and templates
Designed key collateral including EVPs, capability statements, and pitch decks
Branded a salary survey used as a lead-generation tool

Personal Branding and Team Engagement

To amplify brand reach and team presence, we delivered LinkedIn training and engagement support.

Ran a tailored personal branding session focused on authenticity and visibility
Shared strategies for consistent content and connection building
Supported the team with ongoing content ideas and best practices

Ongoing Digital Marketing Support

We continue to drive momentum with consistent marketing activity.

Manage and schedule social media content
Write blogs that support SEO and industry credibility
Build email campaigns that promote the podcast and generate leads

Deliverables

Podcast strategy, production and promotion
Brand guideline refresh and visual identity update
EVP, pitch decks, salary surveys and capability statements
LinkedIn training and personal brand coaching
Social media management and content calendars
SEO blogs and targeted email campaigns

The Results

Podcast

Leaders in Construction established as a recognised industry podcast
Strengthened relationships with clients and industry leaders through authentic, insightful conversations

Brand

Streamlined and cohesive brand identity aligned with growth goals
Professional collateral suite supporting recruitment and sales

Engagement and Awareness

Significant increase in team engagement and visibility on LinkedIn
Increased brand awareness and inbound opportunities through consistent marketing activity

Case Study: Subscription Model Launch and Brand Refresh

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 13:45:43 GMT

Who: Architecture and Interior Design Recruitment Agency

Where: London, UK

Business Size: 2-person team

Timeframe: 3 months

Twenty One Twelve is a specialist recruitment agency in the architecture and interior design space. Based in London, they had been working with Prominence for over two years across social media, email marketing, and branded content such as salary guides.

When they decided to launch a new subscription-based recruitment service, they partnered with us to bring it to life. The model was a clear shift from the industry’s traditional percentage-based fee structure, and they needed help communicating its value and rolling it out effectively.

The Challenge

Explaining the value of a monthly subscription model to an audience used to percentage-based recruitment fees
Communicating the long-term benefits, including strategic hiring support and forward planning
Creating clear, compelling messaging across all channels to build trust and generate interest
Refreshing the brand in line with existing guidelines—updated, but still recognisable

Our Solution

Strategic Launch Planning and Messaging

We worked closely with the team to define their value proposition and build a launch strategy.

Developed a clear rollout plan with timelines, phases, and content goals
Crafted messaging to explain the new model in simple, client-friendly terms
Highlighted the long-term benefits: predictability, cost control, and alignment with business goals

Content Creation and Campaign Execution

We created and delivered all assets needed for a multi-channel launch.

Designed and wrote email campaigns for both new and existing clients
Rolled out teaser and explainer content across LinkedIn
Updated email signatures and social media banners to promote the launch
Produced short-form video content, hosted on a new YouTube channel and embedded across platforms
Created a suite of brochures and sales collateral to support client conversations

Brand Refresh and Tone of Voice

To match the direction of the new offering, we updated the brand identity and refined the tone of voice.

Designed a new logo that built on the existing brand but felt more premium
Delivered updated assets and templates for internal and external use
Developed tone of voice guidelines to ensure consistent messaging across all content

Ongoing Marketing Support

We continued to support the agency with regular marketing activity to build momentum.

Social media content and scheduling
Email marketing
Content production, including salary guides, website updates, and a podcast launch

The Results

Positioning

Successfully launched a subscription-based recruitment service into a highly specialised market
Messaging clearly explained the value and tackled client concerns head-on

Engagement

Strong engagement across email and social media
Multiple client conversations started within the first two months
Video content helped humanise the offer and make it easy to understand

Brand

A refined, modern visual identity that remained true to the original
Clear, consistent messaging across all touchpoints

The Difference Between AEO, GEO and SEO for Recruitment Agencies

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 11:15:35 GMT

Recruitment agencies are increasingly hearing new acronyms around search and visibility. SEO, AEO and GEO are often mentioned together, but they serve different purposes.

Understanding how they work together is more useful than treating them as competing trends.

SEO: Search Engine Optimisation

SEO focuses on helping pages rank in traditional search results.

For recruitment agencies, this includes:

Keyword optimisation
Technical website performance
Authority and backlinks
Content relevance

SEO answers the question: how do we get found?

AEO: Answer Engine Optimisation

AEO focuses on how content is surfaced when people search using full questions and expect direct answers.

For recruiters, this means:

Clear explanations of services and specialisms
Structured content that can be extracted and referenced
Answering commercial questions directly

AEO answers a different question: how do we become the answer?

GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation

GEO focuses on how content is interpreted and represented when AI platforms generate responses.

For recruitment agencies, this ensures:

Expertise is represented accurately
Messaging remains consistent
Content is not misinterpreted

We are already seeing agencies receive leads where prospects reference generated answers rather than websites directly.

How they work together

These approaches are complementary:

SEO supports discovery
AEO supports clarity and referencing
GEO supports accurate representation

Together, they create a more resilient, future-ready search strategy for recruitment agencies operating globally.

FAQs: AEO vs GEO vs SEO

What is the main difference between SEO and AEO?

SEO focuses on ranking pages. AEO focuses on being used as the answer.

What is GEO and why does it matter?

GEO ensures your expertise is accurately represented when responses are generated.

Do recruitment agencies need all three?

Yes. Each supports a different stage of visibility and understanding.

Are agencies really getting leads from AI platforms?

Yes. We are already seeing inbound enquiries referencing generated answers.

How to Market Your Recruitment Agency in Dubai in 2026

Sun, 21 Dec 2025 11:03:15 GMT

Dubai’s recruitment market is booming. The UAE is set to lead the GCC with 5.6% GDP growth in 2026 , driven by mega-projects, DIFC fintech expansion, and ongoing infrastructure development. The demand for specialist talent keeps rising.

But so does the competition.

Hundreds of local recruitment agencies are battling for the same clients, and a lot of them fighting for market share in the same sectors. The ones consistently winning are the ones that market themselves with the same precision they use to fill roles. They show proof, understand the Dubai hiring landscape, and position themselves as the obvious choice – avoiding the ‘new shiny recruiter’ feel.

We break down what key factors agency owners in Dubai who want to attract better clients, raise margins, and grow smart in 2026, need to consider.

Position your brand as the obvious local choice

Dubai-based clients want to work with recruiters who understand their needs, professionally and culturally. They’re not looking for a generic “global” partner. They want a team who’s in the know and happy to work in line with more bespoke needs and expectations, in some cases.

Here’s what your brand needs to communicate instantly across your website, LinkedIn, and email marketing:

You understand the unique aspects of hiring in Dubai
You’ve delivered local results
You’re visible in the right business circles

Quick brand-building wins:

Add your MOHRE licence number to your homepage and email footer
Use specific testimonials: “Placed 8 compliance roles for DIFC fintech” beats “Great service!”

Own your niche and market like it

Trying to appeal to everyone in Dubai is a quick way to get ignored. The best agencies here go deep into their niche, whether it's construction, fintech, legal, healthcare, or something else. And then they tailor every part of their marketing to speak directly to that audience.

When your niche is clear, everything else gets easier – you will be seen as the recruiter of choice as you build your credibility. The recruitment sector is hot in Dubai, meaning SEO and GEO needs to be a core pillar of your marketing strategy to become more effective.

Why niche wins in Dubai:

Clients trust specialists - your content needs to reflect that
SEO becomes easier when you're targeting fewer, more specific terms
Sector-specific salary guides, landing pages, and testimonials drive higher conversions

Where to double down on your niche:

Create LinkedIn posts and carousels with sector insights
Join and contribute to niche WhatsApp and LinkedIn groups (yes, they exist)
Build separate service pages for each industry on your website
Run sector-specific events or webinars: “Hiring in DIFC Fintech - 2026 Outlook”

You’ll attract clients who value expertise, and recruiters who want to work in a desk that’s positioned to win.

Dominate Dubai-specific Google searches

Most hiring decision makers in Dubai don’t start their searches on LinkedIn. They start with Google and even ChatGPT – the Government has paid ChatGPT Pro for all Residents, so this will become the search of choice in the not too distant future. If you’re not ranking for SEO and GEO when someone searches "tech recruiter Dubai" or "Emiratisation recruitment partner," you’re letting hot leads go elsewhere.

Google is one of the most underused channels in Dubai recruitment marketing. Yet the intent behind these searches is gold, people aren’t just browsing, they’re making hiring decsions.

To win in search in 2026:

Create landing pages for each niche: "Construction Recruitment Dubai," "Hiring for DIFC fintech firms," "Legal staffing in JLT"
Add local schema markup and geotags to your pages so Google knows you're relevant to Dubai
Post weekly blogs about things that matter locally: Ramadan hiring plans, Golden Visa employer updates, free zone expansion news
Don’t ignore your Google Business Profile: reviews, real photos, and updated services go a long way

Bonus: Get listed in credible local directories - Dubai Chamber, DAFZA, DMCC, TECOM. It boosts your visibility and authority in Google’s eyes.

Turn LinkedIn into your primary lead channel

Yes, LinkedIn still works in Dubai. But only if you’re using it to do more than just post job ads.

Dubai-based clients want expertise. They want proof that you’re tracking local trends and understand the shifts in their sector. Think of LinkedIn not as a megaphone but as a magnet for attention, engagement, and leads.

What a smart LinkedIn strategy looks like:

Share data-driven posts: "Construction PM salaries up 14% in Q1"
Comment on regional trends: Expo 2030, Emiratisation targets, DIFC licensing shifts
Get your recruiters involved - personal posts get 5x more engagement than company pages

Considering paid LinkedIn ads? Run ad campaigns promoting high-value content, like salary guides or niche hiring insights. Test small and scale only if the ads are generating actual leads or conversations, not just likes.

Build high-trust salary guides

Salary content is one of the highest-performing assets you can create for Dubai. Local clients are constantly benchmarking pay, and if you're the one supplying the data, you instantly become a go-to expert.

Instead of publishing generic stats, build something bespoke to your niche. Use your own placement data, industry insights, and publicly available stats. This becomes a powerful lead magnet and a proof point in every pitch.

Steps to build a killer 2026 salary guide:

Focus on a niche: "Dubai Fintech Salary Guide 2026"
Gate it behind a form: name, company, role - keep it short
Share it every quarter and use it to start conversations with both clients and candidates
Repurpose into carousels, WhatsApp summaries, infographics and even short videos

Paid search: hyper-targeted is the name of the game

Google Ads can be a powerhouse for lead generation if done right. But in Dubai, most recruitment agencies waste money on broad, expensive keywords. To win, you need to go niche, local, and solution-focused.

How to build high-performing Google campaigns:

Use intent-rich keywords: "hire engineers Dubai," "DIFC recruitment partner," "Emiratisation consultants UAE"
Build focused landing pages that clearly explain what you offer and include a lead form
Include outcomes in your messaging: "Placed 12 site engineers in 21 days"
Run test campaigns and scale what delivers calls or emails - ignore vanity clicks

Remember, success here isn’t about traffic. It’s about conversion.

Events and business groups: real connections, real ROI

Dubai is built on relationships and communities, and in-person business meetings trump online relationships most of the time. But that doesn’t mean spending big on massive conference booths. The most effective strategies involve being visible in the right rooms and hosting small, targeted sessions that spark real conversations.

What to try in 2026:

Host breakfast roundtables during DIFC Week or GITEX with hiring managers
Sponsor panel talks through the British Business Group or local chambers
Offer printed one-pagers like "90-Day Free Zone Hiring Plan" at industry events

You don’t need a massive booth. You need a reason for the right people to talk to you.

Visual content: stop the scroll

Your prospects scroll fast. If your content doesn’t pop visually, it gets ignored. Visuals help simplify complex ideas and boost engagement dramatically, especially on LinkedIn and WhatsApp.

Ideas for engaging visual content:

Short-form video (under 60s): "3 Emiratisation Hiring Fixes That Work"
Infographics: "Dubai Salary Trends by Industry & Free Zone"
Day-in-the-life reels: Show your recruiters at work to build credibility and relatability
LinkedIn carousels: "5 Changes in DIFC Hiring to Watch in 2026"

Your goal is to stop the scroll, add value fast, and build trust in seconds.

Don’t forget recruiter attraction

Dubai is competitive on both sides of the market. While agencies fight for clients, they are also competing hard for experienced billers. If your marketing only speaks to clients, you are missing a huge opportunity.

The strongest agencies use marketing to sell their desks, culture, and earning potential just as clearly as they sell their services. Recruiters want transparency. They want to see proof that your business is a place where they can succeed.

This is especially important in Dubai, where relocation decisions are big and expectations are high.

How to attract better recruiters:

Use targeted LinkedIn ads that clearly state earning potential and desk focus
Build a careers page that shows real consultant stories, not generic promises
Share commission structures, team achievements, and progression paths openly
Use WhatsApp or direct outreach to share live desk opportunities with your network

When recruiter attraction is built into your marketing, growth becomes far easier to sustain.

Common marketing mistakes Dubai agencies still make

Even established agencies fall into avoidable traps when it comes to marketing in Dubai. These mistakes quietly limit growth and often go unnoticed until results start to stall.

The most common issues are not about effort. They are about focus and relevance.

Mistakes to watch out for:

Publishing generic content that could apply to any city in the world
Ignoring Arabic-language assets for mainland clients
Competing on volume instead of positioning for higher-margin work
Hiding or overlooking MOHRE licence and compliance signals
Relying only on a company LinkedIn page instead of empowering individuals
Avoiding paid activity while waiting for SEO to mature
Forgetting that marketing should also attract recruiters

Avoiding these mistakes often unlocks growth faster than adding new tactics.

Want proof this works in Dubai?

We partnered with a fast-scaling enterprise recruitment group expanding across multiple countries. They needed one central marketing strategy and individual plans for each specialist brand.

We delivered:

A clear growth plan for the parent company
Bespoke marketing strategies by vertical and region
A team ready to implement everything quickly

The results:

130% increase in LinkedIn follows in year one
180% rise in impressions in just six months
28% headcount growth across all business units
ROI that exceeded the combined cost of our agency fees, SEO and paid ad spend
Better brand recognition and stronger local SEO visibility across the board

If you're recruiting in Dubai and want results like that, we’ve done it and we can do it for you too.

What Prominence builds for Dubai recruitment agencies

We are a recruitment marketing agency that works exclusively with recruitment businesses. That focus matters, especially in a market like Dubai where nuance, compliance, and positioning make a real difference.

We partner with both local and international firms that want to grow with intent, stand out from the crowd, and attract the right clients and talent.

Here’s what we deliver:

Bilingual salary guides built from your placement data and market insight
English and Arabic lead-gen websites designed for conversion, not just visibility
End-to-end LinkedIn strategies (organic and paid) to attract clients and recruiters
Full content marketing plans, including blog writing, video production, and graphic design
Email marketing and automated nurture sequences using HubSpot or your chosen CRM
EVP and employer branding projects aligned with DIFC, free zone, and Emiratisation hiring needs
Paid advertising across LinkedIn, Google, Facebook, and Instagram with niche-specific targeting
Website audits, landing page optimisation, and conversion tracking setup
On-demand marketing team support or fully outsourced solutions that scale with you

If you're serious about growing in Dubai and want a partner who already knows what works here, we're ready.

Want to see how we’ve helped recruitment companies in Dubai grow?

Get in touch for a no-obligation marketing consultation to review your current marketing and show you exactly where to improve. You’ll get a practical, honest breakdown of what to fix, what to keep, and what to scale. Let’s talk.

FAQs: Marketing a Recruitment Agency in Dubai

How long does MOHRE approval take? Free zone licence: 1–2 weeks. Mainland NOMC: 1–3 months depending on PRO. Source: MOHRE Fastest way to build pipeline? A targeted salary guide campaign with LinkedIn lead gen is usually the quickest. Suggested ad budget? Focus on strategy first. Trial small-scale campaigns and scale what converts. There is no universal benchmark - results vary by niche, audience, and offer. How to show Emiratisation awareness? Mention quota knowledge, hiring experience, and add MOHRE badge to your site. Must-have website elements? MOHRE compliance badge, niche-specific salary guide download, Dubai testimonials, bilingual toggle, mobile-first design.

Have You Got Your Marketing and Tech Stack Ready for Your 2026 Strategy?

Thu, 27 Nov 2025 13:02:02 GMT

Recruiters, let’s talk straight. You’ve probably already started mapping out your billing goals for 2026, got your team targets lined up, maybe even your hiring plans. But often, marketing and the tech stack that should support it aren’t getting the same level of attention.

A recent LinkedIn poll showed that tech is topping the list of investment priorities for recruitment agencies heading into the new year. That result isn’t surprising: when used effectively, tech can strengthen your brand, streamline business development, and keep candidates warm, all while helping your consultants stay focused on what they do best.

The catch? Without a proper marketing strategy, tech is just another line on the budget. It can’t do the heavy lifting on its own. Let’s unpack how to get both your strategy and your tech stack working together, before January hits.

Why Your Marketing and Tech Stack Need to Work Together

You wouldn’t send your top biller out with a broken phone and no LinkedIn access. So why run your marketing with disconnected tools and no plan?

When your strategy is aligned with your systems, your brand feels consistent, your lead gen runs smoother, and you stop guessing where the next client or candidate is coming from. Suddenly, the effort you put into content, emails, and website design starts pulling in actual leads, not just likes.

Here’s what becomes possible when your tech and marketing are in sync:

Your CRM shows who’s engaging with what
Automated journeys keep leads warm without constant follow-up
Your email campaigns reach the right people with the right message
Your website captures leads and tells you where they came from
Reporting gives you visibility on what works and what doesn’t

The result? Less time wasted, more conversions, a consistently warm pipeline.

What a 2026-Ready Recruitment Marketing Strategy Looks Like

To build a recruitment marketing engine that actually performs in 2026, you need more than a vague content plan.

Here's what matters most, broken down into core areas of your tech and strategy:

Website: Your 24/7 Recruiter

Your website should be the hardest-working member of your team.

It’s the first impression for most clients and candidates. And if it’s slow, hard to navigate, or packed with generic copy, you’re losing business before you even get a call.

A high-performing recruitment website should:

Let clients submit briefs or job requests with ease
Make applying quick and painless for candidates
Use short, mobile-friendly forms that actually work
Have strong, clear CTAs that guide users on every page
Load fast and function well across all devices

But good design is just the beginning. To actually drive growth, your site must be optimised for SEO, AEO, and Geo SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is what helps your website rank in Google search results when people are looking for recruitment services or marketing support. It’s about having the right keywords, content, structure, and internal links to make your site visible and valuable.

Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO) takes it further. AEO is how you make your content visible to AI-powered search tools like Google’s featured snippets or voice search. These tools look for direct, clear answers to specific questions. If your content is structured correctly, your site becomes the one that gets surfaced with answers instead of being buried on page three.

Geo SEO helps your agency show up in location-specific searches. If someone searches “tech recruiter in Bristol” or “legal recruitment agency in Sydney,” you want your business to appear. That means your site needs location-based pages, consistent contact information, and content that reflects your regional expertise.

To make your website work across all three areas, it should include:

Regular blogs that target real questions and search terms your clients and candidates are using
FAQ pages that speak directly to the challenges your audience is trying to solve
Insight articles, case studies, and resources that prove your expertise
Localised landing pages for every region you serve
Schema markup and structured data to help search engines and AI tools read and rank your content properly

When your website is fully optimised, it doesn’t just support your consultants. It supports your entire growth strategy. It drives traffic, captures leads, and positions your agency as the go-to partner in your market, your niche, and your region.

If it’s not doing all that right now, it’s time to fix it.

CRM / ATS: Automate Sales Journeys, Don’t Just Store Data

our CRM should not be a digital filing cabinet. It should be the heartbeat of your business development.

With the right setup, your CRM can:

Automatically trigger outreach based on behaviour
Assign leads to consultants at the right time
Track every client and candidate interaction
Give clear visibility of which campaigns drive revenue

Platforms like Bullhorn Automation, Mailchimp, and Roi-AI give you the power to move from manual follow-ups to intelligent, automated sales journeys. That means your consultants spend more time closing and less time chasing.

Email Marketing Campaigns: More Than Just Newsletters

Email still delivers some of the highest ROI in recruitment marketing. But it only works if you're using it with structure and strategy, not as a last-minute blast to a cold list.

Your CRM might manage automated BD and candidate journeys, but email campaigns have a distinct role. They keep your brand top of mind, deliver helpful content, and generate interest before your consultants even make contact.

Here’s how to get more from email in 2026:

Run monthly newsletters targeted by sector, seniority, or region to keep your audience engaged and informed
Use automated sequences triggered by downloads, site visits, or form submissions to warm leads and guide them through the funnel
Segment by role, location, job title, or buying stage so your messages are always relevant
Share insight-driven content that adds value, not noise - think case studies, blogs, or market trends
Introduce Featured Candidate Newsletters to showcase standout talent directly to your client base. These curated snapshots highlight pre-qualified candidates who are actively looking or open to opportunities. It’s a powerful way to drive client engagement and speed up the placement cycle

These campaigns should feel personal, not robotic. Use your recruiters’ market insight to tailor messaging, keep it human, and always focus on delivering value.

With the right structure in place, email becomes more than just a marketing tool. It becomes a consistent source of warm leads, engaged clients, and faster placements.

Analytics & Attribution

You can’t scale what you can’t measure. Yet too many recruitment businesses are still making decisions based on gut feel.

Set up proper tracking tools like GA4 and Hotjar. Use them to answer real questions:

Where are candidates dropping off your site?
Which campaigns bring in the best leads?
What’s your average cost per lead by channel?
Are your content efforts actually driving conversions?

Attribution helps you double down on what works. And lets you stop spending time and money on what doesn’t.

Content and Social Media: Build Proof, Not Just Presence

“Just post more” isn’t a strategy.

Recruitment agencies should be building content that supports conversations, not just fills up feeds. If your consultants are hearing the same objections, your marketing should be tackling those before the first call even happens.

Your content needs to:

Answer the questions your clients and candidates are actually asking
Show proof through case studies, results, and testimonials
Support consultants with materials they can use to win work
Be consistently shared and repurposed across platforms

Your content should work as hard as your consultants. It should be useful, targeted, and built to move conversations forward. Focus on creating content that earns attention because it answers real questions and solves real problems. That’s what builds trust and drives action, not just showing up in someone’s feed more often.

AI Tools

AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are everywhere right now. And yes, they can be incredibly useful in your marketing workflow. But only if you use them with intention and control.

The biggest mistake recruiters make with AI is letting it take over the message. Your brand voice, your market knowledge, and your consultants’ insight are what set you apart. AI can support that, it should never replace it.

Here's how AI can add value:

Help with content ideation when you're stuck or want a fresh take
Speed up first drafts for blogs, email sequences, or campaign copy
Repurpose existing content into different formats like LinkedIn posts, email snippets, or social graphics
Summarise complex ideas or reword copy more clearly

But here’s what AI cannot do:

Capture your brand’s tone in a way that feels real
Understand the recruitment industry’s nuances like your team does
Decide what content will actually resonate with your clients and candidates
Replace human storytelling, proof points, and lived market experience

There’s also the risk of AI content being too generic. If you publish without reviewing or editing, it can hurt your SEO and AEO performance. Google and LinkedIn prioritise helpful, original content that adds real value, not keyword-stuffed AI copy.

Use AI to save time, not to cut corners. Let it support your consultants’ knowledge, enhance your marketing process, and give your team more headspace. But the voice, the positioning, the strategy - that still needs to come from real people who understand your audience. AI is here to help you work smarter. Just don’t hand it the mic.

Who’s Actually in Charge of This?

Here’s something a lot of recruitment leaders don’t ask often enough: who’s actually responsible for all this?

Is there someone in your business who owns the marketing strategy and the tech implementation? Do they know what’s working and what’s not? Are they empowered to make decisions, test new ideas, and hold people accountable?

Marketing success doesn’t happen by accident. It needs ownership. Whether that’s an internal Head of Marketing, an outsourced team like Prominence, or someone wearing multiple hats, someone needs to lead. If you can’t name that person right now, you’ve just found your biggest risk heading into 2026.

Build Content That Actually Delivers

Creating content for the sake of it is a waste of time and budget. The goal isn’t just to post more, it’s to create the kind of content that helps your consultants open doors, build relationships, and close deals.

That starts with SEO-led blogs that address the real questions your clients and candidates are asking, supported by content that works across the funnel:

Case studies that prove you deliver
Email sequences that educate and keep your agency front of mind
Videos that feel like a conversation, not a sales pitch

Use automation to get it out there consistently, but don’t rely on it to write the message. That needs to come from your brand, your recruiters, and your market insight. Because if your content sounds like every other agency out there, what’s the point?

Make every post, email, and video count. Otherwise, you’re just adding to the noise.

Know What’s Actually Working

Attribution is your best friend. If you don’t know where your best leads are coming from, you’re flying blind. The right tech setup will tell you what campaigns drive traffic, which content leads to conversions, and how your cost per lead is tracking.

At Prominence, we use a marketing attribution model that helps recruitment businesses make sense of their marketing efforts. It shows where your leads originate, how they interact with your brand across different channels, and which campaigns actually turn interest into revenue. It’s simple to use and gives you the visibility you need to double down on what works, and stop wasting budget on what doesn’t.

How to Run a Simple Audit Before Year-End

Ask yourself:

Do we have a documented strategy?
Are our campaigns mapped and measured?
Is our tech stack integrated and actually being used?
Are we getting useful insights from our CRM and analytics?
Most importantly: who is in charge of making sure all of this is happening?

If the answer to any of those is no, you’ve got work to do before January.

What Happens When You Get This Right

When marketing and tech align, the change is immediate. Inbound leads rise. Consultants spend less time chasing cold leads. Clients engage faster. Candidates come to you. Marketing stops being a cost and starts becoming your best revenue channel.

How Prominence Can Help

Our services cover everything you need to get your 2026 marketing strategy firing:

Strategy and planning
SEO and website optimisation
Social media and content marketing
Email marketing and automation
Employer branding and talent attraction
PPC and paid advertising
Lead generation and campaign delivery

We audit your current tech and strategy, create plans that align with your goals, produce content that delivers leads, and optimise everything to keep it moving forward.

We’ve been doing this for more than a decade globaly.

Want 2026 to be your best year yet? Get in touch.

Social Care Recruitment: Consistent Marketing That Drives Business

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 15:22:30 GMT

Who: Charles Hunter Associates

Where: England

Business Size: Medium-sized agency

The social care and social work sectors are facing mounting challenges, from workforce shortages and burnout to rising service demand and underfunding. To stand out in a complex and competitive space, one recruitment agency turned to Prominence for consistent marketing support.

Our work focused on building a professional, high-performing brand presence across all channels, with activity tailored to support both inbound attraction and business development.

The Challenge

Improve digital presence and increase brand recognition
Position the agency as a leader in the social care recruitment space
Create consistent marketing touchpoints that supported BD efforts
Keep content relevant to the fast-changing landscape of social care

Our Solution

Foundational Brand Work

We worked closely with the internal team to build a clear and consistent identity.

Developed an EVP tailored to the social care audience
Advised on website updates to improve UX and SEO
Reviewed content across all channels for tone and consistency

Marketing Activity

Our long-term support ensured the brand stayed top of mind.

Delivered regular social media content aligned with key themes
Ran email marketing campaigns targeting clients and candidates
Produced SEO-focused blog content with updates relevant to the sector

Results-Focused Campaigns

Every piece of content was designed with lead generation in mind.

Strong open and click-through rates on email campaigns
Marketing insights used by recruiters to follow up and convert leads
Consistent visibility supporting brand recognition and client trust

Deliverables

EVP creation and brand alignment
Website UX and content updates
Social media content planning and scheduling
Email marketing strategy and execution
Blog writing with SEO best practices
Performance tracking and reporting

The Results

Positioning

A clearly defined brand presence in the social care recruitment space
EVP and messaging aligned with sector-specific challenges and values

Engagement

High-performing email campaigns with strong open and click-through rates
Content actively used for business development by the recruitment team

Productivity

Consistent marketing output without internal resource strain
Scalable strategy to support ongoing growth and visibility

Social Work and Social Care Recruitment Agency: Salary Survey Campaign Launch

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 15:01:09 GMT

Who: Charles Hunter Associates

Where: UK

Business Size: SME

Charles Hunter Associates is a leading recruitment agency specialising in the provision of social workers and social care workers across England.

The social care industry faces a number of systemic challenges:

Workforce crisis due to staff shortages, low pay, and burnout
Ongoing funding and resource constraints impacting service quality
Rising demand for care services and increased mental health needs

To highlight these issues and add value to the industry, Charles Hunter Associates aimed to launch a salary and sentiment survey to capture the realities of both workers and employers in the sector.

The Challenge

Design a survey that would generate meaningful, reliable data
Encourage high participation from a workforce under pressure
Produce a professional report with industry credibility
Generate marketing opportunities from the results

Our Solution

Survey Design and Promotion

We focused on getting the questions right and driving meaningful engagement.

Crafted clear, unbiased survey questions with a mix of quantitative and open-ended responses
Promoted the survey via targeted emails to both workers and employers
Amplified reach through organic and paid social media campaigns

Data Analysis and Report Creation

Once the data was collected, we turned it into insight.

Analysed over 100 worker responses and 20 employer contributions
Designed a branded, easy-to-digest report with clear recommendations
Distributed to key stakeholders across the industry

Campaign Promotion and Results

We used the report as a centrepiece for wider marketing activity.

Promoted across LinkedIn with strategic content and engagement prompts
Sent targeted follow-up emails to clients and prospects with the report link

Deliverables

Survey design and audience targeting strategy
Survey promotion via email and social media
Data analysis and report copywriting
Report design and branding
LinkedIn promotion and campaign posts
Email follow-ups and web traffic reporting

The Results

Business Development

6 meetings secured with new clients within 2 weeks of release
Re-established terms with 2 former clients
Began working on senior-level roles as a direct result of the report

Marketing Impact

Over 750 visits to the report landing page
6 confirmed marketing conversions
LinkedIn impressions up 13% and comments up 6% over three months

Client Feedback

"Prominence have been extremely helpful with our marketing activities. Caroline was always on hand to answer questions and the support we received was exceptional. They helped us with both large projects and day-to-day marketing activities." — Mollie O’Sullivan, Marketing Executive, Charles Hunter Associates

Why a Mobile-Optimised Website Grows Your Business Faster

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 06:28:56 GMT

With two-thirds of web traffic now flowing through mobile devices, we’re not exaggerating when we say mobile optimisation is critical for recruitment agency website design.

Over the past five years, mobile web traffic has jumped by more than 20%. That means whether someone’s looking for a job on their lunch break or researching recruiters during their commute, chances are they’re doing it on a smartphone. If your recruitment agency’s website isn’t mobile optimised, you’re likely missing out on traffic, engagement, and ultimately, on business.

So why are some recruitment websites still not designed with mobile in mind? In many cases, it’s an oversight. Mobile responsiveness may not have been the top priority when the site was first built, or hasn’t been revisited during updates. In any case, a website optimised for mobile is an absolute must-have today for marketing for recruitment agencies.

We’ll walk you through why mobile optimisation is so important for recruitment agencies, how to tell if your website delivers a smooth mobile experience, and how to get your website mobile-ready – so you can attract, engage, and convert more candidates and clients.

First Impressions Matter (Especially on Mobile)

When someone lands on your site from a mobile device and it loads slowly, displays poorly, or is clunky to navigate, they’re gone in seconds. A mobile optimised website ensures your recruitment brand puts its best foot forward. Quick load times, responsive layouts, and easy navigation keep users engaged.

Remember: candidates and clients are judging your credibility in those first few taps!

Higher Rankings, Better Visibility

Google moved to mobile-first indexing years ago, meaning it predominantly uses the mobile version of your site for ranking and indexing. So if your site isn’t optimised for mobile, it could be slipping down Google’s search results, making it harder for candidates and clients to find you in the first place.

Along with a better user experience, a mobile-friendly site is a foundational piece of SEO and digital marketing for recruitment agencies.

Better Conversion Rates

What good is your website traffic if it doesn’t convert?

A seamless mobile experience makes it easier for users to apply for jobs, register interest, or contact your team. Making it easy for visitors to perform the action you want them to do (sign up, apply, contact) will enable your conversion rates to grow.

It Future-Proofs Your Recruitment Website Design

User behaviour is always evolving. Optimising your site for mobile ensures it can keep up with changing user expectations and device types. A good recruitment agency website design today should anticipate tomorrow’s tech.

Think about integration with your ATS, CRM, social media platforms, and even tools like voice search. Having a website that is agile enough to adapt to new tech is a big advantage.

It Supports All Your Other Marketing Activity

Social ads, email newsletters, job alerts… Where do most people click through from those channels? Their phone.

If your website is the centre of your digital marketing ecosystem, then mobile is the bridge that gets people there. An optimised mobile experience increases the ROI of every other marketing effort you’re running.

Signs Your Website Isn’t Mobile Friendly

Not sure where your site stands? At a glance, here are a few red flags:

1) Text is too small or runs off-screen.

If users have to squint, scroll sideways, or zoom in just to read basic information, your site isn’t doing its job. Mobile-friendly websites adjust text size and layout automatically for smaller screens.

2) Buttons are hard to tap.

On a phone, buttons need to be big enough to tap without precision thumb gymnastics. If clickable elements on each page are too close together or too small, it creates frustration and increases bounce rates (visitors clicking away from your website).

3) Pages take more than three seconds to load.

We’re not telling tales when it comes to website load speed for mobiles – 47% of users expect a site to load in two seconds or less. Slow-loading pages on mobile are a major reason visitors give up and go elsewhere.

4) You have to pinch and zoom to read anything.

If users constantly need to zoom in just to read job ads or navigation menus, your site isn’t responsive. A mobile optimised layout presents content clearly and accessibly, without extra effort from the user.

5) Google Search Console tells you so!

Google’s free tools will flag mobile usability issues, like touch elements being too close or content wider than the screen. If you’re seeing warnings in Search Console, your site likely isn’t passing the mobile-friendliness test.

Optimising for Mobile: Quick Tips

Two areas where recruitment businesses can score quick wins when optimising their website are job vacancy pages and the registration page for applicants.

1) Keep job descriptions short, clear, and easy to scroll on mobile.

Dense blocks of text can overwhelm candidates on a phone screen. Besides, too many requirements may discourage great applicants from hitting ‘Apply’. Focus on what really matters.

2) Simplify your application forms so they’re mobile-accessible and quick to complete.

Long forms with too many fields can cause candidates to abandon the process altogether. Ideally, applications should take less than five minutes. Test it yourself on a smartphone to find any sticking points.

3) Use ‘sticky’ call-to-action buttons.

Sticky or fixed-position CTAs like “Apply Now” or “Contact Us” stay visible as users scroll, making it easier for them to take action without hunting for the next step. This is a helpful way to improve your website’s conversion rates, by keeping key interactions front and centre.

4) Use compressed images and lazy loading.

Large, uncompressed images can seriously slow down mobile load times. Use image compression and lazy loading (where images load only as users scroll) to keep your site fast and responsive.

5) Test regularly on different devices.

Don’t assume your site works everywhere just because it looks good on your phone! Test on multiple devices and browsers (iOS, Android, Safari, Chrome, etc.) to catch layout issues or broken elements before your users do.

So, What’s Next?

If you’re serious about marketing your recruitment agency, a mobile optimised website is non-negotiable.

At Prominence, we work with recruitment agencies to create websites that perform and look good on every type of device. We make sure your digital presence is working hard on every screen.

Want to know how your site stacks up?

Get in touch for a website audit and start turning mobile visitors into measurable results.

Is Your Recruitment Website Built to Make You Money?

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 06:58:14 GMT

When we ask, "How does a recruitment agency website make money?" we’re not talking about monetisation through ads or subscriptions, nor are we talking about job boards. We’re talking about recruitment agency website design as a lead generation and conversion engine. Sure, you need a BD person or team doing their thing, but if your website is outdated or clunky, it’s harder for potential clients or candidates to take your brand seriously.

Surprisingly, there are many agencies with plenty of years in the business and a happy yet modest clientele who still struggle to differentiate, and that often comes down to their website.

The quality of recruitment agency website design matters, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. In this area of marketing for recruitment agencies, simplicity often gets better results. The quality of website design for recruitment agencies matters, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. In this area of recruitment marketing strategy, simplicity often gets better results.

We’ll cover key areas that help your website generate ROI by creating an experience that turns passive browsers into active leads.

Always Start with User Experience

Overlooking basic functionality is a common mistake we see recruiters make with their websites. Often, that’s because they’re not the people who are using it.

Function beats fashion every time. You need a site that looks professional and works for clients and candidates alike.

Ask yourself:

Can a client easily find your specialisations and get in touch within a click or two?
Can a candidate find relevant roles without going through a maze of pages?
Do your contact forms actually load on mobile?

Improving user experience (UX) starts with understanding how people navigate your site and removing friction. That means having a clear menu structure, a prominent search bar or filter functionality for jobs, and logical touchpoints that don’t force visitors to think too hard.

Try this: ask someone unfamiliar with your business to find a job and make contact on your site. Watch what happens.

Go Easy on the Forms

We get it – your CRM might want to capture all the data. Your visitors, however, probably don’t want to give away so much information upfront. If a candidate has to fill out a 15-field form just to register interest, you’ve already lost them.

Keep your forms simple and quick to complete:

Name
Email
Phone (maybe)
Upload CV

That’s enough to start a conversation. You can always collect more detail once the lead is warm.

For clients, the same principle applies. Make it easy for them to request a callback, submit a vacancy, or send a message, without needing to dig around for your email address.

Keep Navigation Simple

Load time is always important, but that’s just one aspect of effective recruitment agency website design. The best recruitment websites are also built for speed of use – how long it takes for a visitor to find and do what they want to do while on your site.

In UX design, this concept is highlighted by Hick’s Law (or the Hick-Hyman Law): the more choices a person is presented with, the longer they will take to reach a decision. The point is to avoid overwhelming your website visitors with endless submenus where they’re hunting for basic information.

For recruiter websites, that means:

Clear paths for candidates to browse, search, and apply for jobs
Obvious next steps for clients looking to hire
Logical menu labels (no one will click a button labelled "Solutions" if they’re just trying to call you).

Also, make sure job pages are optimised for job seekers. Use structured headers, highlight key info above the fold and include relevant keywords. We also recommend including search filters and making sure applications don’t redirect offsite unnecessarily – you definitely want to avoid people clicking away without signing up!

Including testimonials or case studies is a handy way to establish social proof (i.e. build trust) while visitors browse your site.

Don’t Skimp on Calls to Action

A strong call to action (CTA) is the unsung hero of lead generation. And yes, it’s likely your website needs more of them. Every key page (home, jobs, about, client services, blog posts) should guide visitors towards a next step.

That could be:

“Apply Now”
“Register Your CV”
“Submit a Vacancy”
“Book a Call”

Make those CTAs visible above the fold, not hidden in the footer or buried at the end of a long scroll.

Use buttons, highlight contact info, and make sure they’re thumb-friendly on mobile. When in doubt: add a button.

Content That Answers Questions

Good UX and forms can get people to stay longer on your website. To keep visitors engaged and coming back, you’ll need the right content. Think beyond just job listings and the usual “About Us” page. What do clients and candidates want to know when they land on your site?

For clients, it might be:

“What roles do you specialise in?”
“How do you screen candidates?”
“Why should I use an agency over hiring directly?”

For candidates, it could be:

“What’s the job market like right now?”
“How can I find remote/hybrid roles?”
“How do I stand out in my application?”

Having blog content, FAQ pages, case studies, or even short video explainers can make a big difference in engaging visitors. Resources that answer questions can help build trust and keep people on your site longer, which helps with SEO, too.

Don't forget: a regularly updated blog or insights section shows that your agency is switched on and in touch with the market. That alone can be the difference between a bounce and a lead.

The Takeaway

A recruitment agency website doesn’t need to be the flashiest. But it does need to function as a business tool that supports the company’s goals, like bringing in more of the right candidates and helping clients easily reach out.

At Prominence, we help recruitment agencies build websites that do just that. Websites designed not just to look good, but to deliver real ROI. Want your site to start pulling its weight? Get in touch with us to find out how we can help.

Why Recruitment Agencies Need to Act Fast About Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 07:33:29 GMT

Search is changing. Fast.

For years, recruitment businesses have relied on traditional SEO to help them get found online. But as tools like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Perplexity become part of everyday life, the way people search for information, and the way they find your agency, is shifting.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) comes in.

Instead of focusing solely on getting your website to appear in the familiar Google rankings, GEO is about making sure your brand shows up in the answers provided directly by AI-powered search engines. In other words, when someone asks, “How much do recruitment agencies charge?” or “What’s the average time to hire in tech?”, you want your agency’s content to be the source those tools use to build their response.

And for recruitment businesses, that’s a differentiator and a potential game-changer.

Does GEO Really Matter for Recruitment?

Think about how clients and candidates behave today. They want instant answers. They’re not scrolling through endless search results, they’re asking AI tools questions and trusting the answers.

If your agency’s insights, blogs, or salary guides are included in those AI-generated summaries, you’re putting your brand in front of people earlier and in a more authoritative way. Before they’ve even clicked a link, they’ve seen your name and expertise. That builds trust, and in recruitment, trust is everything.

It also makes your content work harder. You’re probably already producing blogs, market updates and advice pieces. By optimising them for GEO, you extend their reach and give them a new lease of life, not just showing up in Google search, but being pulled into AI-generated answers too.

So, Where Do I Start?!

The good news? You don’t need to rip up your content strategy and start again. Instead, think about GEO as the next evolution of what you’re already doing.

Start by looking at the questions your clients and candidates actually ask you. These are your GEO opportunities. Then, make sure your content answers those questions clearly, directly, and in a way that’s easy for AI tools to understand. That means using simple headings, structured answers, and content that actually gets to the point.

Depth matters too. AI engines favour content that feels complete and authoritative. So, instead of writing a surface-level blog, create something that genuinely explores the topic, whether that’s a guide to hiring timelines in your sector, a breakdown of salary trends, or an explainer on how recruitment fees work.

And remember, AI tools are trained on conversational language. Write in the same way your audience speaks. If you frame your content around real, natural questions, you’re far more likely to appear in generative search answers.

Shall I Just Focus on GEO?

Generative Engine Optimisation isn’t here to replace SEO, it’s here to sit alongside it. The recruitment agencies that adapt now will have a serious edge: they’ll be seen earlier in the client and candidate journey, they’ll build trust faster, and they’ll win more attention in an increasingly noisy space.

Your competitors might still be fighting over Google rankings. With GEO, you could be the name that AI recommends first. And that’s where the real opportunity lies.

FAQs

Get in touch to find out how we can help build your GEO strategy.

What AI Means for Your SEO Strategy

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 08:51:02 GMT

The rise of AI is transforming how SEO for recruitment agencies works. More people are using tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity with the intent to find a product or service, while Google and Bing have embraced AI-generated overviews of their search results.

While AI currently accounts for just a tiny slice of referral traffic, it’s already impacting SEO for recruitment websites in significant ways. About 63% of all websites are receiving at least some traffic from AI tools, with ChatGPT responsible for half of all AI-driven visits, according to an Ahrefs analysis.

That said, Google still dominates, driving 345 times more traffic than AI and has 80% of search market share , so traditional SEO is far from dead . It’s just that what was ‘SEO best practice’ five years ago looks a bit different today. AI overviews in SEO are now a big deal, and it is possible to optimise your content so it's more likely to be included in these summaries.

Here at Prominence, we’re getting noteworthy results by helping clients make their website content more accessible to AI platforms. Here’s some tips on how to do it.

Structure is (Still) Essential

Whether it’s a Google search engine bot or a large language model (LLM) used by ChatGPT, structured content is what helps AI understand what your page is about. Including a wall of text on every page of your website will likely hurt your SEO (and turn off potential clients and candidates).

To allow AI search tools to easily scan your website content and show it to people searching for the keywords your business is targeting, structure is key.

Good heading and paragraph structure helps AI (and humans) understand your content at a glance. Here’s how to do it:

Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and clear section breaks to make scanning easy. This also makes your content more visually appealing, which is an underrated factor in converting prospects into customers.
Follow a logical hierarchy for headings: start with one H1 header to define each website page, then use H2s and H3s to break up topics and subtopics. This helps search engines and AI tools interpret your content correctly.

Restructure Existing Content for Quick Wins

AI search loves content that directly answers user queries, like FAQ sections. An easy way to get started is by breaking up your existing long-form content into bite-sized, searchable sections.

For example, where you have a lengthy how-to guide, break it up into sections that address specific questions. Instead of one long article on “How to hire great developers,” split it into clearly labelled sections like “What skills should you look for in a developer?” or “How can a tech recruiter find developers in Australia?”

This makes your content easier to navigate, more engaging for readers, and more likely to be picked up by AI systems scanning for quick answers. Three big wins for your SEO!

Target AI Overviews in SEO Content

The AI overview in SEO is ripe for targeting. Standalone FAQ pages can be a powerful tool for this purpose. Writing a solid set of FAQs can help you build authority on a particular topic and increase your chances of being picked up in AI Overviews or rich snippets.

The key is to use FAQ pages strategically and avoid keyword stuffing and generic questions. Instead of using questions like “What industries do you recruit in?” think of them as a way to answer the specific questions candidates and clients are actually typing into Google.

When to Create a Standalone FAQ Page

You should consider writing a standalone FAQ page when:

You regularly get the same questions from candidates or clients.
You're targeting a specific niche or job type (e.g. tech contractors, executive search, locum nurses).

What a Good FAQ Page Looks Like

A quality FAQ page is written in a natural question-and-answer format. Don’t go overboard with the bullet points. Here are examples for recruiters:

Example 1: “What Does a Senior Product Manager Do?”

Create a page that breaks down the typical responsibilities, required skills, salary and career path for a Senior Product Manager. This can double as a job description template and help you rank for related search queries like:

“Senior product manager salary Australia”
“What skills do you need to be a product manager?”
“Is product management a good career?”

Example 2: “Hiring Temporary Staff - What Employers Need to Know”

This could cover contract lengths, legal considerations and your agency’s role in the process. Questions might include:

“How long can I hire a temp worker for?”
“Do I need to provide benefits for temp staff?”
“What’s the notice period for temporary employees?”

See how we broke up this section with headers and bullet points? It’s that easy.

Tap Into Related Searches

Targeting a catch-all search phrase won’t cut it for AI. Search is highly contextual for AI platforms, as users will phrase things in lots of different ways. Instead of focusing on one “hero” keyword like ‘recruitment agency Sydney’, think more broadly:

tech recruiters in Sydney
hire a contract recruiter Sydney
best agency for hiring developers in Sydney, and so on.

These related phrases help you build topical authority and increase your chances of showing up in AI-generated responses. In traditional SEO, this strategy is referred to long-tail keyword targeting. That’s why FAQ sections can be so useful, as they allow you to do use more keywords without stuffing them into long paragraphs.

The Basics of SEO Haven’t Changed

Google's AI Overviews often pull from content that already ranks well, especially from the top 10 organic results. So if your site isn’t appearing on page one, it’s unlikely to be featured in AI summaries either. That means you still need to optimise pages anyway. The AI overview in SEO is just part of SEO, not its replacement.

The Takeaway

Far from replacing SEO for recruitment websites, AI has just raised the bar on what good SEO looks like.

Despite all the buzz around AI in search, the fundamentals of SEO for recruitment agencies still matter:

Having well-structured elements on a user-friendly website
Using keywords that target search intent
Content that is helpful and relevant to your audience Building quality backlinks

The goal is to make your website a go-to resource for your niche, whether someone lands via a traditional search or an AI summary.

Get Expert Help on SEO for Recruiters

Need help rewriting your website for AI-readability? We can do that. At Prominence, we help recruitment agencies stay visible and relevant in the AI era. Get in touch to see how we can make your SEO strategy human and AI-friendly.

How to Amplify Your Existing Marketing Resources

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 12:19:32 GMT

Resources like salary reports, industry surveys and how-to guides are like bread and butter in marketing for recruiters – staples that appeal to a broad audience. Producing a resource like an industry whitepaper or salary report is a savvy way to connect with client and candidate audiences. Such resources can be time-consuming to create – but are you doing enough to get them seen by your intended audience? Thankfully, you don’t need additional thousands of dollars in marketing budget to promote such content.

With a few simple approaches, you can reduce marketing costs by maximising your existing resources.

Create Exclusive Access for Business Development

For the first month after creating a resource, consider restricting its access to your recruiters for business development (BD) purposes only.

For instance, a recruiter can offer access to your latest salary survey before its public release with a script along the lines of:

“Hi, I wanted to share an exclusive preview of our latest salary survey with you before it’s published. The insights might help you benchmark salaries more effectively. Would you like early access?”

Offering prospects a sneak peek at exclusive research is one way to make your BD outreach more compelling. Before a prospect can ask, ‘What’s in this for me?’, they will already have their hands on a useful freebie that demonstrates your company’s thought leadership.

Remember to keep track of who you’re sending this material to, so you can manage your lead generation effectively and follow up with them at a later date.

Offer Teasers and Snapshots

Any original research you produce through polls and surveys, whether in the form of full reports and whitepapers or a series of blog articles, can provide lots of snackable, bite-sized content.

Rather than releasing all your findings at once, offer your client and candidate audiences teasers across multiple channels, such as your socials and newsletters.

You can share snippets like a punchy quote, an intriguing infographic or chart, or a couple of quick stats. Giving mini previews is a useful way to get users curious enough to download the full resource.

Tweak Email Signatures

Consider your company email signatures, which are essentially free marketing real estate. Every email your team sends is an opportunity to market your existing resources.

To attract more clicks and sign-ups for your latest resource – a whitepaper, salary survey, or other downloadable content – add a succinct call to action to your company email signatures.

Including the landing page URL for your resource is a wise move. A simple line like “Download our latest industry salary guide here” can deliver a healthy bump in clicks and sign-ups. Just remember to keep email signatures simple and uncluttered, sticking to just the essentials (you can probably leave out your office address, for example).

Create Optimised Landing Pages

Before you start actioning the tips above, it’s a good idea to create optimised landing pages you can point people to for access to your resources. Instead of linking people to your website homepage, with a landing page, you can immediately start gathering leads via sign-ups from the audience you’re targeting.

We recommend creating separate landing pages for clients and candidates This allows you to not only tailor the page to each audience but allow for you to track the page conversions separately. Include a strong call-to-action text on the landing page so users understand they should sign up to download the resource or receive future updates. Don’t be afraid to spell it out!

Add Catchy Social Media Banners

Your team’s social media profiles are another piece of marketing real estate you can use to promote your latest resources. Banners are a useful way to keep your content front and centre for your audience. Your company’s and team members’ profiles on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and X have space for a banner which you can customise to include a link to your resource.

You could promote it with a teaser like: “Our latest salary survey is live! Click here for insights on current industry trends” and include a custom URL that takes users to the landing page.

Tailor Messaging for Clients and Candidates

Clients and candidates often have different interests when it comes to your resources, so tailoring your content to each group is key.

For example, clients may be more focused on salary trends to guide their hiring budgets, whilst candidates are interested in understanding their earning potential.

Here are some examples of how to create distinct messages for each:

Client Message: “Find out how our latest industry salary benchmarks can help you retain top talent.”

Candidate Message: “Discover what your peers are earning and where you stand in the market.”

Marketing for Recruiters, Made Easy

By strategically promoting your resources (whilst tailoring your approach to different audiences, of course), you can turn a range of existing assets into handy tools for both marketing and business development.

Here at Prominence, we love helping recruitment agencies find new approaches that hit their audience’s sweet spots and reel in those leads. Get in touch with our experts in digital marketing for recruiters today – we’ll get you started.

Prominence Recruitment Marketing Appoints Julie Saul as Global Growth & Partnership Director, and Board Director

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 09:08:13 GMT

Prominence Recruitment Marketing is proud to announce the appointment of Julie Saul as Global Growth and Partnership Director and member of the Board of Directors.

Julie brings with her more than three decades of experience in the recruitment industry, having founded, scaled, and successfully exited her own recruitment business. In recent years, she has served as a trusted Growth Advisor, supporting recruitment leaders in scaling their businesses and driving sustainable, long-term success.

At Prominence, Julie will play a pivotal role in strengthening local and global partnerships and accelerating the company’s acquisition and expansion plans. Her wealth of prior experience as a founder and managing director gives her unique insight into the challenges recruitment businesses face, and how innovative marketing strategies can unlock growth opportunities.

“We are thrilled to welcome Julie to our board,” said Tom Burkinshaw Chief Executive of Prominence. “Her significant expertise in recruitment, proven track record in business growth, and genuine passion for helping companies succeed make her an invaluable addition to our leadership team. Julie’s appointment marks a significant step forward as we continue to scale globally.”

Commenting on her new role, Julie Saul said: “I’m excited to join Prominence at such a dynamic stage in its journey. Having supported recruitment businesses through their growth challenges, I know how vital the right marketing strategies and partnerships are to scaling successfully. I look forward to working closely with the team to build on Prominence’s impressive reputation and help drive its global growth.”

With Julie’s appointment, Prominence strengthens its position as a global leader in recruitment marketing, committed to delivering innovative, results-driven strategies that empower recruitment businesses internationally.

About Prominence Recruitment Marketing

Prominence Recruitment Marketing is a leading global recruitment marketing consultancy dedicated to helping recruitment firms achieve sustainable growth through innovative marketing strategies, partnerships, and scalable solutions.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Tom Burkinshaw

Chief Executive

Prominence Recruitment Marketing

tom.burkinshaw@weareprominence.com

+44 7359 508911

The training, L&D, and career pathways you offer

Your team culture and leadership style

Flexibility and work-life balance (whatever that means in your world)

Any non-financial perks that show you value your people

How to craft or refresh an EVP

The more tangible an EVP is, the better. Here’s a practical way get it sorted, either from scratch or when revamping an existing one:

Audit your culture and what you already offer

List out your cultural selling points. What’s genuinely valued by your team? And what is just wallpaper? Highlight what makes your agency a standout place to work, whether that’s a great manager-to-recruiter ratio or that annual offsite in an exotic location.

Identify your future team members

After a culture audit, it’s easier to develop a target persona of the recruitment professional you want to attract. Consider how this persona complements existing teams: Senior consultants hungry for progression? Career-changers looking for support? Flexible-first parents? Get clear on what matters to them, then back it up with real data. Survey your team, chat with past leavers, and keep an eye on what your competitors are offering.

Define the EVP pillars

Keep it simple. Your EVP should capture the key areas (comp & commission, career progression, work-life balance, culture and values). Most importantly, make sure it’s rooted in what the company can presently offer, not wishful thinking.

Write it up (and make it real)

You don’t need a manifesto. Just a clear, honest statement about what people can expect when they join you. Then tie that promise to specific, tangible things, like flexible hours, personal coaching, uncapped commission, internal mobility – whatever it is that makes a job offer compelling.

Keep it fresh

Check in with your team regularly and revisit your EVP at least once a year. Business needs evolve and people’s priorities shift. An EVP should evolve with them.

Shout about it (strategically)

An EVP needs to be communicated. Thread it through key messaging channels related to hiring, including your company website, social media and interviews. We’ll go into more detail about these below.

Let’s talk about your ‘Work for Us’ page

If your company website doesn’t have a ‘Work for Us’ or ‘Join Us’ page, you're missing one of the easiest ways to sell your EVP to prospective hires. This is one of the first places potential hires will check, so it’s wise to invest time in it.

Consider the Work for Us page a curated exhibit of what it’s like to work at your agency. Depending on your brand and focus, the content might vary slightly:

Corporate, high-performance firms (e.g. focused on exec search or senior placements): highlight clear progression pathways, robust training, structured incentives, and thought leadership opportunities. Include testimonials that speak to success stories and personal growth.

Boutique or lifestyle-focused agencies: spotlight flexibility, autonomy, and culture fit. If you’re remote-first or operate a four-day week, spell it out. Feature quotes from team members about how the job fits into their life.

Start-ups or scale-ups: lean into the excitement of building something. Show how recruiters can shape the agency’s direction, influence decisions, and share in the rewards. Include content about innovation, agility, and internal collaboration.

No matter your agency’s style, the basic elements of a Work for Us page include:

Clear explanation of your EVP

A few roles you’re actively hiring for

Team photos or a video that captures the culture

Quotes or case studies from team members

Overview of your commission structure or what success looks like

A short contact form or clear way to express interest in one click

Remember to update the page at least every six months, and especially when specific details are no longer accurate or relevant.

Cast an eagle eye on socials

Now, do a quick test: grab your phone and scroll your company’s social media feeds for 30 seconds. Next, ask yourself: Would you be excited to apply for a job based on what you see?

Social media plays a huge role in EVP for recruitment agencies. Agencies can, however, fall into the trap of only showing the “fun stuff” – Friday drinks, team lunches and holiday parties. That's not necessarily bad, but if it’s the only type of imagery on the company’s social media feeds, you might be unintentionally alienating potential candidates. Namely, people with families, those who prefer a quieter lifestyle, or those who are looking for concrete proof of career growth opportunities.

If in doubt, aim for a balance between the tangible (career development, interesting work with clients) and the fun stuff. Instead of saying, “we’re a great place to work”, prove it. For example:

Career journeys – Post about consultants who joined as resourcers or admins and are now team leads. Use before/after snapshots, quotes, and stats.

Training & mentorship – Show clips or photos from internal training sessions, external courses, or coaching programs. Highlight managers who support their team’s growth.

Wellbeing or flexibility perks – Did someone move cities and keep their job? Take a sabbatical? Shift to part-time post-parental leave? These are powerful stories that say more than a list of benefits ever could.

Recognition and wins – Celebrate when people hit milestones including rookies and culture champions, not just top billers.

Every time you post, ask: “Would this make someone want to work here?”

Use the power of an interview handout

When you’re interviewing recruiters for a role within your agency, consider creating a take-home brochure you can hand over at the end. Think of it as your EVP on paper: an attention-grabbing summary of why they should work for you. And we’ll argue that it should include the commission structure.

We know recruitment agencies can be reluctant to highlight their commission structure in their marketing materials, especially on the company website. It’s about giving serious candidates something they can chew on. Commission structures are often a deal-maker. Why not let them know how rewarding it can be?

Is It Time to Give Your EVP Some TLC?

We help recruitment agencies across Australia and New Zealand market themselves to their most important audience – recruiters. Talk to Prominence and let’s get your EVP working as hard as your team does. Don’t hesitate to send a message or give us a call today.

How to Stand out Within a Saturated Market

Wed, 11 Jun 2025 10:20:17 GMT

Surprisingly, there are many agencies with plenty of years in the business and a happy yet modest clientele who still struggle to differentiate, and that often comes down to their website.

We’ll cover key areas that help your website generate ROI by creating an experience that turns passive browsers into active leads.

Always Start with User Experience

Overlooking basic functionality is a common mistake we see recruiters make with their websites. Often, that’s because they’re not the people who are using it.

Function beats fashion every time. You need a site that looks professional and works for clients and candidates alike.

Ask yourself:

Can a client easily find your specialisations and get in touch within a click or two?
Can a candidate find relevant roles without going through a maze of pages?
Do your contact forms actually load on mobile?

Try this: ask someone unfamiliar with your business to find a job and make contact on your site. Watch what happens.

Go Easy on the Forms

Keep your forms simple and quick to complete:

Name
Email
Phone (maybe)
Upload CV

That’s enough to start a conversation. You can always collect more detail once the lead is warm.

For clients, the same principle applies. Make it easy for them to request a callback, submit a vacancy, or send a message, without needing to dig around for your email address.

Keep Navigation Simple

For recruiter websites, that means:

Clear paths for candidates to browse, search, and apply for jobs
Obvious next steps for clients looking to hire
Logical menu labels (no one will click a button labelled "Solutions" if they’re just trying to call you).

Including testimonials or case studies is a handy way to establish social proof (i.e. build trust) while visitors browse your site.

Don’t Skimp on Calls to Action

That could be:

“Apply Now”
“Register Your CV”
“Submit a Vacancy”
“Book a Call”

Make those CTAs visible above the fold, not hidden in the footer or buried at the end of a long scroll.

Use buttons, highlight contact info, and make sure they’re thumb-friendly on mobile. When in doubt: add a button.

Content That Answers Questions

For clients, it might be:

“What roles do you specialise in?”
“How do you screen candidates?”
“Why should I use an agency over hiring directly?”

For candidates, it could be:

“What’s the job market like right now?”
“How can I find remote/hybrid roles?”
“How do I stand out in my application?”

Don't forget: a regularly updated blog or insights section shows that your agency is switched on and in touch with the market. That alone can be the difference between a bounce and a lead.

The Takeaway

How Podcasts Can Win You New Clients

Tue, 27 May 2025 12:33:02 GMT

In an era where it feels like everyone, including the neighbour’s dog, has a podcast, it’s tempting to dismiss the idea as just another marketing trend. That, however, would overlook the immense potential podcasts hold for BD in recruitment. We love podcasts for their versatility, their ability to be consumed anywhere and as a vehicle for demonstrating your subject matter and industry expertise.

As a recruitment marketing tool, podcasts aren’t just about the number of listeners per episode, the size of your subscriber base or the number of clicks. Podcast marketing gives recruiters that essential foot in the door in BD campaigns and gain plenty of other hot leads besides. We’ll explain how.

Give Recruiters a Reason to Pick up the Phone

Think about the typical recruiter approach to a business development call. It often starts with something along the lines of, “Do you have any vacancies you need filling?” Now, while that question might get straight to the point, it’s hardly the kind of opener that’s going to blow their socks off.

But imagine flipping the script entirely. Instead of the usual pitch, what if you reached out to a potential client with a question like this: “We host a podcast focused on the (insert your recruitment specialisation here) industry, and we’d love to have you as a guest to discuss the challenges in developing the future workforce.”

Suddenly, you’re looking at buy-in. What would usually be a cold call can quickly become a warm one – and make for a faster connection with your prospect. You’re not just another recruiter trying to win placements, you’re a thought leader offering them a platform to share their insights – a flattering proposition!

This approach is far more engaging and offers potential clients something of real value. They get an opportunity to raise their brand awareness among candidates and demonstrate their expertise.

Before trying this approach, you will of course do solid research on your prospect and be ready to explain why they would make a good guest on your podcast.

Spice Up Your Lead Generation

With well-crafted podcast content, you’re creating a goldmine of recruitment marketing material that can be repurposed across multiple channels, expanding your lead generation potential. Key moments from a compelling podcast episode can be turned into snippets and used virtually anywhere. Highlighting a thought-provoking quote, a surprising statistic, or a powerful insight is perfect for bite-sized content.

By transcribing your episodes, you can easily identify these highlights and transform them into punchy graphics with quotes, video clips, or text posts to drive engagement on social channels – and attract more clicks to your website. Podcast episode highlights are also excellent material for your blog posts, newsletters, and email marketing.

When launching an email campaign centred around a specific theme, you could highlight snippets from a podcast where the same issue is discussed. Used in this way, podcasts can really add depth to your messaging and reinforce your authority as a subject matter expert.

Direct Listeners to Purpose-Built Resources

Landing pages pair with podcast marketing like wine does with cheese. Throughout your podcast episodes, make it a habit to guide listeners to a dedicated landing page where they can access free and valuable guides.

Think salary reports, whitepapers, how-to guides for hiring managers or candidates – the sky’s the limit! These resources are just a quick form away – listeners simply enter their name and email address to download the content.

This simple step turns casual listeners into potential leads. Once they’re on your list, you can nurture these connections through targeted email marketing, using newsletters to engage and convert them.

Use Follow-Ups and Collect Feedback

Following up podcast episodes with surveys is another way to produce solid leads. After each episode, you could send out a brief survey that includes a question like “Are you planning to hire in the next three months?”. Those clicks are currency! (Even if they’re not hiring immediately, you’ve planted a seed.)

Invite listeners to complete polls and give feedback on each episode – e.g. “Who should we bring on as a guest next?” This can also draw in guests who become your clients.

Tools to Get Started with Podcast Marketing

The cost of producing a podcast will vary, but there is no need for overkill, especially for your first few episodes. When you’re just starting out, aim for clean audio and tight editing without extra frills.

Investing in a couple of professional-quality microphones is easier than ever – your typical tech retailer will have a range of affordable options to choose from. Make sure you buy two, so you can record your host and guest properly!

There are plenty of affordable editing software tools out there for turning out polished recordings. If you’re willing to engage a freelance editor, you can save time and get a truly professional-sounding result.

Finally, you’ll need a reliable hosting platform that gives your listeners easy access through a range of devices.

Get Tailored Advice on Creating Your Podcast

Podcasts for recruiters are an excellent channel for demonstrating all that valuable expertise you’ve built up over years in the industry, whilst developing a connection with your audience – and warm leads! At Prominence, we’ve helped dozens of clients successfully launch podcasts that have helped them smash their marketing goals. Contact us today to get help with developing your podcast marketing strategy.

Why Diversifying Your Marketing Strategy Is the Key to Growth

Mon, 05 May 2025 10:54:07 GMT

Recruitment agencies can sometimes fall into a familiar trap when it comes to marketing: they put all their eggs in one basket and hope for the best.

One month, it’s an all-guns-blazing social media campaign. The next, it's radio silence, because you’re unsure what activity you should be focusing on or you got distracted by work. Meanwhile, the company blog hasn’t been updated in two years. Sound familiar?

Just as you need to plant more than one seed when growing a garden, digital marketing for recruiters gets the most results with a little reaping and sowing. Gardening metaphors aside, the key is to use multiple marketing channels over time to create the results you want to see.

Growth doesn’t come from doing more of one thing. It comes from doing the right mix of things consistently.

Why Single-Channel Marketing Fails

Your future clients and candidates will rarely make decisions after a single touchpoint. It takes time to build a sense of trust and credibility for your brand. Yet there is no single magic number of touchpoints. The range of touchpoints you need to target depends on factors such as:

The prospect’s level of familiarity with your brand

Their stage in the buying journey

The qualities of your service offering

The sector and geographies you’re recruiting in

In other words, you need to show up in multiple places before prospects even consider reaching out to you.

Another good reason for diversifying is that each channel or platform has its own set of limitations. Ideally, you’re aiming to reduce the risks of coming up against these limitations.

Take social media, for example. With ever-diminishing organic reach, if you’re relying on social media alone to generate leads, you could be waiting a long time for the emails to come in or the phone to ring.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) comes with another set of technicalities that can involve more work than what might be initially obvious. Google Ads campaigns, for example, won’t give you good results unless your website is optimised for a smooth user experience .

How to Start Diversifying Your Marketing Strategy

The first step is to plan smarter , not harder. Mapping out a 12-month recruitment marketing strategy in line with your business goals creates the structure you need to get results.

For example:

Goal 1 : Grow client base in the technology sector.

Strategy : Focus on LinkedIn thought leadership posts, sponsor a niche tech community newsletter, and build SEO-optimised landing pages tailored to tech hiring trends.

Goal 2 : Attract more active candidates for hard-to-fill healthcare roles .

Strategy : Create engaging blog content around healthcare career tips, run targeted Facebook ads (where many nurses and healthcare workers are active), and build an email nurture campaign with job alerts and advice.

As you may have noticed, part of this planning means asking:

Where does my audience really spend their time?

Spoiler: if your target clients aren’t active on LinkedIn, no amount of daily posting will fix that. Instead, you could focus on email newsletters, events marketing (such as industry forums) and partnerships with relevant industry publications.

The Fundamentals of Marketing Diversification

Before you jump into a new marketing plan, it helps to what will make it workable. To build a marketing strategy that supports the growth of your recruitment business, make sure you’re covering these bases:

Multi-channel presence

Use a mix of channels (email, SEO, social media, paid ads, content marketing) to reach your audience where they are, and when they're ready to engage. Research your audience to identify which channels will give you the most bang for your buck and help avoid spreading resources too thin.

Consistency over time

It’s boring but true: a one-off campaign won't build brand equity. Commit to showing up regularly with valuable and relevant messaging.

Quality content

Think blogs, videos , case studies, and social posts that genuinely address the pain points of your audience (not just "we're hiring" announcements). Clients and candidates appreciate informative content.

Clear and measurable goals

Know what you're trying to achieve (leads, brand awareness, candidate engagement) and track your progress ruthlessly.

Flexibility

If something’s not working, adjust it. The ROI of digital marketing for recruiters depends on regular tweaks,

The Takeaway

A diversified marketing strategy directly addresses the need to find your audience where they are and helps sow the seeds of trust in your brand. Email marketing, an SEO-optimised blog, paid ads, and social media – all have a part to play when they’re used with the right intent. With a bit of upfront planning, you can avoid doing too much or too little, and instead do what is just right.

Grow Your Recruitment Business with Our Help

If your marketing efforts feel a bit scattergun, or you’re stuck doing the same thing and expecting different results, it’s time to shake things up. That’s where Prominence can help. We help recruitment agencies create marketing strategies built for real, sustainable growth – executed by people who understand the recruitment world.

With our team of recruitment marketing professionals, we’ll help you create content that looks great, grabs attention and is on-point for your audience. Give us a call or send us a message for help with converting your content into revenue.

Does PPC Work for Recruitment Agencies?

Thu, 20 Mar 2025 12:37:58 GMT

Optimised Landing Pages are Essential

Before you launch a pay-per-click advertising campaign, creating an optimised landing page will be necessary for capturing all those clicks and then tracking where they end up (as leads or conversions). If you don’t have a landing page fit for purpose, you’re likely wasting a whole lot of money sending people to your website, where they can’t actually get in touch with you.

Google paid ads, for example, are particularly useful for lead generation, especially for marketing to prospective clients. However, such campaigns work best with a landing page that allows prospects to arrive at your website and easily perform an action, e.g. submitting their contact information.

To create effective landing pages for PPC campaigns, start with an eye-grabbing headline that quickly engages visitors to your website.

Follow this with a strong value proposition that highlights the specific benefits – what’s in it for the candidate and client? Using direct language and bullet points is best.

No landing page is complete without a prominent call-to-action (CTA), to create a sense of urgency. Don’t forget to use high-quality visuals that are consistent with your brand identity.

Additionally, ensure your landing pages are optimised for mobile with responsive design, so they can load quickly and be easily navigable.

The form should be simple – ask for only essential information with clear labels and a single CTA. We recommend you also include trust elements like a privacy policy link, GDPR compliance, and a clear opt-in tick-box, to build trust and comply with regulations. Now you have all the elements of an effective landing page!

How Does PPC Compare to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)?

You could regard PPC as an investment that supports your SEO strategy. Here are the key differences between the two and how they complement each other.

Keyword Research

Like SEO, effective keyword research is necessary to make PPC work. With that foundation in place, you can use PPC ads to target people with specific ads, just as you would use SEO keywords to create new blogs and website content.

Cost

Unlike SEO, however, pay-per-click advertising doesn’t come free (the hint is in the name). It’s wise to allocate a budget for PPC campaigns of a minimum $1,500 AUD or £750 per month. By working with a marketer (internal or outsourced) with PPC expertise , it’s easier to ensure you’re not over- or under-spending on PPC campaigns. With a bid strategy and daily or campaign limits in place, you can sensibly manage your spending levers.

Precise Targeting

PPC’s ability to perform impressively specific audience targeting is unmatched. You can drill down into audience segments based on their age, location, job type and qualifications – all critical data points for a successful recruitment marketing campaign.

Speed

Whilst SEO is an excellent channel for establishing brand awareness and authority over the long term, PPC can get your website to receive traffic almost instantly. By using other networks for PPC, such as social network ads (LinkedIn, Facebook) or display / programmatic advertising (Google ads on specific websites), you can reach audiences quickly for highly targeted and time-based campaigns.

Tips for Effective PPC Campaigns

Research Audiences and Keywords Thoroughly

Think of PPC as throwing a dart or shooting an arrow – if you can’t envision your target, you may as well drive around shouting out job ads from a megaphone. The key to PPC success is creating realistic audience personas and making savvy use of keywords that are bound to get noticed quickly.

Use Suitable Channels

Yes, you could theoretically pay for ads on TikTok to target candidates over the age of 55 with actuarial and director experience. Does that mean those ads will reach their target and compel them to click? Probably not. Go where your audience is – that means using PPC campaigns within channels that your audience will be regularly using.

PPC on Facebook, for example, is suitable for manual and blue-collar job types and industries, but not so much for professionals like accountants. We’re less inclined to recommend LinkedIn for PPC campaigns these days, as their PPC rates have increased over time, and it’s become more difficult to generate leads. PPC on LinkedIn does, however, remain useful for increasing brand awareness and promoting events such as webinars and meet-ups, to encourage more registrations.

Include Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

Ultimately, an ad is asking people to do something. PPC campaigns aimed at prospective candidates or clients should invite them to perform a desired action – whether that be submitting their email address, registering their profile, or applying for a specific position.

Use Retargeting

Retargeting gets your ad shown to people who have previously visited your website. By showing them relevant ads as they browse other sites, you can remind them of your brand and give them a nudge to revisit your website to complete a specific action. Make sure you have retargeting set up for up to 30 days – this can allow you to follow up with potential clients and candidates after the initial PPC campaign.

We Specialise in PPC for Recruiters – Talk to Us!

Paid advertising can deliver strong marketing ROI with a minimal upfront outlay. Engaging with a recruitment marketing agency that has PPC expertise can help you boost your brand and get strong leads in a variety of settings. Whether you’re trying to engage more candidates for a specific project or looking to capture clients in a candidate-short market, PPC can do the hard work for you.

To learn more about how PPC can support your marketing strategy, get in touch with our friendly team for a free chat. We’d love to help!

Tips for Improving your Personal Brand as a Recruiter

Tue, 18 Feb 2025 12:45:31 GMT

With so many recruiters around the world, it can be a little difficult to stand out. You may be adept at cold calling and emailing, but this skill isn’t always enough to cut through in a time of high noise and low signal.

A personal brand is that unique combination of skills, knowledge and values that define how you present yourself and are perceived by others professionally. For recruitment marketing purposes, knowing how to build and improve your personal brand is key to building trust among clients and candidates, helping you achieve that cut through – and generate leads.

Personal Brand for Recruiters: Why it Matters

We can think of dozens of reasons why recruiters benefit from a positive personal brand, but here are the highlights:

Stay Top of Mind

By staying visible, you’re the first person clients think of when they need to recruit and candidates think of when they’re job hunting. It’s a long-term strategy, not just about quick wins.

Build Trust In Your Expertise

Your personal brand enables you to establish trust before ever speaking to someone, turning that cold call into a warm conversation. Clients and candidates will research you just as you do with them, so a strong personal brand can make all the difference.

Be Searchable and Easily Found

When you build an effective personal brand, good clients and candidates will reach out to you directly, resulting in more warm calls and fewer cold ones!

Boost Your InMail Success

You’re four times more likely to have your LinkedIn InMails accepted when recipients have already interacted with your brand. Improving your personal brand presence on LinkedIn will elevate the probability of these interactions.

First, Optimise Your Social Media Profiles

Before you unleash a barrage of social media posts to ‘boost your profile’, hold up for a moment – have you optimised your profiles?

Although this sounds basic, you would be shocked to know how many recruiters forget to maintain their LinkedIn profiles! Ensure you have a current, professional-quality profile photo and have included your industry and location details in the relevant fields, and don’t forget to update your contact details if you move roles.

On your LinkedIn profile, remember to include the details of your most current work experience and employer, along with a tidy headline and summary in your About section. Also be sure to include at least five top skills, as these will be the first bits of information someone will read on your profile. Finally, edit your LinkedIn URL to show your first and last name – this makes your profile look professional and memorable!

Create Original Content

Personal branding is ultimately part of a digital marketing strategy which means creating original content is key. If the thought of generating content ideas stresses you out though, don’t worry. Recruitment is a goldmine of material for original marketing content.

To create original content that resonates with the audience of your clients, all you need to do is focus on sharing specific examples that are relevant to their industry. Think of things like anecdotes, case studies and quick tips that address common questions from clients and candidates.

To get the creative juices flowing, here are questions you can ask yourself to brainstorm new content ideas for your personal branding goals:

What have I been talking with my clients and candidates about recently?
What’s been going on in the market?
What was the topic of a recent industry event I can comment on?
What are my clients posting about on LinkedIn that I can join in the conversation on?
What are the common pain points clients and candidates often experience?

Think of some examples for each of these and what that would mean from a recruitment perspective.

For instance, if you’ve noticed a rise in candidates receiving counter-offers that surprise your clients, what quick advice would you give to both clients and candidates? (Remember to keep your ultimate goal in mind – advising candidates to accept a counter-offer wouldn’t align with your objectives!)

Armed with a few bullet points, et voilà! You now have material for original content you can share on LinkedIn. (For more advice on the nuts and bolts of posting on LinkedIn as a recruiter, read these tips).

There’s no such thing as too many content ideas, so here are other ways you can drum up inspiration for posts on LinkedIn.

Explore LinkedIn Hashtags: Regularly check relevant hashtags on LinkedIn and engage with content from thought leaders in your industry. Joining conversations will help you expand your network and you’ll be more informed about what’s happening.

Set Up Google Alerts: We love this because it’s low-effort yet still effective. Set up alerts for specific keywords and topics – anything newsworthy related to recruitment and your clients’ industries makes for interesting content to share with your audience.

Check Your Camera Roll: Scroll through your recent photos. Have you attended any events, met with clients, or visited interesting places for work? These moments can also make for great content.

Your Company’s LinkedIn Page: Don’t overlook your company’s LinkedIn page! When your company posts updates, achievements or industry insights, there’s plenty to share and build upon.

Competitors: Don’t be afraid to check out what your competitors are doing, either. Use that insight to identify five key topics that you’re uniquely qualified to discuss – these can form the basis for posts including images and short videos.

Remember to Comment, Share and Like

Engaging with other people’s content is another key aspect of building a personal brand for recruiters. Commenting, sharing and liking posts on LinkedIn helps position you as knowledgeable and supportive, which are two excellent traits to display as a recruiter!

Not all engagement is created equal, however, so it helps to understand there is a hierarchy of sorts for these activities. LinkedIn’s algorithm favours commenting more than any other type of engagement, so comments will get you the most visibility, followed by sharing and liking.

Be strategic with your comments. You’ll have to say something more substantial than ‘great work’, ‘love this’ or just emoji. Think of any additional insight you could add to the original post, or summarise its key takeaways in your own words. Another approach is to ask questions and start a conversation. Plus, don’t forget to connect with people who add value to the discussion – you never know where a simple question might lead!

Bonus tip: Sharing your clients’ and colleagues’ posts is beneficial, but keep in mind that if you don’t add a comment to your share, it will barely reach anyone!

Be Authentic

We’re in a time when authenticity reigns supreme, for both content and how it’s delivered. People have managed to gain huge social media followings just by expressing themselves with sincerity in short videos they’ve recorded with a smartphone while sitting in their car. We’re not saying you should turn your LinkedIn into a TikTok feed, but audiences do appreciate content that doesn’t sound overly formal or staged.

Be ready for inspiration to strike at unexpected moments. When you have a fascinating interaction with a client or candidate that you learned from, don’t be afraid to record a quick video with your insights. A 30-second video can be just enough to get your audience thinking and engaging with you.

Strive for a balance between professionalism and authenticity, and your audience will keep coming back for more! Just be sure to stay true to yourself – there’s no need to pretend to be someone you’re not.

Consistency and Patience is Key

If there is one foundational rule of personal brand for recruiters, it’s consistency. Making time each week (or day) to post on social media, even when you don’t see immediate engagement, is the key to lasting results. Keep experimenting with different types of content to see what sticks.

Many people give up quickly because they’re not seeing dozens of likes on their posts. We’re here to tell you that is missing the point! Regular posting sends the right signals to social media algorithms and shows your audience you love what you do.

By consistently creating and sharing valuable content, you’ll gradually build a following and position yourself as an authority in your domain. Remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint, so keep at !

Recruitment Marketing That Works

For more advice on how to build and improve your personal brand, or how to incorporate your personal brand efforts into a broader recruitment marketing strategy, the team at Prominence is here to help! As specialists in digital marketing for recruiters, we love helping agencies smash their growth goals with effective marketing. Contact us today to find out more!

Optimising Costs with Outsourced Recruitment Marketing

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 11:16:35 GMT

To stand out from the competition, effective marketing is more important than ever for recruitment agencies. Without it, your business growth can quickly hit a brick wall and force your consultants to fish in the same pool of prospects. That’s hardly enjoyable or productive (even if your consultants won’t admit to it!)

In a highly competitive market, the good news is that you can optimise your costs with outsourced recruitment marketing and access capabilities that can take years to build in-house. We’ll explain why and how.

The Real Costs of In-House Marketing

The average marketing budget sits somewhere between 7-10% of company revenue, as surveys by Deloitte and Gartner suggest. (If you’re in start-up or high growth mode, that percentage will be higher.) Plans to increase marketing budgets over the coming years will, of course, vary by industry and business needs, but it’s clear that internal marketing teams don’t come cheap.

For businesses based in the UK, the average marketing coordinator salary is in the vicinity of £24,000. With the recent increase in the employer National Insurance Contributions rate (from 13.8% to 15%), recruitment agencies are now facing significant payroll costs – and that’s before any marketing is being done to speak of!

Breaking it down, an in-house marketing coordinator on a minimum salary of £22k will cost an additional £770 annually from 2025, whilst a midweight marketer on £45k will cost at least another £1,000. Add that up over a team of two to four people (or more), along with leave entitlements and other employee costs, and those pounds sure add up. Not to mention the cost of replacing and onboarding marketing employees.

Recruitment agencies in Australia don’t get off lightly, either. To employ a full-time marketing coordinator, you’re looking at an average salary range of $70,000-$80,000 AUD. Add in superannuation, payroll tax, minimum leave entitlements, along with onboarding and training, the actual annual cost of that coordinator will be 1.25 to 1.4 times higher than their base salary. That’s up to $122,000 annually for one employee with a limited skillset.

Here’s the catch: a junior or midweight marketing coordinator can handle the basics, but when your business needs specialised marketing skills to grow, you’ll need to hire more specialists – and that’s when your costs will skyrocket.

Access to Marketing Expertise Without Hiring

With outsourced marketing, you can skip the fixed, ongoing expenses of an in-house marketing team. Outsourcing gives you access to specialised skills like graphic design, paid advertising and copywriting when you need them, without the ongoing overhead of salaries and taxes.

After all, your business might not need the same set of marketing skills all year. Certain expertise is more important for some campaigns and marketing plans and not others.

When using an outsourced marketing agency like us, you get access to an embedded marketing team where you only pay for work you need during a given project or timeframe. We act as an extension of your business to manage your marketing, giving you a range of established skills and strategic knowledge at your fingertips. All without making a single hire.

Scalability Based on Business Needs

An outsourced marketing solution gives you precious scalability. As all recruitment business leaders are aware, business conditions fluctuate. Your goals will inevitably be adjusted to meet changing market conditions. Based on our experience in working with recruiters, here are common scenarios where marketing scalability is a survival issue:

1. Crowded Markets

In crowded industries and sectors, recruiters face stiff competition from rivals with big marketing budgets. To stay ahead, they need smart and adaptable strategies that pack a punch without overspending.

2. Start-Up Challenges

For new recruiters with limited revenue and an unproven offering, the focus is on generating interest and building momentum quickly. Outsourced marketing will provide that essential lift-off without the risk of hiring an untested marketing coordinator.

3. New Ventures and Expansions

Recruitment agencies launching a new service or breaking into a new market will need a surge in marketing resources to ensure their efforts pay off. Scalable marketing means recruiters can dial their efforts up or down as needed. No overcommitting, nor missing out on opportunities! How do you achieve this sweet scalability? With an outsourced marketing solution, one that gives you flexible pricing options and a solid range of capabilities. If you want to pay on a project basis or have a marketing team on retainer, a good marketing agency will give you those options, too. This helps you forecast and manage costs over any length of time.

Reduced Hidden Overheads

On top of staffing costs, there are a few other cost gremlins lurking under the floorboards that most companies aren’t aware of until it’s too late. Infrastructure expenses like marketing software and tools quickly add up, especially when you need a group subscription or must pay a premium for basic functionality. An outsourced marketing provider has all these necessary tools, so you don’t need to duplicate them.

Even the office space you need for an in-house team can sometimes get overlooked – an often astronomical cost that is becoming harder to justify for many businesses! Engaging a marketing agency gives you access to a marketing team at your fingertips, without the expense of bums on seats.

The Final Word

Of course, there are many situations where it makes good business sense to maintain or grow an in-house marketing team. The key, however, is to understand the big picture: your balance sheet, the ROI you can reasonably expect from an in-house team, and which options will best enable you to stay agile in a challenging market or business phase. Understanding these factors will guide you to the right marketing solution and avoid expensive mistakes.

Outsourced Marketing for Recruiters, Done Your Way

We’ve sung the praises of outsourced marketing here, but we’re also experts at helping our clients get the best out of their internal marketing teams. Whether you’re seeking marketing specialists that can dovetail with your internal team, or a standalone solution, or something else, we can do it for you. Let’s talk! Get in touch with Prominence today – we’d love to hear from you.

Marketing Automation for Recruiters: Essential Tips

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 11:29:32 GMT

We can’t think of a single instance of a recruiter saying they love admin. And yet, administrative tasks eat up increasingly large chunks of a recruiter’s workday. It’s a given that job application volumes will keep rising, leaving recruiters with shrinking resources to carry out other vital functions – like nurturing passive candidates, engaging clients, or building a social media following.

Marketing automation can solve many of the resource problems recruiters face. Trying to juggle activities like generating leads for new clients and candidates alongside the day-to-day practicalities of sourcing, interviewing and client consultation gets painful fast – unless you have the right tools to automate the process.

We’ll explain how marketing automation for recruiters works in the wild, and how you can use it to connect with your target audiences.

How Marketing Automation Helps You Target Clients

Marketing automation for recruiters can be applied to every stage of the sales funnel, from raising awareness of your brand to building relationships with your long-term clients. Its potential for generation BD leads is second to none.

Generating leads is one of the most effective uses of marketing automation and is generally an ‘always on’ feature, as long as you’re in business!

Email Marketing

One approach we use in our clients’ newsletter strategy is to highlight the top (anonymous) candidates of the month, in targeted campaigns to specific segments of the client’s mailing list. With the power of automation, we help them track link clicks which creates an especially handy list of BD leads their recruitment team can jump onto immediately.

With automation, even invalid email contacts can be BD leads. Gathering a list of emails that have bounced can give you the opportunity to reach out to these contacts and update their details. Case in point : We helped a recruitment agency in New Zealand update all their contacts with automation, enabling them to make a solid 40 placements over 18 months.

Lead Generation from Your Website or Campaigns

For simpler BD campaigns, you can also automate alerts for high-value actions, like when a client clicks on your website, leaves feedback or clicks on a call-to-action (CTA) in an email. These alerts will give you warm leads that are prime opportunities for the taking.

One successful automation we implemented with a client was an introduction email from the directors for anyone who registers a vacancy. This strengthened their connection with the recruiters and helped build the client’s relationship with their brand. For specific campaigns, such as salary surveys, webinars, events or anything else that leads your audience to a landing page, the sky is the limit!

Engage Candidates with Automation

Marketing automation tools are also excellent for nurturing candidates and efficiently managing your candidate database. You can capture new candidates from your company website (through contact forms and landing pages), social media channels and job boards, without manual input from your recruitment team.

First, Freshen Up your ATS

Cleaning up your ATS allows you to get the most mileage out of marketing automation. Ensuring contact details are current allows you to target people in your database with the most relevant messages. To refresh your ATS, start by clearing out incomplete, duplicate and corrupted data. The good news is that ATS spring cleaning can also be automated – there are tools that can weed out contacts with missing or incorrect email addresses, phone numbers and more. Considering your ATS is a core business asset, a periodic clean-up is a good practice (and helps with data privacy compliance).

Acknowledge New Applications

This one is standard among quality recruitment agencies, so if you’re not doing this yet, make it a priority! Set up an auto-response for people who apply to your open jobs or submit their CV to your website.

Engage New Candidate Leads

Just as you would with clients, with automation you can set up alerts when a candidate subscribes to your newsletter or updates their details on your database, providing you with instant leads to follow for new placements.

Stay in Touch with Past Candidates

Another excellent use of marketing automation tools is re-connecting with past applicants and candidates who have sat in your ATS for months or longer.

It’s likely you have thousands of people in your database, a fraction of which could yield high-quality placements – if only you would reach out to them! Automation can do this for you, at set intervals of your choosing (e.g. every 6 or 12 months).

Provide a Smooth Onboarding Experience

It might seem simple, but the small check-ins with candidates once they’ve been hired can make a big difference.

With automation, you can send a text on a new hire’s first day to see how they’re settling in. After a couple of weeks, you can send them a follow-up to ensure everything is going smoothly. Long-term Follow-ups 

Reaching out to candidates or clients after a year often surprises them because it’s so uncommon. This simple gesture can lead to valuable conversations that can turn into new placements.

Case in point : One of our clients who implemented automated one-year check-ins found that about 1 in 10 responses led to new candidate and client opportunities.

Tips for Successful Recruitment Marketing Automation

Whether your business is running its marketing activities in-house or has engaged a recruitment marketing agency, you won’t go far without a functioning, user-friendly website integrated with an applicant tracking system or CRM .

This setup is what allows you to siphon a range of marketing activities and workflows into one hub. As automation runs on data, centralising your data collection will enable advanced techniques that help you target client and candidate prospects without lifting a finger.

Tracking the return on investment for each campaign – measuring the costs vs the resulting revenue or conversions generated – is essential for a sustainable marketing strategy.

Automation Tools to Supercharge Digital Marketing for Recruiters

As you might expect, there are tons of automation tools to choose from. Most mainstream CRMs include automation features, with varying levels of sophistication.

The key criteria you should judge these against is whether they’re designed with recruitment businesses in mind. That’s why we recommend solutions made by recruiters for recruiters, like Roi-Ai , can do all of the above and more, and Bullhorn Automation which also has many handy features.

Find Tailored Automation Solutions for Your Recruitment Business

We’re not exaggerating when we say there’s not enough space here to cover all the marketing activities that can be automated! With so many platforms and add-ons available, your biggest concern is likely to be about where to begin. That’s when talking to a recruitment marketing specialist can help. For marketing that is tailored to your business goals, contact us for a free chat today.

The Future of Social Media in 2025

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 12:11:41 GMT

Social media just won’t stop evolving, and neither do we as marketers. Algorithm updates, new features, changes in audience demographics and preferences – there is just so much to keep up with! The fundamentals, however, are more straightforward than some might think.

With 2025 underway, it’s time to take a fresh look at the social media trends shaping these fundamentals and how recruiters can do their marketing. What lies ahead are plenty of opportunities to engage with your clients, candidates and future employees with savvy social media marketing strategies and practices.

Here are key social media trends for 2025 and how to tap into them for growing your recruitment business.

1. Instagram: Still a Powerhouse

Instagram’s popularity is soaring, making it an essential marketing channel for recruitment agencies in 2025. If you’re sceptical about it, don’t be! Now ranking as the third most popular social media network, with 2 billion monthly active users, Instagram remains essential for your social media marketing strategy.

Instagram’s visual format is ideal for showcasing daily life in your business, team milestones and event highlights. The platform’s multigenerational appeal means you can engage with Gen Z, Millennials, and even older demographics in one space. Compared to other social media platforms, that audience diversity has enormous potential.

Of course, you want to confirm that your target audience is active on Instagram before building a game plan for the platform. With a dedicated recruitment marketing agency by your side, you can effectively segment your audience and develop a content strategy that will speak to them. We can help you manage your Instagram presence with regular, fresh content that shows your brand’s unique personality, saving you loads of time every week.

2. Get Serious with Influencers & Creators

Industry influencers and content creators are being taken more seriously by brands and audiences, and for a good reason – they can connect their audiences to exactly what they’re looking for and add credibility to your messaging.

This year, look for opportunities to partner with respected voices in your industry niche. Collaborating with such voices can help you position your agency as a thought leader, broaden your audience and give you new content ideas to play with.

In the recruitment industry, influencers are more likely to be thought leaders with solid industry experience than people running paid promotions on TikTok or Instagram. Think of individuals with strong credentials in the sectors you recruit in and people with subject matter expertise related to topics you want to bring to your audience. These people can make excellent collaborators for your company’s marketing vehicles like podcasts, webinars and events.

Here at Prominence, we’ve helped our clients achieve great results from collaborating with influencers and creators connected to their industry niches. By managing the entire marketing process for Beyond Recruitment’s Economic & Labour Report 2023-24, we enabled their audience to engage directly with industry thought leaders, resulting in a 74% audience growth from the previous year and a wide-reaching earned media coverage.

With a strategy to collaborate with industry experts on topics such as employer branding though blogs and video content, we’ve helped Bespoke Careers grow their LinkedIn impressions by 46%, increase post reactions by 12%, and boost comments by 57% – all critical measures for expanding audience reach.

Need another reason to collaborate with influencers for marketing content? You can use such content as resources to distribute to client and candidate prospects – a handy way to add value and show off your brand’s authenticity.

3. Give Video Content More Love

Video is dominating social media, with platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram prioritising video in their algorithms, whilst TikTok and YouTube continue to go from strength to strength. It’s no wonder, as Sprout Social’s survey indicates, that marketers are prioritising video this year.

Some 47% of marketers will prioritise short-form video (60 seconds or less), whilst 17% will focus on videos less than 10 minutes long (17%) and 14% will devote more resources to photos and carousels.

Video can seem daunting if you’ve never dipped your toes in, but we can assure you it’s vital social media marketing strategies, getting your brand and message out there. The good news is that you don’t need an expensive video production set-up to get started.

Whether it’s short clips for social media posts to in-depth content for webinars or podcasts, video can be produced with minimal cost and be endlessly repurposed for variety of channels. We’ve helped clients with creating videos with production quality that quickly engages their audience without breaking the bank, and we can help you do that, too! Some good places to start with video content include recruitment tips, team introductions and client testimonials.

4. Connecting with Audiences on a Deeper Level

Storytelling is a recruiter’s most important marketing tool because at its heart, recruitment is all about people. In 2025, make every piece of marketing content start with a compelling, human-centered story.

Showing people the ‘story’ will humanise your brand and build trust. Case studies, video testimonials from clients and candidates and showing your team’s work behind the scenes are some effective ways to do this. In 2025, ramping up your presence on YouTube and other storytelling-friendly platforms will help your brand meaningfully connect with clients and candidates.

To make storytelling effective, it helps to have expertise in identifying the moments that you can turn into narratives for compelling content. We can help you with this process, guiding you through strategies for developing content that tells a story and doing the creative work to execute that strategy, including video, visual design and copywriting.

5. Memes: Proceed with Caution

Memes can make your company’s social media presence fun and relatable. But as economic conditions shift, it’s important to strike the right tone. Not all audiences will appreciate a humorous approach in social media marketing strategies, especially in challenging markets.

The jury’s still out on whether meme-based content will continue to get positive engagement in 2025. It’s important to consider whether using memes and humour in your marketing content will add the value your audience is craving. In other words, you need to ‘read the room’.

To achieve the right balance between sounding relatable and using an appropriate tone for your audience and market, working with a specialist in marketing for recruiters is a sensible move. We can help you assess whether memes and humour align with your brand’s tone of voice and audience and create content that balances humour with professionalism. With a close eye on changing market dynamics, we can help you adapt your social media strategy to your audience’s expectations.

6. Keeping It Human

Artificial intelligence will continue to gather momentum in 2025. AI tools are no doubt helpful in creating job adverts and job descriptions, whilst 58% of candidates globally (and 78% in Australia) are using AI to apply for jobs and clients are using it to screen candidates. It’s already an unstoppable force.

However, as more organisations adopt AI for everyday use, the need for human connection will become even more critical in marketing for recruiters. Relying on automated content can risk your brand sounding, well, lifeless!

Recruiters who can balance a personal touch with AI will get the best results from their marketing efforts. With the right marketing expertise, you can integrate AI-based tools in your marketing whilst maintaining your brand’s human side.

7. It All Starts with a Social Media Marketing Strategy

In 2025, effective marketing for recruiters will succeed with a social-first approach – creating unique, engaging content specifically designed for social media. We all need to be where the audience is! As audiences spend so much of their time on social media, adopting a social-first marketing strategy is critical for building brand awareness and new business leads.

Consistency is key, but it can be time-consuming for a recruitment business to manage a social media presence full-time. With our data-driven social media marketing strategies, you can empower your team to focus on the essentials of recruiting, while we take care of the rest.

Marketing for Recruiters Done Right

Exciting times are ahead or social media marketing, but it can be tricky to keep up with the pace of change. Here at Prominence, our mission is to help recruitment agencies build a social media presence that creates value for their audience and makes their brand shine. We’d love to help you get real results. Get in touch with our experts in digital marketing for recruiters today – we’ll get you started.

Ways to Use Videos in your Marketing Strategy

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:33:51 GMT

Lights, camera… action? Whether you’re creating short-form videos for social media, or producing a series for your website, video offers endless opportunities to engage your audience in creative ways. It allows for immediate connection in ways that static content on a webpage or social post simply can’t. With audiences increasingly hooked on video, it’s an essential medium in digital marketing for recruitment agencies.

The good news is you don’t need a Hollywood production team to pull it off, nor do you have to choreograph a few dances for TikTok. A smartphone with a few accessories and basic editing software is enough to get started.

Here are practical video marketing tips for recruiters to help you create appealing content for your candidate and client audiences – and promote your employer brand to boot!

Video Testimonials

Written testimonials are great, but video testimonials add that extra layer of authenticity. Hearing directly from candidates or clients who have had a positive experience with your agency gives testimonials a more genuine and personal touch. Video testimonials are great for sharing across your social media channels, website landing pages and email campaigns.

Whether filming in person or virtually, keep the mood light – avoid rushing your subject and allow time for a few takes. To make the testimonial authentic, engage your client or candidate in a casual conversation where you can guide them with talking points.

Remind them that edits can be made, so there’s no pressure to get it perfect on the first try! The aim is to keep your subject relaxed and sounding natural.

Video Case Studies

Case studies are an excellent tool to demonstrate your agency’s ability to deliver results, but PDFs or reports aren’t the only way to present them. Turning a case study into a video can add much more heft to your message and make it more shareable on social media. Video case studies will typically walk the viewer through the problem your client faced, the solution your agency provided and the results you achieved.

If your client is willing to participate, you can interview them as a key player to bring the narrative to life. To keep the video from becoming a dull sequence of people talking to the camera, we recommend including visuals like workplace footage.

Client Workplace Videos

If your agency has an exclusive relationship with a client, you can create videos showcasing their workplace – an engaging way to give their candidates a behind-the-scenes look at where they might be working.

These videos can offer a sneak peek into the client’s company culture, office environment and the people they’d be working with, making them a great vehicle for highlighting your client’s employer brand. When planning the footage, think about what will help candidates envision themselves in the role and create a strong connection to the client’s brand.

‘Work for Us’ Videos

EVP content is a key puzzle piece in digital marketing for recruitment agencies – and ‘work for us’ videos are perfect for getting your employer brand out there to other recruiters.

Just as you would for a client, use a ‘work for us’ video to communicate the benefits of working for a business – in this case, yours. Highlight your agency’s values, mission, and what makes you stand out from the competition. You can include footage of your team, your office environment, and day-to-day activities to help potential candidates see what it’s really like to be a part of your recruitment team.

Tips for Making Videos Look Professional

Here are key tips for making your video content look professional, no matter how small your budget:

Ensure Good Lighting, Audio and a Clean Background

Lighting can make or break the quality of a video, so ensure whoever is appearing in front of the camera is well-lit and easy to see without making them look washed out. (Pro tip: The main lighting source is best positioned behind the camera.) Avoid busy or distracting elements in the background that could pull attention away from what’s being said.

Invest in a basic tripod for your camera to avoid the amateurish camera shake look, along with a clip-on microphone to cut out background noise. There are plenty of budget-friendly options available for this gear that is compatible with smartphones and easy to use without having video expertise.

Grab Attention with a Punchy Intro

The first few seconds of your video are critical in this era of ever-shrinking attention spans, so avoiding lengthy introductions is key. Instead, dive right into something engaging – pose a thought-provoking question, share an eye-catching statistic relevant to your audience, or make a bold statement. The goal is to make people curious within the first two seconds, making them more likely to keep watching.

Write a Script to Create Structure and Flow

Whilst it’s tempting to improvise, writing a script ensures the video flows logically from one point to the next. Preparing a script will keep you on track and prevent rambling. This doesn’t mean the video needs to feel robotic – you should leave room for natural moments as well. The purpose of a script is to ensure you hit all your key points and keep the viewer engaged from start to finish.

Include a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

Every video should have a purpose, and that purpose should lead to a clear call to action. Whether you want viewers to sign up for your newsletter, register a CV or a vacancy, make sure the next steps are obvious. Including a CTA at the end in the form of a pop-up annotation or an embedded link makes it easy for viewers to follow through.

Incorporate Your Company Branding

Using video for marketing is an opportunity to reinforce your company’s brand identity. Whether it’s through a branded intro/outro or placing your logo in the corner throughout the video, make sure your company is clearly associated with the content.

Add Subtitles

Consider that most people watching your video will have the sound off, so including subtitles is important for keeping them watching as long as possible.

Get Started with Video Marketing – Talk to Us!

Using video for marketing campaigns can help drive engagement, add more colour and show the humans behind the brand of your agency and that of your clients.

Plus, as more people scroll through their social feeds, they’re increasingly drawn to the storytelling power of video. Why not use it to rise above the noise and create genuine connections with both candidates and clients?

At Prominence, we consider every channel available to execute digital marketing for recruitment agencies, including video. With careful consultation, we’ll help you determine how video can fit into your marketing strategy and how to produce content that grows your recruitment business. Contact us today for a free chat to see what we can do for you.

Global Digital Marketing Agency, Prominence, Embarks on Next Chapter with A New Owner

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 12:10:49 GMT

Prominence, one of the largest and longest-established global Recruitment Marketing Agencies, has been sold for an undisclosed figure, to industry marketing veteran, Tom Burkinshaw.

Tom will join existing MD, Amber Loach, who has been instrumental in leading Prominence and the global teams in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the United Kingdom, to deliver the marketing expertise that Prominence customers know and love.

The acquisition and ongoing investment will open a new chapter of innovation for Prominence customers in all regions, by building on the already established marketing offerings, plus introducing newer services across MarTech and AI.

Tom Burkinshaw commented: “Having known Prominence for some time, I am thrilled to now be part of such an innovative business. When the opportunity of acquiring Prominence came about, it was an easy decision. Its outstanding reputation and proven ability to deliver top-tier marketing solutions for recruitment firms looking to scale efficiently aligned perfectly with my experience. Our aim is to build on this strong foundation and drive even greater success and growth for both Prominence and its clients. I’m excited to achieve this alongside Amber Loach, who will continue her role as Managing Director.”

Prominence MD, Amber Loach, commented: “Building Prominence over the years with Chris has been an extraordinary journey, his vision and leadership have been instrumental in making Prominence what it is today. As we move to this next chapter, I’m confident Tom’s expertise and values perfectly align with Prominence and I couldn’t be more excited to work closely with him to take the business to the next level.”

Prominence Founder, Chris South, added: “After a fantastic 10 years building Prominence from the grass-roots idea of an outsourced marketing service, to what it is today, Scott and I decided that it is now time to hand over to a new leader who can provide the singular focus needed to propel Prominence through the next 10 years. Tom is the ideal person to do this. His deep understanding of the recruitment sector, along with his vision for the future, align perfectly with the business’s core values. I am confident that under his leadership, Prominence will continue to thrive and innovate. Thank you to Scott, Amber and all Prominence employees and customers, current and past, who have made the business what it is today.”

About Tom Burkinshaw

Tom Burkinshaw is an experienced marketing leader with extensive international and portfolio experience in the marketing, recruitment, investment and property sectors.

About Prominence

Prominence is a global recruitment marketing agency, specialising in comprehensive marketing services exclusively for recruitment firms. With a global footprint and a team of local industry experts, the agency is dedicated to helping recruitment companies enhance their market presence and achieve their business goals.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Tom Burkinshaw

tom.burkinshaw@weareprominence.com

Marketing Strategy for Recruiters: A Podcast

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 11:57:44 GMT

Recruitment marketing can mean the difference between a boom and a bust for agencies. If you want to keep winning new business and develop a brand image that draws in the best candidates, you’ll find those goals are impossible without adequate marketing resources.

If you’re an in-house marketer for a recruitment agency, where do you begin with the plethora of activities and tools you need for effective marketing? There are so many plates to spin! And how can you bring it all together with an approved marketing budget and well-defined marketing objectives? The truth is that many marketers simply can’t.

Plenty of recruitment agencies have excellent internal marketing teams who can pull it all off, but there are many more who struggle to use their resources wisely.

In a recent podcast, our Managing Director, Amber Loach, sat down for a chat with Lysha from The Recruiter’s Recruitment Podcast to discuss the challenges faced by in-house marketers working within recruitment agencies and the importance of leadership buy-in for building a mature marketing strategy .

They covered tips on how to recognise when to outsource recruitment marketing, creating engaging LinkedIn content, enlisting employees as marketing assets, with real-world examples.

Ready to hear more? Get enlightened by two industry professionals with experience in the trenches! Grab a cuppa and listen to the full episode now.

Get More Advice on Recruitment Marketing

In-house marketers are a secret weapon for recruitment agencies, but having an outsourced specialist working by your side is even better! For recruitment marketing advice and support tailored to your business goals, contact us today.

1) Filling Skills Gaps with Expertise

In-house recruitment marketers are versatile, handling everything from content creation to social media management to paid ads and SEO copywriting. However, a marketer can’t be an expert in everything. A recruitment marketing agency typically has experts in all marketing skills, allowing you to pick and choose what you need, when you need it.

2) Specialist Recruitment Knowledge

Understanding the unique challenges and opportunities the recruitment industry brings is vital for any marketer in this industry. We stay updated with industry trends, compliance issues, and the latest tools, ensuring that your campaigns are not only effective but also compliant and cutting-edge.

3) Freeing Up Time for Core Marketing Activities

An in-house marketer’s to-do list can be overwhelming. Partnering with a recruitment marketing agency allows your team to focus on what they do best while the agency handles the rest. Whether that’s creation of blog posts, social media updates, email newsletters, paid advertising campaigns, podcast management, marketing strategy (or the everything else a recruitment marketer does!) ensuring a consistent and high-quality output that resonates with your target audience.

4) Cost-Effective Solutions for Maximum Impact

Outsourcing your recruitment marketing to a specialised agency is not just about gaining access to expertise; it can also be cost-effective solution. Here’s why:

Reduced Overheads

Hiring full-time specialists for every aspect of your marketing can be expensive. By outsourcing to an agency, you avoid the costs associated with salaries, benefits, training, and technology.

Flexible Pricing Models

Agencies offer flexible pricing models that suit your budget and needs. Whether you require comprehensive campaign management or specific services, they tailor their offerings to provide the best value for your investment.

Adaptable Resources

Marketing needs can vary throughout the year. During peak recruitment seasons, you may need to ramp up your marketing efforts. In quieter periods, you might scale down. Agencies provide the flexibility to adjust resources and strategies, ensuring you only pay for what you need, when you need it.

Rapid Response

Market dynamics can change rapidly, requiring quick adjustments in your marketing strategy. Agencies’ agile approach allows for rapid response to market changes, ensuring your campaigns remain effective and relevant.

5) Quick Onboarding Time

Because recruitment marketing agencies focus solely on the recruitment sector, they can onboard quickly and seamlessly. Their familiarity with recruitment processes and terminology means they can hit the ground running, delivering immediate value and accelerating your marketing initiatives.

Partnering for Success

Collaborating with a specialised recruitment marketing agency doesn’t mean replacing your in-house team; it means empowering them. Agencies act as an extension of your team, providing the expertise, tools, and strategic support needed to elevate your recruitment marketing efforts.

In the competitive world of recruitment marketing , having the right support can make all the difference. Specialised recruitment marketing agencies are here to fill the skills gaps, free up your time, provide strategic support, and offer cost-effective, scalable solutions, enabling your in-house marketer to focus on what truly matters – driving your business forward. Partner with a recruitment marketing agency like Prominence and experience the transformative impact of specialised marketing for recruiters.

For more information on how we can support your marketing efforts, contact us today.

Mastering Email Marketing for Recruiters: 8 Essential Tips

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:05:15 GMT

Don’t listen to the haters who say email is dead. As a marketing channel, email marketing remains unbeatable for its ability to help you grow and connect with your audience.

In a time when digital marketers expend considerable energy trying to capture attention before the next swipe, a savvy email marketing strategy puts you in front of an audience that is engaged, open to new opportunities and eager to be informed.

Proven Email Marketing Strategies that Deliver Results for Recruiters

Our customers regularly win new business and have candidates reach out to them through targeted email marketing campaigns. Here are a few tried-and-tested use cases for email marketing that produce meaningful results in the form of leads and conversions.

Showcasing Available Candidates to Your Clients

This campaign entails a weekly email highlighting candidates from your talent pool who are available to start new roles next week, distributed to your clients according to segmentation by industry, company type or other relevant categories. It works particularly well for freelancers or contractors.

We track activity and set you up with alerts for clients who click, providing a fast connection for placement opportunities. It’s an informed and precise way of doing business development.

Broadcasting New Roles

In a similar vein to the ‘available candidates’ campaign, this one involves a weekly or monthly round-up of ‘hot jobs’, inviting candidates from your database to apply. We provide you with leads on which candidates have clicked, and your consultants can take care of the rest.

Monthly Newsletters

Newsletters are the ideal vehicle for recruitment agencies aiming to cement their brand with thought leadership. Think plenty of sector-specific content including videos, podcasts, news and market insights. Consider a well-crafted newsletter a touchpoint that places your business front of mind for those looking to hire or move jobs.

How to Optimise Email Campaigns for Best Results

Here are eight essential tips to optimise your email campaigns and engage both candidates and clients at the right time, every time.

1. Build and Segment Your List

Ensure you start with a mailing list that is up to date and compliant with privacy and communication regulations (e.g. GDPR, anti-spam laws). Segment your email audience by job type, industry, and engagement level to send targeted, relevant content.

2. Personalise and Add Value

Add a personal touch by using recipients’ names and customising emails based on their preferences. Offer valuable content such as industry insights and career advice, not just job listings.

3. Create Compelling Subject Lines and Calls-To-Action

Writing short, intriguing subject lines is the key to having a high open rate for emails. To stand out in recipients’ inboxes, keep subject headers punchy, direct and to the point. Use clear, action-oriented calls to action to guide recipients toward applying for jobs or visiting your website.

4. Optimise Emails for Mobile and Use Clean Design

At this point in history, not making your marketing content mobile-friendly is a big no-no! Ensure your emails are instantly readable on mobile devices, with a responsive and tidy design. Clean and professional layouts are key – think effective use of white space, easily readable fonts and appealing images.

5. Automate and Test

Make use of automation tools like Roi-Ai to create a smooth and painless campaign workflow, including follow-ups and onboarding. It’s also wise to conduct A/B testing on subject lines, content, and send times, to understand what works best and target your audience with laser-like accuracy.

6. Track and Analyse Key Metrics

Tracking performance is the bedrock of digital marketing for recruiters, especially email marketing. Monitoring key metrics such as open rates and click-through rates allows you to measure engagement. Use analytics to refine your strategy and enhance future campaigns.

7. Enable Social Sharing and Easy Unsubscribe

Adding social sharing buttons in emails is a simple way to extend your reach. To maintain a healthy email list and minimise spam complaints, provide a straightforward way to unsubscribe with as few clicks as possible.

8. Simplify Email Content with Personalisation

Assume that most (or everyone) in your audience will be skim-reading your emails, so it’s important to break up content with headings and subheadings.

When it comes to personalisation, you can do more than just address recipients by their name. You can tailor content based on their previous interactions with your business, their location, role type, demographics, or interests. Getting granular can produce surprisingly good results.

Get Email Marketing Expertise and Results with Prominence

At Prominence, we apply cutting-edge technology through our partnerships ensuring seamless integration and superior email marketing performance.

Implementing these strategies is just the starting point. To supercharge your email marketing efforts, the Prominence team can create killer campaigns that drive engagement and win you new business.

Ready to have an expert go over it with you? Contact us today for a free chat and tailored support for transforming your recruitment marketing. For more expert insights, check out our blog here.

Does SEO For Recruitment Websites Still Matter?

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 13:24:44 GMT

The death of SEO has been greatly exaggerated. Type into Google ‘Is SEO…’ and Autocomplete immediately suggests, ‘Is SEO Dead?’. With frequent search engine algorithm changes, the rise of AI-generated content, and more people using social media to search for products and services, some people are led to believe SEO is becoming obsolete. The reality is that search engine optimisation hasn’t died, it’s simply evolving. Your future candidates and clients will continue to search for recruitment agencies in Google, Bing and other search engines, so having a well-optimised website is essential for ranking highly in these search results.

Many recruitment companies prioritise SEO for this reason, but many more barely give SEO the attention it deserves. With so many other marketing activities to invest time and money in, such as social media and paid advertising, it’s understandable that SEO might get overlooked.

SEO, however, is one of the best long-term marketing tools that can generate new business and grow your database years after you’ve created content. So, here’s the lowdown on why you should care about SEO, regardless of which year you’re reading this blog!

A Quick Definition of SEO For Recruitment Agencies

Before we dive into the ins and outs of search engine optimisation, here’s a quick overview of what SEO is and does: SEO encompasses the practices of creating and refining a website’s content, structure and links, to make it easily discoverable in search engines.

Whenever you use Google to search for something, there’s a sophisticated algorithm quietly at work in the background, ensuring you receive the most relevant results for your query. While the specifics of Google’s algorithm remain a mystery, continually evolving over time, one thing is certain: it prioritises relevance above all else.

Recruitment SEO Best Practices

Use Effective SEO Keywords for Recruitment

SEO allows recruiters to set up their websites with specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to their industry, niche, or job openings. This targeted approach ensures that the traffic driven to your website or job postings is composed of individuals who are actively seeking what your business offers.

We recommend agencies review their websites periodically to ensure the text on each page includes relevant keywords related to their service offering and the types of jobs they recruit for. The same principle applies to new content you add to a website, in the form of blog articles. Using a free keyword research tool, such as Moz, SEMRush, or Google Keyword Planner, will give you suggestions for SEO keywords for recruitment topics, and how many people are searching for them. Plus, a quick search on any search engine will allow you to see what your competitors are trying to rank for!

Focus on Location

Jobseekers and potential clients tend to search for recruiters and jobs by location, so it’s sensible to include location-related keywords throughout your website. For example, if a website has a page listing temporary jobs and these are all located in Melbourne or London, the main title or subheadings on that page could include a phrase like ‘Find temporary jobs in Melbourne’ or ‘London’.

Make Your Site as User Friendly as Possible

With so many people using search engines from their mobile devices today, you’d be crazy not to optimise your website for mobile. Many website builder tools have mobile optimisation features built in, but it does help to understand why a site should be mobile-friendly: because it helps elevate your SEO rankings. In practice, mobile-friendly sites don’t require zooming in to read them on mobile.

Regularly Update Your Website with New Content

Regularly publishing fresh and engaging blog content on your website does wonders for SEO. With regular blogging, you can mine new SEO-relevant keywords and themes, establish your agency as a thought leader and articulate your expertise in an industry niche – all key for creating a recognisable voice for your brand.

It’s worthwhile developing a strategy for just for blogs alone, as this type of content can strike many of your marketing targets at once. Blogs often bring passive clients and candidates to your site – they may not be looking for your recruitment services just yet, but they do need information on “How to Interview a DevOps Engineer” or “How to Write a CV for a Project Manager” which in turn helps you build your brand awareness and build trust with your audience – so hopefully they reach out when they’re ready!

By working with a recruitment marketing specialist, you can develop a content strategy that uses regular content to elevate SEO and build solid brand awareness.

Why SEO is Cost-Effective

Compared to traditional recruitment methods such as advertising on job boards or cold calling, investing in SEO can be more cost-effective in the long run. Once optimised, your website can continue to attract organic traffic without the need for ongoing payments or manual outreach efforts.

For example, let’s say an exasperated hiring manager in Sydney or London finally starts searching for a recruitment agency online after a bad hire or two. She may start searching for ‘data science recruiters Australia’ in Google, Bing or perhaps DuckDuckGo, for help with finding candidates.

That’s where your SEO efforts will come in handy. As a recruitment business specialising in data science roles, you’ll have several pages on your website mentioning the words ‘data science recruiter and ‘Australia’, along with easy-to-follow links for contacting your team. That’s how this hiring manager may find your website and begin a long and fruitful relationship with your recruitment agency.

In short, SEO is how people will find you when they’re exploring their options or about to make a decision – like signing up to work with a recruiter.

Stay Ahead of the Recruitment SEO Curve

While some marketing practices yield more immediate results, SEO offers the advantage of long-term sustainability. Once established, a strong SEO presence can continue to generate leads and attract candidates over time, with minimal intervention.

The SEO landscape is constantly changing, however, so it’s advantageous to work with SEO experts who can keep you up-to-date with the latest trends in SEO for recruitment agencies. At Prominence, our digital marketing specialists will work with you to create an SEO strategy tailored to your business needs. To tap into the power of search engine marketing and optimisation, contact us today for an expert chat.

How Marketing Can Generate New Business for Recruiters in a Tough Market

Wed, 19 Jun 2024 13:51:04 GMT

In today’s competitive market, recruiters face significant challenges. With economic fluctuations and shifting job market dynamics, generating new business has become tougher than ever. However, amidst these challenges lies an opportunity.

Content marketing can be the key to not only attracting new client leads but also rediscovering and re-engaging old ones. The recruitment landscape is currently marked by:

Increased Competition: More agencies are vying for the same pool of clients, making differentiation crucial.
Economic Uncertainty: Businesses are more cautious with their hiring budgets, scrutinising every partnership more closely.
Evolving Client Needs: The shift towards remote work and digital transformation has altered what clients expect from recruitment agencies.

In such a climate, standing out requires more than just “hitting the phones”. Content marketing offers a strategic way to demonstrate your expertise, build trust, and ultimately generate new business.

How Marketing Can Help Recruiters Do BD

1. Re-establishing Authority and Trust

In a tough market, businesses are looking for partners they can trust. Content marketing helps you establish and reinforce your authority in the niche industry you recruit in. By regularly producing high-quality, insightful thought leadership content, you can:

Showcase Expertise: Publish articles, whitepapers, and blog posts that address current industry challenges, offering solutions and demonstrating your deep understanding of the market.
Highlight Success Stories: Share detailed case studies and client testimonials that illustrate your agency’s effectiveness in placing top talent, even in difficult times.

2. Enhancing Visibility and Reach

To generate new business, you need to be where potential clients are. Content marketing enhances your online visibility, making it easier for businesses to find you. Key strategies include:

SEO Optimisation: Ensure your content is optimised for search engines with relevant keywords, improving your rankings and increasing organic traffic.
Consistent Posting: Maintain a regular content schedule to keep your website fresh and engaging, signalling to search engines and clients that your agency is active and up-to-date.

3. Re-engaging Old Clients

In challenging times, reconnecting with clients who you’ve not had a job on with for a while, can be just as valuable as finding new ones. Content marketing provides a natural way to rekindle these relationships:

Personalised Newsletters: Send tailored content to previous clients, updating them on industry trends, your latest successes, and how you can help with their current recruitment needs.
Targeted Campaigns: Develop specific content campaigns aimed at former clients, reminding them of your past successes and showcasing new capabilities.

4. Building a Stronger Brand Presence

A strong brand presence is essential for standing out in a crowded market. Content marketing allows you to shape and communicate your recruitment agency’s unique value proposition effectively:

Thought Leadership: Position your agency as a thought leader by sharing expert insights and participating in industry discussions through blogs, webinars, and social media.
Engaging Social Media: Use social media platforms to distribute your content, engage with your audience, and amplify your brand’s voice.

5. Driving Lead Generation

Content marketing isn’t just about visibility; it’s about converting that visibility into leads. Effective strategies include:

Sales Enablement Tools: Offer valuable resources, such as guides or industry reports, in exchange for contact information or use as an excuse to pick up the phone and start building a relationship with this potential new client.
Nurturing Sequences: Implement automated email sequences that deliver valuable content to leads over time, nurturing them through the sales funnel so you stay top of mind until they are ready to engage.

In a tough market, understanding how marketing can generate new business for recruiters can be the key to success. By establishing authority, enhancing visibility, and building a strong brand presence, you can differentiate your agency and demonstrate the value you bring to potential clients.

At Prominence, we specialise in helping recruitment agencies navigate these challenges and use content marketing to win new business and ultimately more placed roles.

Ready to transform your recruitment agency’s marketing strategy? Contact Prominence to discover how our content marketing expertise can help you generate new business and reengage contacts in the database.

Marketing for Start up Recruitment Agencies

Wed, 17 Apr 2024 13:09:09 GMT

When you hear the name Tesla, you think of Elon Musk. Apple is synonymous with Steve Jobs and Microsoft with Bill Gates.

Yes, these leaders are all billionaires and have run some of the most famous companies in the world. But they’ve also succeeded in building strong, recognisable personal brands.

As a start-up recruitment agency, it can be tempting to go all in with a flashy new corporate brand and website. After all, you want to launch into the market with a bang, right?

But actually, it’s worth taking your time and making it all about you for the first few years. At the end of the day, you’ve created your current network based on your good name – so use it!

Investing in your personal brand that is, creating content under your name rather than your business not only makes you more visible online. It can also build trust, confidence and an amplified network that you can transfer to your corporate brand down the track.

In our latest webinar, Managing Director Amber Loach provides fast and simple personal branding tips to help start-up recruitment agencies on their marketing journey.

Take a read through the summary below or view the full session now.

Personal Branding

Before you start putting your energy into a marketing strategy for your business, it’s worthwhile investing in your personal brand.

This frees you up to focus on billing and business development activity for the first few years, while still ensuring you remain front of mind with current and prospective candidates and clients.

Some of the different strategies for boosting your personal brand include:

Optimising your LinkedIn profile

Clear headings, updated contact details, keywords

Sharing regular and engaging content

Ensure content is interesting and relevant to your target audience
Focus on consistency try to post a couple of times a week
Post a mix of content from job ads and polls to personal highlights and opinions on industry trends

Finding your voice

Infuse content with your personality and don’t be afraid to be controversial
Use colloquial language
Don’t forget emojis and hashtags

As a small recruitment agency, your priority for the first several years should be leveraging the connections and network you’ve built over the course of your career. That’s why we recommend for you to initially focus 80% on your personal brand and 20% on your company brand.

Looking to the Future

Once you’ve grown your team to around four or five recruiters, we believe it’s time to switch the focus to your company brand. You now have enough support to deliver on incoming enquiries, likely the finances to invest in it properly and have sufficient time to dedicate to marketing activity.

There are a number of marketing avenues for start-up recruitment agencies to explore, all dependent on your business goals. For example, are you looking to grow your headcount in the next two to five years or increase your number of candidate leads? Perhaps you want to maintain the number of clients on your books but want to focus on cementing those relationships, or you might be looking to expand an account within a business.

Some of the marketing tools to consider are:

Search Engine Optimisation

Improves your rankings on Google search results organically
Long-term game expects to see results after months, not days
Big opportunity for a smaller, niche agency

Google Ads

Cost Per Click basis
Google will determine the cost of the click based on how relevant and interesting your ad is
Better ROI when used to attract clients compared to candidates

Social Paid Ads

LinkedIn – Cost Per Click, can be very specific, and good for targeting passive candidates and clients
Facebook / Snapchat / Instagram – better for recruiting low-skill roles such as customer service or drivers

Email Marketing

Need a good number of people in your existing CRM
Expect a 30-35% open rate
More important to consider conversion rate / click through

Automation

Email content that goes out to clients and candidates automatically at key trigger points
Very useful in Contracting space – for example, when a candidate is coming to the end of a contract

Marketing Strategy for Start Ups

Before getting started with any of these channels, it’s important to create a marketing strategy and activity calendar for your start up recruitment agency. When working with our clients, we run exploratory strategy sessions that cover a range of different topics from target audience personas to value propositions.

This is just a glimpse of what was covered in the webinar about marketing for start-up recruitment agencies – we encourage you to click below and view the recording and presentation slides to get a full picture of recruitment marketing for start-ups.

If you have any questions regarding the webinar or would like to chat more about how Prominence can help with marketing for a start-up recruitment agency, please get in touch with Prominence Recruitment Marketing.

Tips for Posting on LinkedIn for Recruiters in 2024

Wed, 07 Feb 2024 14:31:17 GMT

Whether you like it, loathe it, or are merely indifferent to it at this point, LinkedIn remains a key part of a well-thought-through marketing strategy for recruiters. As with any social networking platform, having strategies for posting on LinkedIn will get you much more mileage than winging it.

With 2024 firmly in place, now is an ideal time to review your approach to posting on LinkedIn, to get the most out of the site and maximise the efficiency of your marketing efforts. Time saved is money earned!

Use the ‘What’s In It for Me?’ Principle

LinkedIn announced major changes to its algorithm in 2023, with the stated aim of delivering more relevant content to users and strengthening their existing connections on the site. In practice, that means your posts will work best when they offer something of value to the audience – a solid foundation of every marketing strategy for recruiters.

In other words, sharing knowledge, advice or insights is the name of the game. When creating posts, pause and imagine potential and existing clients and candidates asking, ‘what’s in it for me?’ as they read them. The posts that will perform best are those that inform your audience, provoke thought or conversation.

You may be tempted to think, ‘what’s the harm in posting an occasional boast about billing big or making record placements?’ Plenty, in fact! LinkedIn is quite explicit about this, actually. In an announcement about the new algorithm last year, LinkedIn’s Alice Xiong noted the site’s users overwhelmingly value content that is grounded in knowledge or advice and enables them to feel connected with people they know to help them discover the right opportunities or learn something from their time spent on the site.

“On the flip side,” she added, “we’ve heard that the posts that are the least valuable were humblebrags and personal professional updates from people you don’t know.” You’ve been warned!

Use Hashtags Wisely

Hashtags are a powerful link between your business, prospective clients and candidates on LinkedIn. With a bit of hashtag savvy, more of your content will be seen by people who are actively looking for it – always vital for converting those eyeballs into genuine prospects!

Hashtag Do’s:

Research: Identify trending and popular hashtags on LinkedIn related to your business, services and target audiences. What are your competitors using? What are people searching for? What kind of content do you find on certain hashtags?

Use a mix of broad and niche hashtags: This allows you to gain a balanced audience reach. For example, #NowHiring, #recruiters, and #leadership are as broad as they come, while a tag like #sydneytech will be focused on a specific community and location.

Create hashtags based on your company’s brand: These could highlight your workplace culture, candidate communities, or the company in general. Just remember to make them easy to read by capitalising each separate word, and avoid using word combinations that are too common to be linked to your company.

Hashtag Do’s:

Overdoing hashtags on each post: The limit is 30 hashtags per post on LinkedIn, but it’s wise to go with far fewer (more like 3-5) and keep them as relevant to the post as possible. Stuffing hashtags in each post can easily look amateurish and spammy!

Jumping on hashtag bandwagons: It can be tempting at times to make posts for the sole purpose of capitalising on a hashtag that has gone viral. At best, the overall reach of such post might be underwhelming; at worst, people will roll their eyes when they see it. Instead, focus on hashtags that are industry-specific or at least seasonally relevant (e.g. the festive season, or a charity event you’re involved in).

Not measuring the performance of your posts: LinkedIn doesn’t have a feature dedicated to analysing hashtags alone, but you can measure how your posts perform nonetheless. (To view your company’s page analytics, go to the Admin view on the page and click ‘Analytics’ on the left hand side.) Performance metrics to look at include impressions, clicks, and engagement rates. The trick is to compare the performance of similar posts with different hashtags, which you can do using LinkedIn’s dashboard. Try it out over a few weeks and see.

Stop the Scroll with Catchy Visuals

Without images or video, your posts can get lost in the wash very quickly. Think of how a LinkedIn news feed appears when you’re scrolling through it – the posts with visuals attached are much more likely to catch your eye first.

Perhaps the worst of all posting sins is huge blocks of text. With attention spans shrinking by the day, visuals are now a matter of life and death when it comes to reaching your audience! Aim to include an image (in the form of an infographic or suitable photo), or a video, with each post.

LinkedIn’s own research shows that posts with images have a two times higher comment rate, and larger images have a 38% higher click-through rate than other images (LinkedIn recommends 1200 x 627 pixels for single images).

If you have the means to produce video content, you can upload up to 15 minutes of footage (10 from your phone) to LinkedIn’s native video platform.

Adding visuals is an instant boost in storytelling power. When you’re posting about a team achievement, new hire or helping a client reach their goals, including a photo will make it more meaningful. Infographics are useful for simplifying data and statistics, making them more accessible to your audience.

Learn More About Digital Marketing for Recruiters

Want more tips on digital marketing for recruiters, or a guiding hand for developing social media-ready content? Get in touch with the team at Prominence to get your recruitment marketing strategy on the right footing.

How Much Should You Pay a Marketing Manager at Your Recruitment Agency?

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 14:58:45 GMT

As a Recruiter, hiring a Marketing Manager for your recruitment agency can feel a bit out of your comfort zone. Hiring salespeople is straightforward – as you know they will have to meet their targets or hit the road – but hiring a Marketer can be a whole different ball game.

If you’re in the process of hiring a Marketing Manager for your recruitment agency you’ve come to the right place. But before you even get to the part where you’re thinking about how much to pay them,

there are several questions you need to ask yourself.

What is Your Marketing Manager Going to be Responsible For?

The first thing you need to do is identify exactly what the responsibilities of your marketing hire will be – and there are a few aspects to think about!

Ask yourself which of these areas is a priority to your recruitment agency because realistically, one person cannot manage all of these to a high standard – there just aren’t enough hours in the day!

Marketing strategy
Social media management
Pay per click (PPC) ads
Graphic design
Email marketing
Automation
Social media advertising
One-off projects such as a new website
Copywriting
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Do You Want a Senior Marketing Person or a Junior?

Much the same as Recruiters, Marketers are often categorised into two areas: generalists or specialists. Generalists will have an overview of the various marketing areas above but will not be an expert in everything, which is not always a negative.

A specialist Marketer will be an expert in their niche. Social Media Manager, PPC Specialist and Brand Manager, for example, are all standalone job titles and these people tend to have a much more in-depth knowledge of their specialism but will likely be unfamiliar with everything that goes into a successful marketing strategy for a recruitment agency.

The most common marketing hire for recruitment agencies is a generalist who oversees a bit of social media, some email marketing and perhaps a little bit of graphic design. They may also do some administrative work. Additionally, they may manage a few external providers for technical resources such as PPC ads.

Larger agencies may hire a senior who can oversee strategy and then a coordinator below them, again still relying on third-party support for complex items or larger graphic design items.

What’s Your Marketing Budget?

Global data suggests that your overall marketing budget should be 7-8% of your recruitment agency’s gross profit. Obviously, this can vary greatly depending on the size, marketing position and future plans of the business.

Once you have worked out your overall marketing budget, you should be able to work backwards and figure out how much you should pay your new marketing hire.

Bear in mind that your marketing budget should include the following items:

– Jobs board spend

– Cost of hiring a Marketing Manager

– Paid advertising spend (Google Ads, Social Media Ads etc.)

– Additional outsourcing needs (graphic design for example)

It’s worth noting that if your budget is limited you shouldn’t spend it all on one marketing hire. Having a separate budget for paid advertising, events, collateral, etc is just as important.

What is the Average Salary of a Marketing Manager?

If we use Indeed data to benchmark your marketing hire’s salary, you’re looking at anywhere between £27,000 up to £70,000 per year, per hire in the UK, and from $83,000 (AUD) to $144,000 (AUD) in Australia. We would suggest that the average for the recruitment industry is on the lower end of this scale.

*Indeed UK as of July 2022: https://uk.indeed.com/career/marketing-manager/salaries

*Indeed UK as of July 2022: https://au.indeed.com/career/marketing-manager/salaries?hl=en

In an ideal world, every recruitment agency would have a Senior Generalist Marketer to create a marketing strategy and consult with the senior leadership team on the overall business goals, plus a couple of Junior Specialist Marketers in the team to get stuff done – but as you can imagine, this is where things start to get expensive!

Of course, there is also always the option to hire someone part-time, but as we’re sure you’re aware – half the time means half the output and you’re unlikely to see a huge ROI. If you were just looking for someone to write a couple of blogs and manage your social media profiles, for example, this would be more than sufficient.

The Other Option: A Marketing Agency for Recruiters

If you’ve read through the above, and you’re thinking “I just want someone to do it all and not have it cost the earth?!” you’re in luck.

Prominence is a marketing agency for Recruiters, which means that for everything discussed above, we have a team of specialists that can do it all. From marketing strategy to graphic design, paid advertising to social media management, our team are expert in all things marketing for recruitment agencies.

The best bit? Our costs are on par with hiring a Junior Marketing Manager. PLUS, we have all the knowledge of recruitment that makes our onboarding process super smooth.

So, if you want to see results quickly but don’t have the budget or the time to hire an internal marketing team, we’re your guys.

Get in touch with one of our Directors or fill out our contact form to get the ball rolling.

Top Tips for Winning Recruitment Awards

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 07:15:08 GMT

There are many business benefits associated with winning industry awards, probably the most underrated is the positive impact that it can have on your recruitment team.

Whereas there used to be only one or two annual award events to consider, in Australia, New Zealand and the UK there are now a number of credible organisations each running their own awards. These include:

RCSA
Seek
APSCo
REC
TALiNT Partners
Global Recruiter
Plus there are a number of broader business awards such as HRINZ, Westpac, Deloitte, Optus etc.

So, if finding an award to enter is no longer a problem, how do you ensure all the effort required to put the award entry together actually pays off?

We’ve been helping our clients to plan and write awards for several years now and have been pretty successful, winning at least one award from each of the above organisations. Using what we’ve learnt from our successes (and failures!), we’ve built up an internal formula of what it takes to conceptualise a credible entry and then write a winning submission. Here are our top tips for winning a recruitment award.

1. Pick Your Award Carefully

There are some award categories that are obvious choices, but they aren’t always the best option. Things to consider are the likely levels of competition and whether your business has truly done something unique or significant in the category you’re considering entering. The feedback from judges is that they got a lot of entries that may have been considered winners several years ago, but the bar is now much higher, with many agencies really pushing the limits of innovation and commitment to their industry, staff or customers. So, in addition to picking the award carefully, also do great work!

2. Plan in Advance

Following on from point one, the best results go to those that plan their entry the year before. This doesn’t play well to a recruiter’s natural instincts, as most of us like instant gratification, however we always experience better results when the particular points or topics have been pre-planned. Doing this has the added bonus of providing additional guidance and direction for your overall business strategy.

3. Aim for Low Hanging Fruit

Some awards are simply just not as popular or easy to win. Whilst winning Large Agency of the Year may be the best accolade, picking up best Back Office Support Team is just as satisfying and potentially easier to win.

4. Use Every Opportunity to Present Evidence

This is the biggest opportunity to stake a claim for winning the award. A lot of drafts we read contain generalisations and talk to points that hold very little relevance to the actual award itself. We try to corroborate every statement, backing up each point with clear evidence. It could be a testimonial about a particular change from the team or a client, financial results or any other relevant metric. In addition, we always ensure that we have a validated response for each point highlighted in the award definition. This way the judges can easily tick off their criteria without having to hunt for examples. For example, if the definition asks for examples of the team working together, we’ll explain a situation where this happened and include a testimonial from someone in the team about this scenario.

5. Follow the Instructions

We’re embarrassed to put this in, but having seen so many other articles talking about this point we thought it best to cover it off. So, stick to the word limit, present your information in the exact format requested, proof your work (and have someone else do it), take advantage of links and attachments if you’re permitted to do so, use a legible font and font size and ensure you have enough time to submit the entry itself!

If this all sounds like an awful lot of work, that’s because it is! The good news is that our expert team of marketers and copywriters are more than happy to help, please feel free to get in touch to discuss how we can help to get your brand into the limelight.

Good luck!

How to Build a Marketing Plan for Your Recruitment Agency

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:58:01 GMT

Building a marketing strategy for your recruitment agency is an essential step in aligning your sales and marketing teams, but it isn’t always a straightforward task.

When you’re getting started, there are a couple of things you need to do first in order to make your marketing plan a success:

1) Identify your business goals

The goal of any marketing strategy is to contribute to your business goals. In recruitment, your goals will usually look something like this:

X jobs per month
X inbound client leads per month
X internal hires per quarter
X revenue generated per quarter/month

2) Identify your marketing KPIs

Once your business goals are established, the next step is to look at how marketing can support these goals. You might want to look at key metrics like:

Website traffic
Conversions on the website/campaigns
Report/case study downloads (if you’re looking at building a lot of downloadable content)
Referral traffic to conversion pages (did people come in from a blog and end up on the submit a vacancy page on your website?)
Social media engagement (how many people are clicking through on your content?)
Quality leads from a specific campaign
Google ranking (are you showing up for the right keywords on Google?)

Keep in mind that we wouldn’t recommend looking at all of these metrics at once. Identify 3-5 that you want to focus on and reassess them every quarter so ensure they remain relevant. Start by identifying these metrics from the last two years so you have a baseline to help you determine what ‘success looks like. A realistic goal can be anywhere between 5-15% growth per year.

Top tip : Google Analytics and Google Search Console can show you most of this information. Make sure you have it set up on your website! You can ask your web provider or marketing manager to do this for you, or if you’re partnering with a recruitment marketing agency, they will already have this all up and running.

How to Structure a Recruitment Marketing Strategy

Template When you’re putting together your recruitment marketing plan, it needs to include:

Dates
Title of the project
Budget
Any key dates in the business calendar

For example:

We know that creating your recruitment marketing plan from scratch might seem a bit overwhelming, so we have put together a free resource to help you get started.

Download your recruitment marketing strategy template here .

Work with a Recruitment Marketing Specialist

Of course, completing and maintaining your recruitment agency marketing plan template can be a significant time commitment, time that is often taken away from other parts of the business. If all this seems like too much right now and you have bigger things to think about, it might be a good idea to think about partnering with a specialist – that’s us!

Prominence is a marketing agency for recruiters. Creating recruitment marketing strategies and delivering everything that goes into one is what we do every day for recruitment agencies in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

If you need help putting together your marketing strategy, get in touch via our form to find out if our marketing services would be a good fit for your recruitment agency.

6 Digital Marketing Tips for Recruitment Agencies

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:41:05 GMT

The Australian recruitment marketing sector is continuously changing, and never more so than now. If you are wondering what marketing your recruitment agency should be doing, take a read of these six marketing tips specifically for recruitment agencies.

Recruitment Marketing Tip #1: Get More Out of Your Website

The quality of recruitment websites has increased significantly in recent years, to a point where most recruiters have a site that is fully responsive and well set up for client and candidate audiences. The 6 Digital Marketing Tips for Recruitment Agencies 01problem with this is that the level of competition has grown and therefore more attention has to be paid to what is going on behind the scenes. When we look at new websites, they often have not been thought through from an architecture perspective, nor has the wording been crafted with SEO in mind.

Fixing this doesn’t have to be complicated. At a high level, ensure you have all the core pages that your audience would naturally look for, and that you have a dedicated page catering to each of your core disciplines, roles and delivery areas. This is fairly easy if you are a specialist business – if not, my advice is to focus your efforts on the areas that the majority of your revenue comes from.

It is still relatively easy to be at the top of the Google search results for one or two core search phrases, so pick carefully and double down your efforts. If this doesn’t lead to results, you can adjust from there until you find the right terms.

Recruitment Marketing Tip #2: Leverage the Power of Automation

Automation is slowly creeping into our sector, not just for marketing but also for things like compliance. One of the main benefits of automation is that it allows you to get more value out of your database and also take care of some of the jobs that recruiters either do not enjoy doing or simply do not have the time to do. In the current market where the volume of candidates is high, this can be particularly valuable to help weed through applicants and find those that are a good fit.

At a base level, automation should look to validate applications and reactivate candidates that are already on your database.

Recruitment Marketing Tip #3: Engage Your Recruiters

Get this right, and this is where the magic happens. Unfortunately, in most businesses’ recruiters are so busy with their day-to-day tasks that supporting marketing efforts tends to take a backseat. Luckily, there are a couple of tools you can utilise to addresses this. One of my favourite marketing ideas is to make a competition of it – this is great for short-term wins or to boost a specific campaign. To track the progress and success of these, I favour the LinkedIn social selling index . Another quick win is to utilise a new LinkedIn tool that enables you to push daily content out to your company’s employees directly on LinkedIn. Before this existed, another way to do this would be to manually copy the link and share it across the team – sometimes this is still necessary as they may not be active on LinkedIn (or paying attention to notifications).

Recruitment Marketing Tip #4: Don’t Skimp on Advertising

Most recruitment agencies have become good at generating their own content, from quick social posts of team outings to larger industry-wide reports. The next challenge to overcome is that marketing is no longer free. Go back five years and this was not the case; the commercialisation of social media was still in its relative infancy. This meant a single post on social media would often reach hundreds if not thousands of people in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane, enabling a brand to be built with very little cost.

These days, there is significantly more competition on social media platforms, so to have true impact, you have to be prepared to spend. An annual advertising budget may include offline advertising, but should definitely include paid advertising on the likes of Google, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and potentially new channels such as Snapchat (depending on the market).

Recruitment Marketing Tip #5: Don’t Forget EDMs

Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) continues to be one of the most successful ways of marketing a recruitment brand to both new and existing candidates and clients. If you are using an automation product this may help, but if not, it is essential to utilise tools like MailChimp to communicate both your brand and sales messaging to your audiences. We have consistently seen this to be one of the main sources of high-quality leads, outside of business development calls.

Recruitment Marketing Tip #6: Choose the Right Marketing Partner

Obviously, we are biased! However, whether you choose to go with fully outsourced marketing or are just looking for ad hoc support, choosing the right partner that truly understands the recruitment industry and the specific niche within which you work significantly increases your likelihood of success. Interested to find out more? We would love to chat.

Summary

There’s no question that an effective recruitment marketing strategy makes a big difference to the reach your brand has. By using our top recruitment agency marketing ideas, you can attract individuals and businesses that were previously off the radar, convert these into leads and then develop them into new clients or candidate placements. To learn more about marketing strategies for recruitment agencies, or if you’re keen to see which strategies would be best for you, please get in touch.

Recruitment Marketing Metrics That Matter

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 06:24:07 GMT

Launching a marketing campaign can be an exhilarating moment as you watch your creative baby head out into the world.

And while we can get caught up in initial indicators of success from the number of shares and follows to website visits, our interest tends to wane over time. As a result, we lose track of whether the spend was worth it or not. And before we know it, we’re back to screening candidates and filling roles, without really thinking how people found us in the first place.

In a previous blog , we talked through the key factors to consider when setting an annual recruitment marketing budget so you can see a solid return on your investment.

But how do you actually track and measure that ROI? In this blog, we talk through different recruitment marketing metrics that help you decide if your campaign worked (or not).

Why Are Marketing Metrics Important?

We live in a world where we measure everything from the number of ‘likes’ on our personal Instagram posts to our recruitment consultants’ KPIs. So why should marketing activity be any different?

Yes, at the end of the FY you can look at your overall number of placements, financials including revenue and profit growth and review the number of clients gained and lost. But how has your marketing spend contributed to the overall growth of your business?

Marketing metrics, when reported regularly and accurately, can not only help you optimise every dollar/pound spent, but also measure your ROI and create a case for increased future spend. If you can attribute your increased revenue or new client roster to a particular campaign, you might have a case for greater investment in your budget and/or team.

At a campaign or even tactical level, marketing metrics can also help to inform future decision-making. That might include the channel mix used to target specific audience groups or the timing of certain activities that will get you the biggest bang for your buck.

Not All Metrics are Made Equal

It can be easy to be swept up in the excitement of watching your LinkedIn following grow or hitting a certain number of impressions on your Facebook ad. But it’s important to remember why you’ve invested money into marketing activity in the first place.

In an earlier blog , we talked about the importance of setting clear, measurable objectives. Note the word ‘measurable’! These targets are ultimately how you know if your activity has been a good investment or if it needs tweaking in the future.

For example, you might gain lots of new social media followers as a result of your fun new TikTok campaign. But what if your objective was to drive traffic to your website and get people to register for an event? The activity might have increased brand awareness, but maybe you didn’t achieve what you set out to with the campaign.

The ultimate marketing metric is Cost Per Acquisition  or in recruitment terms Cost Per Placed Lead which refers to all the money spent on securing a new client who you were then able to successfully place a candidate for. This metric is generally used at the end of the financial year to decide how the entire marketing budget, or a specific sub-campaign, fared.

It’s calculated as follows:

Cost Per Acquisition (Placed Lead) = Campaign Cost/Number of conversions

Other Important Metrics

While Cost Per Acquisition measures success at a macro level, there are plenty of other ways to evaluate smaller campaigns or specific channels.

Paid Marketing Metrics

Think of any form of online advertising you include in your campaign from PPC (pay per click) to online display ads. Who saw them, on what websites, using which search terms and what action did they take as a result?

Key paid marketing metrics include:

Click-Through Rates (CTR)
Conversion metrics linked to the campaign objective e.g. a client downloading a Salary Survey or a candidate registering their CV
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Website Metrics

The data you collect on your website traffic can help evaluate your SEO strategy and identify areas of the website that may not be particularly user-friendly. It will also show you where people are spending most of their time.

Key website metrics include:

Website visits – the number of times the website was visited
Bounce rate – how many people leave a website after only visiting one page
Page views – the number of times a particular page is viewed
Session duration - the amount of time spent on the website

Social Media Metrics

When Instagram trialled the removal of likes back in 2019, it caused an uproar. Why? Because users wanted other people, and more importantly brands, to see how popular they were.

Social media activity can be used to evaluate a brand’s influence and following, even when using professional platforms like LinkedIn.

The main social media metrics include:

Engagement Likes / comments / shares / retweets / @mentions
Number of followers/subscribers
Click Through Rates
Reach – the potential number of unique viewers a post could have
Impressions – how often a post appears
Referrals to your website
Conversion rate
Share of voice – listening software can track volume and sentiment

Email Marketing Metrics

It’s reassuring to know that when you send your EDM out into the world, you can track exactly where it goes and what recipients do with it.

Email marketing is a relatively low-cost, high-impact channel if done correctly and can help drive new candidates and employers as well as engage existing clients.

Key email marketing metrics include:

Open rate
Click-through rate
Conversion rate
Forwarding rate
New subscribers
Bounce rate – number of times the email was returned by the recipient’s server
Unsubscribes
Spam complaints

Recruitment Marketing Tip #4: Don’t Skimp on Advertising

Spending Too Much on Jobs Boards? Here’s How Marketing Can Solve the Problem

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 05:21:49 GMT

Recruitment agencies across the globe have felt the squeeze of job board advertising prices with in recent years.

In Australia, recruiters have described a spike in costs but reduced ad performance since Seek introduced their new model back in 2019, which included variable pricing for ads based on things like candidate availability and location.

In the UK, Total Jobs has equally surprised their existing customers with many choosing to walk away from years-long contracts following price hikes earlier in 2022.

And while we certainly believe job boards still have value, we think now is a good time for recruitment agencies to re-assess how well their job ads are performing and whether there is an alternative way to attract top talent.

In this blog, we discuss different approaches to sourcing talent that can work in conjunction with or in place of job boards.

The Question of ROI

With so much outrage seen on LinkedIn right now, we wanted to take a step back and look at the figures. Yes, 300% price increases sound extreme but it doesn’t really mean anything unless you attach it to an outcome.

As a recruitment marketing company, we are all about Cost Per Acquisition, also known as Cost Per Placed Lead. This metric is usually applied when securing a new client, but it can also apply to candidates.

Here are a few initial questions to ask :

How much did you spend sourcing the successful candidate as a percentage of all applications received?
Are you tracking the full cost of securing a candidate across their entire recruitment journey?
Is there an opportunity to be more strategic when using job ads, for example focusing on high-worth roles or high-volume recruitment drives?

By analysing this data, you might see some clear trends of where you can justify the ROI of job boards for some roles but not others.

PageUp recently analysed their customer data and presented the following findings:

This shows that while job boards might be driving volume, they aren’t necessarily an effective recruitment strategy when compared with others.

How to Reduce Your Reliance on Job Boards

So how do you find the ideal attraction methodology for the roles you recruit?

Our approach when working with new clients is to first run a workshop that identifies your audience, your USP and your marketing objectives. From there, we put together a strategy that will help you achieve those goals and produce a solid ROI.

But for the purposes of this blog, we’ve put together some initial ideas to get you started:

Establishing Your Online Recruitment Hub

The ultimate goal when recruiting should be to drive quality candidates to your website and for them to either register their interest or directly apply for an active role.

Your website is your recruitment epi-centre and the most important public-facing asset you have outside of your team.

It should be a place where you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, answer any questions or address any concerns and most importantly house all of your active roles.

The key to a good website is making sure it’s functional and user-friendly. That means putting yourself in the candidate’s shoes and making sure there is an easy path for them to follow from landing on your site to taking some form of action e.g. applying, uploading their CV or calling one of your consultants.

If you find any blockers, such as compulsory fields that could be off-putting or onerous application processes, do what you can to remove them.

Building Brand Awareness

So, you’ve built a functional website and uploaded all of your jobs, but how do you attract candidates?

Brand awareness comes through actively positioning and promoting your business within your marketplace. It’s becoming the go-to people when candidates decide they want to change roles. It’s skipping the jobs board because people know you’re the best connected and most experienced, so why waste time with the middleman?

Brand awareness can be achieved through a number of different channels and methods, from promoting consistent and engaging content on social media to sponsoring industry events and hosting webinars.

Harnessing Paid Advertising

Recruiters can sometimes be nervous about paid advertising because any Pay-Per-Click model sounds less controlled than a flat fee.

But if you’re strategic with your paid advertising, you can create campaigns that directly target different roles or role types through tailored media placement and drive interested job seekers directly to your website.

Bespoke landing pages can be created to continue the single candidate experience and maximise the chances of them applying for the role then and there.

Amplifying Social Media

We all know you can promote jobs through LinkedIn, but are you making the most of your personal and corporate LinkedIn profiles? Are you positioning your business and your people as industry experts who regularly and actively participate in industry discussions? Are you creating original content that demonstrates your understanding of the marketplace?

And are you making the most of your network? It clearly takes a lot of time and effort to develop connections within your community, so now is the time to cash in on those contacts. Sending InMails and promoting referral schemes are just a couple of ideas.

Automating Communication

Once a candidate has registered with your recruitment agency, it’s the first step in their nurture journey. They may be actively looking for a new role or only interested in a specific advertised opportunity or they could be at the start of six-month-long long process with you.

If there’s one thing we know recruiters are short on, it’s time. And that’s where automation can achieve great gains. By automating some core email communications you can take the pressure off yourself and your team by regularly touching base with candidates automatically.

Some examples of automated communication include birthday messages, checking in on a new starter during their first day/week/month and regularly touching base with passive candidates.

Get in Touch

With talk of monopolies and duopolies in the job board industry, it’s always useful to re-assess your reliance on any single talent attraction tool. Not only could you find significant cost savings, you could also take the first step to boosting your own brand awareness and increasing your market share.

Here at Prominence, we work with recruitment agencies and help them navigate their way out of the confusing maze of recruitment marketing. We’ll help you achieve your marketing goals and connect you with the clients and candidates you want to reach.

Contact one of our specialist team today to find out how we can help you.

Marketing in Uncertain Times: The Dos and Don’ts

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 05:01:05 GMT

We’ve had our fair share of ‘uncertain times’ in recent years and marketing is often first on the chopping block as a ‘non-essential’ business item when it comes to cutting costs.

But there is so much data to support the fact that maintaining marketing activity through turbulent times results in businesses coming out stronger than ever on the other side. According to the Harvard Business Review “failing to support brands or examine core customers’ changing needs can jeopardize performance over the long term”.

While your recruitment competitors will likely be thinking of how they can scale back, you can stay front of mind, build trust and ultimately be there when you’re needed by investing in your marketing strategy – in the right ways. When things look rocky, clients and candidates will need reassurance and to know you’re still there for them. Not to mention there will be recruiters out there whose jobs aren’t secure – it’s the perfect time to find top talent in the market for your own business.

“By maintaining your position in a customer’s mind, you can give them a feeling of normalcy when other parts of their life might be in turmoil. They will come to think of you as being reliable, particularly if your competition scales back or even halts their own advertising,” says Forbes.

The other impact of cutting marketing budgets is the effect it will have on your team. While it’s a good time for you to keep an eye out for recruiters moving jobs, you also want to ensure your team don’t begin to panic and look around for other jobs in what they see as more secure companies. Having a robust employer brand is just as important for attracting good recruiters post-downturn as it is for retaining the ones you’ve got.

There’s a huge opportunity to come out the other side better than your competitors. If other companies are struggling it can mean there are less recruiters vying for the same candidates and clients – it’s much easier to be seen and to cut through the noise.

So, with all this talk of ‘what’s going to happen in the few months’ here’s our advice for your marketing strategy.

Stay Consistent

The worst thing you can do is disappear. That real estate you’ve spent years building up will quickly be taken up by your competitors.

Focus on Your Loyal Customer Base

Recruiters in particular are guilty of going after new client leads and not paying enough attention to their existing ones. Look at who you have good relationships with, is there an opportunity to build out that account?

Shout Even Louder Than You Were

There’s never a more important time to shout about your wins. It may feel wrong to highlight positivity in what can be a negative time. But this is where your clients, candidates and even other recruiters (if you’re looking to grow) need to see that you’re seeing successes to continue to trust you.

The scope of marketing activities you can get your teeth into may feel a little overwhelming, so our advice is to focus on the strategic avenues.

Social Media

It doesn’t have to be every day but make sure you’re posting your latest roles, testimonials from clients/candidates and sharing your success stories. Your network needs to know you’ve not gone anywhere. By looking at the data you can focus your time on the social posts you know get the most engagement.

Email Marketing

Capitalise on your database. When was the last time you reached out to clients or candidates you worked with more than a year ago? And we don’t mean spamming them with generic sales emails every day. Instead, curate quality and relevant content that employers and job seekers will appreciate. You want to be the first company they think of when it’s time to recruit or look for a new role. Building and maintaining relationships is the key here!

Automation

Look at how you can streamline a lot of your processes – especially if you see a rise in applicants due to higher unemployment rates. You can automate things like rejection emails or interview confirmations to free up your time so you can focus on other priorities.

SEO Strategy

People will never stop using Google. Focus on how you can update your website to ensure you’re on the first page of Google. SEO is a long process but once it’s done it’s free marketing! You do need to keep your website refreshed with content though.

Bringing in the Experts

Working with a recruitment marketing agency like Prominence means you don’t have to go through trial and error we know what works first time around. When there’s no time or money to lose, it pays to do it right first time around.

A long-term commitment to marketing and resisting the urge to panic and cut costs is the key to ensuring you thrive in times of turmoil. When companies stop marketing in a downturn there is so much evidence to suggest they struggle to come out the other end when compared to those who have maintained strategic marketing activities.

If you’d like to have more of a chat about how we can help with your recruitment marketing strategy, drop me a line!

LinkedIn Post Ideas to Get Your Business Noticed

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:53:57 GMT

Scrolling through your LinkedIn feed can sometimes feel worthy of a game of bingo.

How many times do we see #humblebrag posts with the sole purpose of self-promotion?

We’re not saying that’s entirely a bad thing, but if you want your post to stand out from the crowd and effectively communicate your message to your reader, you’ll need to be a bit more strategic!

Here’s our top tips for creating LinkedIn posts that will get your business noticed.

Use Attention-Grabbing Visuals

We’ve all experienced the sore-thumb syndrome that comes from scrolling through social media feeds too much.

But the reality is that we are all fickle creatures and value our precious spare time. If you’re on a break between meetings or sitting in the back of a taxi home, what’s going to get your attention? Not a big block of text, that’s for sure!

If you have the means to produce video content, you can upload up to 15 minutes of footage (10 from your phone) to LinkedIn’s native video platform.

You’ll be able to share your story in a more captivating way and build trust with your readers by ‘showing, not telling’.

Ask For Opinions

It suffices to say that a lot of people like the sound of their own voice, especially online.

Were you ever told in your more junior days that the best way to build a new relationship is to ask for advice? Not only do you make the person you’re asking feel important, but you also have the opportunity to start a discussion.

Social media is no different, and putting out questions or polls can be a great way to engage people.

Don’t worry, if you’re strategic about the question you post you won’t look uninformed. In fact, the question itself can be an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and understanding of the industry. Think about topics trending in your market at the moment. It could be anything from world news (e.g. the impact of the upcoming recession or the increase in energy prices) to niche announcements about businesses changing their HR policies or letting people go.

By kicking off the conversation, there are endless opportunities to engage with readers and build rapport.

Host an Interactive Discussion

Taking things one step further, you could also host a native video livestream from your company page.

It may sound daunting, but evidence shows LinkedIn Live video generates 24 times more engagement than the average post. Content-wise, there are lots of options, from livestreaming a webinar or panel discussion, to keynote speeches at conferences.

And you can book the streams well in advance so you can also get some mileage out of promoting the event and building your ideal audience.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

It’s been reported that the average user spends just seven minutes and 30 seconds on LinkedIn every day.

One way to get around this is to be a ‘save for later’ article that drives the reader back to your website where it’s being hosted.

This is beneficial for many reasons – it gives the reader a greater understanding of your brand and also offers the chance to browse around your site. They’re already there, so why not take a look around? It also breaks you away from the LinkedIn feed and prevents you getting lost amongst the ‘I must read that one day’ pile.

Don’t Forget Your Employees

Another interesting stat for you – 30% of a company’s engagement on LinkedIn comes from employees.

They are also 14 times more likely to share your company content when compared with other types of content.

Think about each of your employees as being an online brand ambassador with the capacity to amplify your messaging across their networks.

Not only will it boost your brand recognition, but it says a lot about your team culture and values when you have employees wanting to see you succeed.

There are many ways you can maximise opportunities with employees, such as:

Creating a branded cover image for them to add to their personal profiles
Creating a hashtag for your business and encourage your team to add it to their posts
Sharing your employee’s LinkedIn posts on your company page

Summary

LinkedIn remains the number one professional networking site in the world, and is constantly developing new and innovative tools to help people and businesses connect.

This list is just a taster of what can be produced off the back of a strategic, measurable social media plan for your organisation. Here at Prominence, we are specialists in recruitment marketing and work in partnership with our clients to build brand recognition, drive engagement, and boost revenue.

We understand the challenges of operating at the frontline of talent shortages, changing attitudes to work, and tightening profit margins. If you’d like advice on the best way to build your network and attract new clients to your business, get in touch with us today.

One NEW and Simple Step to Increase Employee Engagement on LinkedIn

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:38:18 GMT

If you, like most recruitment leaders and marketers, struggle to get your team to engage with the content posted to the LinkedIn Company Page, there is now a tool to help! The new LinkedIn Employee Notifications feature allows you to easily let your recruiters know when you’ve posted an update on the Page.

Why is the LinkedIn Employee Notification Tool a Good Thing?

It’s easy for employees to miss your company’s posts amongst the constant stream of content on their feed, which means they often won’t engage with them. The Employee Notifications feature helps businesses expand their organic reach on LinkedIn by giving your recruitment team the opportunity to amplify the content and act as brand advocates by sharing it with their connections.

When an employee receives a notification and clicks on the post preview, they are redirected to the update where they can comment, react or re-share, enabling your recruitment agency marketing to go farther.

How to Increase Your Employee Engagement on LinkedIn

4 steps notify your employees about a post:

Create the content from your Company Page on LinkedIn and post it
Click the menu in the upper right-hand corner of the post (…) OR click on the ‘Notify Employees’ button if it is already visible
Click ‘Notify Employees’
A pop up will appear, click ‘Yes’

Things to keep in mind when using the LinkedIn Employee Notification tool:

An admin can notify employees once per day
Employees are members who have listed your organisation in the Work Experience section of their profile
Notifications are delivered based on a relevance model, which means some employees may not receive a notification
Employees can choose to opt-out of these notifications, which may affect your page analytics

To find out how you can make the most of the LinkedIn Pages Employee Notifications tool or for more advice on marketing for recruitment agencies, feel free to get in touch .

The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Recruitment Business

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:27:21 GMT

If you’re thinking about starting your own recruitment business any time soon, you might want to have a flick through this guide. With insights, tips and advice from 14 recruitment industry experts it’s a real must have to help get your recruitment business off to the best possible start. Our Managing Director, Chris South was one of those 14 industry experts.

It can be easy to get bogged down with all the cool things you can do with digital marketing when you’re launching your own recruitment agency, but in this guide, Chris outlines the basics so that you can cut through the noise and implement what is really going to count. From getting your website (and website domain) set up, to sorting out your social media pages and the importance of personal branding, it’s all in there.

Get your copy of ‘A Positive Start: The Ultimate Guide to Starting a Recruitment Business ’.

If you have any questions about the guide or would like to talk to us about our marketing services for recruitment agencies, please get in touch.

The RCSA Annual Conference for Newbies

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:15:22 GMT

This year I’m sad to say the Prominence team won’t be in Fiji for the annual RCSA conference. This isn’t out of a lack of desire to be there, more that we just have too much else on in taking care of our existing clients!

So, with various members of the team having attended the annual conference for the last three years, instead, I thought we’d share our insights on how to get the most out of the two or three days in Fiji. The biggest complaint we hear is from recruiters who sit through sessions they aren’t enjoying or find to be irrelevant. Some of the best people I’ve heard from have not been the paid keynote speakers or the various vendors who get on stage, but from your peers who are there to share their experiences. Obviously, spend 15 minutes or so planning the sessions you’d like to sit in on, but if something doesn’t meet expectations make sure you have a contingency, or just spend the time networking.

Networking. For recruiters this should come naturally, however when confronted with a room full of competitors or peers, bizarrely most of us tend to keep to ourselves or our existing networks.

The people I’ve met at the RCSA conferences and others like it have formed the mainstay of my professional network, my friends and those I lean on when I need a favour or I’m in need of expertise.

Some recruiters treat the conference as a business holiday, and there is no issue with this at all. However, if you’re going for business with the intention of learning and developing then you’re doing yourself and your agency a disservice if you don’t actively network. There is so much experience at these conferences and a lot of people who are willing to share it. These conversations can truly fast track your business by years. You may find future staff, a buyer, new technology, a partner or an investor. Don’t forget the vendors too, most are more than happy to just talk with you and share their knowledge, generally this isn’t a place where you encounter pressure sales.

My favourite times for networking are during the pre-conference activities (golf, welcome drinks etc) or during the day itself, when there are sessions I’m less interested in (yes, you’ve paid a lot of money, but it doesn’t mean you have to go to every session!). You’ll find others around the resort who are more than happy to grab a coffee or beer. The evening events are a great chance for random conversations, but most people are letting their hair down so why be any different!

It’s not for everyone (definitely not me!) but if you do feel social media inclined then you can also find a few people networking on Twitter. Follow the conference hashtag #rcsaconf and join in conversations of interest.

That’s it from me. Have a great time in Fiji, looking forward to seeing you all at the 2018 conference!

How to Measure Return on Social Media Investment

Wed, 30 Aug 2023 09:05:25 GMT

What would happen if you stopped posting content to your social channels for a week or even a month? My guess is that in most cases it would make no difference to your recruitment or careers business.

This is because the majority of recruitment firms or internal talent teams are only playing lip service to social media. Posting occasional blogs and semi-regular mainstream media articles to small audiences is enough to show a social media presence, but only requires minimal investment. As you can probably guess this lack of investment results in limited returns. This creates a vicious cycle, which is where most businesses remain. The only way to generate results from social media is to invest in strategy and content and the only way to be sure this investment is working is to know how to measure your returns.

This article provides an overview on how to measure the success (or failure) of your online marketing strategy.

Good News

The good news is that when compared to traditional marketing mediums social and digital media make it easier to measure results. That said there are always going to be some results that remain qualitative, but these techniques and tools will help you to spot positive or negative trends.

Don’t Rely on Platform Statistics

There are lots of unscrupulous companies out there selling Twitter followers or Facebook likes. This is one of the main reasons that platform specific social media audience numbers are a poor indicator of online success.

I accept that if a company has 40,000 Twitter followers compared with 100 the larger audience is going to provide significantly increased post visibility. However just because a business page has a large audience it isn’t a guarantee of user engagement or that the audience will see the content. This is because of post visibility algorithms that are in place to restrict the visibility of organic posts. These restrictions are designed to maintain the quality of the user experience (by preventing spam) and to encourage businesses to undertake paid advertising.

Therefore once your online presence is social proofed (enough likes or followers to give your business credibility) the value of additional likes and followers is minimal and often purely correlates with the amount of advertising revenue spent on the related platform.

Recruitment / Careers Website

A well designed and functional website is vital to the successful measurement of online marketing success. We go into greater detail on what to consider when building a new website here, however to enable your business to measure results you just need to be aware that your website should act as a centralised hub for all marketing traffic.

Importantly traffic will likely not enter the site through the one location, instead coming in to jobs, consultant profiles, landing pages, company blogs or other pages.

Google Analytics

To measure the traffic results of a website or careers portal, I recommend using Google Analytics. It is one of the best free tools available on the internet, providing all the functionality needed, without having to pay for complex third party solutions.

As an example we recently ran a client campaign and on the day we posted some organic (free) marketing content to a Facebook Group we could immediately see that we generated over 1000 additional website visitors.

Whilst Google Analytics is a great tool if you aren’t used to online marketing it can be confusing or worse provide misleading results. So below is an overview to get you started on Analytics.

Audience

Start in the Overview tab, from here you can get day by day (or even hour by hour) break down of all website traffic plus can see the following:

Sessions – the amount of times your website has been visited

Users – the amount of unique visitors, generally more important than Sessions as it eliminates repeat visitors

Average Session Duration – how long someone is on your site, which is a good indication of how much relevant content there is available for them to review

NB. If your marketing solutions are working each of these metrics should be increasing over time

New & Returning Visitors – this pie chart provides information on how many of your website users return to the site. As a recruitment business it is healthy to have returning visitors, this shows positive engagement and that they see your site as a good source of jobs. Mobile – On the left hand side there is also a sub-tab labelled Mobile, from here you can see the percentage of web traffic that comes from both mobile and desktop.

Acquisition

This tab provides information on where your website traffic originates. This is incredibly powerful data that allows you to review the effectiveness of platform specific activities. The initial chart breaks the traffic by high level source. In this example Social [Media] is the highest contributor, followed by Organic Search (generally Google). Each of these traffic sources can then be further expanded to show specific sources, for instance clicking Social will show traffic results from each social network.

Note that when you click Organic you will see some of the keywords that have been searched, but the majority aren’t visible.

Behaviour

This tab is useful to gain an insight into which landing pages your users arrive on and then using the Behaviour Flow sub-tab you can see where users next navigate.

Conversions

This is perhaps the most important of the tabs. By setting up Goals, Analytics shows how many of your website users completed a specific action. For recruiters these actions are most commonly setup to record when a candidate applies to a job or when a client registers for a whitepaper or similar. From the Goals sub-tab you can see the total user goal conversion rate (as a percentage) and by clicking the Source / Medium link Analytics shows the specific sources that these converted users originated from.

Example 1, Return on Investment on Job Boards

Onestop Recruitment spent $4,000 a month on a job board, this led to 500 website visits, of which 200 users applied or registered their details.

At a ratio of 100 applicants to 1 placement with an average fee of $13,000, this campaign resulted in $26,000 revenue at a cost of $4,000.

Example 2, Return on Investment on a Social Campaign

Fasttrack Careers spent $5,000 preparing a labour trends whitepaper, $1,500 designing graphics for an online marketing campaign and $2,000 promoting the content across the social channels. This spend led to 5000 website visitors and 35 client registrations requesting to have the whitepaper delivered.

At a ratio of 5 clients visits to 1 placement and an average fee of $8,000 this campaign resulted in $56,000 revenue at a cost of $8,500.

NB. Working out the placement ratios is a little harder as it relies on additional data, most databases now have this functionality or it can be manually tracked over a period of several months.

Measuring Brand Growth

Whilst campaigns can be tracked using goal conversions improvements in brand strength and recognition are harder to measure. Rather than using goals, data should be compared with the month previous and the same month the year before. This tracks on-going progress and also ensures seasonal fluctuations are taken into consideration.

To run comparison data select your current data range and then click Compare to and enter the dates of your choosing.

Additional Insights

About The Author

Chris has worked in the recruitment industry for eight years, where he has been fortunate enough to spend considerable time getting to know the inner workings of three different recruitment sectors in both New Zealand and the United States.

Relevant data can also be

monitored using the analytics

reports from each social application or third party suppliers. In some cases this data can only be used to verify the accuracy of both sets of results, but in others additional insights can be found.

LinkedIn analytics are a good example of these additional insights, highlighting the amount of interactions that occur on both organic and paid posts. Interactions are then shown as a percentage of the total user impressions, providing an indication on how relevant and engaging the post content was.

Conclusion

The data from Google Analytics is considerably more important that the number of likes or followers your business has, but it isn’t the only measurement tool available.

By setting up your recruitment business with a strategy that revolves around a centralised marketing hub, it will be easier to justify and monitor spend on marketing projects that previously would have held too much risk. Hopefully this will help your business get ahead of your competition as they continue to pay lip service to one of the most rewarding marketing channels.

We also put together a quick marketing self-review, feel free to give it a go here.

Now running Prominence Chris and the team consult with recruitment agencies and employers on strategies that produce better access to talent. Services include social recruitment training, recruitment agency marketing, employment branding and job marketing conceptualisation and design.

Chris is an active speaker and has successfully delivered lecture and seminar based content across all areas of social recruitment. Chris also volunteers as a speaker at tertiary education facilities to provide real world advice to students and career counsellors on how best to utilise social media for job search purposes.

Chris can be found on Twitter @findsouth

Why Reviews are Becoming Increasingly Critical to Recruitment Success

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 13:31:43 GMT

Over the last month, chances are you have been prompted at least once to review a restaurant, hotel or any one of hundreds of other products or services. The difference, compared with only a few years ago is the broad variety of websites that now request reviews. Some are very specific to the industry that they service, for example, Zomato for restaurants, whereas others are relevant to almost every business, for example, Google Reviews.

You may not have even noticed that reviews are becoming commonplace in the recruitment sector. Again, only a few years ago the only major review site relevant to our industry was Glassdoor, albeit that Glassdoor hasn’t experienced much momentum in Asia-Pacific yet. As of today, the review sites that currently exist and are relevant to recruitment agencies in APAC include Glassdoor, Indeed, Seek, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn.

With all of these channels, ever increasing prompts to leave reviews and consumers who are more readily used to reviewing everyday elements of their life, the chance of you or your recruitment business either wittingly or unwittingly receiving reviews is considerably higher than ever before. As online reviews continue to become more commonplace the reviews that your business has will, without doubt, start to impact your ability to attract top talent and also win new business. Just imagine the day you receive a response to a well thought through RFP stating that the business isn’t proceeding with your agency because of numerous poor online reviews. Obviously, this is an extreme example, but at the other end of the spectrum are really high-quality candidates who elect to work with another Recruiter because they have better or more credible personal LinkedIn reviews (in this case recommendations).

Good News

The good news is that it is relatively easy to position your business in a positive light if you choose to proactively take control of your agency’s brand across core websites or apps. This is because the vast majority of our industry isn’t keeping up to speed with this fast-changing consumer behaviour.

With the exception of LinkedIn, on every other review site, it is nearly impossible to remove or edit unwanted feedback. This means that if left unchecked the probability of your agency’s reviews being negative is high. Even if as a business you pride yourself on excellent service there are bound to be the odd anomalies. This is because people leaving reviews are significantly more likely to have had a negative experience than neutral or positive. The only way to counter this is to actively seek positive reviews on your target channels.

As an individual Recruiter, the simplest way to do this is to always be looking to transfer any positive feedback from candidates or clients into online reviews. Expanding on an earlier point, this generally means encouraging recommendations on the main professional networking channel LinkedIn. As an individual Recruiter, it is absolutely critical to have up-to-date recommendations from relatable candidates and clients.

As a Recruitment Manager or Director obtaining positive reviews is a little trickier and involves greater amounts of up-front planning. In our experience, working with many agencies, we have found the best way to do this is to combine review requests with more commonplace satisfaction surveys. Typically, most agencies these days send out automated or semi-automated requests for feedback to clients and candidates that they have either placed or possibly have just organised interviews for or with. These feedback requests are normally through tools such as Survey Monkey and encompass NPS (Net Promoter Score) questions. The Resulting NPS score and other feedback provide a really good indication of how satisfied with your service that particular customer is. It is then only a small logical leap to send those who have left positive feedback a message requesting them to post this on your chosen review channel. In some businesses, it may also be suitable to incentivise the customer to do this, for example offering a voucher or similar. What is critical is to ensure as much of this process is automated, to maintain a good, consistent experience. There are other methods to encourage positive feedback, for example, you could ask candidates during your initial interviews to consider leaving feedback at a later stage.

Whilst you’re building your businesses’ positive reviews and even once you have them flowing, it is really important to also engage with everyone that takes the time to review your business. This is especially true if you’re unfortunate enough to receive negative reviews. The key here is to show you’re listening, that the issue is being investigated appropriately and to avoid long winded back and forth arguments.

Summary

Hopefully, this article encourages you to at least review the existing online feedback that exists on either yourself or your business. If you are looking at implementing a positive review system please feel free to get in touch .

How to Measure and Track Your Recruiter’s Personal Branding Efforts

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 13:12:00 GMT

In most cases, recruiters have larger professional networks than the recruitment agency they work for. We are also moving into an economy where consumers (in this case candidates and clients) expect to hear from individuals, rather than (or as well as) the company they represent. However, one of the biggest challenges faced by recruitment Directors, Managers and Marketers is getting recruiters, who are already busy, engaged in active marketing efforts. The good news is that there are proven ways to get your recruiters on-board and to track their progress. For this article, we have sought contributions from three of the industry’s leading recruitment marketers, which, alongside our own input has resulted in a comprehensive personal branding guide for recruiters.

Featured Recruitment Marketers

Recruiter personal branding is easily divided into two clear areas; online and offline. We’ve explored each of these in detail, and at the end, provided a tool that can be used to set standards and monitor progress within your recruitment business.

Online

There are several different levels of online contribution, from simply engaging with others, through to posting content and finally blogging or video. The reason we say these are different levels of contribution is because each takes a different amount of effort, and in the online environment, results are very closely aligned to that effort.

Social Activity

Encouraging your teams to engage socially (LinkedIn) is relatively easy to do. Either of the following two methods will ensure that social activity isn’t limited to a select few social media enthusiasts.

The first method is quite simple: request that your team visit your agency’s Company LinkedIn Page at a prescribed time each day and then that they share the latest content. This method might sound somewhat draconian, however, because of this, it is also one of the most effective ways to encourage social activity. It is best suited to teams that are junior in nature or not socially savvy. Whilst this method has clear benefits, it also has a major drawback, as many people will not respond well to this kind of dictation. We have seen it being most successful when used as a stepping stone while the recruiters familiarise themselves with being socially active.

The second method relies more on engaging the recruiters and providing accessibility to information. Central to this strategy is planning your company’s social postings in advance and then sharing these with the business through a content schedule. We have found there are two opportunities to share the content schedule, either during a Friday afternoon or Monday morning meeting, or by sending round the social content each morning. Talking about content during meetings is always preferable as this encourages the two-way flow of ideas and helps recruiters to feel the content is their own. Daily emails can work but also risk getting quickly get ignored or redirected to other folders.

If you’d like to download an example content schedule, please click here.

Once you’ve armed your recruiters with this information, it’s really important to ensure that they know how to be socially active. It may sound obvious, but many people don’t. If possible, be sure that every recruiter is trained on the basics of liking, sharing and commenting on LinkedIn (or the social etiquette on any other platform you choose). It’s also a great idea to ensure your team is aware of what they shouldn’t be doing. It’s not uncommon to see recruiters sharing jobs from their competitors or their clients, in both cases giving these people free exposure to their networks. In the same way, without training or guidelines, you also risk maverick recruiters expressing opinions that represent your brand poorly or negatively.

Knock: I’ve been seeing more consultants sharing more personal anecdotes. They’re posting about how, for example, as an IT recruiter they’re learning to code because it will help them be better at their job, or sharing personal stories around job anniversaries and office culture. It shows personality beyond their professional expertise and I think that really resonates with people.

Grimmer: Something I try not to do is share content on the company page, and then have the team all share the same content in quick succession. They tend to have very similar networks on LinkedIn, and it is not ideal to have the same piece of content pop up multiple times in the same person’s feed. Instead, I try to stagger when, where and who shares the content to increase the longevity of the piece. It takes some time to manage, but the engagement statistics are much higher.

It’s also important to realise that the consultants will prioritise activity that makes placements. They need to be educated and engaged in the ‘Why’. If they can’t see the direct benefit in producing and sharing content, they just won’t do it.

From a brand perspective, it’s also important to have a central filter on what content and comments are shared by consultants on social platforms linking to their employer. Consultants might not always be fully aware of how their comments could be construed in the marketplace, and despite what they say, not all publicity is good publicity.

Borg: During induction, we reinforce to our team that they are our Brand Ambassadors: they are an extension of our brand, and we empower and encourage them to authentically post and engage on social media, and to our blog. We also invest time both during the recruitment phase, and at the outset of their employment with us, to make sure that the Recruiters we hire understand and are aligned with our core brand values.

Blogging

Getting recruiters active on social media is one thing, but it is another altogether to get them involved in blogging for your agency. Again, there are multiple ways of encouraging this, ranging from requesting your recruiters to get involved and seeing what they produce to providing a clear, structured approach to blogging.

In most situations, we’ve found that training is essential, as is some sort of formal review process and ideally a blogging schedule, so your team know when they have to contribute. Ideally, the schedule will ensure you have enough content, but also ensure that blogging doesn’t become an unwanted distraction at the same time.

What is also really important is that your recruiters receive feedback as to how their blogs have performed and added value to them or the company. We have experienced success by providing simple certificates with the relevant statistics on them, presented during team meetings or wrap-ups, plus also adding blogging to the annual awards list. Getting your recruiters involved in your mailouts, newsletters or EDMs is also another good way to drive engagement.

Knock: We find that after the recruiters put out their first blog and realise the potential to position themselves as an expert in their space, motivation generally follows. I use Google Analytics to track Click Through Rate (CTR), time on page and bounce rate of each blog. The consultant who achieves the highest CTR for their blog every year is recognised in front of the team. We then run through the most successful blogs and discuss elements of each, allowing us to create better content.

If the blog articles are not at the desired level, always advise why this is and help them to produce better content next time. However, if you find you have recruiters that either don’t have time to write, or simply don’t have the ability to write, one other option is to have their articles ghost-written. This is where a marketing agency or third-party writer will write content on behalf of your recruiters. In most situations, they will have a phone conversation with the recruiter to explore the subject matter, and then go away to write the article on their behalf.

Grimmer: Our consultants understand that establishing a profile as thought leaders in their space through producing quality blogs is a clear benefit. But actually achieving this is the challenge. We tend to find that most of our recruiters are not natural writers. Another potential hurdle is ensuring a unified theme throughout all our consultants’ blogs. We certainly want to draw on their individual experience, insight, and voice; however, their messages still need to align with our company values and brand.

The first step is to help consultants identify their audience. For example, when I sat down with our consultant specialising in the corporate administration and support space, we agreed that the most appropriate audience for her blog articles was her candidate network. We profiled this audience and once she had a good understanding of who she was talking to, and what might interest them in terms of subject matter, it was much easier to write the blog.

You do also need to provide basic structure and guidelines in order to achieve consistency across the brand. Once the structure is in place and the audience is well defined, we generally see the consultants writing confidence rapidly develop.

Borg: The biggest hurdle we find is in Consultants finding the time to put pen to paper all the while running a busy desk. Naturally, they will devote their time to the activity which has a direct impact on revenue generation. Whilst they understand blogging helps to build their personal brand and to position themselves as a thought leader in their area of specialisation, despite good intentions, blog writing ends up on the bottom of their to-do list.

We’ve got a highly personable team, so I encourage staff to inject their personality into their blogs and social media posts. And storytelling works; I find that it is the blogs and social media posts that are an authentic and true reflection of the author’s personality, opinions or experiences, that deliver the highest levels of engagement with our audience. When delivered as a story, content engages the readers who want to know how that story ends.

Offline

The best ways to approach offline branding with recruiters isn’t significantly different from online. However, what we have found is that the single biggest factor that prevents recruiters doing more offline personal branding is actually a lack of confidence. This may sound strange when referring to recruiters, who are traditionally seen as somewhat over-confident, but in reality, this is often a facade.

For most recruiters, that means that it’s more important to address this underlying issue as opposed to trying to get results solely through KPIs. Training is the obvious solution, but there is only so much that classroom training can do. In our experience, having your recruiters attend events alongside your seniors or Directors is the best way to get them used to these environments.

Once they become more comfortable with conferences and MeetUps, it’s important to work with them to build a schedule of relevant industry events that are worth attending. Some firms go a step further than this by discussing specific goals for each event, for example, connections made or leads gained.

If you have a particularly adventurous team, then the next step in branding is to begin speaking publicly or getting involved in the events themselves. If you reach this stage, it’s possible for a few recruiters to do this successfully, but you’re probably approaching the territory where they will need professional coaching or training. In our experience, it’s best to start with the Directors and Managers of the business and then involve other recruiters as they become more experienced.

Knock: When at these events, it’s really important that recruiters are active on social media. This creates a crossover of the two branding efforts, and helps to raise their profile and also position them as an expert in their field. Always use an event hashtag to link it all together.

Grimmer: It can be quite daunting for new recruiters to attend events. They haven’t yet developed the confidence to have a value-adding discussion with a prospective client, or the base network that makes it a bit more familiar when you walk into a room and can see a few friendly faces.

We tackle this in two ways. First and foremost, no matter how new a recruiter is to the craft, they need to be trained thoroughly on identifying and articulating their own value proposition. If they can confidently recognise and engage with the value of what they do, they will be far more proud and confident to talk about it in a room full of strangers.

Secondly, attending events with some more seasoned consultants who can assist them in building their networks will quickly lessen the fear. Most recruiters can at least leverage existing contacts in a room to meet a few new ones each time they attend an event which should help grow their network. Encourage them to prepare for an event before they attend, know who is going and actively target who they want to meet, and what they might have to say that could be valuable to that person.

Another great way to build a consultant’s brand in the offline world is to get them involved with local charity events. Not only are they supporting and building awareness for a great cause, participating in a fun run or something similar in a branded shirt will do wonders for their personal, and company brand.

Lastly, remember that your people are their brand! So every interaction, whether specifically work related or not, is still a potential client/candidate. We get a lot of business from friends of friends and people that our team engages with socially.

Borg: Recruiters are typically confident, so getting them to attend and mingle at meet-ups and events is not usually difficult. However, helping them to identify those events that will be of greatest value and making sure they maximise the opportunity they gain from being at the event is key. Using their social medium of choice to post, tag, hashtag and comment before, during or following an event is one way our team does this, thus aligning your online and offline branding efforts.

Identifying which staff are most suited to attend and represent the brand at a networking event is also important.

Tracking Progress

For many organisations, just getting your recruitment team involved is enough, but it’s possible to track progress to also help your recruiters become increasingly confident and effective with their branding. Below, is one idea of how you might track and monitor the performance of the recruiter’s personal branding activity.

Knock: Branding and social influence can be hard to quantify in the short term, but educating consultants to utilise LinkedIn and Twitter analytics opens the door for more strategic content marketing rather than a ‘spray and pray’ approach. A very basic example would be

showing your recruiters how to analyse which posts are receiving better engagement on each platform and adjusting content accordingly.

Grimmer: One other way to track performance is to record the volume of placements that come from sources outside of job boards. The more referrals and self-sourced candidates the better. We aim for at least 75% of our placements to be through referral.

Borg: Engagement is key, and these days it is easily measured with the accessibility of social media data and analytics tools. We educate consultants on how to measure success when posting content and blogs, and then encourage them to use their voice to experiment with their content themes and format to garner higher levels of engagement from their targeted audiences.

Thanks

Thank you to Christina, Fiona, and Jeannette for taking the time to contribute to this guide. Hopefully, it will help you, as either a recruitment Manager or Director, to progress your team’s personal branding journey.

A Guide to Recruitment SEO

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 11:08:52 GMT

At Prominence, we don’t develop websites but as a specialist marketing agency for recruiters, we do get exposure to a huge volume of recruitment websites. One thing we’re repeatedly surprised by is the number of poor sites that sit high in the top 10 of a simple Google search. By poor we’re referring to either old or non-responsive (not suitable for mobile) designs, little in the way of calls to action (after all you want people to do something when they land on your site) or just generally short of useful or engaging information for any of the three core recruitment audiences (the three c’s, [recruitment] consultants, candidates and clients).

Luckily, there appears to have been a sea of change creeping in over the last few years, with many recruitment firms investing in updated websites. The problem for most of these companies however, is that although their websites now look visually appealing and are technically up to date, they still aren’t showing up on a Google search for relevant keywords. Worse, the same agencies that have old fashioned and dated websites still remain in the top 10.

Enter the mythical beast that is Recruitment SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t new, it was here in the heyday of AOL and Ask Jeeves. To a novice, it can appear to be a hugely complex subject with many unknowns. It’s actually fairly simple, you need to focus on getting a few basics right and then, if you really want to push the boat out, there are a number of technical measures that can also be implemented.

Google changes how it ranks search results on a regular basis, but assuming you have a fairly modern website that is responsive, then the only three things you need to consider are: site structure/architecture, keywords/phrases and maintaining regularly updated good quality content.

Website Structure

Your web vender should have helped with recommendations for this. However, because doing this correctly requires more work than a standard website (from you) and obviously adds additional expense to the project, it often gets missed or only half completed.

Think of the structure in the mind of your customers (any one of the three c’s). The site needs to be easy and obvious to navigate but also it MUST have individual pages that are dedicated to your business’s core areas of service. Examples include, pages for each of your locations, specialist business areas, jobs you recruit for, and business specialities (permanent, contract, temporary, executive etc).

The reason for doing this is to provide Google with pages that are keyword rich for each specific area of your business. If, for example you just have a single page for all of your specialist business areas, then the chances are that each speciality will only be mentioned once at most and potentially other synonyms that could be searched, won’t be included. If this is the case you’ll be missing out on good quality, relevant traffic.

One last note on structure, whilst your building these pages you also want to ensure that if someone happens to land on them, that there are obvious calls to actions (CTAs) so you can convert additional traffic into leads and results.

Keywords/Phrases

This isn’t jamming your site full of every keyword you can think of. It is however, thinking about the terms that people are likely to be searching for when they find your site. Take it a step further and it should just be the terms that people who YOU WANT to visit your site, are likely to be searching. For example, if you run a specialist medical recruitment business in Melbourne do you want people finding you when they search for a generic term like Australia Jobs? If you do this, a high percentage of those who click through to your site won’t find information that is relevant and will therefore quickly leave your page. This tells Google your site isn’t relevant for this term and could actually harm your SEO. Instead focus on key phrases that are relevant to your audience, in this example, perhaps Medical Recruitment Agency, Melbourne would be better.

There is some science to selecting keywords, for example you should review monthly search volumes by using Google Keyword Planner and review your high-ranking competitor’s website to see what they are targeting. However, a large part of your planning will be based on your industry knowledge and then experimentation.

When you have your key phrases thread them carefully throughout your website, focusing the most important words on the Home Page (Tier 1) and then the others on their own dedicated pages (Tier 2 onwards). It’s important to not only include them in the body text but also ensure they are in the Page Title and Heading Tags.

Lastly, track the performance of your selected phrases. There are lots of tools available to do this, we favour Agency Analytics, now Unamo SEO, and simply using Google Incognito Search to regularly check where your site features.

Regularly Updated Content

This requires the most time and effort but is important for two reasons. First, Google likes websites that have regular new content, second is backlinks. Backlinks are links to your website from other websites. The higher the quality of the links your site has the more likely your site is to rank highly. This also explains to a certain extent why some older sites have a high Google ranking, they have been around for a long while and built up many backlinks.

Don’t worry about paying third party providers to actively pursue backlinks, it’s an old-school practice that generally does more harm than good. Instead, focus on having good quality content that other people will want to link to. This could be a research paper than other sites link to as a reference, a press release or a simple blog that is shared across social media. The better the site linking into your website the greater the impact. So, if you can find ways to get links from newspapers, industry publications or anything else similar then this is especially good.

Start Small

This article is only a brief introduction to Recruitment SEO, there are obviously many more things you can be doing, some of which are technical such as Canonical Tags, XML Sitemaps and even getting a Wikipedia page. Our advice is to start small. Pick a part of your business that generates a lot of your revenue (or one that you’d like to generate a lot of your revenue!) and then focus your SEO efforts on this area. Once you start seeing results (anything from one to six months), you can then build this out across other parts of your business.

It’s worth noting that large international recruitment agencies don’t have any real advantage with SEO. They may get more press coverage and have bigger marketing teams, but they also have to cover a broader range of keywords. This means a smaller agency with good website structure/architecture, well thought out keywords/phrases and regularly updated, good quality content can just as easily get to the top of Google Search.

If you’re looking for support with your recruitment website’s SEO content, feel free to get in touch .

Why Recruiters Should Own and Operate A Salary Survey Tool

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:53:21 GMT

Salary surveys are old marketing, right? Actually, far from it. Even in today’s digital age they remain one of the most effective sources of warm client and candidate leads.

The key to getting results out of salary surveys is to modernise the approach. The large agencies have been producing sizable hard copy reports for many years. They’ve obviously updated this approach a little and made them available online – providing the user enters their details!

The big difference now is that there is no need to spend an eternity collating and producing all of the statistics, only to find out that you have half-data or missing results.

To get the most out of your recruitment agency’s salary survey, the key is to do two things: have an online tool that provides the participant with some form of instant gratification, and produce one or more offline and online reports that report on the trends in the data.

Online Tool

The volume of people searching online for salary data, either as a job seeker or employer, is only just behind the volume of people searching for jobs. The big difference is that many of these people may not be quite ready to search for jobs, so their details can potentially be captured at an earlier stage. One look at the suggested search results in Google gives you some idea what people are looking for:

You can see from the above searches that people are searching quite specifically for data. They are no longer prepared to settle for vague data that lists them with every other person with the same job title in the same city. This change in demand is due largely to a change in consumer behaviour. The good news is that this leaves a gap for niche salary survey tools that target your agency’s unique specialisation, location or industry.

There are several salary survey tools available, all of which can be purchased on monthly subscriptions. Some also have a setup fee, and then depending on the tool they can be rebranded to look and feel like they belong to your agency. The major difference between the tools is that some require you to share your data, and the ownership remains with the vendor, whereas others are hosted for you but everything (including the data) remains your intellectual property. It’s also important to look at how much customisation is possible, especially around the specific questions. After all, the questions asked in Executive are going to be significantly different from those in Blue Collar sectors. Whatever the tool, it is crucial that they offer immediate value to the user. In today’s digital age, people want instant results and will skip anything that doesn’t offer this in favour of something that does. As an example, our tool provides the user with an exact indication of how their salary compares directly to people with the same job title in the same region or even sub-sector of that region.

Salary Report

The purpose of publishing a report is centred around clients. Whilst clients will enter their own salary data (everyone is a candidate after all!), there is more value for them in seeing data comparisons so they can see compensation levels for their teams. There are three ways reports can be used to attract and engage clients. The first is to have the report available online so employers searching for data will find it and then have to enter their details to download it (an instant BD lead!). Some recruitment agencies use salary reports as sales enablement tools for their recruiters; producing the report but not marketing it, and tasking the recruiters with organising as many client meetings as possible to walk through the results. The most time-intensive use is to host an event to discuss the report’s findings and any other items of interest. These may take a while to organise, but they are a great platform and provide fantastic one on one time with clients. Producing reports from a good online salary tool is fairly easy. For example, our tool offers a simple CSV/Excel export function. This data can then be sorted and filtered to suit your needs. Some recruiters choose to produce one large report, others break the findings into smaller reports or snapshots. Either is a good option, so do what best suits your business.

Two examples of our online salary tool can be viewed here and here. If you’d like more information on having your own Salary Survey Tool, please feel free to contact us.

Protecting Your Recruitment Marketing IP

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:40:22 GMT

When we are speaking to a potential new recruitment customer, one of the questions that we are regularly asked is how as a recruitment industry specialist marketing agency we ensure that we avoid conflicts of interest when representing different recruitment agencies. In summary, we carefully manage our client relationships so that conflicts are avoided and approach any concerns raised with complete transparency. There is obviously a lot more to it than that, so below is the detailed answer:

Visibility is Everything

In the world of marketing, nearly everything that is undertaken will at some stage be publicly visible. In fact, often the more visible something is, the better! The key is to ensure that while the activity is being planned it is kept under wraps so that a competitor can’t beat you to the punchline. Once a particular strategy is live, the chances of it being copied are high, as other firms will inevitably try to go with options that are proven, easy wins.

As an example, we believe we were the first company to really get social job marketing cards right. Simple, branded, customisable images which recruiters could use on social media to promote their hot jobs. We’ve been doing this for over three years and nowadays most recruitment firms have their own version. The key with marketing is to continue to innovate. In the recruitment sector, the pace of change is slower, but this point is still important, especially in today’s digitally driven environment.

However, as a marketing partner, if we were to utilise a client’s unique idea for another agency, this would be a clear breach of trust. We would expect to go out of business pretty quickly if that was how we operated! One of the benefits of working with us is that those barriers exist. If you have an internal marketer who leaves for the competition, or another firm simply copies your ideas, there are no barriers at all.

That said, there are elements to marketing that are commonplace and can’t be ‘owned’ by any particular firm. Salary Surveys are a great example. How many recruitment agencies produce salary surveys? It’s a lot, many of whom are in direct competition. There is nothing new about them (although our product is pretty cool!), so multiple clients producing these rarely presents an issue.

We’re Your Partners

s a marketing partner, we ensure we are heavily exposed to and involved in your recruitment agency’s marketing strategy. However, we avoid exposure to your day-to-day business strategy unless it’s absolutely necessary. For us, this allows us to get on with our part of the job to the best of our ability, but this unique way of partnering also means that we avoid other conflicts that could otherwise present themselves; such as the movement of staff between agency or competing for similar business.

Furthermore, everything we do for our clients is brand personalised and specifically tailored to that agency. This is the true value of content marketing. We may write 10 different blogs on CV tips (sometimes even for the same client!) but each will have a unique angle, reflecting the different opinions and outlooks of every recruiter we speak to.

We do this by having a dedicated team that pays close attention to what makes each recruiter, and each agency different, and reflects that in the work that is produced for them. Internally we have grown to be such a size where we have numerous strategists, writers and designers, ensuring that content produced for one client will not be similar to that of another. We also operate very stringent Chinese walls, whereby the work of each client is kept isolated from one another.

In Closing

Like all business partnerships, there are always conflicts that will arise. It’s unavoidable, to some degree. It’s our belief that when these conflicts happen, it is how these are addressed and managed that makes a great partnership. As mentioned, we know this is a sensitive issue for our current and prospective clients, so we approach it with care, sincerity and complete transparency. If you’d like to speak to a marketing partner whose ethos is based around co-operating effectively to deliver excellent results, then we’d love to speak with you.

To Outsource or Not? How to Choose Between Agency and In-House Marketers

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:34:53 GMT

Not surprisingly, when we speak with prospective clients, one of the first questions we get asked is: “Can you tell me the differences between hiring an in-house marketer and outsourcing to an agency?” We’re obviously biased, but the reality is that there isn’t a simple answer to this question, as a lot depends on the specific situation of your recruitment business. So, with this in mind, what we’ve tried to do here is to provide an overview of what you can expect with the two different approaches to recruitment agency marketing.

The main two elements you should consider when evaluating your marketing options are costs and objectives. For example, if your budget is less than $40,000 per annum, then your choice is limited to either working with an agency or hiring someone to work part time. In the same way, if your objective is to grow quickly and outpace your competition, then your budget and approach will obviously need to reflect this.

In-House Marketing

Firstly, let’s explore the different types of in-house marketer that are typical in recruitment firms. The commonly agreed ideal in-house scenario is to have a senior marketer tasked with overseeing strategy and campaigns, supported by one or more juniors who can carry out day-to-day delivery, such as content writing, graphic design and social media management.

Most mid-sized agencies (in this case I’m referring to any recruitment business of up to around 100 recruiters) aren’t fortunate enough to have a budget big enough to warrant this ideal scenario, so instead opt for one of three solutions: hire a senior marketing professional, hire a marketing graduate or transfer someone internally into the role (usually a recruiter or admin). Each of these solutions is going to bring different assets to your business. Obviously, a senior marketer will know how to put together a strategy, although it would be ideal if they will have already worked in the recruitment sector as there are very few other industries that have two or even three very different audiences (candidate, clients and sometimes recruiters). The other two solutions won’t be much help with strategy, but internal moves are likely to have the best understanding of the recruitment sector and your company’s brand, whilst marketing graduates, especially those with a year or two of experience will likely be the most competent across all the tools needed for delivery.

Whichever option you select, if they are going to be the sole marketer in your business, it’s vital to ensure they are a true generalist rather than a specialist in a specific subject area. To deliver on a good strategy they will need the following skills, listed in order of importance: Basic Marketing Principles, Content Writing, Graphic Design (this really has to be Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign), Google Analytics, MailChimp (or other EDM tools), Social Media (LinkedIn Advertising, Facebook Business Manager, YouTube), Google AdWords. Other desirable skills include: Basic HTML/Wordpress knowledge, SEO, and Video Editing (Premier Pro). In addition, probably the most important skill your marketer needs to have is the ability to influence, hold their own and drive action. I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say recruiters are a unique group of people. We are always flat out juggling lots of jobs, candidates and clients, and rarely have time for anything else. In order for recruitment marketing to really succeed, your marketer has to be able to get these people to give them some of their time, make decisions and ideally contribute towards the activity.

When hiring your marketer, also evaluate their long-term plans. It is vitally important that your marketer remains with the business for at least the first two years. This is because it will take three to six months to get up to speed and if they leave within the two-year window, you’ll find yourself back at the beginning. A junior will likely remain challenged during this time but a senior may outgrow the company and role.

Lastly, no matter what marketing mix you decide upon (even sizable marketing teams) it’s likely you will still need some external support; most commonly online advertising and retargeting are outsourced, but also graphics, video, writing, or whatever other skills the team either doesn’t have or doesn’t have time to do.

Outsourced Marketing

Let’s start off with what outsourced marketing is. Most marketing agencies are geared around campaigns and paid a small retainer to be available as and when the need for these arise. Each campaign is then priced based on the work required. The evolving digital landscape has meant that for the last ten years there has been a new model that caters to the constant on-going marketing efforts, termed Outsourced Marketing.

If you expected me to say this solution is perfect for every business, you’d be wrong. It isn’t. For starters, we know that the outsourced model only works for businesses that have more than five full-time recruiters (unless you’re in high-growth mode), we also know that for some, having a person in-house that can be summoned at a moment’s notice is a deal-breaker.

The key to successful outsourcing is to work with a partner agency that has an in-depth understanding of the local recruitment market. If you have this in place, there aren’t a lot of differences between having an in-house marketing team. The agency will have one or more people who will assist and direct strategy, then specialists that take care of each component of your delivery, from social media through to graphics and content writing. With specialists in each department, you can expect that the time taken to complete various marketing tasks to be faster than a generalist marketer who is trying to cover multiple bases. You’ll also get access to all of the agency’s industry knowledge and insights, avoiding wasted time and effort on campaigns that underperform. Communication is the critical success factor. Where possible it’s important to treat the agency team as an extension of your team. As an example, putting them in direct contact with your recruiters to ghost-write articles on their behalf, or having them present marketing updates to your management team or board of directors.

Costs

There are two costs that should be considered when setting up a marketing function. The first is the cost of the person(s) or agency delivering it, and the second is the budget needed for advertising, sponsorship and events; although if you’re supplementing an in-house team’s skills with graphic design, writing or digital skills, then you’d also need to factor this in. The general rule of thumb is that you should factor in twice the salary or cost of your marketing function for advertising etc. This obviously varies if you need to outsource more of the components or are in aggressive growth mode and need greater visibility in a shorter space of time.

As the cost of your marketing function varies depending on the delivery approach you select, it is relatively easy to estimate the associated costs. Below we’ve broken down the typical costs for each of the four delivery options that we’ve highlighted in this article.

Summary

Cost and objectives are the two major decision factors but there is also a third that should not be overlooked: the quality of delivery. As an example, we recently on-boarded a new recruitment agency who had previously been using a freelance marketer on a part-time basis. The marketer was given free rein to get the recruitment agency’s brand up and running, with responsibilities that included writing a number blogs, sending newsletters and maximising social media reach. What we found when we took over was nothing short of scary. Although the agreed activity had been happening, the written content lacked direction or planning, the newsletters were full of mistakes (in terms of spelling and simple tools weren’t being used correctly), plus the social footprint was a jumble of unbranded, generally irrelevant content. For obvious reasons, the recruiter’s directors were unaware these issues existed and were happily paying large sums of money for sub-standard results.

Whichever route you choose for your marketing, good luck! If you do find yourselves stuck either when selecting a new marketer, putting together your strategy or looking for an outsourced partner, feel free to get in touch .

How Much Traffic Should Your Recruitment Website Get?

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 10:06:28 GMT

One of the key measures of how strong your online brand is, is the volume of RELEVANT website visitors it receives.

It doesn’t matter if you have the flashiest, best looking website in your region or even country, if you don’t have enough people seeing it, the design means nothing.

The higher the number of visitors, the greater the volume of job applications, client vacancy requests and even recruiters applying to work for you will be.

Obviously, there are other metrics you should pay attention to, but knowing your website Sessions and Users, and how this compares to industry averages is a very good starting place.

Finding Industry Averages

So, what are industry average website traffic numbers? Well, there is no easy answer to this because every business is different and there is definitely no publicly available data on the subject (we recruiters are a private bunch!). With many recruitment clients throughout Australia and New Zealand we are probably the best place organisation to access and provide some insight on this subject.

Comparative data is best broken down by the number of recruiters working for the agency, which is a good indicator of size. As well as size, we’ve split the data into clients with active marketing programs and those that are typical of the average recruitment agency.

We’ve included Sessions and Users as these are both helpful numbers to know. Sessions is all visits to your website, Users are the total number of unique visitors to your website.

Other Success Metrics

Other statistics you should keep a close eye on include; the amount of time the visitors spend on your recruitment website (Time on Site) and Bounce Rate (Time on Site is the better metric). The longer the time, the more content the user is digesting and the greater affinity they will have with your brand. One word of caution, if your application process is not streamlined, significant time on site could elude to a poor candidate experience.

Also, keep track of how many people come from specific sources, for example Google, Direct, LinkedIn, Indeed etc. Trends here can tell you a lot about your audience and the success or otherwise of your SEO or marketing.

Once a person reaches your site the last two things that you need to know are where they go and whether they complete any actions or goals. It’s here where it is very important to have clear calls to action for all of your audiences; clients, candidates and recruiters (if you’re trying to attract them). Do people apply for jobs, they sign-up to newsletters, download salary guides or register jobs? The tools are there to measure this activity but there is a murky area where data is lost. This is usually in the form of a third party job application tool or the user logically choosing to phone your agency rather than complete an online form. So set up Goals and track User Paths, but also pay attention internally to the volumes of candidates and cold client calls that come through.

True Analysis

The last thing to remember when it comes to website traffic is that we work in a seasonal business, some agencies have more traffic at Christmas, others significantly less, some boom in election year, and others don’t. The only way to paint a really accurate picture for your recruitment agency is to actively track your results over a sustained period of time. When we on-board a new client, we try to record historic website and social analytics for at least six months. We then enter new data every month. You can try (and we have) all sorts of flashy tools, or to export countless documents from Google Analytics, but the best way is to simply manually record them each month. It takes around 10 minutes.

Recruitment Marketing During a Crisis

Tue, 29 Aug 2023 09:37:38 GMT

One of the most commonly cited assumptions is that the balance of power has shifted from candidates to clients almost overnight, and therefore all marketing efforts should be geared towards clients. There is most definitely a degree of reality here as there are fewer roles in the market and finding and securing them is going to be tougher. However, I believe, for most sectors, one of the biggest challenges is going to remain: convincing high-quality candidates to consider a new opportunity.

Speaking to several recruitment leaders who have managed through previous crises, they all agree that risk aversion takes a while to wear off for candidates, with many electing to stay put when they may have previously considered a move. As a recruiter, it is essential to reach these people ahead of time so they are engaged with your brand and ready to move when your clients need them.

This issue is going to be compounded, as client expectations will have changed and they will now expect to be able to attract higher-quality candidates far more easily than they may have done before. In other words, it is going to be far harder to convince them to take a ‘7 out of 10’ when they think there are lots of ‘10 out of 10s’ flooding the market. Therefore, my advice (perhaps contrary to what others are saying) is that marketing efforts most definitely need to be weighted towards clients, but it is essential to continue marketing to good quality candidates as well. To be clear, not all candidates, as this has the potential to distract and waste time, but the very best people in the market who you know will be high value to your clients.

Timing

It has been really interesting to watch how different businesses have responded. Businesses in different sectors are taking different approaches, but we are also seeing seemingly-identical businesses taking approaches that are the polar opposite of each other. I believe this is due to sheer panic and uncertainty, with reactive decisions at the forefront for most of us.

We are going through an incredibly quick, multistage process that has been changing on a weekly basis, however, this speed of change is already beginning to slow.

Marketing Crisis Stages

These stages are relevant to the tactics I discuss below. The key point is that the speed and reactive nature of your marketing will slow, and there is now time for a carefully thought-out approach.

Tactics

At present, with most people confined to their homes, the number of channels available to all Marketing teams (whether recruitment or not) has significantly shrunk and is now restricted to digital/social/radio/TV. This means there is increased competition for the available space, but the good news is that there are also currently significantly more eyeballs online, resulting in a bigger overall audience.

One example of a more engaged or available audience that we have seen is email open rates, which have significantly increased. In the same way, the numbers of people viewing and reading content online has also gone up. So, right now, content marketing is very important – meaning more online and even an increase in frequencies around email. This content should include a balanced mix of indirect and direct messaging. You want to help and assist so your brand is front-of-mind but also make it easy for the audience to take action, whether that is coming to you with a vacancy or applying to a job. Here are two examples ( example 1 , example 2 ) of content created specifically to help candidates and clients during this period.

Remember, the content you produce doesn’t have to be ground-breaking, but it does need to be useful and relevant. Even though your competitors may be producing similar material and advice, don’t let this be a barrier to your own efforts. If you do, your brand will fade into the background, making your recruiters’ jobs twice as hard.

This is not to say there is no room for innovation – there is, and it absolutely should be done. Some of the best ideas and initiatives we have been involved in have been partnerships with other businesses or individuals, and also charity initiatives such as this one .

Arm your recruitment team – content marketing is great, but you are likely asking your teams to make a significantly increased number of business development calls, something which may be a relatively new concept to some of them. It is absolutely essential to make this process as easy as possible, otherwise, it just won’t happen. So, when producing material for email or social media, think about how this can be tweaked for the recruiters to discuss or present to their clients. At the same time, the more input you can get from your recruitment teams on what is going on and what their clients or candidates want to hear about, the more relevant you can make your marketing approach.

In the current stage, I would limit paid spend to absolute core priority groups; for example, a limited AdWords campaign geared towards client lead generation. However, as we enter the planning stage, I expect to see paid digital advertising budgets return to a level of normality relatively quickly.

One opportunity that will materialise is the potential to attract good recruiters to your brand as we move out of this period. I don’t just mean the recruiters that have been made redundant, but those that have been unsettled or unimpressed by their company’s approach and therefore are more likely to want to move. How you visualise your brand’s response and showcase your team during this period will really make you stand out later. Another option I have seen one agency begin to do is to organise Zoom chats with recruiters that they believe could be a good future fit.

Key Marketing Rules for Recruiters

Fight to ensure your brand does not appear out of touch, or worse, out of action
Support your recruiters to make their business development calls
Focus on activities related to the core business, but ensure you know what this is first
Be personable, empathetic and reasonable with your approach
Keep an eye on what others are doing, but do not let this lead your decisions

Whatever you focus on, remember it is all about adding value, playing the long game and generating goodwill – people will remember this later.

Chris

Busting Recruitment Marketing Jargon

Thu, 22 Jun 2023 13:01:15 GMT

Marketing, like any other specialist function, can feel like it has a language of its own. And when you add recruitment marketing Jargon on top of that, it can feel overwhelming.

Phrases like user journey, brand personality, tone of voice and customer persona are commonly used but not necessarily explained upfront.

And that’s not even starting on the acronyms! CPC, PPC, UX, USP… the list goes on.

Here at Prominence, we love taking our clients on a journey into the world of marketing and breaking things down into simple, bite-sized pieces of information.

After all, recruitment marketing is what we specialise in, and we want our clients to be able to focus on their core business working with their clients and candidates rather than Googling “what does CX mean?”

In this blog, we’ve created a jargon-buster list to help you on your way to cracking the code of recruitment marketing.

Branding for Recruitment Agencies

Kicking things off with a big one! A brand comprises a number of elements that together represent the value and influence you have on your customers. It’s more than a logo or a collection of colours it’s also the experiences you offer, the connections you create and the promises you make.

Think of Apple as a brand. It’s design-centric, user friendly and always innovative. Through this strategy, Apple has created such brand loyalty that people queue for hours outside a shop to buy the latest product, regardless of what it is. Sitting behind the brand are supporting visual elements such as the logo, the tagline “Think Different” and a series of cool, engaging ad campaigns.

Personal Branding

Within the world of recruitment, another important term is personal branding. This is applying the theory of branding, to how you position yourself to your customer. So, how do you want your customers to think of you and what experience can you offer them? How do you translate that brand into your communications from networking and meetings to the content you post on LinkedIn?

Big Picture Branding

Brand Awareness The number of people in your potential market who know who you are at any given point. Increasing brand awareness is often a priority for small recruitment agencies that are looking to grow.
Brand Personality If your brand was a person, what would they be like? Are you friendly and approachable or serious and respected? How are you different from your competitors?
Tone of Voice What does your brand sound like in writing or when you’re pitching to clients?

Visual Components of Branding

Logo – A unique visual identifier that is often trademarked e.g. Lacoste’s crocodile.
Strapline/Tagline A short, sharp statement that summarises a brand or product e.g. Nike’s Just Do It.
Brand Identity/Look and Feel A collection of visual elements including logos, straplines, design features and colours.

Marketing Strategy for Recruitment Agencies

When we start working with a new client, we run a half-day workshop that goes through all of their business goals, identifies who their competitors are, what makes them stand out in the market and who they want to work with. This information helps us build a bespoke marketing strategy and a subsequent calendar of activity.

Your marketing strategy should include:

Objectives What do you want to achieve through marketing activity? Do you want to grow your brand awareness or do you want to increase the number of candidates registering?
USP/Unique Selling Proposition – How is your service better than your competitors?
Target Audience Who are you trying to sell to? Do you operate in a niche sector such as financial services or just recruit contractors?
Audience Personas – What characteristics do all of your ideal clients or candidates have in common? Can they be grouped into a few different profiles?
Marketing Mix – What is the list of channels and tools that are going to help you achieve your objectives?

Marketing Tools and Channels for Recruitment Agencies

Content marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on creating different pieces of content that inform, entertain or inspire people. It can comprise social media posts, blogs, white papers, videos, webinars, eBooks and more. It’s not designed to be an overt sell but rather a collection of useful information pieces that can capture the attention of your customers, demonstrate your value and build trust for future interactions (e.g. LinkedIn Inmails). It’s also a great vehicle to drive customers to your website.

Social Media Marketing is a form of content marketing and covers content that is delivered through social media platforms such as LinkedIn, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and more. The content can be tailored to increase your brand awareness, highlight specific roles you’re recruiting for or profile team members depending on your objectives.

Email Marketing is a way to consistently engage with current and prospective clients through email communications. Emails can range from newsletters updating customers with your latest blogs or webinars, to highlighting new roles being recruited. You can also automate parts of your recruitment process via email such as interview confirmations to candidates or welcome emails for new starters.

Search Engine Marketing comprises two parts – paid and organic. Both strive to ensure your agency’s website appears as high as possible on a search engine results pages, making you more visible and driving more traffic to your website.

Paid is also called PPC (Pay Per Click) where you invest money into bidding for appropriate keywords (aka phrases people search on the internet) in return for higher search rankings.

Organic search is also known as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and is a series of steps you take to improve the structure and content on your website to improve search rankings. This may include reviewing the metadata (information that sits behind the website that is read by the search engine web crawlers) or ensuring the copy on your pages is easy to read with clear and optimised headings, appropriate use of keywords and is regularly updated.

Paid Advertising is where you buy space on a media channel to promote your business. Paid digital ads on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google can be cost-effective and drive traffic directly to your website. They are also highly targeted and allow you to refine your search based on categories such as geography, job title, seniority and interests. Other media includes things like radio, print and TV which require higher budgets and make return on investment hard to track.

Websites serve a number of functions including being a central CTA (call to action) on all of your marketing activity, a place to advertise active jobs and a tool to help people find your business. They should be well-planned and user-friendly , SEO-optimised and have a structure user journey that takes them from entry point to action e.g. submitting their CV or making a phone call. This journey is also called UX (User Experience) or CX (Customer Experience).

Get in Touch

We appreciate that’s a lot of information to digest and we don’t expect you to study these terms in detail. As your recruitment marketing partners, we’re here to help navigate the confusing world of clicks, likes and comments so you see real value and return on your marketing spend.

We know the recruitment markets across Australia, New Zealand and the UK inside and out. We offer insights from our wealth of marketing experience – from strategy and messaging development to deciding whether LinkedIn, Facebook or TikTok are the right platforms for your goals and audience.

If you’d like more advice on developing your recruitment marketing strategy or want to find out about our outsourced marketing packages for recruitment agencies, get in touch for a chat.

What To Do Now About the New Gmail Spam Rules

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 12:49:19 GMT

We love quality email marketing – it makes the world go around for recruiters. A well-timed job alert or informative newsletter can do wonders for engaging with people in your database, generating leads and upping your placement rates.

Poor practices abound in email marketing, however. Google is kicking back against the growing volume of spam on its platform, so they’re tightening up their email spam filters from February.

With its new, stricter filter for Gmail spam, Google says it wants to set an industry standard for email hygiene – and Yahoo is also on board with the changes.

These developments will have implications for email-based recruitment marketing campaigns, so it’s important to understand what is changing, so you can avoid getting caught up in pesky spam filters!

Don’t Bulk Email

If your organisation is sending more than 5,000 emails in one day to email addresses with Google domains (@gmail.com or @googlemail.com), or Yahoo domains (@yahoo.com, @myyahoo.com, “@yahoo.com” or “@myyahoo.com etc), the new filter will automatically place you in the ‘bulk sender’ category, an effective penalty. In practice, this means your email messages may not get delivered at all.

For recruitment marketing purposes, it’s vital that you’re tracking the number of messages going out to candidates and prospects, to avoid falling foul of this rule. When you have a whole team of recruiters using CRMs and automated communication tools daily, it’s easy to go above this threshold.

If you have email-based KPIs in place for your recruiters and business development teams, it’s wise to swap these out for KPIs that aren’t contingent on the number of emails going out, especially cold emails.

Add a One-Click Unsubscribe Button

Most email marketing tools include an unsubscribe link template by default, but many of these force users to click through several buttons to complete the unsubscribe process.

Google and Yahoo are clamping down on this by obliging senders to allow recipients to unsubscribe with one click. Effectively, a multi-click unsubscribe process risks getting your emails marked as spam, so you should start implementing one-click unsubscribe buttons immediately.

Google also advises senders to periodically send check-in messages to confirm that recipients want to stay subscribed. You should be able to regularly identify recipients who don’t open or read your messages over a certain period, so you can unsubscribe them – also the best way to keep your database clean and current.

Authenticate Your Company Email Domains

In the unlikely event your business has not authenticated its email address domains, be sure to get onto this pronto! Google and Yahoo will now require email senders to prove they own their domain name and aren’t hiding behind spoofed IP addresses.

Your email service provider should be making the necessary updates to their DNS automatically, but it won’t hurt to double check this.

Watch Your Spam Complaint Rate

Monitoring spam complaint rates is always a good recruitment marketing practice, but now it’s essential for any business sending messages to Google email addresses. Under the new Google and Gmail spam rules, you’ll need to ensure the rate of recipients marking your messages as spam stays below 0.3%.

Going over this threshold can drive up your bounce rates or even risk getting your emails blocked altogether, so ignore this rule at your peril!

Create High-Quality Email Content

Technicalities aside, all effective recruitment marketing hinges on creating content that speaks to your audience’s needs. What we’re trying to say here is, don’t be boring or salesy in your emails. Do be obsessed with making your content relevant to whoever you’re sending it to .

How do you do that? By segmenting your audience into specific groups and understanding their intent throughout the stages of the sales cycle (placement pipeline). This will enable your business to create email content that gets opened and read – and more subscribers!

Beat the Gmail Filter for Spam with a Smart Strategy

With Gmail covering about 30% of the overall email market, keeping informed about changes to spam filtering can have a profound impact on how you design and deliver email marketing campaigns. Ultimately, the best approach to overcoming these limitations is to double down on quality content and better targeting of your audience.

In short, the days of “spray and pray” emails are over for recruitment marketing, but all for the better! For actionable advice and an email marketing strategy that supports your business aims, reach out to the recruitment marketing experts at Prominence. We’d love to help.

What is Digital Recruitment Marketing?

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 13:16:58 GMT

Wow, where do we start with an article titled “what is digital recruitment marketing”?!

Firstly, it is important to debunk some of the myths that exist around digital versus regular recruitment marketing:

1. Contrary to popular belief, offline (job ads, events, etc) and online marketing both still have a place in a recruiter’s marketing toolkit. However, over the last 10 years or so, digital has definitely become the shiny new toy.

2. Digital is not one single thing. This means that whilst automation can be considered digital, so can things such as inbound marketing, social media marketing, email marketing and, of course, paid online advertising.

So, What is Digital Recruitment Marketing?

In its simplest form, digital recruitment marketing is the use of digital channels to reach either candidates, clients, or potentially recruiters themselves, to get them to engage with a recruitment brand, with the end goal of generating more placements.

Digital channels utilised for recruitment marketing include:

LinkedIn

Digital marketing in the recruitment sector will nearly always include something to do with LinkedIn. This is because the social media platform is the primary channel for business users. Marketing on LinkedIn could include a mix of both organic content posted to a recruiter’s LinkedIn company page and paid advertising targeted to specific user groups.

Email Marketing

The granddaddy of digital marketing, email has been around for so long now that it doesn’t feel like it should belong in this group. However, it is still one of the most successful recruitment marketing tools. These days, email has morphed into automation platforms (see the next point).

Automation

Automated recruitment marketing is quickly becoming the next big thing for recruiters who are looking to maximise value from their own databases. Setting up campaigns to re-engage existing candidates or actively develop new clients are all possibilities these days.

Google Search/PPC Digital/Social Advertising

This category is broad but each of the approaches has one thing in common: that recruiters will pay for the visibility of their brand either by click or the volume of users they reach. Search-based advertising can work well for some recruitment agencies, but often, PPC advertising is the more effective technique, especially through emerging channels such as Google Custom Intent.

SEO

This is another topic that has been around for a long while (and one that is also getting significantly harder to master). Search engine optimisation (SEO) for recruitment agencies can be a massive benefit, especially when recruiting for a specific niche in a specific area. Our advice is to focus on the two or three high-value recruitment areas and gear this towards either clients or candidates.

Digital Marketing Strategy for Recruitment Agencies

The areas mentioned above are only the main digital marketing channels that are available for recruiters – there are many others to consider. However, it is wise to not spend too much time looking for new and unique channels and instead to think more about crafting the right digital marketing strategy for your recruitment agency.

As with most marketing, success comes down to the specific messaging that is being pushed out to your audiences through these digital marketing tools. If you are unsure where to start, work backwards – think first about your goals, then determine the type of content that will engage the relevant audiences and, lastly, pick the one or two channels that you feel resonate with you and will most likely yield success.

How to build a digital marketing strategy:

Digital marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. If you are looking for a proven digital marketing strategy built specifically for recruitment agencies or would simply like some honest advice on what works, we would love to hear from you .

Amber Loach – Podcast Interview with Prominence Partner RecWired

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 12:52:45 GMT

Recruitment marketing is unknown territory for many recruiters and rightly so! It’s not necessarily considered a core function for a startup agency that is in the process of building its client and candidate base from existing networks.

But once you’ve reached your sweet spot you have a team of Consultants with established personal brands and a bank of loyal clients you might start thinking about how marketing takes your growth to the next level

In a recent podcast, our Director of Growth, Amber Loach, sat down for a chat with Andy Hallett from RecWired about Prominence, our exciting plans for 2023 and the lowdown on recruitment marketing trends.

They discussed our top advice for recruitment agencies looking to kick-start their marketing activities, from identifying and summarising those key business challenges and learning to find a balance between your EVP and CVP – as well as what those are!

Amber and Andy also had the time to discuss thrilling predictions for the recruitment industry this year, as well as some exciting news about the opening of a new Prominence office in Europe!

Ready to hear more? You can listen to the full episode now.

Access the Full Podcast Now

You can listen to the full conversation between Amber and Andy on RecWired’s podcast now. Or, if you’d like to chat with Amber about opportunities to enhance your recruitment marketing activities, get in touch t oday.

11 Tips to Make Your Marketing Budget Go Further

Thu, 10 Mar 2022 13:13:19 GMT

Recruitment marketing is now a more effective way than ever for recruitment agencies to engage and attract candidates (or clients), and it is only going to become more significant as we go forward. It can be tough to stand out from the crowd whilst also sticking to your budget, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. If you’re in charge of your agency’s brand, and you’re looking to get the most out of you marketing budget, look no further! Here are our 11 top tips to make your marketing budget go further.

1. Analyse Your Previous Marketing Initiatives

Analysing any previous marketing efforts is first on our list. Without this data you’re shooting in the dark. Website (Google), social and newsletter analytics are the best tools to acquire quantitative data. Outside of this, your ATS or recruitment database should track placement sources and peaks and troughs in candidate applications. Lastly, feedback from your hiring managers or recruitment team on the calibre of candidates being generated from each activity is highly valuable, even if it can be a little opinionated sometimes.

2. Guerilla Marketing at Events

Sponsoring events often takes up a large proportion of most marketing budgets. Instead, you can try spending some of this budget on

A red name tag with the word meetup on it

tickets to get your team along to an event so you can do a bit of guerilla brand marketing. 10 (well briefed) people from your team in company branded clothing will generate far more conversations than 2 people stuck at a booth all day.

Whilst we’re talking about events, training your subject matter experts to present at these events offers the unique opportunity to talk to a captive audience of prospective employees and/or candidates. Lastly, rather than fully sponsoring large annual events, try sponsoring the drinks or food, or offering your office as a venue for smaller meet-ups. It’s a great excuse to attend, plus your brand is given promotion for very little cost.

3. Review Existing Supplier Agreements

Outsourcing some, or even all of your marketing, is no bad thing. However, in the same way remaining with the same insurance company for many years can see you paying an unnecessary premium, remaining with the same marketing suppliers can mean you’re missing out on lower cost alternatives. Although time intensive, annually or bi-annually putting your services out to tender keeps your existing vendor on their toes and may in some instances provide significant cost saving by switching.

A great example is stock imagery. Some suppliers can charge hundreds if not thousands of dollars, for images, but there are now many new suppliers, such as Adobe Stock, that have a good range of licensed stock from as little as a dollar an image.

4. Recycle/Repurpose Content

Producing a large piece of content such as a video, blog or infographic can be expensive for many reasons, but there are numerous ways to extend the value of that investment. A video, for example, may attract and engage your audiences better on Facebook than on LinkedIn, but for very little additional cost you could use the research for the video to create a blog or infographic. These would expand your marketing reach to different platforms and also potentially engage new audiences who prefer to digest content through a different medium.

Whilst we’re on the subject of being thrifty, the majority of marketing content has a reasonably short period of impact. Thereafter it may help with SEO, but it will largely be left collecting dust. Simply dusting the cobwebs off of previously effective pieces of content and pushing them out again is not only free, but also has the added benefit of already being a proven success. There are plenty of other ways to re-purpose content, some of which can be found here.

Winning an award, or even being nominated, is free marketing for your business. Research what award ceremonies and categories are available for your sector in the early planning stages of your marketing strategy. This way you allow yourself plenty of time to submit entries and also can ensure your business is doing the work needed to be eligible for the awards themselves.

6. Produce Great Content

Producing great visual content doesn’t have to be expensive, there are now lots of online tools such as Canva or Piktochart that make it possible to design infographics and other images with very little skill or cost.

Written content is generally more time intensive than costly. To reduce the amount of time needed from one or two people, our favourite idea is to engage and train hiring managers or recruiters to write content. After all, they are the industry experts! In our experience, some people will require a bit of gentle prodding to begin with, but providing they are given good training and help with ideas, most can become competent bloggers, and some will even write better content than paid content writers.

7. Online Reviews

Encouraging your staff to review your company on sites such as Glassdoor is a low cost way to promote in-house employment brands.

To encourage reviews, perhaps incorporate requesting a Glassdoor review into your exit interviews. Don’t panic if your business ends up with negative reviews, simply the action of responding and addressing these points will be viewed favourably by most people. In addition, if the review is bad, it will highlight changes that need to actioned.

8. Online Contests

There is a common misconception that a lot of time and funding is needed to make an online contest successful but this doesn’t always need to be the case. Simple contests, such as polls and quizzes, boost engagement and reflect a more personable side to your business. As an example, if targeting those in the technology sector, a quiz asking people to upload images of their first computer could really gain some good engagement.

9. Create Audience Personas

Most of us have a high level understanding of our audiences. However, to cost effectively reach and engage people it is essential, to build detailed personas for each of your target audience groups.

Audience personas should include detailed demographic information along with media consumption preferences, interests, hobbies, and anything else that will help you better understand how to engage them. Here’s a detailed breakdown of some of the other elements you should include.

As a business we’ve been able to gain significantly more reach and engagement by building personas. For instance, with doctors, we targeted away from traditional medical journals to instead focus on mountain biking and golf websites, as we found that these were strong fields of interest for Doctors.

10. Webinars

Webinars, either led by a hiring manager running a job related Q&A or a recruiter talking through job seeker tips are another cost effective marketing technique. The added bonus with webinars is that they can be recorded and then re-used as marketing content for additional channels.

11. Database Marketing

Having candidate and applicant information on a recruitment database or ATS isn’t new, but these are rarely utilized effectively for marketing and on-going engagement. This can be costly if you need to upgrade to a new database in order to set up e-marketing, but a good alternative solution is to export your data to a specific mailing application such as MailChimp.

Crucially, newsletters shouldn’t just be used to promote live job opportunities. You can also use them to showcase on-going opportunities and engage candidate audiences that may not be actively seeking work and to source referrals.

Summary

Hopefully these 11 tips have provided you with inspiration to explore alternative ways of marketing your brands and attracting talent. If you’ve got any more tips we’d love to hear from you, and as always please feel free to get in touch if you’re looking for inspiration in making your marketing budget go further.

How to Set a Marketing Budget for Your Recruitment Agency

Wed, 12 May 2021 13:06:04 GMT

You might call us biased, but we think marketing should be on the top of the list when slicing up the pie each financial year. Far more than the team who “make things pretty”, strategic marketing professionals can help increase a recruitment agency’s brand awareness, drive customers to your services, and ultimately increase your bottom line.

To help you out, we’ve put together this list of things to consider when setting a marketing budget for your recruitment agency so you see a solid return on your investments.

So, how do you to set a marketing budget for your recruitment agency?

How Much to Spend on Your Marketing Budget

Answering this question without a clear recruitment marketing strategy is basically equivalent to sticking your finger in the air. Some rules of thumb have been proposed in the past – for example, dedicating 5-10% of your gross revenue to marketing activities. But the more important thing to think about is where your business is in its growth strategy and what you actually want to achieve from your spending.

For example, if you’re a start-up agency with plenty of in-house expertise but absolutely zero market awareness or client/candidate base, you’re probably going to need to go hard on pushing brand awareness. So in this case, it could be worth allocating up to 20% of your projected revenue to marketing. But if you’ve been operating for many years and are well-established in the market, you might just be focussing on client retention and promoting a particular new service. Here you might set aside five to ten percent.

Another point to consider is whether job board advertisements form part of your current marketing budget. This can quickly take up much of your spending, and while directly linked to talent attraction goals, it shouldn’t be the only strategy used to drive job seekers to your business.

Either way, a recruitment marketing strategy should start with a set of clear, measurable objectives. This not only helps you solidify the purpose of your marketing activity but also provides a checkpoint you can refer to throughout the campaign. Although you will need to take into consideration that not everything ‘marketing’ can be measured and directly attributed to ROI, some examples of marketing objectives include:

Points to consider when setting a recruitment marketing budget

How to Allocate Spend

Any experienced marketer will tell you that the downfall of a marketing strategy is starting with channels or tactics first. This can be seen as the “fun part”, but it’s actually the least important.

The number one priority is properly identifying and understanding your target audience including current clients, prospective clients and candidates. That means knowing who they are, where they are, what media they consume and how much they know about your business. It’s important to look past basic socio-demographic details like age, gender and where they live. After all, the following profile – male, British, in his 70s, wealthy, likes dogs, has two children – applies to both Elton John and Ozzy Ozbourne.

Instead, try writing up several customer personas that profile who your different customers are. As part of that process, you will be able to pinpoint how they get their information about what’s happening in the world – is it through online news sites, are they active on LinkedIn, are they likely to be on TikTok?

This media consumption data will then inform how you reach them with your marketing activities which can either be owned, earned or paid. Owned is through channels that belong to you such as your company’s website and social media accounts while paid refers to purchasing advertising space. Finally, earned is more PR-related so things like unpaid press coverage and endorsements.

Be aware though that your messaging strategy is just as important as your media. You might be able to get your message in front of your dream client or candidate, but you won’t necessarily have any impact on them – whether that’s to simply get them to notice you, drive them to your website or get them to pick up the phone.

How to Ensure ROI for Your Marketing Budget

Return on investment is every finance director’s ultimate goal, and well-planned recruitment marketing activities should be able to deliver. By constantly measuring your activities against your objectives, you will be able to see if the plan is working. For example, as part of our Cost Per Click (CPC) campaigns you can see in real-time how many impressions or conversions you’re getting. Or through email marketing, you can tell how many people are opening your EDM and following your call to action. Web Analytic tools will help you track your web traffic, while social media platforms can measure engagement through likes and comments.

If you’re not on track to achieve your KPIs, you can tweak your creative assets or change direction with your channel mix. The benefit of digital marketing is it’s relatively adaptable compared with offline channels like TV or print advertising. Digital lends itself well to creating multiple versions of an ad that can go out into the market at once. If you see that one is out-performing the other, it’s easy to switch focus and invest more in that asset.

It is worth saying that not all marketing activity is this easy to measure. If you are looking to enhance your brand’s reputation or stake in the market, you might need to rely on qualitative measures such as client/candidate testimonials or informal feedback. While not necessarily quantifiable, all customer observations can help paint a picture that tells you whether your marketing activity is working.

Who is Running the Budget

Another cost to consider when setting a marketing budget is the human resource required to deliver it. This is often forgotten as a marketing cost, but there are different models to consider ranging from having an in-house marketing team to hiring a consultant to outsource the entire strategy delivery. Any in-house headcount can be a substantial cost that should be factored into the marketing budget and reviewed regularly as part of the overall marketing delivery. There are advantages to each different model and it’s important to find the right one for you based on the size of your team, your budget and your business goals. For many recruitment businesses, however, hiring a whole team of marketing specialists is not a realistic or effective option.

Working with a specialist recruitment marketing agency like ours can help you achieve economies of scale, and tap into a broad range of specialist skills from strategy through web development and design – without having them on your payroll.

Here at Prominence, we know recruitment markets across Australia, New Zealand and the UK inside and out, and can offer insights from our wealth of experience – from strategy and messaging development to deciding whether LinkedIn, Facebook or TikTok is the right platform for your goals and audience. If you’d like more advice on how to set a recruitment marketing budget or want to find out about our outsourced marketing packages for recruitment agencies, get in touch with us for a free chat.

Recruiters: Here’s How to Get a Better Response from Candidates

Wed, 03 Mar 2021 12:55:37 GMT

Nearly every business we work with is now operating a candidate short market. Obviously, this means that candidates themselves are receiving significantly more recruiter and job approaches. Our job as marketers has been flipped on its head, to looking for ways to support recruiters as they try to make their candidate outreach and approaches stand out.

Over the last few months, we have seen several tactics prove to be incredibly successful in doing this.

1. Video

There are tens if not hundreds of video applications out there, but which one you choose doesn’t really matter – the key point is to use video. Our clients that use video to reach out to candidates on platforms such as LinkedIn are seeing significantly higher response rates.

A simple smartphone setup with decent light and microphone, plus a willingness to have a go, is all you need.

Our favourite tool for this purpose from both a functionality and cost perspective is Loom , because it offers additional features such as notifications when your videos have been viewed.

2. Role Briefs

A good quality job advert has always been important, but on its own, is often no longer enough. Our clients that fill exclusive and retained roles (which is most of them these days) are working with us to create role briefs that can be shared. The executive search firms have been doing this for a while, but we are seeing this trend pushing into most recruitment agencies.

Again, there are tools that can help with the distribution of these such as Qwilr , however, a simple, well-designed PDF is a great place to start.

3. Automation

For some roles, there is simply not enough time to reach out to every suitable candidate on the database. In these situations, recruiters are utilising targeted mass emails (or texts), paired with automation that is designed to nurture the candidates.

This could be in the form of several vacancies promoted to a specific group of candidates, or a single vacancy sent to an identified shortlist. The automation component makes it more likely that the candidate will see and engage with the job information by automatically resending the email to those who haven’t initially opened it.

We’re a little biased, but Roi-AI is the best place to start here!

4. Animation

When it comes to promoting job vacancies on social media channels such as LinkedIn, old-fashioned text ads and even branded images are struggling to gain impact. Alongside a video, animated ads have far greater reach and engagement, and are proving to be a real winner for our clients.

Historically, producing animation has been expensive, but there are now many platforms out there that make this significantly quicker and cheaper. If you’re an agency owner or marketing manager looking to take advantage of animation but also maintain control, then our newest platform, Valve47 , could definitely be worth considering.

If you need more advice on how to get the market’s best talent to engage with your roles, feel free to get in touch – our team of recruitment marketing specialists has all the strategies, skills and digital tools to help you get ahead.

Prominence UK is a go! Australasian outsourced recruitment marketing agency opens its doors in London

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 13:26:06 GMT

The past year has been a rollercoaster for businesses across the world, to say the least, and Prominence has not been immune to the effects. But the recruitment marketing agency is taking challenges in its stride and leveraging new market opportunities through the launch of Prominence UK – with marketing buff and long-time team member Amber Loach at the helm as Director.

Previously serving as Marketing Strategy Manager, Amber was one of the first employees in the Prominence Australia business and has proved time and time again that her dedication to clients, knowledge of the recruitment world and marketing expertise are second to none. A UK office has been in the pipeline for Prominence for several years, and with recent events leaving Amber stranded in England, it quickly became clear that this was the perfect chance to hit go!

“When I joined Prominence, opening a new business in a new country was not something I had my sights on, but the opportunities and support Chris and the Prominence team have given me have been incredible,” said Amber.

“I’m stoked to be back in London and ready to bring the success Prominence has had in Australia and New Zealand to Europe!”

Prominence Managing Director Chris South commented that “We have been strategically working our processes with a view to bringing a unique offering to England for some time now. Having built a following in Australia through her work, Amber is the perfect person to take our brand and way of doing things to this new market.”

“For me personally, after nearly 15 years away it feels like a bit of a homecoming, so I am absolutely thrilled to be in a position to do this,” he added.

In the current environment, it has never been more important to stand out from the crowd. Prominence’s results-focused in-bound digital marketing services are proven to enhance the productivity and profitability of recruitment agencies. The marketing business targets three core recruitment audiences referred to as “the three Cs”:

Candidates, Clients and Consultants (recruiters). Each of these requires a different strategy but they are all focused on producing the same end-result – an increased volume of quality jobs and improved job fill rates.

Contact

For more information or to request Prominence’s latest case studies, please contact

Amber Loach

Director – UK

+44 7561 385709

Email: amber.loach@prominence.social

Why Prominence is an obvious fit for the UK recruitment market

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 13:28:18 GMT

We’ve known for years that Prominence is a perfect fit for the UK recruitment market – we’ve just been waiting for the right time. But one thing a global pandemic has taught me is that sometimes you just have to hit go and see what happens, which is exactly the conversation Chris and I had a couple of months ago, so here we are!

I never in a million years thought that I would base my career in the world of recruitment! However, I’ve been working in recruitment marketing for over six years. Starting out as an internal marketer in both London and Sydney, to where I found my feet at Prominence, as Marketing Account Manager, and then Marketing Strategy Manager.

As cliché as it sounds, I’ve loved being a part of the Prominence journey from a start-up (the business was just 6 people when I joined) to a global agency, with four offices in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and the UK. And each office chocker block with talented marketers! From senior strategy managers and social media managers to graphic designers, animators, paid advertising specialists, and exceptional copywriters.

Working with recruiters across Australia, being able to offer advice and direction that has genuinely contributed to the success of their business has been incredible. So much so, that I really struggled handing over my clients when I left Australia earlier this year! I’m looking forward to having that kind of relationship with agencies on this side of the world too.

So, why the UK?

The recruitment marketing world in the UK is fantastic (heaps more varied and innovative than Australia, but shh don’t tell them!). There are so many top marketers specialising in recruitment, which means that half of my job is already done – we’re not new to the market, so we don’t have to ‘sell’ agencies the benefits of partnering with an outsourced recruitment marketing agency.

In March 2018 we set up our third office in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Now, we have over 10 people there who are all specialists in their own fields. Meaning we can work in both the APAC and European markets without issue – this also helps us have a huge breadth of services (did I mention we have internal animators working for us) and keep the costs low for the recruiters we partner with.

We pride ourselves on becoming an ‘arm of the business’ to deliver everything from the everyday marketing basics like social media management and electronic database mailers (EDMs), to major projects like brand redesigns, salary surveys, SEO website projects and CPC paid advertising campaigns – all part of an annual marketing strategy and under one monthly cost.

If you’re thinking about outsourcing your recruitment marketing, someone said this to me recently which might help with making up your mind:

“ I completely understand why companies outsource their marketing – for the cost of hiring one internal marketing specialist, you can have access to a whole team of experts. And you’re not relying on one person to have all the knowledge, and staying up to date with the latest trends ”.

And that pretty much sums it up.

Drop me an email at amber.loach@prominence.social if you’d like to have an initial conversation about what we do, and how it could work for you. I know lockdown 2.0 hasn’t been ideal, but I really think spending some extra time over the next months to think about how you want to position your marketing strategy coming out of this is incredibly important.

Stay safe.

Amber