Your recruitment marketing strategy shouldn't be something you write once and forget about. Markets shift, platforms change, audiences evolve, and what worked eighteen months ago might not be delivering anymore.
But "refresh your strategy" is easy to say and harder to do when you're deep in day-to-day marketing. So here's a practical walkthrough of when to review, what to look at, and how to make changes that stick.
Before you change anything, go back to your goals. What is your marketing supposed to deliver for the business? More candidates? More clients? Brand recognition in a new sector? Retention of existing clients?
If you can't answer that clearly, that's the first thing to fix. Every activity in your marketing plan should connect to a measurable outcome. If it doesn't, it's either missing a purpose or the purpose hasn't been defined yet.
Ask yourself: why is this activity valuable to the business? What's the objective? How will I know if I've hit the target? What tools and channels am I using to get there? And what is the competition doing?
Everything you do as part of your recruitment marketing needs to have a purpose and deliver a result. Starting from clear objectives makes the rest of the process far simpler.
Before planning new activity, take a hard look at what's already running.
Which content is generating traffic? Which pages convert visitors into leads? Which social posts get engagement from the right people (not just engagement in general)? What's ranking well on search and what's dropped off?
Most recruitment firms spend the bulk of their marketing budget on job board listings because the ROI is easy to track: you can count applications and make quick decisions about which sites to keep. But are your best-placed candidates actually coming from job boards, or from organic search, or from a LinkedIn post a consultant shared months ago?
If you don't know, measurement is where you need to start. Without it, any strategy refresh is guesswork.
Your marketing targets two groups: clients and candidates. Which matters most right now will depend on market conditions, but both need attention.
Candidate expectations shift. Client priorities change. The messaging that resonated two years ago may not reflect what your audience cares about today.
Talk to your consultants. They speak to candidates and clients every day and can tell you what's changing: what questions keep coming up, what concerns are new, what's driving people to look for a new role or a new supplier. That insight is worth more than any third-party research report.
If you want to go deeper, candidate personas are a practical way to structure this. They give your whole team a shared understanding of who you're marketing to and what matters to them.
This one deserves its own section because it's easy to deprioritise and expensive to get wrong.
Why does candidate experience matter for marketing? Two reasons.
Reputation. Candidates talk. They post about poor experiences on social media, on Glassdoor, in forums. Some of those posts get picked up by the press. Not all press is good press - that is a myth.
Business development. The candidate you place today could be the hiring manager you're pitching to next year. The candidate you don't bother replying to could be the decision-maker who chooses your competitor.
Candidate care isn't a "nice to have". It's a strategic marketing asset. If your current process leaves candidates feeling ignored or undervalued, that can become a brand problem.
Whether social media sits inside your broader marketing plan or has its own strategy, the goals should be aligned with the wider business objectives.
The key steps:
Social media moves quickly. What the algorithms reward, what formats get traction, and which platforms your audience prefers can all shift in a matter of months. Building in regular reviews (quarterly at minimum) keeps your approach current.
You can't know where to spend your time or budget unless you're tracking what works.
Where are your placed candidates actually coming from? What drove the client who signed last month to pick up the phone? Which piece of content started that conversation?
If you can answer those questions, you can make smart decisions about where to invest. If you can't, that's the gap to close before anything else.
There are a lot of recruitment marketing metrics worth tracking, from web traffic sources to email open rates to social engagement by platform. But the ones that matter most to your business are lead volume (how many enquiries your marketing generates) and lead conversion (how many of those turn into revenue). Everything else is useful context, but those two numbers are what your board cares about.
A good CRM, consistently used, makes this possible. Without one, you're flying blind.
We have more free resources on our blog, in our ebooks and in our webinars to help you plan and measure your recruitment marketing.