What is Recruitment Marketing and Recruitment Sales?

We all know Recruitment is similar to Business Development. In Business Development one is selling the company’s products and services to a targeted set of prospects, while in Recruitment one is selling the company’s job opportunities to a targeted set of job seekers. The effort, Time, Tactics, Creativeness, and Relationship Management for both these functions are the same.

Let’s take the case of Business Development; there are four distinct stages of efforts, namely:

1. Marketing for Awareness
2. Marketing for Lead Generation
3. Sales for Negotiations
4. Sales for Closure

Recruitment also follows all of the above stages. Let’s map them:

• Recruitment Marketing for Awareness – Here branding aspects come into play – Personal Branding and Company Branding. Personal branding is created by building a strong profile on LinkedIn and then connecting with your target set of candidates and building a talent pool that can be leveraged later. Company branding aspects include Company website, Company LinkedIn page, Company Social Media pages. While the recruitment team is not involved in the Company aspect directly, they can certainly offer their insights to the corporate marketing teams on what attracts jobseeker to look at our company compared to the competition. The intent of branding is primarily to create awareness about the fact that you exist and that you are a worthy company to consider to a career with.

• Recruitment Marketing to Lead Generation – Here the intent is to generate concrete leads/applicants for a given job opportunity. This can be achieved by creating enticing Job Descriptions and then posting them on multiple sites, where they will get discovered (strong SEO keywords usage) by job seekers with relevant skills. Your lead generation becomes stronger if your Marketing for Awareness is strong as well.

• Recruitment Sales for Negotiations – Here the recruiter is selling/negotiating the job opportunity to the job seeker. Key here is the ability to understand jobseeker’s aspirations and then being able to effectively map the benefits the job offers to those aspirations. If the mapping is not strong, the ability to let go of the job seeker to avoid drop-offs at a later stage is also key.

• Recruitment Sales for Closure – Here the recruiter ensures that all the queries and terms of employment are clearly understood by the jobseeker; getting the job seeker to share all the relevant documentation to initiate onboarding process and finally constantly being engaged with the jobseeker till he or she joins; then ensures proper closure.