Alex Faiers, founder of website design and digital marketing agency Addictivity, told recruiters at Scaling Your Recruitment Business, an event hosted by Rattingers accountants in London, that recruiters “were paying lip service to digital marketing and the opportunities that it can produce”. Improving the conversion rate so that, for example, more candidates applied for the jobs a recruitment agency posted online was the key, said Faiers.

Faiers said the first step was to assign a monetary value to conversions. “If two successful candidates, who apply through your website or via a digital marketing campaign, generate £10k in fees, raising the conversion rate from 2% to 10% would generate £100k – a 900% increase.”

He then went on to make a number of practical suggestions: “Focus on solving a specific problem for a specific person.” Faiers said a good example of ‘a lead magnet’ was a salary survey, which he said “works brilliantly both with clients and candidates”. He suggested that this could be the first of what typically would be 12-14 touch points.

Automate your marketing, said Faiers, citing the example of contacting candidates, who had previously responded positively to content in the past to inform them of a newly published blog. “It is automatically working for you 24/7, building authority and trust with both clients and candidates over time. It is about adding value to someone’s life so that you are top of mind,” he said.

Technology meant that automation of content could be ‘smart’, he explained, so that how a candidate or client previously responded could determine the content and messages they then received. Faiers said no one was doing this ‘remarketing’, where candidates are sent targeted ads, and if they don’t apply for a particular job they are shown a different ad.  

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