Trends, Product and Industry Insights to Help Create Your HR Tomorrow, Today.
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Focus on Talent
May 5, 2014
Should Recruiters Have Marketing Experience?
The term 'Recruitment Marketing' has been generating a lot of buzz in recruitment circles for quite some time now. Contrary to what many recruitment technology vendors may say, Recruitment Marketing is not a product or feature, but rather an increasingly critical competency of a successful recruiting organization.
The term seems to have been spawn from the growing list of similarities between what Recruiters do and what Marketers do. In a recent blog post on ERE.net, Jacque Vilet made a strong argument that Recruiting should be moved to the Marketing department. Regardless of where the Recruitment department sits, the table below shows how similar their activities are, even if in some cases, the terminology is slightly different.
|
Marketing |
Recruiting |
|
Find prospects to turn into customers |
Find candidates to turn into hires |
|
Strengthen consumer brand |
Strengthen employer brand |
|
Create and promote advertisements |
Create and promote job postings |
|
Build web sites / landing pages |
Build career sites / job pages |
|
Ensure web sites are mobile friendly |
Ensure career sites are mobile friendly |
|
Create corporate social network pages |
Create career social network pages |
|
Push corporate content through social channels |
Push careers content through social channels |
|
Streamline and optimize the buying process |
Streamline and optimize the application processes |
|
Nurture leads |
Nurture your talent network / communities |
So for me, this begs the question. When hiring people for your Recruitment function, should they have a Marketing degree or have prior Marketing experience? A quick search of Indeed for Recruiting positions shows that this is already the case more often than not. In my not-so-scientific research study, 2/3 of the Recruiting jobs posted on the first page made mention of Marketing skills being required or highly preferred.
Maybe at some point there will be academic programs graduating people with Recruitment Marketing degrees, but I'm not aware of any today. So until then, if you are trying to hire your next top Recruiter, take note of what level of Marketing experience a candidate has under their belt. They may be an expert in many of the activities you need, just with slightly different terminology.