Before you choose the channel, work out what is actually making the role hard to fill.
If your recruitment marketing strategy starts with: “Which job board should we use?”
You’re probably already solving the wrong problem.
Yes, the channel matters. Just not yet.
But before anyone starts opening rate cards, booking media or asking which platform has the biggest audience, there are a few more important questions to answer.
- Who are you actually trying to hire?
- What is making those people difficult to recruit?
- Where is the current recruitment process breaking?
Because a visibility problem, a candidate quality problem and an employer brand problem need very different answers.
The solution should follow the problem.
Start with the people you actually need to hire
“We have 50 vacancies.”
Okay.
But what does that actually mean?
Are they 50 versions of the same job?
Are five genuinely hard to fill and the other 45 doing perfectly well?
Are they all in one location?
Are some seasonal, some specialist and some just sitting on the careers site because nobody has closed them yet?
A good recruitment marketing strategy starts by breaking the hiring requirement down properly.
Look at:
- Role families
- Locations
- Hiring volumes
- Urgency
- Seasonality
- Which roles are genuinely hard to fill
- Which roles already generate candidates without much support
Because not every vacancy needs the same answer.
Some need more visibility.
Some need sourcing.
Some need a stronger proposition.
And some need to be left alone because they are already working perfectly well.
We’ve explored this in more detail in Why the Best Recruitment Teams Don’t Treat Every Vacancy the Same, because one of the easiest ways to waste recruitment spend is to treat every role as if it has the same problem.
Understand the candidate market before choosing the channel
Once you know what you actually need, look at the people you are trying to reach.
Ask:
- Are they actively job hunting?
- How many realistically exist in that location?
- What are competitors offering?
- Is the salary genuinely competitive?
- Are working patterns, travel or flexibility creating a barrier?
- Would somebody need a very good reason to leave their current employer?
This is where recruitment marketing becomes much more than posting a vacancy and hoping for the best.
A care role in a rural area has a very different candidate market from an office-based role in a major city.
A senior specialist who is perfectly happy where they are is unlikely to behave like somebody checking job boards every morning.
There isn’t one candidate market, so there shouldn’t be one standard recruitment approach.
National hiring trends can give us useful context, but they should never replace what your own roles, locations and recruitment funnel are telling you.
Candidate availability and candidate suitability are not the same thing.
Work out where recruitment is actually breaking
This is the bit that saves you from spending money on the wrong fix.
Before choosing a channel, diagnose the problem.
Nobody is seeing the vacancy?
Look at visibility.
People are seeing it but not clicking?
Look at the title, salary, location, employer brand and overall proposition.
Candidates click but don’t apply?
Look at the advert and application journey.
Plenty apply but hardly any are suitable?
Look at targeting, criteria and screening.
Good candidates are applying but not becoming hires?
Now you are looking at process, speed, candidate experience and hiring manager behaviour.
We’ve looked before at what happens when employers do all the hard work of attracting candidates and then lose them somewhere between application and hire in Before You Buy More Candidates, Look After the Ones You’ve Already Got.
The point is simple:
Find where recruitment is breaking before deciding what needs fixing.
Otherwise, you can end up solving the wrong problem very efficiently. And paying for the privilege.
Choose recruitment channels based on the problem
Only now should the channel conversation start.
Job boards can be the right answer when you need active candidates.
Proactive sourcing through LinkedIn Recruiter, Indeed Smart Sourcing, CV databases or your own talent pools can make more sense when the right people are unlikely to apply themselves.
Google, Meta and employer brand activity can help when awareness or attraction is the bigger issue.
And sometimes your existing recruitment advertising is already doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
The problem is somewhere else.
That is why the useful question is not:
“Which recruitment platform is best?”
It is:
“Which approach is right for this hiring problem?”
Because:
- One role family may perform brilliantly on one channel and badly on another
- One location may need much more support than the rest of the country
- One genuinely hard-to-fill vacancy may justify a completely different approach from the rest of the recruitment plan
A good recruitment marketing strategy gives you permission to treat those things differently.
And it also means resisting the temptation to default to the same platform every time.
The strongest recruitment strategies are built around candidate behaviour and hiring need, rather than loyalty to one channel.
Measure recruitment outcomes, not just applications
Applications matter.
They are just not the finish line.
If you want to know whether your recruitment marketing is actually working, you need to look further down the funnel.
Where possible, track:
- Suitable applications
- Interviews
- Offers
- Hires
- Cost per interview
- Cost per hire
- Application-to-interview conversion
- Interview-to-hire conversion
Because cost per application can make some fairly questionable activity look brilliant.
A channel delivering hundreds of cheap applications can look fantastic on a dashboard.
Until you discover hardly any of them were suitable.
Another channel may generate fewer applications at a higher cost, but produce considerably more interviews and hires.
Which performed better?
You cannot answer that properly if your reporting stops at Apply.
Cheap applications are not automatically good recruitment marketing.
We go into this in more detail in More Applications Doesn’t Always Mean Better Recruitment, because application volume on its own tells you very little about whether your recruitment strategy is actually producing the right people.
And if the campaign appears to be doing its job but the vacancy is still sitting open, Your Recruitment Campaign Is Working… So Why Aren’t You Hiring? looks at what might be going wrong further down the recruitment journey.
That is why recruitment marketing strategy and recruitment data need to sit much closer together.
Your recruitment marketing strategy should explain why
A good recruitment marketing plan should be able to answer:
- Who are we trying to hire?
- What is making those people difficult to recruit?
- Where is the recruitment journey currently breaking?
- What activity is most likely to improve it?
- How will we know whether it worked?
Only then do you need to decide which channels belong in the plan.
Because a list of platforms tells you where you are advertising.
A strategy should tell you why.
And that is the difference.
Different problem. Different answer.
How Artfully helps
At Artfully, we help clients understand what is actually driving recruitment performance before recommending what should happen next.
Sometimes that means changing the channel mix.
Sometimes it means improving sourcing, employer brand, candidate experience or measurement.
And sometimes the right recommendation is to leave something alone because it is already working perfectly well.
For clients who need a deeper strategic review, Artfully Elevate helps us step back from individual jobs and campaigns and look holistically at the wider recruitment picture.
That can include:
- Where recruitment spend is going
- Which channels are actually providing quality hires
- Where is budget being spread too thinly – or a complete waste of money!
- Which roles and locations need a different approach
- Where candidates are dropping off
- Whether process, employer brand or sourcing is a part of the problem
- What the recruitment data is actually telling us
The point is not to add more activity for the sake of it.
It is to give a clear view of what is working, what isn’t and where the budget should actually go.
Because a recruitment marketing strategy should not just to you what to buy. It should help you make better hiring decisions.
