Recruiters Are Not Marketers

When the concept of recruiters thinking more like marketers was first thrown around as a concept in the early 00’s, as a recruiter I thought it sounded great. It made recruitment seem sexier, so I thought, “yeah, let’s be marketers!” A lot of recruiters I’ve met didn’t actually plan to be a recruiter as a child, so it’s easy to believe, or at least understand, why the idea that recruiters should be more like marketers appeals to people — just like it did to me.

However, like a lot of concepts that come out of business school theory or HR think tanks, when you just pause for a minute and think about it, it turns out to be quite wide of the mark. So why is it something that’s still talked about frequently?

Maybe it’s something we want to believe, or it’s something we push in an attempt to be more relevant to the board perhaps. Maybe it’s to say, “Hey you know how marketing is really important to sell our products? Well, we are marketing too, which means we’re equally as important too.”

Recruiting has changed dramatically over time. We’ve moved from help-wanted signs, advertisements in the press, job boards, LinkedIn (yeah, that’s getting old now), search engines, broader social media, content strategies, dark social, PPC, SEO, persona mapping, paid social, creative outreach, geo-targeted, geo-fencing, and all sorts of weird and wonderful marketing techniques, using digital tools and software to attract and lure in talent.

So the way we approach candidates has absolutely shifted, and whether you’ve worked alongside your marketing team or built your own sourcing and recruitment marketing function, one thing is for sure: recruiters are still recruiters.

So what do we do differently to marketers? The best of us are focused on relationship building with candidates and hiring managers, and making great quality hires. We’re exceptional at taking a brief, and challenging it, understanding the market they’re operating in, giving advice, and taking pride in hunting down the best person to meet the (revised, realistic) brief. A marketer can’t do that. In fact, I’d go as far to say, when we say we should be more like marketers, we’re greatly undervaluing ourselves.

Recruiters are also adept at juggling conflicting priorities, and managing expectations along the way. We sell when we need to, and listen when it counts.

One big difference is that a good recruiter is in it for the long term, as they know their candidates will be future clients or hiring managers, and they’ll work hard to understand them well, and provide a great service to everyone.

The recruiters I’ve described don’t think they are marketers at all. They’ve adapted their style over the years for sure. They have a social profile, deep networks, and know how to source candidates via the Internet (or they have someone who does that for them if they’re lucky). These great recruiters are great solution salespeople. This brings me to my main point, which didn’t come out of an HR think tank or consultancy talking about wars and talent.

Recruiters do not have a new job description which makes them a researcher, a copywriter, a sourcing ninja (love those guys), a data analyst, a graphic designer, a UX designer, or lord knows whatever else. Those jobs are for different experts. And we should be making sure we fill our recruitment function with them if we want to be best in class, and can make a case for it by justifying the spend through improvement in service to the business, quality of experience, and quality of hire.

But what we should ensure more than anything else, is that we fill our teams with the best quality recruiters. It’s these guys that make the difference between winning and losing. No matter how bad your technology, processes, or countless other challenges you face, good recruiters always find a way to succeed.

One piece of consultancy research I do believe in is the 2014 Deloitte study, High Impact Talent Acquisition. It told me what I’ve known since I started out as a recruiter in ‘02. The relationship between recruiter and hiring manager is the most important predictor of a successful hiring outcome … four times more influential than anything else that impacts successful recruiting (no matter what marketing tactics are in play).

Good recruiters, as Lou Adler points out, perform the most important role in any business. And their weapon of choice is a phone, not a marketing funnel diagram, and definitely not a process map.

Recruiters should be the succession plan for the sales teams in any product business, or hey, vice versa. Get your sales teams to sit with your recruiters and learn a few things. If they don’t, you don’t have the best recruiters in your team that you could have.