New recruiting roles: The recruiting marketing specialist

3 mins, 10 secs read time

WANTED: Talent acquisition professionals with a marketing background who know how to find great talent by creating effective job ads and leveraging the right channels to promote them.

Key Responsibilities: Creating dynamic job descriptions that reflect the position and its duties, implementing new strategies to highlight the company and the benefits of working there, understanding the channels and methods that deliver the best candidates, creating and defining the employer brand, and generally helping the company stand out as an employer of choice.

The problem

Companies today face enormous competition as they strive to find the talent they need to be successful. The ability to recruit qualified talent in an increasingly competitive hiring landscape continues to be one of the biggest challenges facing employers today, with research from SHRM showing that more than half of HR professionals indicate obtaining human capital will be their biggest challenge over the next decade.

So what can companies do to improve their talent acquisition strategies at a time when the best candidates seem to be in shorter supply than ever? The answer certainly isn’t to continue blindly posting your open positions to even more job boards—that strategy will just deliver a higher number of unqualified candidates, wasting your company’s talent acquisition dollars and wasting the time of recruiters and hiring managers who must plow through countless resumes.

The solution

Instead, a solution is to enhance your recruitment marketing strategy, leveraging creative content and new media to target in-demand talent and convince them why they should apply to work for your company.

To guide these recruitment marketing efforts, more companies are hiring Recruitment Marketing Specialists—one of several new recruiting roles to crop up in recent years (in addition to Social Media Sourcer, Talent Operations Manager, Employer Branding Specialist, and Candidate Experience Manager). Recruitment Marketing Specialists are crucial for spreading the word about your open positions to the people most likely to be interested and qualified for the role at hand.

The need for such a position is clear: research from Bersin by Deloitte found that the average cost to fill a position is $4,000 and is increasing every year, mainly due to increased competition. Yet, as a third of new hires quit their job after about six months (side note: this can be cured with structured new hire onboarding), it shows that many companies’ recruiting strategies are not as effective as needed. That’s where the Recruitment Marketing Specialist comes in. They understand how to position a company favorably against the competition, how to create engaging job descriptions that appeal to top talent, and overall, how to draw attention to your company and its job openings to get your jobs in front of the right people.

But wait, there’s more

The role of the Recruitment Marketing Specialist extends beyond just posting job ads to relevant channels and managing recruitment media campaigns. This person also plays a critical role in developing, defining, and conveying the employer brand, helping to uncover and promote the differentiating factors that make your company a great place to work. This is essential to attracting not only candidates who meet the basic requirements, but also who have the personality, work preferences, and shared mission to be a strong cultural fit and remain with the company for the long-term. Those in this role also serve as brand ambassadors, touting the benefits of working for the company at various events, like career fairs or on-campus recruiting events.

As hiring the best talent possible continues to be a challenge for many employers, the ability to fine-tune the entire recruitment process and ensure a more focused approach is key to recruiting success. And guiding those efforts falls to one of the many new breeds of recruiting roles, the Recruitment Marketing Specialist.