Recruitment Marketing – what’s in a name?

{ 05/11/2010 @ 8:04 am } · { Employer Branding, Marketing, Recruitment }
{ Tags: Employer Branding, Recruitment, Social Recruiting }

As an agency, we straddle both sides of marketing communications – brand/product and recruitment. From this viewpoint, it’s interesting to see how one side gets all caught up in what it wants to be, while the other simply does what it needs to do.

Brand/Product marketing does just that – be it online, in print, on TV, around social media. One simple ‘definition’ to describe how it promotes the services/business/product to capture the audience/market.

Pretty much what Recruitment marketing should do really. But somehow the Recruitment comms industry seems more concerned on trying to label itself to be different for difference’s sake. To give itself an importance. A USP.

Recruitment Advertising begat Recruitment Marketing begat Employer Branding (at which point we even fell into the trap with Employer Personality) begat many more terms today – Employee Engagement (more suited to describe Internal Comms but being bandied around, confusingly, to encompass recruitment now), Employer Brand Engagement, Social Recruiting, Employer Reputation and no doubt a couple more in the time it took to write, and read, this.

After (what is it now over 15 years?) since the term Employer Branding came into the world – there are still debates now about what it means and stands for. Not forgetting those forever raging over how, what and why you need to to create and embrace it. This itch to keep ‘re-badging’ doesn’t help. It might seem like it needs to evolve but it’s never settled for what it is. The buzz-words don’t really create any USP for a Recruitment Comms agency because half the clients don’t understand what they mean. All it does create is confusion.

Is that why many in HR (and some so-called experts in the recruitment field) still can’t agree on what it takes to make a great employer brand or how much value it adds to the business (and the recruitment process)?