Recruitment Advertising Agencies: an introduction What is a Recruitment Advertising Agency? What does it do? Is it worth engaging a recruitment advertising agency for your recruitment campaign? How much do they cost? These are some of the questions we hope to answer in this article.

What do Recruitment Advertising Agencies do?

If you have just one or two straightforward jobs to advertise and you are confident in your ability to choose the right job board or media to advertise on, then you will have little need for a Recruitment Advertising Agency. However, if you have a more complex role, or you have multiple roles to hire, or you are in need of more extensive recruitment advertising expertise using a Recruitment Advertising Agency might very well make sense.

Recruitment Advertising Agencies offer employers a way of "outsourcing" some of the recruitment process to a specialist and dedicated provider. The work of Recruitment Advertising Agencies covers a number of different areas of the recruitment advertising process.

Creating the job specification 

Typically, and like all recruitment processes, Recruitment Advertising Agencies will start with the creation of a job specification. As we have indicated elsewhere (c.f. 'First things first: write a job specification') pinning down the job specification is the single most important part of the entire recruitment process. It's very hard to hire for a job if you don't know what job your hiring for. The advertising agency will liaise with you in defining and creating an effective job specification.

Creating the ad copy and design

Once the job specification is defined, the Advertising Agency will set about creating your ad and design copy. Bear in mind that Recruitment Advertising Agencies will not limit themselves just to job boards (online media) for your recruitment solution; they will also look at newspapers, trade journals, magazines (offline media). All of these different media channels require different advertising materials. The great thing about Recruitment Advertising Agencies is that they can create the copy/design collateral that works for each selected media.  

On a more practical level, they will also look after sending the ad copy to the publisher, checking that everything is all right, and making sure that all deadlines are met. And, of course, you usually receive a final copy of the advert for approval before it goes out.

Selecting and booking the media

Of course, while we at whatjobsite will always yabber on about job sites and job boards, there are many more advertising options for recruiting: newspapers, trade journals, magazines, brochures, posters, flyers, direct mail, event displays, career websites, microsites, intranets and extranets, Ecards, Email campaigns, animated graphic ads, video, virtual career events, podcasts and blogs —to name a few. And let's not forget the newer advertising options like Search Engine Marketing, Adwords, SEO, social networks, viral marketing and so on.

With such a wealth of choice it can be hard to make a decision on what is the right recruitment channel for you. Again, this is where the Recruitment Advertising Agency can come into its own. The Agency has the expertise to be able to choose the right media for your recruitment campaign and, as we said above, to create effective ads for that media.

Response Management

Sorting and sifting through a mountain of response can be tiresome and a waste of your time. Many Recruitment Advertising Agencies also provide a Response Management Service. Typically, this means that the Agency will filter your applications and forward you only the best. But Response Management can also encompass more extensive services such as looking after candidate invitation and rejection letters, manning dedicated lines for telephone screening, arranging interviews for and even conducting interviews with candidates.

Employer Branding

Employer Branding isn’t just about your job ads or company logo. It's about what kind of company you are seen to be by the outside world. It's about how people view your company as a place to work; how your staff treat each other; how you work as a team. (c.f. 'Recruitment Branding: an introduction')

What Recruitment Advertising Agencies can help with is defining your recruitment brand and then using that brand in your recruitment advertising strategy so that you attract the best staff for your company. Identifying your recruitment brand is a complex area and would, we believe, require the services of a Recruitment Advertising Agency.

The Cost

What you pay for the services of your Recruitment Advertising Agency really does depend on what you want from your Recruitment Advertising Agency. But there are a number of ways Recrutiment Advertising Agencies charge for their services. Sometimes, for example, Agencies do not charge the client directly but instead make their money by taking a commission on the the advertising they book. For example, let's say that your ad in Computer Times costs £750. The agency might get between 10% and 20% commission from the publisher for placing the ad.

However, even if the Agency does take commission for booking ads, most will also charge for the costs of ad media production. And for more value-added sevices like Response Management and Branding research most will charge some kind of a consultancy fee.

Online-only Recruitment Advertising Agencies

There are a growing number of Online Recruitment Advertising Agencies that work a little differently to the usual Recruitment Advertising Agency. These agencies only work with online media. Typically they allow you to advertise your job on a basket of job boards for a standard one-off fee.

Because of their established relationships with the job boards, they can advertise your job on this basket of job boards at a fraction of the cost that you would pay if you went directlty. One other benefit of using an Online Recruitment Advertising Agency, that shouldn't be underestimated, is that you'll only have to upload your job once for all these different sites. Check out our Suppliers Directory for our listing of Recruitment Advertising Agencies.

Article updated: May 2008

© Mariola Kraczowska | Dreamstime.com

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