You do have the figures… don’t you?  Don’t you?

If you’re putting any effort into marketing your recruitment company you’ll have some good idea of the cost of using various channels

• SEO
• Pay Per Click
• Social Media Optimisation
• Email Marketing
• Other online advertising or sponsorship
• Print media, newspapers, directories, Yell.com, etc etc.

… but it’s not about costs – is it.  If expenditure was about cost we’d all live in the woods under tarpaulin.   It’s about value.  What’s the value to your recruitment website of every pound you spend on any of the channels

And I’m not talking about value of a click – those are just flattery.  Surely you’re measuring your marketing in terms of a good CV or ultimately a placement.  What’s worth most to you – a click from Google on some long-tail search, or one of the 500 hits your site just sent out from its email alerts.

• What’s the best source of good CVs?
• Which keywords are generating the most placements?

If you’re asking those type of questions, you’re on the right track.  Job Aggregator Indeed.com have spruced up and modernised an old marketing phrase relating to the Four As of Advertising and in their white paper remind recruiters how they can only have true control over ROI for marketing if they think like a CFO and observer the four A’s:

1. Assign
2. Automate
3. Analyze
4. Adjust

I won’t go into it verbatim here, but I’m particularly keen on the “Automate” angle of recording marketing expenditure – and am currently helping a client to do this.  We’re looking at

• Providing full referrer information in a consultant’s application email (Source of click, keywords typed (if search) etc.)
• Providing a linkback to the Recruitment Database (in this case the FXRecruiter website also doubles as the database)
• Full custom reporting system that can pull application and referrer data from the database into easy to view graphs and spreadsheets.

Basically, it’s about filling the gap that currently exists between spending your money on marketing and getting good candidate CVs through the door and getting paid for making placements.  And recruitment is all about filling the gap – right?

Alec Brownstein, a 28 year old New Yorker who was in need of copywriting work.

Alec’s plan was to play upon the the guilty pleasure of ‘Vanity Searches’ (Googling your own name) and paid for Google PPC ads using the keyword of the name of his targeted big-shot employers. When those employers Googled themselves (go on – we all do….) the ‘sponsored’ result they saw was Alec Brownstein’s pay-per-click Advert, pointing them to his own website.

The clicks on all the ads cost a total of $6 – and he’s now employed. Nice work.

Using social media tools, such as Twitter, for recruitment may no longer be an optional extra. Businesses may have to do it just to stay in the game, notes Jessica Meher, marketing and communications manager at Nashua, US based Akken Inc. that offers hosted software focused on the staffing and recruiting market. (Read Jesica’s full article here )

Meher said while newspapers and job boards are a good way to source candidates, social media provides a new way to engage with potential employees – and it’s free.

Tweeting your jobs is another way of using the site (something we at Reverse Delta are looking into right now, as it happens!). This is already happening all over twitter – such as this Manchester Nursing Jobs link shows.