When an opening comes up, the default playbook is to paste the job description to Indeed or LinkedIn, cross your fingers, and wait. Sometimes you get lucky. Most of the time, weeks tick by while your team digs through hundreds of unqualified resumes just to find one person worth getting on the phone.
Job boards have their place. They connect you with active job seekers, like a recent grad trying to break into the field or an experienced specialist between roles. But they can’t be your entire recruitment strategy.
In technical fields like healthcare, life sciences, engineering, and the skilled trades, many great candidates aren’t spending their evenings scrolling job listings. They might not be actively looking, but they may be open to the right move if they know who you are and why your team is worth considering.
If a job listing is the only place your company shows up, those candidates are unlikely to find you. And when a recruiter finally reaches out on LinkedIn, they’re starting from scratch—pitching someone who has never heard of your company and has zero reason to respond.
That’s where marketing comes in. Recruiters screen candidates, run interviews, negotiate, and close the deal. Marketing handles the groundwork long before anyone clicks “apply.” By sharing why employees love working at your company, marketing makes sure candidates already know and respect your name by the time a recruiter calls, or they can quickly and easily research your company and decide that they really do want to work with you.
In this post, we’ll break down how recruitment marketing works alongside HR and recruiters, and four ways to build an employer brand that the right people notice.
Recruitment Marketing vs. Recruiters vs. HR: Who Does What?
Bringing a marketing firm into hiring often raises a fair question: “Isn’t that what HR or our recruiters do?” Not quite. A marketing firm doesn’t evaluate candidates, and your HR team or recruiters shouldn’t have to build ad campaigns. Each plays a different role, and they work best together.
- In-house HR runs hiring from inside your company. They post jobs, coordinate interviews, extend offers, and guide new hires through onboarding, on top of everything else HR handles.
- Recruiting firms are outside partners hired to fill specific roles. They search for candidates individually, reach out to them directly, and screen them before sending the strongest ones your way.
- Recruitment marketing agencies don’t screen or place candidates. Instead, they make your company known and appealing as a place to work through targeted ads, employee videos, social media, your careers page, and your online reviews. They make your company known to potential team members that might not even be looking for a new job.. yet.
Put simply, recruiters find people for a job. Marketing makes people want the job. That’s why marketing helps no matter how you hire. If your HR team hires in-house, more applicants show up already knowing who you are. If you work with a recruiting firm, their outreach reaches people who’ve already heard of you, so they aren’t starting from scratch.
The best results come when everyone shares what they learn. Recruiters hear what candidates ask about and why they say yes or no. Marketing uses that to shape the next round of ads, videos, and careers page updates. In return, marketing shows HR and recruiters which ads and channels are bringing in applicants, so everyone knows what’s working.
How Marketing Gives Recruiters a Head Start
Here are four ways recruitment marketing makes hiring easier, with examples from our work with Geo-Technology Associates (GTA), an engineering firm serving the mid-Atlantic.
1. Advertise Before They’re Looking
If the people you want aren’t checking job boards, you have to bring your company to the places they already spend time. The playbook comes down to two moves working together: awareness ads on social media to build familiarity, and search ads on Google to capture active interest.
Awareness ads promote your company as a great place to work, targeting people by industry, job title, and location before they even consider switching jobs. Search ads handle the other side of the equation. When a candidate finally types your field and “jobs near me” into Google, paid search ads ensure your organization sits right at the top of the page.
We used this exact two-part approach for GTA. We ran LinkedIn awareness ads targeted to engineering professionals based on their credentials and location, not their job search status. Those ads were seen more than 311,000 times at an average cost of $2.12 per click, keeping GTA top of mind across their region.
On the search side, when candidates actively searched for engineering roles, GTA appeared at the top of the results page. Those search ads earned a 2.52% click-through rate, well above the typical 1% to 2% industry benchmark, at just $0.66 per click.
Not sure which LinkedIn ad format fits your hiring goals? Our guide to using LinkedIn ads for recruitment breaks down each option and when to use it.
2. Show Your Culture on Video and Social
Nobody believes a stock photo of a team smiling in a conference room. If you want people to picture themselves working for you, pull out a phone and show them what a real workday looks like.
That matters even more in technical fields, where the work can be hard to explain in a job post. As GTA Vice President Meghan McDonough told us, “It’s hard to make geotechnical and civil engineering look glamorous.” Instead of dressing it up, GTA pointed cameras directly at their active job sites, letting their staff talk through the problems they were solving on the ground. That straightforward look behind the scenes generated over 939,000 views, while growing their Instagram audience by 190% and their LinkedIn following by 110%
Also, don’t be afraid to have some fun with it, especially when you’re trying to reach younger candidates. When anticipation for Grand Theft Auto VI sent searches for “GTA” soaring, we saw an opening. We created “The Other GTA,” a campaign of gaming-inspired videos introducing Gen Z and Millennial job seekers to engineering and entry-level careers at Geo-Technology Associates.
Every post and ad sent visitors to a landing page where real team members talked about their day-to-day roles and how they advanced within the company. In the first 30 days, the campaign drew over 237,000 views, averaged $0.08 per click on Instagram, and more than doubled GTA’s regular monthly website traffic.
3. Let Your Employees Vouch for You
Your current team members are the most credible advocates you have. When the company president says a workplace is supportive, candidates expect that pitch. When an employee says it, candidates are more likely to believe it.
Peer-to-peer trust gives your recruiting team a major head start. When employees share project updates or talk about their work on LinkedIn, they carry your name into networks recruiters can’t reach with cold InMail messages alone. A candidate who sees a former classmate or coworker doing well at your company already has a reason to take the recruiter’s call.
Online reviews are employees talking about you, too. They’re just anonymous, and not always kind. Most candidates read a company’s reviews before they apply, so an outdated profile or a string of unanswered complaints can make them think twice. Claim your Glassdoor and Indeed pages and keep them current. Responding to reviews, including the critical ones, shows candidates that someone’s paying attention.
That reputation work was a core priority for GTA. We updated their Glassdoor profile to highlight what makes the company a great place to work and responded professionally to both positive and negative reviews. That work helped raise their rating from 3.5 to 4.0 stars.
Want to take control of your employer brand? Our guide on how to Glassdoor strategically covers everything from claiming your company profile to responding to tough reviews.
4. Optimize Your Careers Page
Some companies skip building a dedicated careers page and send traffic straight to an external applicant tracking system like BambooHR or Lever. The problem is that third-party portals give you zero control. You can’t track which marketing campaigns drove the visit, and you can’t customize the candidate experience.
Hosting the page directly on your own website lets you introduce your culture properly before asking for a resume. It also lets you see which marketing channels actually generate applications instead of guessing where your hires come from.
The main priority is removing friction. Candidates shouldn’t have to pinch and zoom on a phone screen or create an account just to read a job description. Keep the first step simple. Ask for the bare minimum information your hiring team needs to start a conversation, then save lengthy questionnaires and background paperwork for later interview rounds.
Finally, make open roles easy to explore. For GTA, we built a custom search integration directly into their website so candidates can view openings on an interactive map and filter roles by criteria like job type and office location. That same layout works across STEM, healthcare, and trade firms where qualified people want to sort opportunities quickly by facility or shift schedule before they commit to applying.
Build Your Pipeline Before You Need It
If you only market when you have an open seat, you’ll always be playing catch-up. Hiring reactively drives up your recruiting costs and leaves you choosing from whoever happens to be available at that moment. And saying you would create a job for the right candidate only works if that candidate knows you exist in the first place.
Keeping your employer brand active year-round ensures you are already on their radar when great candidates start considering a career move. That consistency also pays off internally. Sharing stories that celebrate your team and their everyday work reminds current employees why they stay.
Want a recruitment marketing strategy that actually works? See how we help organizations hire and grow on our Recruitment & Workforce page, and reach out so we can talk.