What is the best choice when it comes to implementing your recruitment marketing strategy? Do you choose a media agency or handle it in-house using software? If you look at this question with a financial perspective, the choice is immediately clear. Then go with recruitment marketing automation software. That will save you a lot of money!
Recruitment marketing: through an agency or in-house?
Many employers know it by now: candidates really don't come flocking by themselves anymore! You need recruitment marketing to fill vacancies. But then the question is: how do you execute it? Do you go for handy recruitment marketing software? Or do you hire a marketing agency to help you?
Being in control yourself, having real-time insight into your campaign data, easy lead generation, automating follow-up, always being in conversation with your target audience. These are all reasons why more and more employers are putting RMA software at the heart of in their recruitment marketing strategy. But perhaps the most important is money. After all, you can keep a lot of money in your pocket by using tech to organize your recruitment marketing yourself instead of outsourcing it to a media agency.
Save 5 times on recruitment costs with RMA software
By putting RMA software at the center of your recruitment marketing strategy, you save on agency costs, disconnect agency costs from your media budget, gain in terms of time and productivity and remain flexible to make other choices regarding your recruitment marketing budget in the interim.
1. Software license costs vs. hiring a marketing agency
If you run your recruitment marketing campaigns through a media agency, then you pay for buying ads on the channels (media budget) and the hours the agency needs to do the work. Think about setting up and monitoring campaigns, dashboarding and analysis and consultation with the client. Usually at least 30% (but regularly as much as 50%) of the recruitment marketing budget goes to these agency costs. A lot of money!
When you set that against software license fees, it's obvious that you can make huge savings here. MrWork Leads and Jobs, for example, starts at €1,099 per month. Assuming hourly rates from marketing agencies of at least €100 (more often going towards €150), you can buy up to 10 hours from a recruitment marketing agency for the software license fee. And what do you get for 10 hours? Maybe one recruitment campaign, whereas with RMA software you can run as many campaigns as you want.
2. Run more and more frequent campaigns? With software, your fixed costs stay the same
This brings us directly to the next financial advantage of RMA software over a media agency: you can separate the fixed costs from the number of campaigns you run or the media budget you use. With a media agency you have to deal with agency costs that grow along with your advertising budget and/or campaigns, whereas with software you can run as many campaigns as you want for the fixed license fee. This makes RMA software a scalable choice.
3. Save time and increase team productivity
At first it may seem that your recruitment (marketing) team will spend more time executing your recruitment marketing strategy themselves, but nothing could be further from the truth. Thanks to automations, their work actually becomes easier and faster. With smart RMA tooling you can have campaigns live within a few clicks, less time is lost in coordinating with others (such as your contacts at a media agency), you can follow up and screen recruitment leads automatically and you have everything organised in one platform. You save time with RMA software.
So your recruitment (marketing) team is in control and they spend less time on tasks that can be automated. This allows them to focus on the real people work: providing the ultimate candidate experience and making the right match between candidate and vacancy. The result: you can get more done with smaller teams.
4. Stay flexible with your recruitment marketing budget
A partnership with a recruitment marketing agency often consists of annual or multi-year contracts in which you agree to purchase recruitment marketing activities from them for X amount of money. Does something change in the organization or in the market, reducing your intake needs? If anything is a waste of your recruitment budget, it's spending money on things you don't need (anymore).
With RMA software, you're in control. Pausing a campaign, switching off channels, shifting the focus by redistributing the advertising budget, it's all done in a minute. This way, you make optimal use of your recruitment marketing budget and no money is lost on unnecessary actions and campaigns.
5. Getting everything out of your media budget
Finally, with RMA you ensure that you really get the most out of every euro of media budget. The crux of many recruitment campaigns is still conversion. The reach and number of clicks of the campaign are fine, but no applications come in... This can be solved with lead generation tooling, because you lower the threshold to respond significantly. That makes it much easier and more non-committal for candidates to get in touch and they do. We often see conversion rates increase from 1% to 3% to 5% to 10% by using RMA software.
In addition, with RMA you can get to know talent much earlier. Even if they do not necessarily want to apply yet, but are just orienting. For that you have so-called soft conversions. (WhatsApp pop-up, webinar invitation, asking questions via chat, etc.) You then stay in automated contact and build talent pools with committed and quality candidates. With those talent pools, you then realize the necessary inflow into your ATS. In short, with RMA you get much more return from your media budget.!
Example cases of cost savings thanks to RMA software
What does that really accomplish? Switching from working with a marketing agency to managing it yourself with recruitment marketing automation software? We show it through two different case studies.
Case 1: corporate organization with large recruitment budget
The recruitment team of a large corporate with 14,000 employees outsources their recruitment marketing to a media agency. The total cost: €450,000 per year. Over 30% of this consists of agency costs. So about €135,000. If they switch to RMA software, they save - with an extensive configuration including ATS linkage and content library, many users, automations and target groups and a high inflow requirement - more than 50% on those agency costs. That's great, but if their recruitment marketing needs grow in the coming years, the software costs will remain virtually the same. Even tastier!
Case 2: SME with 300 employees and 25 branches
The recruitment and marketing team of an SME organization with 300 employees and more than 25 offices in the Netherlands now works in a decentralized way with various media agencies and other parties that help execute recruitment marketing. Adding up all those agency costs adds up to a lot!
When they switch to RMA software, they create a single platform on which they centralize all their recruitment marketing activities. This toolkit thus acts as an engine for the ATS as it can be used for campaigns, lead generation, performance optimization and analytics and talent pool building.
This saves them thousands of euros in agency costs. Not to mention the time they save by organizing everything centrally (about 75% time savings) instead of always having to coordinate with all kinds of local partners. And they generate 30% more inflow than before they started working with RMA software. So triple the profit!
Still counting on recruitment marketing advice
We understand that you also hire a media agency because of their expertise in recruitment marketing. That's why at MrWork we offer not only software, but also support and advice from our recruitment marketing specialists. Each customer has its own customer success manager who thinks along with you, answers questions and proactively suggests improvements and new possibilities. This gives you the best of both worlds: control + advice from experts.
Want to save on your recruitment marketing expenses? Let our experts look and calculate with you.
