Finding the right solution quickly
When Esmée Maton, working as Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV, joined the company in 2021, recruitment marketing had to be set up from scratch in the organisation. At the same time, demand from the business was (and is) high, as there was a serious recruitment challenge at almost every division. "In the first period, I did everything myself. On each channel, I had to create, monitor and adjust the campaigns. I also had to set up the technical setup, such as setting pixels and tracking, myself. It all took a lot of time this way," says Esmée. So Esmée soon started looking for methods to make her work faster and easier in order to still meet the needs of the business - with limited capacity.
As befits an innovative organisation with a focus on technological solutions, Royal HaskoningDHV quickly looked for the solution in the corner of software. After all, this allows you to achieve considerable efficiency gains without having to expand the number of FTEs. "I wanted to set up and run campaigns from one central tool, because that would save me a lot of time. At the same time, I do want to turn the knobs myself and have real-time insight into the performance of the campaigns. If you completely outsource the entire process to an agency, you usually don't have those real-time insights and it still feels a bit like a black box into which you throw your money. I wanted a tool that would unburden me, but where I would still be 'in control'. That's what I found in MrWork!"
From just job marketing to full funnel recruitment campaigns
Royal HaskoningDHV has gone through a nice transformation in the field of employer branding and recruitment marketing. Initially, they mainly deployed job campaigns because they were mainly concerned with the concrete result of each recruitment investment: job applicants. "Job applicants are of course an important result to focus on in recruitment marketing campaigns, but just measuring the number of applicants is not the holy grail. Being visible and building your employer brand ensures - especially in the long term - that your campaigns become increasingly successful, also in the number of applicants. That's why I started using more and more full funnel recruitment campaign with an awareness, consideration and action phase. Step by step, I took management and HR through the importance of employer branding and the effect of full funnel campaigns. It is very cool to see that awareness growing internally and that we are increasingly focusing on our reputation and our story as an employer. Besides conversion-oriented campaigns, of course," Esmée says.
"This year, we are expected to run 5 full funnel campaigns and in addition, vacancy campaigns are running almost continuously. All with the MrWork recruitment marketing software. Without this tooling, with our limited capacity (ed: recruitment marketing team currently consists of 2 people), we would never have been able to run so many campaigns and probably not achieve these results. If you have to monitor and adjust your campaigns on every platform separately, it takes an enormous amount of time and probably slips through when you are busy with other things. Thanks to MrWork, I always have insight and an overview, and optimising campaigns is a snap. I'm sure that contributes to the campaign results."
But it's not just the software that adds value for Esmée. The monthly check-ins with MrWork are very valuable, as is the opportunity to spar.
"Everyone I know at MrWork is very pleasant to work with. They really think along with you. At the monthly check-ins, there is plenty of room to ask for advice, both about your campaigns and other recruitment marketing matters, such as the set-up of a landing page. That is really nice. Especially when I was still the only recruitment marketer. By working with MrWork, I still had substantively strong sparring partners to help me move forward."
Esmée Maton, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV
Small team, big results
When Royal HaskoningDHV started working with MrWork, the main aim was to make the process easier. Campaigns had to be set up quickly, with measurability and analytics well set up. "That goal has been more than achieved. We now sometimes run as many as 15 job campaigns simultaneously. We would never have managed that if we had to set this all up manually on each platform. To ensure quality and maintain an overview, only Iris (recruitment marketer) and I put campaigns live. We can still keep up with the demand from the business - which is growing because of the good results - because MrWork is so intuitive to use. From request from the recruiter to live campaign, we only need half an hour. Without the MrWork software, this would be more like a couple of hours per campaign I think," Esmée says.
And then this is just about setting up campaigns. If Esmee adds in the extra time for technical set-up (pixels, tracking, dashboarding) and monitoring and optimisation, they would never be able to run so many recruitment marketing campaigns with a team of 2. Thanks to the MrWork software, Royal HaskoningDHV manages to achieve great results on recruitment marketing with a small team.
Candidates you would never have found otherwise
According to Royal HaskoningDHV, the effect of recruitment campaigns is not only in brand awareness, traffic to the work at site and the number of applicants, but also in the quality of the candidates. "Some candidates you simply don't find with other recruitment methods, such as sourcing via Linkedin. It happens often enough that people do not have a Linkedin profile or it is not up to date, so the candidate does not seem interesting. If you didn't run recruitment campaigns, you would miss out on all these candidates. We have seen it several times that from the campaign, a candidate applied with a heart-felt CV, while the recruiter could not find that candidate on Linkedin or had never selected them based on their outdated Linkedin profile. So you see that recruitment marketing really complements other recruitment methods," says Esmée.
"Awareness of the effect of recruitment marketing campaigns is also growing across borders. For example, I recently received my first request for a MrWork Jobs campaign from the UK. With the MrWork software, this too was set up in no time. Very nice that our success story is spreading further and further into the organisation!"
Esmée Maton, Employer Brand and Recruitment Marketer at Royal HaskoningDHV
Easy contact is the future
Looking to the future, Royal HaskoningDHV is and remains ambitious. To remain or become a market leader in various industries, the focus is really on recruitment. "Finding clients does work. The challenge lies in recruiting employees," is a common statement in the MTs of the divisions.
Esmée's biggest project of 2023 is localising the global EVP and translating this into the campaigns. Thanks to MrWork software, actually deploying all those targeting campaigns, adapted to the region, is done in no time.
What is the next step in Royal HaskoningDHV's recruitment marketing strategy? Lead generation, thinks Esmée. "For many candidates, applying straight away is a step too far. They want to get in touch with us in a low-threshold way first. This is why, among other things, we are looking at adding MrWork Leads and experimenting with other forms of lead generation. For instance, we recently organised a content-based webinar to attract candidates with specialist, technical knowledge. We advertised this webinar through MrWork Jobs and I have to be honest: I was positively surprised by the results. 80 participants signed up for the webinar and we even hired someone from this. Really a great result and a clear signal that we need to keep it low key to connect with candidates more often."
