How Effective Recruitment Marketing Helps Attract Great Candidates

What is Recruitment Marketing?

Recruitment marketing is the use of marketing principles to attract, engage and hire skilled and suitable candidates for your vacancies. It focuses on establishing a strong presence of the Employer Brand with an effort to position the organisation as an employer of choice. Whether it’s done through content on careers sites, email marketing, events or other channels, a good recruitment marketing strategy allows talent acquisition teams to build relationships with potential candidates before they even submit their CV.

According to the latest UK Candidate Attraction 2025 report, 53% of in-house recruitment teams are impacted by candidate scarcity, 25% struggle to attract talent due to below-market salaries, and 17% lose out to competitors, who are perceived as more desirable employers. These challenges signal that the candidate market remains competitive, further underlining the growing importance of recruitment marketing efforts to stand out and become the employer of choice for candidates you want to attract.

What tools can improve recruitment marketing?

1. Targeted advertising helps reach ideal candidates through digital campaigns, social media, and programmatic job ads. Targeted advertising can also be done using multi-posting tools which help recruiters reach a wider audience with the click of a button. Tip: Combine with generative AI assistance to craft compelling messaging that promotes your brand and attracts top talent.
2. CRM & Talent pooling features in an Applicant Tracking System should allow recruitment teams to keep suitable candidates warm and engaged through personalised email marketing campaigns and SMS.
3. Career site content, including video, employee stories and information about your organisation can help candidates learn more about the business, interview process, find answers to frequently asked questions and familiarise themselves with your brand. It can also help attract more high-quality talent and make you stand out from the competition.
4. Employer Branding, which helps organisations showcase their EVPs and paints a clear picture of their culture, values and mission, helping candidates to see if it’s the right fit for them. This really comes into play with targeted advertising, talent pooling and careers site content.
5. Social Media, while often not a top performing candidate attraction channel, it helps build brand awareness. 49% of candidates follow companies on social platforms to stay informed, so it is a valuable channel to build engagement  (LinkedIn, Inside the Mind of Today’s Candidate).

Benefits of Recruitment Marketing

Recruitment teams who take the time to build a strong recruitment strategy realise many benefits, such as:

• Amplified employer brand.
• Improved ability to attract high-quality and diverse talent. 
• Reduced costs and improved ROI.
• Enhanced candidate experience, with the employer brand consistently being applied throughout every touchpoint. 
• Ability to build a strong pool of passive candidates.
• Improved employee retention, due to improved cultural fit, stronger presence of employer brand and enhanced employee experience.

How do recruitment marketing budgets align with the expected hiring levels in 2025?

The importance of recruitment marketing is undeniable. However, in the UK Candidate Attraction Report 2025 the majority of survey respondents anticipate either stagnation or a decrease in recruitment marketing budgets. And while 33% of survey respondents anticipate an increase in hiring levels, only 14% are optimistic about the same growth to reflect in recruitment marketing budgets.

This could create difficulty in attracting talent in a scarce and competitive candidate market, requiring TA professionals to deep dive into the data and drill down into what works and what doesn’t to make the most out of their available resources.

To find out about the 2025 outlook of hiring levels and recruitment budgets in your industry, you can download the free Candidate Attraction Report 2025.

Recruitment Marketing Data 

With recruitment marketing budgets under scrutiny, a great way for recruitment teams to continue achieving their recruitment goals is by drilling down into the data and metrics of recruitment marketing activity. To reduce costs and maximise focus on sourcing channels that perform best for your organisation, carefully review the ROI of each channel is. Understanding which sourcing channels deliver the best results allows you to allocate your time and effort where it matters most.

According to the Candidate Attraction Report 2025, Talent Acquisition teams, who regularly measure their sourcing channels, see better results. For example, social media as a sourcing channel is utilised extensively across the sectors in the report. However, it has consistently delivered an underwhelming source of qualified candidates for many recruitment teams. However, achieving a better return from this channel is possible, and the key to it is regularity when it comes to posting and monitoring performance.

Having good data and analytics tools at hand in your ATS is crucial, as it allows recruitment teams to gain access to live data and create dashboards to keep track of every stage of the candidate journey, identify high-performing channels, and spot bottlenecks before they are able to turn away great candidates. Whether you’re measuring engagement from job boards, social campaigns, or your careers site, it’s important to have the tools that make it easy to see what’s working, and just as importantly, what’s not. This kind of visibility is key to making informed, strategic decisions and achieving desired ROI when constrained by decreasing recruitment marketing budgets. You can learn more about Eploy’s reporting and dashboards here.

Real- Life Recruitment Marketing: How Practice Plus Group leveraged recruitment data to improve its recruitment marketing strategy

Practice Plus Group (PPG) is trusted by the NHS and has helped thousands of people access excellent healthcare services. Practice Plus Group is quite complex in how it delivers its three service lines to address different areas of the business market: Integrated Urgent Care, Health in Justice, and Secondary Care. 

Recruitment Marketing is a key part of the strategy to attract talent to Practice Plus Group. Using recruitment technology, PPG have enhanced candidate engagement, employer brand awareness and saw an increase in application volumes through dedicated recruitment marketing campaigns. Regularly engaging with candidates and applying the employer brand across every candidate touchpoint, the group were able to achieve great results in addressing application volumes and candidate drop-out. 

The impact of these changes is actively tracked by the team using recruitment data, enabling Practice Plus Group to make data-driven decisions in their recruitment marketing efforts to further enhance the positive impact of their employer brand in a sector competing for suitable talent. 

By utilising Eploy’s ATS and its built-in recruitment data and dashboards features, Practice Plus Group:

• Saw greater volumes of applications for roles.
• Since implementing Dynamic Ads to recruitment marketing, PPG’s Resourcing Team achieved a 135% increase in application volume year-on-year. In 2023/2024 (prior to launching dynamic ads), the team received 78K applications, and in 2024/25 (since applying dynamic ads), 105K applications were received. 
• Improved recognition and consistency of Practice Plus Group’s employer brand, which is now applied to every stage of the recruitment process.
• The recruitment team now has full visibility of recruitment data, which allows them to make data-driven decisions in their marketing. 
• With candidate drop-out previously hindering recruitment efforts, the Resourcing Team have reported a significant improvement in successful candidate applications and the quality of candidates since implementing Eploy and using recruitment marketing tools within the platform. 
• Utilised Eploy’s Talent Pools to engage candidates.
• Consistently applied the employer brand throughout the candidate portal.

Read the full case study and learn more about how Practice Plus Group were able to improve their recruitment marketing strategy and outcomes. 

If you would like to learn more about how an Applicant Tracking System can help you navigate and stay on top of the candidate-scarce market, book a demo with one of our team, who will gladly share some winning ideas. No hard-sell or strings attached, just some insight to see if your system has become a barrier not a bridge to recruitment success.