BEST RECRUITMENT AGENCY MARKETING TEAM 2018

Winner: Acorn Recruitment

Recruitment and training company Acorn has a team of only six marketers, but their output is huge. Their responsibilities include candidate attraction; generating warm sales leads, and developing long-term relationships with clients; and reinforcing positioning and strategic planning. The majority of candidate attraction is carried out online and comprises bespoke material for social media activity, emailers and branch posters/flyers. The firm works with a PR agency to ensure Acorn is represented on various media channels. During the past year, the team have run two campaigns to increase applications, which boosted applications by almost 30%. Overall, the company’s permanent and temporary placement figures increased last year by 30% and 7% respectively.

• All members of the marketing team contribute to each candidate attraction campaign – from content, web development, design and delivery – so the cost is only for print and potential gift incentives, which can be only a few hundred pounds yet raise applications between 30% and 100%. The biggest spend for candidate attraction is on job boards.

• The two candidate attraction campaigns the team ran during the year in question were Make Monday Rock, which ran from September to December 2016, and Want More 2017, which ran from January to April 2017.

• Two examples of bespoke projects created for individual clients during the year in question were an agency worker attraction campaign for print agency Harrier and a peak period candidate attraction support campaign for multinational company Tata.

• The team carry out a lot of client entertainment to develop key relationships, and attend jobs fairs and exhibitions to ensure they are speaking to jobseekers at every opportunity.

Judges’ Comments:

“The winner demonstrated a variety of channels and routes to market, with linked return on investment.”