Managing and maintaining a digital marketing team can be challenging. Staff turnover is inevitable, and recruitment is time-consuming and can be costly. Digital marketing recruitment agencies intend to manage some of that process, to allow you to focus on your marketing effort.
A marketing team consists of a wide variety of roles. Depending on the size of your business, you might have a content writing team, an SEO team, a technical team, a graphic design team, videographers, and more. That’s without mentioning the marketing managers.
It can be difficult to find the right candidates for your business. Onboarding and training the wrong candidates is a considerable waste of resources, so you need to be confident in your decisions.
How do you make sure you’re hiring the best talent available? Should you hire individually, freelance, or hire an agency? Truthfully, the answer to all of these questions will depend on your business, but there are some key factors that every marketing department should consider.
What is a Digital Marketing Recruitment Agency?
Essentially, a digital marketing recruitment agency is an agency that recruits candidates for the digital marketing industry. Simple enough.
However, it’s important to note that not just any recruitment agency works well for marketing departments or companies. Recruitment agencies may be able to find you relatively qualified candidates. However, they are far less likely to have the expertise required to narrow down the right candidates for the role before getting in touch with you.
They do not have experience in the industry, nor do they understand the qualifications and qualities required to work for your business. This is why a specialized digital marketing recruitment agency is so important.
The same applies to the majority of industries. Ultimately, you’d rather work with a recruitment partner that understands your space, your recruitment problems, and how to work with marketers. Take the time to evaluate each potential agency and develop a strong understanding of their expertise.
Benefits of Digital Marketing Recruitment Agencies
Recruitment agencies can be a great way to evolve your employment effort once you’ve found the right partner. In fact, industries such as logistics and manufacturing almost solely rely on recruitment agencies. In the UK, over 6,000 recruitment agencies were registered in 2021. It goes to show that recruitment agencies certainly aren’t dead just yet.
Speed
The primary reason that companies hire recruitment agencies is speed. They can work through applications and conduct interviews much quicker than an internal team. Obviously, generally this is dependent on your team size, but typically they have more staff available to devote to the recruitment process. Your HR department is likely already pretty busy.
Time Efficiency
Due to the speedy nature of a recruitment agency, they are more efficient with their time. Working through multiple applications quickly, they can provide you with the candidates that you actually need to see. Avoid getting into conversations with the wrong candidates from the start, and optimize your time.
Candidate Quality
The recruitment agency should work as a filter for your candidates, too. When hiring in-house, you need to speak to potential candidates in order to filter out the ones you’re not interested in. This takes time. As long as your recruitment agency is well-briefed, each candidate they provide should be worth talking to.
Specialists
Recruiters are experts in recruitment. Sounds like stating the obvious but they likely have experience working in a variety of fields, and recruiting for a variety of roles. Your in-house HR department may not be entirely familiar with each individual role. A specialist recruitment agency offers recruiters with a variety of expertise.
Outreach
Recruiters know where to look. Ultimately, not every ideal candidate for your role will be openly looking for a new role. This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be interested in what your company has to offer. Recruiters are far more open to cold outreach than in-house teams, and might already have a variety of relevant candidates on their books.
Key Qualities
Not all digital marketing recruitment agencies are built the same. You need to make sure that your partner is right for your business, or waste a lot of time, money, and resources. Here are a few key considerations you need to make before hiring an agency.
Expertise
As mentioned previously, it’s important to work with a recruitment agency that understands your industry. They should have experience working with others in your industry, and recruiting across a variety of job roles. A variety of expertise and experience is key for your potential partner. Not every company is the same, nor is every job role, so your agency needs to be comfortable with that.
Portfolio of Clients
Similarly to the above point, your potential agency should be able to demonstrate that experience and expertise. Ask to see their portfolio, or testimonials from previous clients. Who have they worked with? How did they perform? Were the other companies happy with the agency? Overall, lived experience is the best way to evaluate recruitment agencies. If they have testimonials from companies that operate in a similar industry to your own, even better.
Understanding Your Requirements
Your requirements for your role are the number one thing that you need to clarify with your recruiters. So, needless to say, you need to make sure that you are clear on those requirements to begin with. But, ensure that your potential agency is comfortable with and understands your needs. If they’ve worked in the space already, this will help contextualize your requirements.
Communication
What are your thoughts on their initial communication with you? Are they staying in touch? Or, are they being overbearing or ghosting you? Your first impressions of any agency are important, don’t ignore them. Gut feeling is important. If they’re not communicating well with you, then they can’t understand your needs properly. It’s also likely that they aren’t communicating with potential candidates well either. Remember, your recruitment agency is a representative of your company during the hiring process, so make sure you’re happy with your choice.
Looking for Digital Marketing Talent?
If you’re looking to find flexible digital marketing talent for your business, hiring in-house isn’t the only viable option.
Augment your marketing teams with an innovative digital marketing agency. Expanding your existing team can be time-consuming, and isn’t necessarily a scalable approach. If you need people with new skills, quickly, an agency could help to boost your existing capacity without the commitment of employment contracts.
At Nituno, we work with B2B SaaS and tech companies to offer a completely augmented marketing approach. We offer anything from entirely strategy, a fractional CMO service, to full-service marketing implementation. Want to learn more? Get in touch with us for a free marketing audit.
