Recruitment agency marketing: the two jobs it has to do, and which one pays first

Recruitment agency marketing has two jobs: finding candidates for the roles you have, and winning the clients who give you the roles. Most agencies put their budget into the first and hope the second follows, which is why so many have a busy job board and a quiet diary.

This guide splits the two, compares the channels for winning clients on cost and speed, and shows what good looks like with our own numbers.

Job one: candidate marketing

Candidate marketing fills the roles you already hold. It is the part most agencies do well, because the feedback is fast: post a role, count the applications.

Three things matter most:

• Job adverts written for the candidate, with salary, location and the reason the role is worth moving for in the first three lines.
• One source of truth for your jobs. Your website should hold the live roles and feed Indeed, not the other way round, so a filled role disappears everywhere at once. Why a recruiter's website should feed Indeed, not copy it explains how the feed works.
• A website that is current. A site full of roles filled in the spring tells candidates and clients the same thing: nobody is minding the shop. We build recruitment websites that stay in step with the job feed.

Good candidate marketing does help win clients. A hiring manager who checks your site and sees live roles in their sector takes you more seriously. But it does not put you in front of that hiring manager in the first place.

Job two: client marketing

Client marketing brings in the roles. It is slower to show results, harder to measure, and the first thing dropped when the desk gets busy. It covers four things:

1. Brand. A clear patch, a clear promise and a profile that says both. "Legal recruitment for high street firms in the North West" is a brand. "Recruitment solutions across all sectors" is wallpaper.
2. Content. Articles, salary guides and LinkedIn posts that show you know the market better than the last agency who rang.
3. Reputation. Reviews, case studies and the candidates you placed who now hire.
4. Outreach. Starting conversations with the hiring managers who need you this month.

The first three make a hiring manager say yes when you reach them. Only the fourth reaches them on your timetable.

The client channels compared

Be straight with yourself about the first three rows. Search and content are worth building, and they keep paying for years once they work. They also take months, and an agency that starts them in a quiet month is still quiet three months later.

Newsletters work when the list is real. A list of candidates and lapsed clients mailed with "hot jobs" every Friday mostly trains people to ignore you.

Events can work, but the meeting happens at the follow-up, not the drinks. Budget for both.

The fast channel: outreach to companies that are hiring

The one client channel that works in weeks is reaching the hiring managers at companies that are recruiting right now. Live adverts open for six weeks or more, new funding, new leaders and headcount growth all tell you who needs help this month. How to find the companies that are hiring right now has the method.

Then treat it as a short sequence, not one call: a connection request with no pitch, a message about their situation, the same conversation by email and text, and a call once they reply. The call is where the meeting gets booked, but only after they have said they want to talk.

On our own campaign we reached 5,950 people over three months, had 752 conversations, and 98 said they were interested. We rang every one of the 98 and 65 booked a meeting. That is 66%, against a cold-call benchmark of 4.6%.

The full approach for agencies, with the UK rules on emailing and ringing companies, is in how to get clients for a recruitment agency.

A simple plan: one slow channel, one fast one

Most small agencies cannot run five channels well. Run two.

The slow one: your website and search. Pick the specialism pages that match your patch, keep the jobs live through the feed, and add one article a month that answers a question hiring managers ask. It builds while you sleep, and it is what ChatGPT and Google read when someone asks them for an agency like yours.

The fast one: outreach to hiring signals. A fresh list every Monday, a steady daily pace, and every interested reply rung within 24 hours.

Brand and content support both. A hiring manager who gets your message, checks your profile and finds a useful post from last week is easier to book.

How to measure it

Count the same things every Friday, for both channels:

1. Hiring managers reached
2. Replies
3. Interested
4. Meetings that actually happened
5. Roles taken from those meetings

Then divide what you spent on client marketing that month by meetings held. That is your cost per meeting, and it is the number that tells you where the next pound goes. A full-time BDM works out at about £410 a meeting once salary, National Insurance and pension are spread over a typical month. What a client meeting really costs a recruitment agency has the sums.

Have the fast channel run for you

If the outreach is the part that keeps slipping, that is the part we run as business development for recruitment agencies: your team's LinkedIn profiles, inboxes and text, and a British caller who rings every interested reply. Modelled, it works out at £98 to £197 a qualified meeting. You keep doing the marketing only you can do, and turn up to the meetings.

Sources

Ours: own CRM, three accounts, three months, read September 2026. Cold calling: Belkins B2B Cold Calling Benchmarks 2026. BDM cost: Indeed UK average salary with employer NI and pension, over the Bridge Group 2025 median of ten meetings a month, read September 2026. Our cost per meeting is modelled on one LinkedIn seat at three to five qualified meetings a month; your market and offer decide the result.

Get your free growth report and see your market's numbers, or book a 1-to-1 and we build your list of hiring companies live on the call.