by Tayla Veenstra | Oct 29, 2026 | Insights, News
AI is becoming embedded in recruitment at remarkable speed. Candidates can use technology to find roles, tailor applications and increase the number of opportunities they pursue, while employers can automate screening, analyse applications and manage increasingly large candidate pools. On paper, both sides should be benefiting, but when candidates respond to automation with more automation and employers respond to increased application volumes with even more automated screening, recruitment risks becoming faster without necessarily becoming better.
That tension sat at the heart of a recent Technology for Talent discussion at MK Tech Week, where the conversation explored everything from AI-assisted assessment and candidate experience to bias, governance and the changing role of human judgement in hiring. Across those different topics, one question kept resurfacing in different forms: just because we can automate more of recruitment, does that mean we should?
More Automation Does Not Automatically Mean Better Recruitment
One of the challenges discussed was the growing cycle between automated applications and automated screening. Technology allows candidates to pursue opportunities at greater scale, while employers faced with larger volumes increasingly rely on technology to help process those applications. Candidates then encounter more automated processes and use more technology themselves to improve their chances of getting through them.
The danger is that both sides become more efficient at participating in the process without necessarily becoming better at understanding each other. For employers, a larger candidate pool does not automatically mean a stronger candidate pool, and for candidates, being able to submit more applications does not necessarily mean finding roles that genuinely suit their skills, motivations and ambitions.
If technology simply allows both sides to do more of the same activity, only faster, we need to question whether that is really progress. The opportunity for AI in recruitment should not simply be increasing volume. It should be improving the quality of the decisions being made within that volume.
The Question Shouldn’t Be What Can We Automate?
It is tempting to approach AI adoption by looking for every manual process that technology could potentially replace, but recruitment requires more nuance. Different hiring decisions carry different levels of complexity, risk and human consequence. The panel discussed how highly standardised, high-volume recruitment may suit greater levels of automation, while senior or high-value roles may warrant significantly more human interaction.
There are parts of recruitment where technology can remove unnecessary administration, organise information and make processes more consistent. There are other moments where context, conversation and judgement become far more important. The more useful question for recruitment businesses and employers therefore isn’t simply, “What can we automate?” It is, “Where does automation improve the experience or decision, and where does human judgement add more value?”
That creates a very different approach to recruitment technology. Instead of trying to remove people from the process, technology becomes a way of helping people spend their time where it matters most.
AI Doesn’t Remove Accountability
Another important part of the discussion centred on bias. It is easy to position technology as a solution to the subjectivity of human decision-making, but replacing a human decision with an automated one does not automatically make the outcome objective. Human recruitment processes already contain bias, and AI systems can also reproduce patterns found within the information and criteria they are given.
That means introducing technology does not remove the need for judgement. In many cases, it makes good judgement even more important. If an organisation uses AI within a hiring decision, it still needs to understand how that technology is being used, what information influences the outcome and whether it can stand behind the resulting decision.
There is a reputational question here as well as a regulatory one. Candidates are unlikely to care that an unfair or confusing experience was caused by an algorithm rather than an individual recruiter. Their experience is still with your organisation and, ultimately, the responsibility for how technology is deployed remains with the business using it. AI can support decision-making, but it cannot outsource accountability.
Candidate Experience Could Be Where Technology Adds the Most Value
Much of the conversation around recruitment technology focuses on what businesses can gain from it: efficiency, scale, lower administrative workloads and faster processes. One of the more interesting possibilities raised during the discussion, however, was what candidates could gain from the same technology.
Instead of using technology purely to filter people out, what if it helped candidates make better decisions before entering a full recruitment process? The panel discussed the idea of a lower-commitment pre-application stage where candidates could answer a small number of questions, understand how closely they align with a role and potentially receive constructive feedback if it is not currently the right opportunity for them.
That changes the role of technology significantly. Rather than simply saying “no”, a recruitment system could potentially provide direction, helping candidates better understand what a role actually requires, where their experience aligns and what they may need to develop. Employers could benefit too, because better-informed candidates could mean fewer unsuitable applications entering the full process and more time for hiring teams to engage properly with the people who progress.
Used in this way, technology does not have to make recruitment less human. It can create more space for meaningful human interaction.
A CV Was Never the Whole Person
The discussion also questioned how much a traditional CV or application form can genuinely tell an employer about someone’s suitability. Experience and qualifications matter, but hiring decisions frequently depend on far more than someone’s employment history. Motivation, behavioural drivers, soft skills and the realities of the organisation itself can all influence whether a hire ultimately succeeds.
Technology may give businesses new ways to structure and explore those factors, but there is an important distinction between using technology to create better questions and allowing technology to make unquestioned judgements about people. The strongest use of AI may therefore be as a tool for exploration rather than a final decision-maker, identifying areas worth discussing, highlighting possible gaps and helping hiring teams approach conversations with more information.
The human element then becomes interpreting that information within the context of the role, organisation and individual. That balance matters because recruitment is not simply a data-matching exercise. Ultimately, it is a decision about people.
Recruitment Technology Should Continue Beyond the Hire
Another interesting point raised during the discussion was how quickly recruitment technology tends to disappear once somebody accepts the job. Organisations invest significant effort in attracting, assessing and hiring someone, but communication can become considerably less structured after they join.
There is an opportunity for technology to support the relationship beyond recruitment itself. The panel discussed possibilities such as tracking development, providing more personalised feedback, maintaining communication and learning from the performance of successful hires. This creates a much broader definition of recruitment technology, where success is not measured purely at the point somebody is hired, but by whether that person succeeds once they arrive, develops within the business and ultimately stays.
For recruitment businesses and RecTech providers, that creates an important shift in thinking. The value of technology does not necessarily end when a vacancy is filled, and the data and relationships created during recruitment could potentially support a much longer employee journey.
The Future Isn’t Human or AI
Much of the conversation surrounding AI is framed as a choice between technology and people, but recruitment probably does not need to make that choice. There are things technology can do exceptionally well. It can process information at scale, introduce consistency, remove repetitive administration and help organisations manage volumes that would be extremely difficult to handle manually. There are also areas where human judgement remains critical, including understanding context, recognising nuance, challenging assumptions, building trust and taking responsibility for decisions that affect people’s careers and businesses.
The real opportunity is working out where each belongs. That requires more than buying technology and inserting it into an existing process. It requires organisations to think carefully about what they are trying to improve in the first place. If the goal is simply to process more candidates, automation can certainly help. If the goal is to make better hiring decisions and create better experiences for candidates and employers, technology needs to be deployed with considerably more thought.
Final Thought
The most interesting question about AI in recruitment isn’t whether the technology will become more capable. The more important question is what we choose to do with that capability.
If AI simply helps candidates submit more applications and employers reject them faster, recruitment may become more efficient without necessarily becoming more effective. But if technology can help candidates understand opportunities better, help employers ask better questions and give hiring teams more time for the conversations where human judgement genuinely matters, that represents a very different future for recruitment.
The Technology for Talent discussion ultimately came back to a tension between scale and judgement. Recruitment needs both. Technology can give businesses the ability to operate at scale, but it cannot remove their responsibility to decide where, when and how that technology should be used.
And that may be the most important human judgement of all.
by Fiona Housiaux | Sep 17, 2026 | Insights, News
I recently ran a poll asking a simple question: Is your team starting to scope out next year’s roadmap yet, or are you heads-down on current campaigns?
It yielded a whopping five votes (lol). Clearly, I’m not going to give up my day job to become an influencer anytime soon. But looking past my micro-sample size revealed two truths about how B2B organisations operate as Q4 approaches:
- The sole “Scoping Out” vote came from Sales (my husband, who naturally had to support the poll, or else!).
- The four “Heads-Down” votes came from Marketers (my brilliant TiC colleagues who are deep in the execution trenches).
This isn’t just a funny split; it highlights a classic B2B tension: sales (or the husband) is already looking ahead to Q1 pipeline, whilst Marketing (my colleagues) is carrying the heavy operational load of bringing Q4 across the line. Let’s be honest (and yes, I am 100% biased), marketers add massive value, but they are often victims of their own success.
Whilst Sales reps can pivot their focus to next quarter’s prospects, marketers are still trying to manage and maximise live campaigns, nurture active leads, optimise conversions right up to December 31st.
However, when marketing is forced to keep its head down in Q4 execution, planning for next year gets squeezed into December’s leftover time. When that happens, marketing risks building Q1 campaigns around general brand positioning while sales is hearing urgent, unaddressed pain points on demo calls, leaving sales teams to enter January without the fresh case studies, targeted landing pages, or pitch decks needed to close early-stage deals.
And because even the best-designed campaigns take weeks to gain traction, a strategy squeezed into November won’t yield qualified opportunities until spring.
How to Give Marketing the Breathing Room to Plan Ahead
You don’t need 500 poll responses to recognise the pattern (well, that’s what I’m telling myself). If you want to show marketing’s strategic value on January 1st, you have to create space for early alignment now. My advice would be (and this is what I’m bringing clients through from September onwards):
1. Run Joint Q1 Target Reviews in Late Q3: Sit down with Sales leadership and ask: Which target accounts and sectors are you prioritising for early next year, and what content gaps are currently slowing down deals? Build your Q1 marketing strategy and output around those commercial priorities.
2. Audit High-Converting Content & Campaigns: Look back at year-to-date performance to see which specific content assets and channels generated actual closed-won business (not just leads). Lock in budget now to double down on those high-performing plays.
3. Co-Design the Sales Enablement Roadmap: Allocate dedicated marketing resources to build key sales collateral, one-sheets, product updates, and ROI calculators, so they are signed off and ready for the sales team to drop into conversations on day one of the new year.
So my five-person poll won’t be winning any awards for rigorous methodology, but it did highlight something very real. Marketers spend all day keeping the current machine running, which makes it far too easy to get swallowed up by the end-of-year rush.
If you want to hit January with real momentum alongside sales, you have to give yourselves permission to look up from the daily grind and start framing next year a little bit earlier.
If you need any help with auditing your year, speak to the team at ThinkinCircles.
by Chris Beechey | Aug 6, 2026 | Insights, News
Here’s something that might sound strange coming from a marketing agency: AI is making your job harder.
Not because it’s a bad tool. It isn’t. It’s because everyone has it now, and everyone is using it in exactly the same way. The result is a market flooded with faster outreach, more content and more applications than anyone knows what to do with.
Somewhere in all of that noise, the thing that actually wins clients and candidates, genuine human connection, is becoming harder and harder to find.
Let’s talk about what’s really going on.
Everyone’s Using AI, and That’s Exactly the Problem
Cast your mind back a couple of years. The pitch for AI in recruitment was simple: do more, faster, with less effort. To be fair, it delivered on that. Adoption of AI in HR doubled in a single year, jumping from 26% to 43% [1]. Agencies started generating job descriptions in seconds, automating sourcing and scheduling interviews without lifting a finger.
The trouble is, candidates got the memo too.
Today, 65% of UK-based Gen Z workers have used AI tools to write their cover letters and application materials [2]. More than half of new hires used generative AI during their job search in early 2024 [3]. The knock-on effect has been staggering. The number of applications per hire has tripled since 2021 [4]. On LinkedIn alone, applications have been coming in at roughly 11,000 per minute [5].
More applications sound like a good thing, don’t they? Except that 64% of recruiters say they’re now seeing a flood of indistinguishable, look-alike CVs [6]. Meanwhile, 34% of recruiters are spending up to half of their working week filtering out spam and low-quality applications [7].
This is what some in the industry are calling the “AI doom loop” [7]. Both sides automate. Both sides scale. Everyone ends up working harder, and very few people get better results.
Trust Is Taking a Real Hit
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. All of this automation isn’t just creating noise. It’s quietly eroding the trust that the entire recruitment industry depends on.
Nearly half of job seekers (46%) say their trust in the hiring process has declined over the past year, and 42% put the blame squarely on AI [7]. Only 8% of candidates believe AI makes hiring fairer [7]. Among Gen Z entry-level workers, 62% have lost faith in the process altogether [7].
It’s not just candidates who feel this way. Employers and recruiters are becoming more sceptical too. A huge 91% of recruiters say they’ve spotted candidate deception, from AI-generated CVs to more elaborate forms of digital manipulation [7]. In some cases, it’s gone as far as deepfakes and synthetic identities being used during interviews [8].
When both sides of a conversation are questioning whether the other is even real, something has gone seriously wrong.
That presents a significant challenge for recruitment marketing because marketing is fundamentally about building trust. If the same channels you’re using to reach people are also making them more sceptical, it’s time to rethink the way you communicate.
A Tricky Spot for RecTech Businesses
If you’re working in RecTech, this creates a particularly interesting challenge.
You’re selling AI-powered solutions into a market that is currently feeling overwhelmed by many of the problems AI has helped create.
That doesn’t mean your product isn’t valuable. It absolutely is. It simply means the way you talk about it needs to evolve.
The RecTech marketing that’s cutting through in 2026 isn’t leading with features or automation capabilities. It’s leading with outcomes, particularly human outcomes.
The message that resonates isn’t, “Our AI can automate your outreach.”
It’s, “Our AI takes care of the noise, so your team can focus on the conversations that actually matter.”
That’s a subtle but important distinction, and it’s one that more RecTech businesses should embrace.
So What Actually Works Right Now?
In a market where everyone has access to the same tools, your competitive advantage is no longer your technology stack. It’s your human signal.
Authentic employer brand storytelling is the first place that signal can shine. Candidates are researching employers more thoroughly than ever before. They’re looking for genuine signs of culture, leadership and stability, not carefully crafted corporate messaging. Agencies that help clients communicate an honest picture of what it’s really like to work there create meaningful differentiation. The commercial impact is significant too, with strong employer branding reducing employee turnover by nearly 28% [9].
Credible thought leadership is equally powerful, particularly for agencies and RecTech businesses. Three-quarters of B2B decision-makers say that a piece of thought leadership has prompted them to research a product or service they had not previously considered [10]. That’s an extraordinary statistic. Publishing content with a genuine point of view, whether it’s a niche salary guide, an informed perspective on market conditions or an article like this, builds authority that no amount of automated outreach can replicate.
Finally, there’s niche specialisation. While generalist agencies use AI to cast the widest possible net, specialists who deeply understand a particular sector continue to stand out. Expertise remains a uniquely human advantage. Marketing that demonstrates genuine sector knowledge through targeted content, community building and practical insight cuts through far more effectively than broad, templated campaigns.
Final Thought
Here’s the irony.
AI has made creating content easier than ever. It has not made earning trust any easier.
If anything, it has made trust even more valuable. As automation becomes commonplace, the businesses that stand out will be those that communicate with greater clarity, stronger opinions and genuine human understanding.
The mechanics of recruitment marketing have changed. Its purpose has not.
People still choose to work with businesses they trust, brands they remember and experts who clearly understand the challenges they face.
The agencies and RecTech businesses that will thrive over the next few years won’t be the ones using the most AI. They’ll be the ones using AI intelligently while continuing to invest in the things technology cannot replace: trust, expertise, relationships and authentic human connection.
In a world where everyone sounds the same, sounding like yourself remains the most powerful thing you can do.
References
[1] SHRM. (2025). AI in HR (2025 Talent Trends). https://www.shrm.org
[2] Kahoot! (2026). Gen Z’s AI Catch-22: Over half depend on AI at work, yet one in five fear it will replace them. https://kahoot.com/press/2026/01/23/gen-zs-ai-catch-22-over-half-depend-on-ai-at-work-yet-one-in-five-fear-it-will-replace-them-new-report-finds/
[3] ZipRecruiter. (2024). New Hires Survey. https://www.ziprecruiter.com
[4] Ashby. (2025). Recruiter Productivity | 2025 Talent Trends Report. https://www.ashbyhq.com/talent-trends-report/reports/2023-recruiter-productivity-trends-report
[5] LinkedIn. (2025). Hiring Trends Snapshot. https://www.linkedin.com
[6] ResumeBuilder. (2025). GenAI Resume Effects Survey. https://www.resumebuilder.com
[7] Greenhouse. (2025). An AI Trust Crisis: 70% of Hiring Managers Trust AI to Make Faster and Better Hiring Decisions, Only 8% of Job Seekers Call it Fair. https://www.greenhouse.com/newsroom/an-ai-trust-crisis-70-of-hiring-managers-trust-ai-to-make-faster-and-better-hiring-decisions-only-8-of-job-seekers-call-it-fair
[8] Raconteur. (2026). Recruitment Under Siege: The Rise of AI-Generated Job Fraud. https://www.raconteur.net/talent-culture/recruitment-under-siege-the-rise-of-ai-generated-job-fraud
[9] LinkedIn. (2024). The Ultimate List of Employer Brand Statistics. https://business.linkedin.com/content/dam/business/talent-solutions/global/en_us/c/pdfs/ultimate-list-of-employer-brand-stats.pdf
[10] Edelman & LinkedIn. (2024). B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report. https://www.edelman.com/expertise/business-marketing/2024-b2b-thought-leadership-impact-report
by Tayla Veenstra | Jul 8, 2026 | Insights, News
Most RecTech suppliers still think the buying journey begins when a prospect books a demo, fills in a contact form or agrees to a sales meeting.
It doesn’t.
According to Gartner, B2B buyers spend just 17% of their buying journey interacting directly with potential suppliers. The remaining 83% happens independently, as buyers research the market, compare providers, consume content and quietly build confidence in the businesses they believe understand their challenges best.
By the time your sales team enters the conversation, much of the decision has already been made.
For RecTech suppliers, this changes the role of marketing entirely. Marketing is no longer there simply to support sales. It is responsible for shaping the perceptions that determine whether sales gets an opportunity in the first place.
The Problem: Most RecTech Marketing Is Easy to Ignore
Faced with increasing competition, many RecTech suppliers respond by producing more content. They publish more LinkedIn posts, write more articles, launch more campaigns and increase their marketing activity, believing that greater visibility will naturally generate more opportunities.
On the surface, that seems logical. AI has made content creation faster, more affordable and more accessible than ever before. Businesses can now produce in a week what once took months.
Yet despite this explosion in content, many suppliers are seeing little improvement in the quality or consistency of their inbound enquiries.
The issue is rarely a lack of effort.
The issue is that much of the content entering the market has become interchangeable. Every business claims to improve efficiency. Every platform promises to transform recruitment. Every supplier positions themselves as innovative. While those statements may all be true, they do little to help buyers understand why one business deserves their attention over another.
When everyone sounds different to themselves but identical to the market, visibility becomes easy to achieve but incredibly difficult to convert into trust.
Marketing Doesn’t Win Deals. It Wins Consideration.
One of the biggest misconceptions in B2B marketing is that its purpose is to generate immediate sales.
Its first job is something much more valuable.
It earns consideration.
Long before buyers contact your business, they are subconsciously deciding which suppliers feel credible, knowledgeable and trustworthy. Every article they read, every webinar they watch and every opinion they encounter contributes to that judgement. Those interactions either strengthen your position in their mind or quietly remove you from consideration altogether.
This is why authority matters.
Buyers rarely shortlist businesses they have never encountered before. They shortlist businesses they recognise, businesses they remember and businesses that have consistently demonstrated expertise before a commercial conversation ever begins.
The companies that win are often not the loudest. They are simply the ones buyers think of first.
Authority Is Built Through Distinctive Thinking
As AI continues to democratise content creation, publishing regularly is no longer a competitive advantage. Almost every business can create content at scale.
What remains difficult is creating content that changes the way people think.
The strongest RecTech brands understand this. Rather than chasing every trend or trying to dominate every conversation, they invest in developing a clear point of view. They share original thinking, challenge accepted assumptions and educate their market in ways that competitors cannot easily replicate.
Over time, that consistency creates something far more valuable than engagement metrics.
It creates memory.
When buyers repeatedly encounter valuable insights from the same business, familiarity grows into trust. That trust becomes preference, and preference ultimately becomes commercial opportunity.
The Businesses That Will Win Tomorrow Are Building Trust Today
Too many businesses evaluate marketing through short-term performance alone. They judge success by this month’s enquiries or this quarter’s pipeline while overlooking the long-term influence marketing has on future buying decisions.
The reality is that every piece of valuable content contributes to future revenue.
A thoughtful article may be read months before a buyer is ready to invest. A webinar might shape the opinion of someone who will only enter the market next year. A founder’s perspective shared on LinkedIn could become the reason your business is remembered when a recommendation is requested six months later.
None of these moments feel significant in isolation.
Together, they create commercial momentum.
That is why the most successful RecTech suppliers treat marketing as a long-term investment in trust rather than a short-term exercise in lead generation.
Own the Conversation Before Someone Else Does
One of the central principles in James Whitelock’s eBook, Own the Conversation, is that brands become memorable when they stop trying to join every conversation and instead become known for leading one.
That philosophy has never been more relevant.
As content becomes easier to create, buyers will increasingly gravitate towards businesses that offer clarity instead of noise, conviction instead of repetition and genuine expertise instead of generic marketing.
Owning a conversation is not about publishing more than your competitors.
It is about giving your market a reason to remember you when the time to buy finally arrives.
Final Thought
The buying journey has changed.
Today’s buyers are educating themselves, forming opinions and building trust long before they ever speak to a supplier. If your marketing is absent during that process, your sales team is being asked to recover opportunities that should already have been created.
The question is no longer whether your business is producing enough content.
The question is whether your market would remember your brand if they needed your solution tomorrow.
If the answer is no, that is where your marketing strategy should begin.
If this way of thinking resonates with you, James Whitelock explores it in much greater depth in Own the Conversation. The eBook explains how recruitment businesses can build authority, differentiate themselves in increasingly competitive markets and become the brands buyers remember before they ever make contact.
You can download the eBook directly from the ThinkinCircles homepage.
by Tayla Veenstra | May 5, 2026 | Insights, News
Recruitment businesses rarely believe they have a direction problem. They believe they have a marketing problem. They assume they need better content, more visibility, stronger campaigns or a new channel strategy. Activity increases. More posts go out. New initiatives are launched. Budgets are adjusted. And yet, despite the motion, growth still feels inconsistent and marketing still feels difficult to justify at board level. The uncomfortable truth is that in many cases the issue is not marketing capability. It is the absence of clear commercial direction guiding it.
The Illusion of Activity
Recruitment firms are rarely short on effort. Websites are live. Social feeds are active. Decks are being designed. Campaigns are being trialled. From the outside it looks productive. Internally it often feels relentless. But activity is not the same as strategy, and movement is not the same as leadership.
Without a clearly defined commercial trajectory, marketing naturally defaults to being reactive. It responds to internal requests, industry trends and short-term priorities rather than shaping long-term perception in the market. Over time, that reactivity begins to look like a marketing weakness when in reality it is a leadership gap. Strategy is not defined by how many channels are active. It is defined by whether those channels are aligned to where the business is actually going.
When Marketing Becomes a Cost Centre
In many agencies, marketing sits close to execution. It supports consultants, produces assets and reacts quickly to changing demands. Often there is a single internal marketer operating under pressure to deliver visible output. In that environment, protecting long-term direction can feel secondary to satisfying immediate requests.
This is where activity starts to masquerade as strategy. There may be SEO running, content publishing and modest inbound traction. There may even be enough success to justify continuing as-is. But surviving and scaling are not the same thing. Without strategic leadership, marketing becomes fragmented and difficult to connect to revenue outcomes. It begins to feel like spend rather than leverage.
The commercial consequences of this misalignment are rarely immediate, but they are significant. Investment is questioned because contribution is unclear. Short-term performance is scrutinised without acknowledging the cumulative nature of brand building. When leadership does not clearly connect marketing to commercial ambition, perception slowly erodes. Marketing is no longer seen as a strategic partner. It becomes a support function.
The Measurement Misunderstanding
Sales performance is tangible and immediate. Calls can be counted. Placements can be tracked. Revenue can be attributed. Marketing influence, by contrast, is layered and cumulative. It shapes credibility, strengthens positioning, improves close rates, supports consultant confidence and builds inbound authority over time.
That does not make marketing immeasurable. It simply means it must be measured in context. Strategic leadership defines what success looks like at each level of the business and ensures that marketing metrics align with commercial reality rather than being judged through the same lens as day-to-day sales output. Without that clarity, marketing is unfairly evaluated and prematurely doubted.
Direction Is a Leadership Responsibility
Recruitment businesses evolve quickly. Niches mature, markets expand and service offerings deepen. Messaging that was accurate three years ago may now be misaligned with where the firm intends to compete. Without leadership actively reviewing and refining positioning, marketing continues to amplify a narrative that no longer reflects the business’s ambition.
A strategically led marketing function looks different in practice. It begins with clarity about where the business is heading and builds its roadmap around that trajectory. It embeds itself within the organisation, understanding consultant conversations and client objections so that messaging reflects real commercial pressures. It communicates in the language of the board and the finance director, demonstrating how marketing contributes to revenue, retention and long-term growth. It manages expectations upwards while protecting focus downwards.
When direction is present, marketing compounds. Campaigns reinforce positioning. Content strengthens authority. Sales enablement improves conversion. Inbound enquiries become more aligned with target markets. Growth feels intentional rather than incidental.
Final Thought
If marketing currently feels like a cost inside your recruitment business, the solution is unlikely to be another channel, another hire or another campaign. It is clarity. Clarity about commercial ambition, positioning and measurement. Clarity about what marketing is meant to achieve and how it will be evaluated. Clarity about who is leading it and how it aligns with long-term growth.
You do not have a marketing problem. You have a direction problem. And until that direction is defined and protected, no amount of activity will ever feel like an investment.
by Kat Allenby | Apr 8, 2026 | Insights, News
Having worked with recruitment firms on their marketing for over two decades now, both as an in-house employee and as an external consultant, I quite often see a similar pattern when the topic of employer branding comes up.
The conversation very quickly turns to content.
“We should probably do a video.”
“Let’s get some consultant testimonials.”
“We need to update the careers page.”
And while those things absolutely have their place, they’re rarely where the conversation should start.
Because a strong employer brand isn’t the video, the photos, or the beautifully designed webpage. Those are just the outputs. The real work happens before any of that is created.
The Rush to “Get Something Out There”
There’s often a sense of urgency around employer branding. Recruitment firms know they need to attract good people, competition is high, and there’s pressure to just start putting something out into the market.
But rushing straight into production can create a bigger problem.
You might end up with something that looks great, but doesn’t actually represent what it’s like to work in the business.
And if the story you’re telling doesn’t match the reality someone experiences when they join, that’s when problems start to appear.
Start With the Questions That Actually Matter
Before producing any content, there are a couple of very simple questions that need answering:
- Who are we actually trying to attract?
- What do we w-life balance.
Without clarity on this, employer branding quickly becomes generic. And generic rarely attracts the right people.ant them to understand about working here?
It sounds obvious, but many businesses skip this step entirely.
The things that appeal to an experienced, high-billing recruiter will be very different from what someone new to the industry might care about. Likewise, a highly competitive, performance-driven agency environment requires very different messaging compared to a firm built around flexibility and work.
Culture: What You Think It Is vs What It Actually Is
Before you can communicate your culture externally, you have to understand it internally. And this is where things can get interesting.
Leadership teams often have a view of the culture they’ve built. But that perception doesn’t always align with how employees experience the business day to day.
The only way to really understand it is by speaking to the people who live it every day.
That might mean running internal surveys, holding small focus groups, or simply having honest conversations with people across the business at different levels and in different job roles.
Questions like:
- What do people genuinely enjoy about working here?
- What makes the environment different from other recruitment firms?
- What kind of person actually succeeds here?
The answers you get are often far more valuable than anything you might assume.
Authenticity Will Always Outperform Perfection
One of the biggest risks with employer branding is trying to present an idealised version of the company.
But authenticity is far more powerful than perfection.
If your environment is fast-paced, competitive and expects people to push themselves to succeed, that’s not a negative. For the right person, that’s exactly the kind of environment they’re looking for.
Where problems arise is when the story being told externally doesn’t match the reality someone experiences when they walk through the door.
Selling a “warm and fluffy” work-life balance culture when the reality is long hours and a high-pressure desk will only attract people who quickly realise the role isn’t what they expected.
And when that happens, the cost isn’t just the hire itself.
The Hidden Cost of Getting It Wrong
A bad hire affects far more than just the recruitment process.
Research from organisations like the Society for Human Resource Management suggests replacing an employee can cost between 50% and 200% of their annual salary once you factor in recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity.
In recruitment businesses, the impact can be even more noticeable.
You’re not just replacing a person. You’re dealing with:
- The time and cost of hiring again
- Disruption to team performance
- Management time spent onboarding someone new
- Lost billings while a desk isn’t performing
- Potential reputational damage if someone leaves and shares their experience publicly
All of which reinforces the importance of getting the employer brand story right from the beginning.
Employer Branding Is a Strategy, Not a Project
Another thing I often remind clients is that employer branding isn’t a one-off task.
It’s not something you “complete” once the video is filmed or the careers page goes live.
It’s an ongoing strategy that evolves with the business. It requires consistent messaging, regular content, and most importantly alignment between the internal culture and the external story being told.
The videos, testimonials and social content all matter. But they should come after the thinking has been done.
Final Thought
If there’s one piece of advice I’d give recruitment firms thinking about employer branding, it’s this: slow down before you start producing anything.
Spend the time understanding what your culture actually looks like today, what makes your environment right for certain people and not others, and who you genuinely want to attract to the business.
Once you’ve done that groundwork, the content becomes much easier to create and far more effective.
Because the best employer brands don’t just look good. They accurately reflect the experience people are walking into.
And that’s what ultimately attracts and retains the right people in the first place.
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