Recruitment campaign: the click is only the start

A recruitment campaign is a series of ads that gets candidates to switch who currently work somewhere else. That is not the same as boosting a job ad on Meta. It is a short sequence of steps you can measure one by one, and the step that matters most comes after the click: how quickly someone talks to a recruiter.

What is a recruitment campaign?

A recruitment campaign is a campaign an employer runs to reach candidates for one or more vacancies, with ads and content on channels such as Meta, LinkedIn and Google. We add one requirement: the campaign leads to a conversation, not just to an application form.

Guides also call it a hiring campaign or an employer branding campaign. The distinction that matters to us is a different one: a campaign that leads to a vacancy, or a campaign that builds recognition among people who are not ready to move yet. This article is about the first. The second belongs to recruitment marketing, which we run together with our sister company Active Talent.

The difference with posting a vacancy is who you reach:

A job board reaches people who are searching. A campaign reaches people who are not searching but would switch.
A job ad describes the role. A campaign makes one promise to one kind of candidate.
A job board delivers CVs. A campaign delivers responses that someone has to pick up the same day.

Why boosting a job ad is not a recruitment campaign

The guides at the top of Google are full of creative showcases. IKEA hid job ads inside the flat-pack boxes of its furniture. Nice to read, but the technician or engineer you want does not change jobs because of a pun. They change jobs because they recognise the employer and because someone calls quickly.

What we see when an employer boosts the vacancy themselves:

The ad is the job description, so it talks about the role and not about the candidate.
The audience is set on interests, so the ad lands with everyone who ever touched a tool.
Whoever responds gets a form and then silence, because nobody agreed who would call.

The budget is not wasted on the channel. It is wasted on what was never arranged. Creativity is rarely the bottleneck. Follow-up is.

How do you set up a recruitment campaign?

We set up a recruitment campaign in four steps, the same four we use in our B2B campaigns, with the recruiter in the role of sales. We build and steer the campaigns; Active Talent holds the conversations.

Profile, not job title. A job title says what someone does; a profile says who you want. Describe the candidate the way you would describe an ideal customer profile: what work do they do now, at what kind of company, in which region, and what would make them move. The colleagues you hired most recently are your source.
The promise. What does that candidate get with you that they do not have today? That is your employer value proposition, and you find it by running a few promises as ads. If you already have one, this is where it goes to work. One promise per ad, with real colleagues in the picture.
Channel and audience. On Meta we reach people who are not searching, in the region where they live. On LinkedIn you target by trade and current employer. Google catches whoever is already looking. In technical and industrial trades we usually start on Meta, because that is where the candidate is and the job board is not.
After the click: the conversation. This is the step most step-by-step guides leave out. Agree beforehand who picks up a response, how fast, and what that person says. With us, Active Talent picks up every response within a day. A candidate with a job does not apply; they want a quick call first. Hold that call a week later and the campaign ran for nothing.

What do you measure in a recruitment campaign?

Counting applications is the wrong yardstick. A campaign that lands with everyone produces plenty of applications from people who do not fit, and costs the recruiter nothing but time. We measure per campaign, so per promise and per audience, the same sequence we use in B2B lead generation:

Responses: who asked for a conversation or left a phone number.
Conversations: how many of those responses the recruiter actually spoke to, and how fast.
Hires: who started, and which campaign they came from.

The time between response and conversation is the first thing we look at. When it grows, more budget will not help; follow-up is the bottleneck.

What we saw

At Templari Benelux demand grew faster than the team could handle. Enquiries kept coming in, but there were too few people to follow them up. We ran a job campaign on Meta for one profile, and the responses went straight to the person holding the conversations.

several people hired, extra capacity for sales

Templari Benelux · job marketing on Meta when demand grew fast; the new colleagues now follow up the leads

See the Templari Benelux project

What worked here was not a striking ad. It was that the campaign and the follow-up sat together, so nobody had to wait. In our campaigns we see that the candidate who eventually starts rarely responded to the first ad; they had seen the employer go by a few times before. Recognition first, then the vacancy, then a quick conversation.

A recruitment campaign starts with who makes the call

A recruitment campaign is not a job ad you boost, but four steps you can each measure: profile, promise, channel and conversation. The first three decide who clicks; the fourth decides whether anyone starts. So arrange who calls first, and only then put budget behind the ad.

Frequently asked questions

What is recruitment marketing?

Recruitment marketing is using marketing to reach candidates before they apply: building recognition among the people you want, and only then showing them the vacancy. A recruitment campaign is the part that leads to a concrete vacancy. We do both together with our sister company Active Talent, which holds the conversations.

What is the difference between a recruitment campaign and a job ad?

A job ad describes a role and waits for people who are already searching to find it. A recruitment campaign goes out to a chosen group of candidates, most of whom have a job, with one promise, and is measured on who talks to the recruiter and who starts. The ad is one piece of the campaign; the profile, the audience and the follow-up are the rest.

What is the difference between HR and recruitment?

HR covers the whole employment relationship: contract, pay, development, absence and departure. Recruitment is the part that finds and hires new people. In a recruitment campaign the recruiter works like sales: they hold the conversation the campaign produces and report back which campaign brought candidates who fit.