Five recruitment mistakes to avoid in the creative and marketing sector
- October 17, 2018
Five recruitment mistakes to avoid
The talent market is changing by the day. It can be hard to keep up, and as a result, recruitment can be stressful and time-consuming - especially in the creative and marketing industries where you’ve got challenging clients and looming deadlines to deal with too. Candidates are becoming more demanding and employee expectations are rising as well: basically, when it comes to marketing recruitment, the stakes are high. Despite your best intentions its easy to make mistakes. Read on to discover the top five recruitment mistakes to avoid in the creative and marketing sector and how to avoid them.
1. Thinking candidates are lucky to work for you
There's much to improve in the business and professional world - the gender pay gap, flexible working, encouraging innovation - to name just a few issues. The main one that’s relevant to the recruiting process is the antiquated view that job-seekers are begging for work. This is reflected in the very way that job adverts are often structured, listing a series of criteria and demands candidates must meet in order to be considered. Craft your job ads as if you were talking to an equal; a human being. Excite and inspire them. In other words, market yourself to potential applicants in order to attract the very best creative talent.
2. Improvising the hiring process
Many busy marketing agencies have everything in their head when looking for a new team member. Writing down your requirements in a job description is an important first step to finding the right candidate. It is easy to make bad hires simply because you weren’t thorough enough at the beginning. Skipping crucial steps in the recruitment process, such as doing background checks, following up references and offering second interviews can result in bad hires slipping through the cracks, which ultimately means you’ll have to start again from scratch in just a few weeks or months.
3. Not reacting quickly enough
It is often necessary to scale your recruitment up or down as and when you need. That means being able to identify a skills gap and have the time to fit the recruitment process into your schedule at short notice. As is often the case in busy marketing agencies, if you win a new contract you’ll need to expand and find the best creative minds quickly. Not reacting quickly enough can comprise the start of your new contract, which creates a bad impression with your new client. If your recruitment process isn’t well managed, time-to-hire will only increase as the interview process drags on and all the good candidates get snapped up by the competition. The result? A lot of wasted time (and money!) and still no good candidates to show for it. You do not want to hire out of desperation.
4. Not networking
It's true that it's often not what you know but who. Networking in the industry is crucial to giving you unbeatable knowledge and understanding of the market, so you can be completely confident when interviewing. If you know exactly what you want from candidates then the recruitment process will run smoothly from start to finish. Not only that but with unbeatable contacts in the industry, you’ll be able to find the perfect fit for your agency at speed.
5. Trying to save money
Doing recruitment yourself can, on paper, appear cheaper. Yet this is often a false economy, in the long run. Believe it or not, it’s actually cheaper to outsource your recruitment rather than do it inhouse - and because dedicated recruitment consultancies can fill vacancies with the right talent faster, it will also drastically reduce the amount of HR resources spent on finding candidates. The cost of a bad hire could total more than £130,000 when you take into account the cost of wasted salary, wasted training, recruitment costs and staff turnover - so it will save you a great deal of money to get it right the first time by outsourcing your recruitment, streamlining your process and reducing your costs.
Outsourcing your marketing recruitment can have a number of benefits for your business and by taking your time to choose a provider who is the right fit for you, you can be completely confident they will understand your culture, values and hiring goals - so you can get the best talent for your growing team. A specialist marketing recruitment agency will take care of the whole process for you, scale up or down for you and network for you to have a pool of amazing talent at their fingertips. If you’re looking to outsource your marketing recruitment, contact Stonor today - our expert team will be more than happy to help.