A recruitment agency is two businesses sharing one marketing budget. The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, sees the same split everywhere in the sector. The client side and the candidate side have different audiences, different buying cycles and different content, and they are usually funded out of one pot by whoever argued hardest at the start of the month.
Neither side is the answer on its own. A desk with vacancies and no people is as stuck as a desk with people and no vacancies, and both look identical on a report that only counts leads.
Should a recruitment agency market to clients or to candidates?
To whichever side is scarce on that desk right now, and the answer changes by role and by quarter. Splitting the budget evenly is the most common mistake in the sector, because it spends against a shortage that does not exist while the real constraint on billing goes unfunded for another month.
Working out which side is short is not difficult, it is simply rarely asked. Count live vacancies against placeable people on file for each desk. Where vacancies outnumber candidates, every euro belongs on attraction. Where the file is deep and the roles are not there, the money belongs on the client side.
Why is winning new clients risky if you cannot fill the roles?
Because an unfilled vacancy ends a client relationship faster than never having won it. A new client judges the agency entirely on the first brief, and a first brief that sits open for weeks confirms the suspicion that they were sold to by someone who could not deliver. That client is then harder to win back than a stranger.
On a new desk or a new sector the sequence should almost always be supply first. Build the file, then sell against it. Marketing that produces briefs you cannot service is not neutral, it actively spends the credibility the agency needs later.
What actually wins client side business for a recruitment agency?
Evidence that you already have the people, not a description of your process. Every agency in the market claims speed, quality and thorough vetting, so those claims carry no information at all. A specific statement of who you can supply this week is the only client message that separates one agency from another.
That changes the shape of the outreach. Instead of an introduction to the agency, the approach leads with a named profile, availability and salary expectation, which is a reason to reply rather than a request for a meeting. Reaching the person who owns the hiring budget rather than the person managing the process is the other half of it, covered in reaching decision makers and built into our pipeline system. Where the volume of conversations is the constraint, outsourced appointment setting is the usual answer.
How do you attract candidates who are not actively job hunting?
By selling the specific role rather than the agency, and by making the first step cost almost nothing. Passive candidates are not reading job boards. They respond to a clearly described job that is visibly better than the one they hold, placed where they already spend time, with a low commitment first contact.
Most job adverts are written as internal specifications and then published as advertising, which is why response rates are poor. An advert has a job to do.
- Lead with what changes for them. The client requirement list is not a reason for anyone to move.
- Name the salary band. Adverts that hide it get a fraction of the response and waste the applications they do get.
- Describe the team and the actual work. People leave managers and join teams, not company descriptions.
- Ask for a conversation, not a CV. A passive candidate does not have one ready and will not write one on spec.
- Reply the same day. Interest in moving jobs is a mood, and it passes.
Which channels work for each side of a recruitment desk?
The two sides barely overlap, so they need separate plans rather than one campaign with two messages. Client side demand is searched for deliberately and infrequently. Candidate side demand is emotional, local and constant, and it responds to being interrupted rather than found.
- Search for sector and service queries. Employers looking for an agency search with intent. See search advertising.
- Professional network advertising for the client side. Precise by job title and company size, covered in B2B network advertising.
- Paid social for role level attraction. Role specific, within a radius, and by far the cheapest route to passive candidates. See paid social.
- Content answering salary and career questions. These get searched constantly and answered badly, and they build the credibility a job advert cannot.
- The database you already hold. Placed candidates, past applicants and lapsed clients are the warmest list in the business, which is the argument in database reactivation.
How should the budget be split between the two sides?
By expected gross profit per fill, not by cost per lead. A cheap application on a desk with no live roles is worth nothing, and an expensive client conversation on a desk with placeable people on file is worth a fee. Cost per lead compares those two badly and will always favour the wrong one.
That means the split moves. A desk that was candidate short in the spring can be client short by the autumn, and a budget fixed in January will be funding last year's shortage all year. Reviewing the allocation monthly against fill rates rather than against lead counts is the discipline, and the wider principle is set out in how to allocate a marketing budget. It also helps to agree what a placeable candidate and a real brief actually are, which is the point of defining a qualified lead.
What stops a placement falling over at offer stage?
Contact and preparation between the offer and the start date, which is as much a marketing job as a consultant one. The candidate who accepted is still being worked on by their current employer and by everyone else they interviewed with, and silence in that window is exactly what a counter offer is designed to exploit.
The material that wins the acceptance is employer brand content, and most agencies never build it. What the team is like, what the first ninety days look like, what the person who took the last role there says now. Sending that during the notice period keeps the decision sold, and it costs a fraction of sourcing the replacement when the placement collapses in week three.
Recruitment is a two sided sale, and both sides can walk. If one side of your desk is consistently starving the other, that is a budget allocation problem rather than a consultant problem, and it is fixable. Our lead generation and wider programme work is built around exactly that kind of constraint. Book a call and we will look at which side of your desk the money should be on.