The Future of Recruitment Marketing: a new event

The sold out event took place in the Radisson Blu Hotel on Tuesday 4th June and welcomed HR and marketing professionals from across a wide range of sectors to talk about the challenges facing companies as they seek to grow their teams.

The event is curated by BlueSky Video Marketing and speaking about the latest edition, Peter Craven said “the good news is that a lot of businesses are growing – winning new business, expanding into new markets and developing new products – which is great news for the local economy. The result of that is recruitment just keeps getting harder – and that was the driver for the focus on recruitment marketing at our latest event.”

The first three events took place in 2018 and focused on the technical developments within the marketing profession with features on website developments, chatbot technology, video marketing, marketing automation platforms and PR and communications in a digital age.

“More of the conversations that we were having with our customers over the last 12 months have been about the recruitment challenge” says Peter. “While businesses can see where the growth is coming from in terms of demand for their products and services, more and more conversations ended up talking about the ability to attract and retain people as a potential blocker to growth. We started doing more and more work in this area so when it came to deciding on a theme for the Future of Marketing event it seemed that recruitment marketing was the obvious choice.”

The event featured a busy and varied agenda. Peter says “I’ve been to enough events over the years to know that ‘death by powerpoint is a real issue so we were conscious of this when putting the format together. We’re also very conscious of how little time people have so there were people that we just had to have involved in the event but whose schedules wouldn’t allow them to put a presentation together so the Q&A sessions allowed us to get the best of both worlds.”

Speaking about the event, James Toland of LMJ Communications said “I really enjoyed the varied format – from Q&A to speaker sessions and live demonstrations of online solutions. It was engaging and highly informative with lots packed in to 3 hours.”

Another attendee was Conor Donnelly, Marketing Manager at FinTrU who attended with Talent Acquisition Manager, Kathy Bell. Conor said “there was plenty of insight from the different speakers covering a range of industries and levels of experience.”

The event featured contributions from:

Fiona Rooney, Managing Director of Ipsos MORI in Northern Ireland who talked about their latest research into Gen Z and how we could use these insights to shape our recruitment marketing messages to this audience.

Claire Loftus of Employee Engagement agency, Evolve who spoke about the cost to business of disengaged employees and what measures organisations can take to build engagement and create an army of brand ambassadors to help communicate your employee value proposition.

Aimee McCracken, Senior Marketing Executive with conveyor belt manufacturers, Smiley Monroe spoke about their recent ‘Hi5 Values’ project which began as an internal project but has had a major impact on their ability to recruit people to the organisation.

Peter Craven of BlueSky Video Marketing then spoke about how video can help you pass the trust test in an environment where business leaders and brands have never experienced such low trust.

Chris Henry, Head of Global Communications with Allstate Northern Ireland then showed some of the work they do to make Allstate a ‘career destination of choice’, highlighting their focus on an ‘always-on’ approach to recruitment marketing.

Paul James of Ardmore Advertising then did a live demonstration of a recruitment marketing chatbot, showing how it could help throughout the recruitment process, from initial screening of candidates to interview scheduling and even starting the induction process before a new recruit joins your organisation.

The final speaker was Orla McGreevy, Head of Sales & Marketing with SeeMeHired.com – the new online recruitment platform launched in January 2019. Orla’s presentation focused on how their platform was set up to remove unconscious bias from the recruitment process and embed diversity and inclusion into recruitment processes

The event concluded with a speaker panel featuring Gordon Milligan, Chair of the Institute of Directors in Northern Ireland and Deputy Chief Executive of Translink, Camilla Long, Co-Founder of Bespoke Communications and Jamie Gordon, a marketing student on his placement year and currently working with Glaze Digital having had a spell with Sync NI previously.

The panel discussion centered around what organisations were doing to try and solve the recruitment problem and how they made sure that their organisations stood out from the crowd in the way they communicated their message.

Speaking about the event Peter Craven said ‘It was the first go at a new topic and a shorter format for the event so while there were a few bumps in the road, overall we’re very happy with how it went. Plans are already underway for a follow up event – sticking with the topic of recruitment marketing – and we hope that will take place here in the late Autumn. We’ve also had interest from a few potential event partners in England and hope to launch a recruitment marketing event in the North West of England. We’re hoping to have details of this by the end of June.”