Recruitment Marketing Foundations

Sharp Consultancy sits within the B2B world, but its audiences are both businesses (prospective commercial clients), and individuals, looking for a new position within Finance and Accountancy. As these are professional audiences, we identified that LinkedIn was the perfect platform to use as the main vehicle for their recruitment social media marketing strategy.

As you would expect, Sharp had already amassed a good following on LinkedIn, with their team of recruiters in Leeds and Sheffield, constantly using the social media platform in their daily work.

To lift this activity, we reviewed and updated The Sharp LinkedIn business page and began creating a recruitment social media marketing strategy that covered creating B2B social media content, developing a visual brand identity, developing their employer branding, and event marketing, to support their existing activities and raise their profile.

Social Media Audit & Competitor Analysis:

• Performed an audit of existing content and metrics on Sharp’s social channels, identifying top performing content and areas of opportunity.
• Thorough analysis of the competitor landscape in the region and nation-wide, identifying key topics, formats and mediums that perform well within the industry and for this specific audience.

Recruitment Social Media Marketing Strategy:

• Created a recruitment marketing strategy which outlines a B2B social media plan for the whole year, plotting key dates, events and updates.
• Crafted detailed social media plans for each month, to be pre-approved by the Sharp Consultancy team.

Crafting a Visual Identity for Sharp’s Social Channels:

• Sharp Consultancy’s branding was already clean and well-built, but our recruitment marketing strategy included bringing their branding to life across social media, by making Sharp’s LinkedIn page visually cohesive, and their content consistent and easily recognisable for their followers.
• We built a bank of templates and bespoke videos and graphics to create a strong visual identity which easily comes through.

Employer Branding:

• Positioning Sharp as an employer of choice in Leeds and Sheffield has been a key priority for them.
• To establish this, we formed a branding strategy as a connected part of our wider recruitment marketing strategy and produced employee-centric content, showcasing Sharp’s company culture and bringing employees’ personalities to life. We shot an office video demonstrating what it’s like to work at Sharp and frequently produce campaigns focused on staff (Meet the Team, Recruiters Insight).
• We built their Instagram profile as a “behind the scenes” look at working within Sharp Consultancy.

Event Marketing:

• Sharp Consultancy’s recruitment marketing strategy has long relied on networking to establish itself as a leader within the Finance and Accounting industry. They therefore run multiple events a year, with the biggest ones being the Young Accountant of the Year Awards and Women in Business networking event.
• The Marketing Optimist have been involved in the marketing of these events every step of the way – from liaising with event partners, to creating promotional graphics, creating slides for the events, filming videos and taking photographs at the events, to follow up post-event.
• This holistic approach to recruitment event marketing has led to events-related campaigns consistently producing the highest engagement on the Sharp social media channels.

Sharp Consultancy – Financial Services Recruitment

Sharp Consultancy has been a leader in Yorkshire’s finance and accountancy recruitment market for over 30 years. With offices in Leeds and Sheffield they support a range of businesses including FTSE listed companies, Investment banks, international private equity houses, Big 4/Top 10 firms of accountants, and smaller regional firms.

Staff retention and internal development is quite possibly the best in the region with many of their team beyond the10 year and even 20-year employment mark, and many of their managers and directors having risen in the ranks from trainee positions.

However, Sharp believed they hid their light under a bushel and came to Marketing Optimist seeking recruitment marketing to spread this message more widely, increase brand recognition and generate interactions with clients and candidates.