For recruitment agencies, reputation is crucial. Whether you are a smaller, local recruitment agency or you have branches across the UK, investing in your employer branding is one of the most valuable things you can do for your reputation.
1. What is employer branding?
2. Why is employer branding important for recruitment agencies?
3. The benefits of investing in employer branding
4. The key ingredients of a strong employer brand
What is employer branding?
Employer branding is how current and potential candidates and clients view your recruitment agency. Think about how a company’s products and services are marketed to consumers – employer branding is the same idea, only it’s focused on your business’ values, culture, and what it’s like to work with the team day-to-day.
Why is employer branding important for recruitment agencies?
Recruitment agencies should always have employer branding in mind, even if you feel there are ‘more important’ tasks to be getting on with. Strong employer branding isn’t about looking good for the sake of it. By highlighting the selling points of your agency, demonstrating your value and the level of service you offer, you gain a competitive edge. This in turn helps with cutting down on costs, reducing hiring times, client acquisition, and improving the quality of your candidates.
The benefits of investing in employer branding
Attract the right candidates
Good employer branding puts you one step ahead when attracting the right candidates for your clients. In 2024, it was reported that 64% of people research a company’s background online before applying for a job, so it stands to reason that jobseekers would also look into a recruitment agency’s background before job searching through them.
Take a look at your agency’s website, social media channels, Indeed and Glassdoor profiles, plus any other online presence you have (including what your recruiters post on LinkedIn). Do they demonstrate the mission and values of your business and your clients? Are you clear about what kinds of roles you recruit for? Can you hear from candidates about the benefits of finding roles through your agency?
Effective employer branding will appeal to candidates who have the right skills and aptitude for your vacancies, making it easier to match them with their ideal job. It will resonate with both active and passive jobseekers, retain candidates long-term so they come back to your agency when thinking about their next career move, and potentially boost candidate referral rates too.
Build trust with clients
We’ve already discussed how employer branding helps recruitment agencies to build a database of talented candidates. A high quality candidate pool increases your chances of finding clients the right hire, first time – enabling you to foster a strong working relationship and making them more likely to use your agency’s services again in the future.
You can also be transparent about your services through your employer branding, so that clients know exactly what to expect when working with you. This reduces the risk of any dissatisfaction among clients and builds trust as your agency either meets or exceeds expectations.
Improve your reputation
Providing a great candidate experience and building positive relationships with clients feeds back into your employer branding and improves your overall reputation. Your company can share about successful hires and positive candidate/client feedback in any marketing materials, to demonstrate the level of your recruitment services.
You may also find that candidates and clients recommend your services to others, enabling your recruitment agency to grow organically through word of mouth, on top of any proactive marketing that you do. A good reputation and growing business will benefit you during difficult periods, such as labour or job shortages.
The key ingredients of a strong employer brand
Employer brand audit
Make sure you know what candidates and clients really think about your recruitment agency by taking the time to find out. To get your audit started:
- Send out surveys to gather feedback from candidates and clients
- Search for your company on social media to see what people are saying about you
- Check your reviews on Google, Indeed, Glassdoor, and similar platforms
Don’t only look for positive feedback – ask for general feedback and, if it’s negative, use it as guidance for where you need to improve. This way you can continue doing what you’re good at with the evidence to show it’s working, while also putting together a plan for how to improve those weaker areas.
Employer value proposition (EVP)
This is used by companies to showcase what employees receive in exchange for their work. Recruitment agencies can apply EVP to what candidates and clients receive in exchange for their time, money and commitment, for example:
- Your agency’s mission, values and culture. Little Journey’s ‘About’ page on their website demonstrates the company’s personality, gives insight into the team, and puts their mission and values at the forefront of what they do.
- Flexible and remote work options. In 2023, the term “remote jobs” was searched in the UK over 18,000 times a month on Google. Does your agency have a range of remote positions available? Perhaps you are experienced in supporting businesses to hire remotely?
- Opportunities for career progression. Hays UK found that 48% of people cited lack of career progression as the top reason why they were unsatisfied with their job. Demonstrating how your agency values career progression could attract candidates looking to advance professionally.
- Commitments to diversity, equality and inclusion. What processes does your agency have in place to engage diverse candidates and support businesses with inclusive hiring practices?
- Candidate recognition. How do you show gratitude to your candidates for their hard work? For example, the annual Unitemps of the Year Awards.
- Client resources. Take a look at Everpool Recruitment’s ‘Resources’ page for inspiration on how you can provide extra value to clients.
- Social responsibility. At Unitemps, any profit made is reinvested into our host universities and their facilities. Could your agency take steps towards supporting a social or environmental concern? If you already do, think about how you can highlight this in your employer branding.
Real and diverse voices
Word of mouth is one of the most effective marketing tools and recruitment agencies can tap into this by sharing testimonials and success stories through their marketing channels. Having real candidates and clients share their positive experience with your agency is more authentic and trustworthy, and acts as a soft sell of your business.
Slalom’s Careers page contains short videos of employees talking about working at the company. The people featured are diverse in terms of race, gender, and age, as well as the city/country that they work in and their job role. The videos also showcase the diverse reasons why people enjoy working at Slalom.
Show don’t tell
Decide what features of your business to highlight in your employer branding, and then show your company doing these things, rather than telling people that you do them.
Are you able to respond to urgent staffing needs, turning around candidates within a 48 hour period? Provide clients with examples of when you’ve done this in the past.
Maybe you have excellent communication with your candidates? Share feedback from past candidates where they have spoken about how helpful your communication was during the recruitment process.
Case studies, like the ones on Recruitment South East’s website, are a great way to provide prospective clients with reliable, in-depth evidence of the quality of your recruitment services.
The trick here is to be proactive. Ask for testimonials from candidates and clients in advance, publish recent successes on your company’s website and social media, and regularly check Google, Indeed and Glassdoor for positive reviews. Create a bank of positive feedback, testimonials and success stories to use in your marketing materials.
Honesty and transparency
At the same time as shouting about all the great things your recruitment agency has to offer, it’s important you don’t over-promise on your services. Don’t exaggerate your culture or make false claims about your agency’s values. Candidates and clients will easily see through this once they begin working with you, and they won’t hesitate to share their experience with others.
Tracking progress
During the first audit of your employer brand, decide on some key performance indicators (KPIs) for your recruitment agency to achieve within a set time period. KPIs for recruitment agencies include:
- Candidate and client satisfaction (monitor this through regular feedback surveys)
- Cost per hire
- Time to hire
- Offer acceptance rate
- Submit to interview ratio (the number of applications submitted to a client vs how many of these are selected for interview)
Effective employer branding for recruitment agencies can be tricky. Recruiters spend a lot of time marketing clients to candidates and vice versa, so it’s difficult to know how to position yourself within this. But starting small, testing what works for your agency, asking for feedback, and always having your employer brand in mind, will enable you to sustainably build a fantastic reputation among both clients and candidates.
Located at universities across the UK, Unitemps is a campus-based recruitment agency with over 25 years’ experience in temporary and permanent recruitment. Our dedicated team is on-hand to help candidates find work and employers find talented staff who add value.
This article was written by Becky Marrow.
Last updated on 13 March 2025
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