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Summary
Most recruitment business owners stop marketing over the summer and restart in September. That restart carries a hidden cost: lower reach, a colder audience and a first month back spent recovering ground you already owned. Marketers and BD professionals call it the reset tax.
This post sets out seven marketing tasks for the summer. They are not designed to fill your quiet weeks with busywork. They are designed to build a marketing system that keeps running when you are heads down billing, so your autumn pipeline is not left to chance.
Key Takeaways
- The reset tax is the cost of stopping and restarting your marketing. Most owners pay it twice a year, over the summer and at Christmas.
- Review the first half and identify what compounded, rather than what gave you a one off hit.
- Work your database while clients and candidates have the headspace to think.
- Build your pipeline sixty days ahead. October fees are earned in July and August.
- Get twelve weeks of content written and scheduled before your busy quarter arrives.
- Fix the shop front. People check your website and LinkedIn profile long before they contact you.
- Be honest about whether you are doing no marketing, too little marketing, or the wrong marketing. The fix is different for each.
- Choose the system over the sprint. Small consistent levers beat bursts of effort every time.
What happened to your marketing last August?
Not what you meant to do. What actually got sent, posted, written and published.
For a lot of recruitment business owners, the honest answer is not very much. Clients go quiet. Candidates are away. The inbox slows. And the marketing, which was already the first thing to get dropped when you were busy, gets dropped again.
Then September arrives, everyone comes back, and you look at a thin pipeline and think, right, time to get back out there.
So you start again. And starting again is the expensive bit.
The Reset Tax Nobody Budgets For
There is a cost to stopping and restarting your marketing, and it never appears on a spreadsheet. Marketers and BD professionals call it the reset tax.
You stop posting for six weeks. Your reach drops, so when you return you are seen by fewer people than before you left. The warm audience you built has cooled. The people who were starting to recognise your name have forgotten it.
You spend your first month back buying your way to where you already were.
Most recruitment business owners pay this tax twice a year. Once over the summer. Once at Christmas.
This is not an argument for working through August. It is an argument for using the summer differently. The quiet weeks are not the time to do more marketing. They are the time to build the thing that means your marketing does not stop when you do.
Why a To Do List Is Not Enough
A list of tasks reinforces the behaviour that keeps recruitment companies stuck. It suggests marketing is a pile of jobs you get to when there is a gap.
After eighteen years working with recruitment and search business owners, I can tell you this is rarely a knowledge problem. You know you should be visible. You know you should be talking to your database.
It is an implementation problem. The gap between knowing and doing is where growth disappears.
So here are seven tasks, and every one of them is chosen because it closes that gap rather than adding to your September workload.
1.Review the First Half Honestly
We are past the halfway point, so look back at January to June and work out what genuinely moved the needle.
Use Stop, Start, Continue if it helps. What will you stop, what will you start, what is working that you should keep doing?
Then add the question that matters most: what compounded?
Some marketing gives you a hit and then nothing. A one off campaign. A burst of posts. Other marketing builds on itself: the content that keeps getting found, the relationships that keep returning, the list that grows whether you are watching it or not.
Separate the two, then be ruthless about where your time goes in the second half.
2.Work Your Database While People Have Headspace
There is gold at your feet.
In your CRM are clients you have not spoken to in eighteen months, candidates you placed three years ago who are now hiring managers, and enquiries that never got a follow up.
Summer is one of the few points in the year when those people have room to think. They are reflecting on the year. They are wondering whether they want another one like it.
That is the moment to land in their inbox with something useful. A market update. A career conversation. A question about autumn hiring plans.
The recruiters with the strongest Septembers are the ones who had those conversations in July.
3.Build Your Sixty Day Pipeline Now
The work you do today does not pay you today. It pays you in around sixty days.
The conversation you have this week becomes next month’s brief and the placement after that. The fees you bank in October were not earned in October. They were earned in July and August by someone who kept going.
So a thin pipeline in September is not a September problem. It is a summer problem you are only finding out about late.
Work backwards. Decide what you want to be billing in the final quarter, count back sixty days, and ask what has to be happening now for that to be true.
4.Get Ahead on Your Content
This is the task that buys back your autumn.
Reach the end of August with twelve weeks of content written and scheduled, and your busiest quarter no longer knocks your marketing over. It simply continues without you.
Do not invent topics from scratch. Go and look at what has already worked. Your website analytics will show you which pages people read. LinkedIn will show you which posts landed. Your client calls will tell you which questions keep coming up.
The market tells you what it wants. Your job is to listen, then say more about it.
5.Sort Out the Shop Front
A beauty salon dresses the window before the season, not during it.
Your website and LinkedIn profile are your shop front, and for most recruitment companies they are costing money. People check you out long before they contact you.
Look at yours the way a stranger would.
- Does your website say who you help, or only what you do?
- Is there a case study or testimonial visible within ten seconds?
- Is there any reason for a visitor to give you their email address?
- Does your LinkedIn profile read like a CV, or like a page written for the people you want to attract?
None of these are big jobs. All of them are the sort of thing that never gets done because it is not urgent.
6.Be Honest About What You Are Really Doing
When I talk to recruitment business owners about their marketing, I hear three answers.
The first, and it is more common than people admit, is that they are not doing any marketing at all. None. Too busy, or referrals have always been enough. It simply is not happening.
The second is that they are doing some, but nowhere near enough of it, and never for long enough to work. A few posts. An email that went out once. It stops before it has a chance to build.
The third is that they are busy doing the wrong things. Activity that feels like marketing and produces nothing. Posting jobs and calling it content. Setting up a channel their market never looks at.
Before you add anything to your list, be honest about which of the three you are.
The fix is different for each. If you are doing nothing, start, and start small enough that you will keep going. If you are doing too little, commit to something you can sustain when the busy weeks arrive. And if you are doing the wrong things, stop them. Stopping is allowed.
Consistency in one or two things that work will always beat scattered effort across six that do not.
7. Choose the System First, Not the Sprint
Every task above fails if you treat it as a burst of effort.
Review the year, blast the database, write some content, tidy the website, feel productive, then run out of road in week three when a big brief lands.
What works instead is small, consistent levers pulled repeatedly, whether you feel like it or not. It is deeply unglamorous and it is the whole game.
The owners who grow are not the ones with the best ideas. They are the ones with something in place that keeps the marketing moving while they are heads down billing.
That is a system. Building one is the best possible use of your summer.
How We Can Help
If you are reading this thinking, I know all of this and I still do not do it, that is the most normal thing in the world. It is the Implementation Gap, and it is not a character flaw.
It is what we have spent this year designing for.
Sharon and I have created The Catalyst System™, and it sits at the heart of Superfast Circle. It is there for exactly the problem described in this post: marketing that runs as a system rather than something you get to when you remember.
If you would like a look at how it works inside Superfast Circle, book a call and we will walk you through it.
www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call
Thanks
Denise
