Haymarket Business Media Recruitment has always been a key contributor to the business. However, during the pandemic revenues dropped by over 75% YoY. With a leaner, yet more efficient team, the senior leadership personnel collaborated to realign the team responsibilities and KPIs, focused commercial development on premium solutions, introduced targeted marketing campaigns, streamlined processes to strengthen conversion, and introduced game-changing initiatives with one primary goal and mission statement - to accelerate our recovery and drive revenue, whilst providing clients with more meaningful and measurable outcomes. The team are now delivering a sustainable, growing recruitment business that is underpinned by Haymarket's known audience strategy.

The sales team was restructured to promote efficiency and they worked with accounts across all our brands, removing duplication and maximising client coverage. They then implemented enhanced Salesforce processes for client coverage, lead management, opportunity performance reporting, premium sales performance and analysis on highest converted marketing channels.

In order to further grow Candidate Audience and to connect their Clients to a new pool of talent, they launched Social Communities for the brands across LinkedIn, which grew by 189%. In addition, to capitalise on the leads driven by client marketing, eCommerce platforms were revamped with tested content, introduced a new multi-ad offering and branded products as ‘Most Popular’, which resulted in an immediate increase in revenue and transactional yield. They also collaborated with their established commercial partnerships to revamp the marketing on their websites and enhanced the commercial agreement. As a result, enquiries and revenue increased from these channels.

To optimise opportunities and convert at a higher value with data-driven products and premium sales, management worked with our learning and development team to upskill the team to ensure they demonstrated value by leading with data and insights. Additionally, forecasting a candidate driven market, the recruitment department quickly introduced new products - Application Booster, Social Amp and Employer Branding package - to maintain strong opportunity yields.

The results speak for themselves. Leads and opportunities, conversion, premium sales contributions, opportunity yield, revenue per head, and client retention all improved and increased month-on-month. The team are now delivering the same revenue as pre-pandemic, and they have seen extraordinary year-on-year digital revenue growth of 64% in a traditionally low-growth sector (recruitment) and across eight mature B2B brands.

Revenue growth driven by a winning combination of digital innovations across product, sales, and marketing. This includes:

• New and improved premium products that provide opportunities for clients to go beyond advertising and get guaranteed results, employer branding or content enhancements.
• More tailored e-commerce offer based on recommendations that drove up both volumes and yield per conversion.
• New ‘Multi-ad’ products that combined various solutions into compelling online packages.

Focusing on more customised packages saw commercial partnerships income increase by nearly 30%. New LinkedIn pages were built for every brand, resulting in followers growing by 189% since October 2021, and the team saw higher conversion rates from leads and improved ROI for clients.

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