An Interview with Jon Evans: Marketing Manager at The Small Consultancy

We get his thoughts on marketing strategy, leveraging trends and what’s next for recruitment marketing.

Can you tell us about your background in marketing/ recruitment and what brought you to The Small Consultancy?

After ten years in recruitment – both in-house and agency – I hit a brick wall. Burnout is a big issue in recruitment, the average tenure in the industry is somewhere between 3-5 years due to the pace and constant commercial pressure. A recruiter needs a basic handle on a whole host of skills, and while most people see us as sales people, a modern recruiter needs a lot more to survive past the 5 years. Marketing is one of these skills…

So, I quit my job and set up as a freelance copywriter. Over the five years I’ve been running Curious Recruitment Marketing, I’ve been lucky enough to work with recruiters all across the country – many of who are early stage startups in need of fractional marketing support and guidance. I’ve been working with Caroline and The Small Consultancy since the covid-lockdown. We both came from commercial backgrounds into recruitment and shared very similar visions and ideas on how recruitment SHOULD work, particularly in-house. 

Over the past few years we’ve set about bringing these shared ideas and values to life. We’ve honed and developed our proposition and service offering as we learned more and more about what our clients really need and not just what was available to them. 

Seeing The Small Consultancy grow with the addition of Elle and the partnership with Carly to offer a wider talent offering has been great and it’s exciting to see The Small Consultancy 2.0 will bring.

How does The Small Consultancy’s mission and values influence your approach to marketing the brand and its services?

Outside of The Small Consultancy, I work almost exclusively with startups and scaleups. One of my favourite things in Marketing is creating a successfully organic strategy that gets a small business above one of their big, established competitors on Google. 

I found this same desire to help growing business thrive and have access to the tools and expertise they need on a flexible basis that suits their needs in The Small Consultancy. Our mission is to help startups and scaleups level the talent playing field by offering them expert and modern recruitment, delivered by experts on a scale and budget that suits their needs and level of growth. 

We have people who’ve been there, ridden the chaos successfully and come out the other side – I think we are all slightly weird in that’s what we enjoy best. We like the challenge of bringing some order to the chaos and puzzling out the right solution that will not only meet client’s needs now but will also be able to grow alongside them. 

As an in-house recruiter, I never liked the phrase ‘Talent Acquisition’ – apart from the fact it’s horribly impersonal, it’s very focussed on attraction – which anyone who has ever worked in-house will tell you is only one piece of the recruitment puzzle – a modern recruitment team is a strategic function, it’s remit shouldn’t stop at getting some interviewees through the door.

Retaining talent is as important as bringing in new talent and recruitment should have a seat at the table offering it’s unique insight and working closely with HR, Marketing and ‘Heads of’ to ensure the best outcomes and smoothest path to sustained growth. I love that I found a company that shares this view and drives real value to it’s clients.

What are the unique challenges and opportunities of marketing in the talent advisory space, particularly in the PE, VC, and scale-up sectors?

The challenge for scaleups and startups in the talent marketing space will pretty much be the same challenges they have elsewhere in their marketing strategy – spending budgets and resources wisely. It’s critical to understand your desired talent as well as you understand your desired customers. You need to know where they are, what they care about, what their challenges are and what the wider market is looking like. 

Once you know more about who and where they are, the next challenge is how to reach them effectively – that means, what content do they consume, where? Do we have any regularly recurring roles where regular organic content might make more sense over paying for ads etc. 

Finally, once you’ve decided how best to reach them, it’s all about the messaging. Are we putting front and centre the aspects of the brand, the role and the benefits that will most hit home with this audience? What are our competitors doing – how can we stand out over the established players?

How do you ensure that the marketing strategies you implement align with both the company’s goals and the evolving needs of the talent market?

Recruitment marketing can’t (and shouldn’t) sit apart from either the wider recruitment strategy or wider business. The days of putting out a repurposed job description as an advert are gone (for the better if you ask me!). 

Recruitment marketing needs input from the marketing team (if there is one), it needs intel and input from hiring managers and stakeholders to operate at maximum efficiency. But it also needs to be funnelling info from the marketing activity back into the business to feed hiring decisions and the wider recruitment strategy. 

In a digital-first world, what are some of the key trends you’re seeing in B2B marketing, and how do they apply to The Small Consultancy’s approach?

AI is something you can’t really ignore right now. There is a lot of terrible use of AI right now which is likely to cause brands some headaches further down the road. Take AI blogs for example, Google have said that while they are flagging material that’s created with AI, they aren’t marking it down as long as it doesn’t fall foul of its existing content guidance. As we all know, Google is notorious for changing their mind (or often just doing the exact opposite of what they say they’re doing!), and if they do, be prepared to lose a lot of organic visibility! 

That said, AI has a really important role to play in enabling us to be more productive. It’s about looking at what we can automate carefully and the possible future consequences of doing so. We’ve taken a conscious approach to engage with AI solutions where they can benefit small businesses looking to produce at scale – but always with careful guard rails and human intervention and input.

More people than ever are also using alternatives to search engines, whether that’s asking ChatGPT (or their chatbot of choice), to TikTok and Reddit. This means understanding your talent pool is even more crucial than ever. It also means understanding how to sell effectively on each of these platforms becomes important as it may be the dealbreaker in how you best use that limited budget for recruitment marketing. 

How do you see marketing’s role evolving in the talent advisory and recruitment sector, especially with advancements in digital tools and data analytics?

Marketing (much like recruitment) will always be at its heart about people. We’ll continue to adapt to new tools, new channels, and the ever-increasing plethora of data available to us. It will give us better insights on how to spend our budgets, but at the end of the day, it will continue to be very much about people trying to connect with other people. 

I think the biggest change for recruitment marketing in the coming years will actually come from a shift in how recruiters (and budget holders) view the importance of marketing in the recruitment process. 

Many still just see Marketing as job ads and, if you are feeling flash, a careers page and a couple of interviews with your existing staff. Recruiters themselves often have a very short-term view on ROI, something that’s usually been garnered over years of working to continual cycles of working towards ‘month end’. Traditionally, if it isn’t going to increase your commission this month then it’s a waste of time. 

But, the perception has already shifted a lot, and while much activity is still very LinkedIn centric, there has been a sharp increase in the last four years of companies and recruiters putting time into building effective employer brands. I don’t see this reversing, and with major shifts to the established norms on the horizon (AI search, Google antitrust breakup) companies will continue to expand beyond just LinkedIn. 

What drives your passion for marketing, particularly in the talent and recruitment space?

I want to leave someone in a better place than when I arrived. It’s nice when someone pays you to write a blog or make a video – but what really gets me excited and motivated each day is working with people to create strategies that will help them meet their goals. Whether that’s taking a business from startup to sale or just helping a small business find their level that makes them happy. I like working with recruiters and teaching them how to be better at the marketing aspects of their role and how valuable a tool they can be to making a stressful role a bit easier.  

Looking ahead, what exciting plans or projects are you working on to further grow The Small Consultancy’s brand presence?

We’ll shortly be launching season 2 of our podcast – which is exciting as it’s been on hiatus for a while to allow us to concentrate on other aspects of the business. We’re also looking to attend more events in 2025 and meet more founders face-to-face and even hosting some of our own virtual events looking to bring founders and fractional experts together from across the startup and scaleup lifecycle.

Find out how our recruitment projects can transform your internal recruitment capabilities and keep your scale-up growing as planned.