B2B Marketing for Recruitment Agencies: Twelve Ways to Win Job Orders [2026]

Hello — I am Takayama, Director and CGO at NowVillage.
This time I will explain how recruitment agencies win job orders, in other words B2B marketing.

We are often asked about attracting candidates, but we are increasingly asked about B2B marketing too, so I thought I would answer here in an article.

For an article on candidate marketing for recruitment agencies, see here (the complete guide to recruitment agency marketing)
For a guide to the digital methods that make candidate attraction work, see click here

The sales and marketing methods for winning job orders fall mainly into outbound and inbound,
and you need to work on both, but which methods and what content you should use change with the stage your organisation is at.

So below I set out the methods you need to use at each stage of a recruitment agency business.

・You are in the early stages and have few job orders you have won yourself
・You want to stop relying on job databases
・You want to make your sales work more efficient

1. The big picture of B2B marketing

The diagram above shows the big picture of B2B marketing.

Against the flow of the business (the steps from awareness through comparison to the order), the order in which you should tackle marketing starts near the order itself —.

no matter how good the activity you run, it is meaningless if it does not lead to an order— that is the point.

From here on, with that general principle in mind, I set out the methods we recommend for each stage of a recruitment agency.

2. [Early stage] Five ways to win your own job orders

This is for cases where the chief executive is doing the sales to win job orders, or there is just one salesperson.

There are five ways to win job orders.
・Dinners
・Cold calling
・Direct messages through contact forms
・A website (for consumers)
・Putting customer voices on the site
I will go through each in turn.

2.1 Dinners

You may think “a dinner, really, as the first item?”, but I include it because it is the most reliable method.

Dinners come in

A: a dinner for four to six people introduced by acquaintances
B: business owners’ associations
— two patterns.

A: a dinner for four to six people introduced by acquaintances
These are dinners where two or three business owners each invite a few owners they want to connect with one another.

B: business owners’ associations
Business owners’ associations come as general associations and industry associations.

Ex) Examples of general associations
・EO
・Astida Salon
・JC

Ex) Examples of industry associations
・The food service and commerce association
・The Miyagi Association of Small Business Entrepreneurs
・Shinjuku Corporation Association (public interest incorporated association)

What you say at the dinner

“We specialise in XX. We have XX registrations a month. Our YouTube videos have XX views. We send 10,000 scout messages a month. We won XX in last year’s recruitment agent rankings.”

and the like —it is best to talk about your area of specialisation and your ability to attract candidates

“I’ll put you in touch with our HR team, so drop me an email.”

That is the sort of reply you get.

2.2 Cold calling

This is an easy method for anyone to take on when you want to win meetings with companies you would like job orders from.
However, You cannot approach anyone without a calling list to hand.
You can buy a calling list, but what matters is winning job orders from companies that are a good fit for you.
There are two ways we recommend building a list, and of the two below, A is the one to tackle first.

A Listing the roles that candidates you have met are being put forward for by competitors
B Listing the companies that are running job adverts

The companies in group A are not running job adverts, so there is no way to find them unless you hear about them from candidates.
And the fact that a competitor is putting someone forward means the role is in line with what that person wants & there is a chance they will be hired.
Collecting list A requires the help of your career advisers, but do make sure you do it.

2.3 Direct messages through contact forms

Use the list you prepared for cold calling, and send direct messages to the companies you could not reach by phone.
The message needs to include detail that brings the candidate into focus, such as their age and career history.
Better still if you can share case studies*, including photos and video of people you have placed.
※ These must be published only as far as personal data is protected.

“At our first meeting we will show you masked CVs of specific candidates who fit your business”
Wording like that raises response rates, because it gives the reader confidence that the meeting will not be a waste of time.

2.4 A website (for consumers)

A consumer-facing website matters more than you might think for raising the rate at which you win job orders.
You need a corporate site that expresses a designed USP, not something built with free tools or no-code.

When someone looks up a company name they came across through cold calling, direct messages or a dinner, if the website is the kind you see everywhere, with nothing distinctive about it, it gets buried among everything else and leaves no impression.
The site also plays an important role once you start mixing in PR and inbound activity, so we recommend putting a solid one in place.

As good examples of sharpening the claim you make about your own field, I would point to KOTORA, LEGAL JOB BOARD and MITSUKARU.

2.5 Putting customer voices on the site

Publish case studies from the companies that use your service.
To start with, quantity over quality is the right way to think about it.
Because from the user’s point of view, whether or not there are case studies at all is what puts their mind at rest
That said, as far as you can, lead with case studies from larger companies or companies well known in the industry.
It is hard to differentiate a recruitment agency service, so you need to use the content of your case studies to show what makes yours distinctive.

Below is an idea of how to present case studies in practice.

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies

3. [Small scale] Four ways to win your own job orders

This is for companies that have a sales team, with around three recruitment advisers.

There are four ways to win job orders.
・Referrals
・A website (landing page or service site)
・PR
・The ads
I will go through each in turn.

3.1 Referrals

Recruitment agency fees are paid on results after the fact, so compared with staffing or job advertising, a certain number of job orders do come through referrals.

When a referral leads all the way to a placement, pass a referral fee or a gift to the person who referred you to leave a good impression.

For companies you absolutely want to work with, we recommend saving them by name on your phone.

the more specific the role, the more a referral is the only way in

3.2 A website (landing page or service site)

Building a B2B landing page will not bring a flood of enquiries, but build one all the same. Someone searching for your service by name on Google is very valuable.

• They heard your name at a dinner
• They saw your chief executive or your service name on social media

At the moment their interest in you spikes like that, prospects search.
If the landing page and service site that catch that trust look cheap, the impression drops sharply and they do not get in touch.
Alongside the basics such as what the service does, include the number of monthly registrations and photos, universities and career histories that bring candidates into focus, so that the web raises your credit too.

▽ Examples of B2B service sites

For a guide to the points that make a landing page perform, download it here

3.3 PR

PR is important work that builds good relationships with a range of stakeholders and with society.
As you keep up your PR work, you win recognition in society and start to be known by your target companies.
Material for PR includes the following.

• Awards (e.g. the White Grand Prix, Good Action)
• Publishing a book (e.g. the co-authored book with Listeners_companies where young people can thrive)
• Best Venture 100
• Shacho Chips
• Campaign pieces (e.g. building a website called “Handwritten Notebook” ⇒ we asked senior colleagues to write by hand on A4 paper what they did during their job hunt, then published it on the site to attract attention)

Rather than only posting to the news section of your site, use press release platforms to distribute it.
Press release platforms include PR TIMES・@PRESS and so on.
Set yourself a rule such as one release a month and keep at it.
No single one has an immediate effect, but the number of people who say “I’ve heard of them” grows steadily.
There is a secondary benefit too: it also works in synergy with your own hiring.

3.4 Advertising

If you specialise in a field such as the food service industry or manufacturing engineers, we also recommend using advertising.
From the hiring company’s point of view, they want to be working with the agency that has gathered plenty of their target job seekers,
so the bar for them to enquire is by no means high.

We recommend starting with methods such as remarketing that target people who have already visited your site.

We have put together a guide on winning new leads online.
Download here click here

4. [Mid-size and above] Three ways to win your own job orders

There are three ways to win job orders.
・White papers
・Article content
・Seminars
I will go through each in turn.

4.1 White papers

The target for marketing to win job orders is HR and hiring managers.
Your downloads (white papers) should of course cover your service, but also share know-how about hiring in the fields you work in.

Here is an idea of the hiring know-how and information to cover.

Audience	Detail
Graduates	A manual for running graduate recruitment events, and the like
Experienced hires	A collection of direct scout email templates with high response rates Industry trend data A template for a recruitment pitch deck and so on

You do not need to produce one every month. Prepare the minimum number that makes people feel you have real expertise — around nine pages — and update it every six months.

4.2 Article content

As with white papers, write article content that solves the problems hiring managers and HR departments have.

For general experienced hiring, for example, the content might look like this.

• The time of year to focus on experienced hiring
• How to set criteria for experienced hiring
• Know-how for experienced hiring

What matters is designing content like that to lead readers to your white papers and to build awareness of your service.

4.3 Seminars

As a rule they do not work.
By working, I mean a seminar leading directly to a meeting.
The reason is that hiring managers often see little difference between one agency’s service and another’s.
However, They are a worthwhile activity if your service is already well known (top one to three in the industry) or if your aim is to win leads and nurture them.

As with article content, run seminars on content that resolves hiring managers’ problems and worries, and keep an archive on your website.
Even when few people attend on the day, an archive on your website means hiring managers can watch it whenever they like.
When you do, make sure the setup captures name, email address and phone number.

5. Using a CRM to accelerate sales for job orders

From here I explain how to use a CRM to get the most out of your marketing for winning job orders.

・Size: small to large
・Need: to run sales for job orders efficiently
・Problem: “we are starting a sales team from scratch” or “our existing team is not making good use of the CRM”

5.1 What a CRM is

CRM (customer relationship management) refers to a tool for managing customer relationships — one with features for managing and analysing existing customers, whether companies or people, and approaching them efficiently.
In recent years tools have grown more capable, and CRMs have appeared that also cover marketing (MA) and sales (SFA), so be aware that the definition of the term shifts with the context.

For a recruitment agency, the ideal is a tool that manages companies, roles and candidates in one place.
In some cases, managing roles and candidates is split from the tool used for sales to win job orders.
The ideal tool also manages, surfaces and lets you work with the items below.

Below is a list of the measures a recruitment agency should track.

Here, with sales to the hiring company in mind, the items in orange are the measures to track.

• By source (referral, advertising, your own site, cold calling, outsourced sales)
• By period

— track enquiry ⇒ meeting ⇒ signing the agency agreement ⇒ putting candidates forward ⇒ offer ⇒ offer accepted.
From a performance review point of view, you also need to track conversion rates by salesperson.

The tools commonly used in the recruitment industry to track those measures, and a comparison of them, are below.

Tool	Category	Feature	Set-up fee	Running costs Cost	Effort to run
HRBC	CRM	◎	△	△	〇
Career Plus	CRM	△	〇	△	〇
Sales Force	MA/SFA/CRM	〇	△	△	△
HubSpot	MA/SFA/CRM	△	〇	◎	〇

When it comes to CRMs for recruitment agencies, PORTERS is dominant, with 2,000 companies using it.
It has the advantage that the features a recruitment agency needs are built in from the start.
HubSpot is the number one tool, used by more than 299,000 companies in 135 countries (as of May 2026), yet it can be implemented at lower cost. It suits those who want to manage advertising performance for attracting customers and the state of their sales pipeline in one place, including MA and SFA.

→ Worth reading as well: “Can HubSpot be used as a CRM for a recruitment agency?」

→ Worth considering: “an API integration service between HubSpot and PORTERS.」

5.2 The advantages of a CRM and the points to watch

First, the advantages.
・Managing sales tasks and progress becomes smooth
・You can build better customer relationships through inbound marketing
・Reporting gives you a quick, accurate picture of where things stand
— those are some of them.

Through inbound marketing, with a CRM in place, there is even a case where enquiries reached 500% of the previous year.
Companies of mid-size and above should consider implementing one.

There are mainly two points to watch when bringing in a CRM tool.
① Build the habit of using the tool, and stick to it
② Compare it with the effort of doing the work by hand

①: Any tool is hard to use at first. Use it patiently and get used to it.
　　If it still feels wrong, you may have chosen the wrong tool.
②: A CRM has a great many features. Compare the time and effort it would take to do work such as raising alerts or keeping logs by hand, and judge it fairly.

5.3 Getting the most out of sales for job orders with a CRM

A CRM lets you get the most out of customer management and inbound marketing.
The ideal is to build a setup like the one in the diagram below.

Let me explain the diagram above in detail.

From winning the lead to entering it in the CRM
Enter the leads you won from dinners, cold calls, direct messages and so on into the CRM.
Some leads turn into meetings straight away (hot leads) and some do not (cold leads).

Tracking in the CRM
Leads that will not turn into a meeting soon should not be thrown away; make them the target of nurturing — bringing them on until they are hot.
Then use the CRM to track when the leads you have won view your website or your email newsletter.
That tells you which content landed with users, so
you can run a plan-do-check-act cycle on content production as well.
Ideally you score users’ actions on the site and keep sight of them.
Acting on users whose score has built up makes the whole thing far more efficient.

Making contact
This means calling or emailing users who have taken some action — viewing, downloading, submitting a form — on content such as helpful articles, downloadable guides and case studies on your website.
Taking action on the web suggests a user has some degree of interest in you, so you can approach the users most likely to take up the service. (Turning a cold lead into a hot one.)

By hand you cannot see actions taken on the web, and even if you could, you can hardly have staff watching for them in order to raise a notification.
Set the CRM up to notify the salesperson automatically.
And because logs of calls and emails are kept, you can see the state of your sales efficiently.
That cuts the time you used to spend searching through email by a long way.

From meeting to order
A CRM also comes with plenty of features that help salespeople in their work.
Beyond sales progress (the measures mentioned earlier), shared meeting notes and task management, there is also reporting that visualises sales performance.
It makes sharing information between salespeople easy and cuts down on missed tasks.

Sharing and handover
Once you have the order, you can enter the role in the CRM and hand it over smoothly to the career advisers.
And if your CRM is connected to your job site, set it up so the role can be published there at the same time.

[Service guide] Marketing support for recruitment agencies

5.4 How to introduce a CRM

NowVillage supports marketing for recruitment agencies, and we also help with CRM (SFA, MA) implementation.
We work with a range of tools including HRBC, HubSpot and Kintone, so do get in touch if you are unsure which CRM to choose or how to implement and use it.