The Secret to a Contented Recruitment Leader (and Marketer)

Lisa Jones is a Director of Barclay Jones, a consultancy working with agency recruiters on their recruitment technology and social media strategies. You’ll see Lisa speaking at many recruitment industry events and being a recruitment technology and social media evangelist online. In this guest blog post she shares the secret to being a contented recruitment leader!

Every recruitment leader I work with wants to improve the content of their recruitment database:

“Lisa, can you make my recruiters more reliant on my CRM system?  I need ROI.”

“Lisa, I’m sick of spending money on external systems.  Why am I spending so much on technology whilst recruiters still insist upon searching for talent elsewhere?”

The reason?  Because your recruiters don’t value your system (and likely they think your data is pants!).

Two questions for every recruitment leader:

1. How many of your candidates placed last year were on your recruitment system, prior to your team spending hours/days sourcing from elsewhere?
2. And what is your marketing function’s plan to work on this? It’s a marketing and sales issue, not necessarily an IT/systems one.

Drive Candidates and Clients into your Recruitment CRM

The content of your recruitment database is driven by the content of your blog, adverts, recruiters’ LinkedIn profiles, tweets – as well as the content of your interviews and sales calls.  The content of your recruitment database will be judged by investors (and recruiters), paid for by your clients, and applied to by awesome candidates.  Your recruitment CRM is critical.

To achieve “database contentment” it is critical that your online content works extremely hard – it is your virtual sales team, internal recruiter, compliance manager.  Content is the chauffeur of great talent, loyal clients and engaged recruiters – let it drive the best data into your Recruitment CRM.

Poor Marketing Strategies

But only 44% of marketers have a content strategy – and those that I see are often not lead-generating content strategies – they’re content-generating content strategies!  Content for content’s sake.

No leads

No talent

Yes, a few more clicks

Yes, brand improvement

But no sales!

How to Fix the Content Problem

There are four key stages to the buyer’s journey. Or rather, the 3 stages with an extra one for recruiters:

Those of you who are seasoned in marketing will spot that I have adapted the 3 stages to 4 – adding “Place and re-place”.

Find me a recruiter who places a candidate who starts the job/stays for the duration – 100% of the time – and you’ve found a unicorn!  A recruiter’s job is not to just find, engage, convert and place talent – it’s to get them to their start date with a smile and help them stay long enough to get that fee (and not have to find a replacement!)

You should have content which actively manages the four of the buyer’s journey (and protects your pipeline.

Pipeline Protection!

Ask yourself, do have content which:

• Attracts passive talent and clients to your brand and jobs?
• Helps talent consider you as a viable option when they are looking for a new career – and by viable I don’t mean “one of the many recruiters that I can apply to” – what content do you have to demonstrate the ROI for candidates giving you their loyalty?
• Demonstrates to clients the ROI of working with you? Can you convert them through stats, rather than just wit or low fees?
• Keeps offered candidates warm?
• Prevents candidates from “blobbing” on the first day
• Keeps placed candidate engaged so “re-placing” them is swift, smooth and not disrupted by other recruiters waving shiny things at them
• Keeps clients engaged post placement, so they become retained in hearts as well as contract

Often recruiters have 1 or 2 of the four stages “sorted” – lots of blogs of what it’s like to work for them, blogs about recruiting into their sector, adverts which advertise the spec of the role, how to get value for your employees – but rarely do I see a strategy to ensure that all bases are covered and actively used by the recruiters to speed up conversions, sales and secure placements and re-placement.

Marketers Need to Create Pipeline Protection for Recruiters

So – with all of the above – it’s critical that as a recruitment leader or marketer you have this in your plan.