RECRUITERS: Stop ringing me and do content marketing instead.

I have been reading (with great amusement) Kernel writer, Mic Wright’s, recent three-part expose on the nefarious world of tech recruiting. Go here it’s *hilare*.

My own experiences of this (again with great amusement) have been from watching increasingly exasperated colleagues field unsolicited calls from opportunistic and inexperienced recruiters who don’t  have a clue (they lack authority) or credentials (no trust).

They typically go something like this:

Recruiter: Hi, can I speak to whoever handles [*insert phony, half-baked non-recruitment request here*], please?

Colleague 1: Is this regarding recruitment?

Recruiter: Er, nope

Colleague 1: Promise?

Recruiter: Yes.

Colleague 1: Okay. *transfers call to Colleague 2*

Colleague 2: Hi…yeah…oh…you’re a recruiter, I’m sorry – we only work with preferred recruitment agencies…yeah, no…okay…no thanks. Bye.

[Puts phone down phone]

Colleague 2: F**king recruiters.

This is only one of many variations where recruiters try and get their foot through the hallowed gates of Idio’s HR procurement chain. Those that do have churned out some great candidates, but more often than not don’t. 

A Brief History of Recruitment

Once a time – in the days of yore – a recruitment agency’s only competition was other recruitment agencies – the ones that spent the most on advertising could expect to attract the most job-seekers. Simples.

Along came online job boards – all vying for the attention of your candidates.  Suddenly, if you searched for ‘Product Evangelist’ on Google, the first twenty results would be dominated by these boards – not recruitment agency site.  Not only that but they seemed to have endless marketing budgets running TV campaigns and sponsoring premiership football clubs.  It wasn’t long before most recruitment agencies succumbed and signed up for advertising packages.  After all, if they couldn’t get on page one themselves, the next best thing was to piggy-back on those that could.

To further compound agency woes; enter social media.  The most progressive of recruiting companies started using their own social media platforms – and those of their employees – to spread the word about their recruitment campaigns.  Constantly networking across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to seek out prospective candidates and profile their businesses as the place to work.  What’s more, the cost of these campaigns compared favourably to the amount of budget spent on advertising.

Today, the environment in which recruitment agencies exist is extraordinarily competitive. Clever agencies are re-thinking how they communicate with their candidates, in fact, really clever ones are forming relationships with their candidates before they even become candidates.  How are they doing this?  By showing thought-leadership through content marketing.

Recruiters need to be the thought leaders of their industry

When I ask our CTO why he’s so despondent about the recruitment process –  it’s because the tech recruiters he encounters lack the specialist knowledge to understand our industry and our company’s requirements.

How many tech recruiters know their MVC from their KFC?

It’s a no-brainer to ask recruiters to understand the sector they’re serving. However, how else can a recruitment organisation convey its expertise apart from great copy on-site and favourable word-of-mouth?

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

By and large Content Marketing does two things it:

ENGENDERS TRUST and SHOWS AUTHORITY

Quite simply, if you’re producing quality, engaging and informative content about the sector you seek to serve – chances are you will look like you know what you are doing.

If you regularly write content you will increase your brand’s reputation as a trusted source of information, an authority in your sector – and, therefore, – the natural home for job-seekers and employers.

A really good example of content marketing is the stuff put out by Inspiring Interns.

Check this out:

 The infographic is easy to understand and provides useful stats – it reflects an organisation that has an appreciation of the graduate employment landscape.

Or check out Red Fox. Red Fox is a niche executive recruitment agency for the Fresh Produce and agricultural sector. They have a bespoke news feed which clients can also sign into via email and each week Redfox industry news is emailed to more than 8,000 people globally.

Owner Max MacGillivray sees his company more as a communications company because he is providing relevant industry content to his audience - How many recruitment consultancies would say that?

By generating quality content around the environment you are trying to recruit and source talent for, you:

• Position yourself as a source of information, a publisher
• Enhance your reputation as an authority in the industry
• Add value to your clients and candidates
• Increase brand awareness
• Drive traffic to your website
• Increase your audience as readers share your news

So, yeah, recruiters – please do this. Then we will like you, know who you are and want to do business with you.*

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Idio strongly believes that creating an individualised customer experience with personalised content based on known customer data is the best route to establishing a long-term customer relationship.

Idio’s platform applies content curation, real-time decisioning and predictive analytics to enable brands to do content marketing that is trackable, scalable and measurable, and understands each customer’s evolving social and behavioural context.

*On a serious note: Idio’s recruiters are *amaze* and we love doing business with you. We’re just directing this at the chancers who aren’t as good as you x