1. Being Pushy
This is a big no-no that extends across every industry, and recruiters are part of the pack. Shoving your products or services down people’s throats never works. In fact, the only real thing it accomplishes is making your firm look annoying and putting candidates and clients off. Just a guess, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for. Being a pushy salesman, whether on the used car lot or as a recruiter, immediately gets peoples’ back up. It’s the reason why people will unfollow your firm on Twitter and bounce away from your blog, never to return. So, if you’re not eagerly getting into people’s face, what should you be posting about?
The key to great content is to add value to your audience. This means posting informative articles that they’d be interested in, providing inspiring quotes from other industry professionals, offering advice to job seekers, or finding other, more subtle ways of expressing your agency’s brand voice.
Brooke Sellas, CEO of B Squared Media understands exactly how important this point is. In her mind, nothing is worse than being, “too sales-y.”
2. Being Antisocial
While it seems obvious, many recruiters miss the clever suggestion in the name “social media” and forget that they’re supposed to be interacting with other people. Tweeting random musings throughout the day is equivalent to opening your notebook and starting a “Dear diary” entry. If you’re not engaging with job seekers and potential clients, you’re really just talking to yourself.
Instead, re-tweet articles that your audience will find interesting and give the author an @ mention. Comment on articles or weigh in on polls on other business’s Facebook page. The same goes for your blog too – get friendly with others by including links to relevant articles that your audience will find interesting. Interview influencers in the recruiting space and post about it. Leave commenting open and respond to people who have interesting feedback on your blog. The point is, be social. It helps spread your name around, engages your followers, and shows prospects that you’re sitting at the cool kids table. And, all this is achieved without ever once needing to annoy or repel your audience by being pushy (remember how we talked about that?).
3. Being Selfish
When asked what the biggest mistake that businesses make in communicating their brand is, Brooke puts it simply, saying, “Focusing on themselves too much.” We’ve all been on a date where you sit in silence while the other person drones on and on about themselves. Or at a cocktail party where no one asks you a single question about yourself. Those are the dates you can’t wait to ditch, and those types of experiences put a bad taste in your candidates and clients mouth when your recruiting content does the same.
As a recruiter, this means offering up interesting information for your candidates and clients, for their sake, not just for yours. Job hunting tips, interview question prep materials, studies on the benefits of businesses working with recruiters to fill their job openings – all these are good examples of content you can publish that is thought-provoking, meaningful, and shows others that you have their interests in mind. Creating value-added elements to all your content is key to creating effective recruitment marketing strategies.
4. Being Absent
As a recruiter, it feels great to hit ‘publish’ on a well-written blog post, or to tweet something clever. But before you sit back and congratulate yourself, remember that it’s only a job well-done if you replicate it again, and again, and again. You’ve probably been there before: getting enthralled in a blog and clicking to see what other posts they have, only to see that they only have 3 blog posts ever published and they were all six months apart. Oh. Disappointment central. Not only does this make you leave that site, it also makes you unlikely to return because you’re assuming it will be another six months before you should check back. The same applies for stagnant social media accounts.
Without sacrificing quality or getting hung up on an exact posting frequency formula, find a way to get in the game and stay there. Your tweets will always be fresh in your followers’ timeline if you’re communicating often. Candidates will look forward to their coffee and blog post read if you have a consistent schedule. People will start looking forward to hearing what you have to say, what interview tips you can offer that day, or what the latest jobs you have to post are when you publish content on an ongoing basis and stick with it.
5. Being Bland
Vanilla is best for frozen yogurt, not for your content. This doesn’t mean you have to be controversial, (unless that’s what your brand is all about) but it means stepping outside of ho-hum headlines, blog content, and social posts. Imagine retweeting an article and saying, “I thought this was an interesting article, give it a read.” OR, having an opinion, showing your brand’s personality, and saying something meaningful, like, “Wow, this article really confirmed my feelings about the future of recruiting in the face of artificial intelligence! Check it out!” One tweet is a snoozer, while the other makes you want to find out more.
Blog posts are the same – from your titles to the references you link to the body of the post itself – it can all be done in a way that’s fun, interesting, catchy, or even downright funny, and we all know that’s the type of content that gets shares, hearts, mentions, and ultimately makes your recruiting agency memorable to prospective clients and new candidates.
Elevate Your Recruitment Marketing Strategies
Now that you know all the things not to do when publishing content for your firm, it’s time to flip things around and do it right. If you’re still looking for help in creating great content and avoiding these five fatal errors, reach out to a professional writing service for help. We’ll whip up some great words and recruitment marketing strategies for your agency to share with the world, so you can reap the benefits of content and continue to do what you do best.
David is the Founder and Director of article-writing.co, the fastest-growing content creation agency in North America. He has transformed companies by offering high-quality content that has impacted their SEO ranking, revitalized websites with engaging and industry-relevant blogs and website copy, and championed successful email campaign copy.
