Improving your brand exposure as a recruiter is vital if you want to stand out from the crowd and attract the best candidates. A strong brand can help you to combat a lack of candidates and position you as a thought leader within your industry.

This blog contains information and tips on how to improve your own brand.

It’s important you set out a long-term social media strategy that supports your business objectives.

Use social media regularly & be consistent

Try to post regularly on social media and make sure that your content is valuable. The best type of content gives value for free and is therefore much more likely to drive traffic to your website.

Take a look at what thought leaders in your target industry are writing/posting and take note of what gets the best engagement. Is there a different perspective you can take on that content, or could you offer an opinion on someone else’s content?

One way to do this is to map out how many pieces of content you want to make per week and use a scheduling tool to help post on your accounts (such as Buffer). Other social media tools such as ContentApp can help to suggest content for you to post across your team as well as help with your job posts.

How to do this:
– Map out the pain points of your target audience & research the latest from your industry.

– Come up with a few blog/content options which would help to solve these pain points & research them.

– Try to make it SEO friendly. Include keywords, lay it out with headings and make the title catchy.

– Use relevant hashtags on social media which are likely to reach your target audience.

– Include a nice banner or image for your content.

– Be consistent & post regularly. Whilst it might not seem to be doing much at the start, you need to keep momentum.

 

Collaborate with others

By working with other thought leaders in your industry, you’re much more likely to increase your reach and audience. Begin by following your favourite industry leaders & news providers and offer your opinion/engage with their content. This can be as simple as replying to their tweets or offering your thoughts on LinkedIn articles/posts that you’ve read.

You can also reach out to those that you want to collaborate with and suggest some blogs you think you could write that might interest them, based on your industry knowledge & what you can offer. In exchange, ask if they can write or produce some content to go on your site. You can start small with this and work with people you know from your industry before building it up later. Eventually, the more of this that you do, the easier it will be to get content from others.

Once you have this content, make sure you share it and tag the relevant people who contributed and who you think might be interested in reading it. However, don’t just share it the once, make sure you revisit it later in the week and month.

 

Use visual content

With the availability of free tools online such as Canva, you can easily create infographics with data/content from your industry. Visual content is a good way to break up a lot of text on your social media feed, but don’t be afraid to re-share these later on.

How to do this:
– Research relevant statistics for your industry or offer some advice based on your experience. If you’re going to produce an infographic on data, some sources you could use are: the ONS, REC, Bullhorn & LinkedIn

– Go to a free infographic maker such as Canva, use photoshop, or a programme of your choice and make the infographic but try not to overload it with information.

– If you’re adding an image, make sure that it is copyright free. You can use sites such as pexels or unsplash to get images.

– Share your infographic at a good time across your social media platforms and include relevant hashtags. Include where you got your data from if relevant & tag people.

 

Create/use video content

Video content is undoubtedly the best content you can be putting time into right now and this is only set to grow. If you have a marketing team, they’ll probably have this covered, however, if you don’t, you should try to take the move to making video content yourself.

Providing you have a fairly modern smartphone, you’ll be able to record footage that is sufficient for some videos. Using your smartphone camera is certainly good enough quality for social media content and you can purchase a tripod for your phone quite cheaply to make sure your footage isn’t shaky.

Video content ideas:
– A ‘How to’ video/tutorial

– An animated video

– An informative video about a topic

– An expert Q&A session

– Customer testimonials

– Company promotion video

– Your thoughts on a recent piece of industry news

 

Start promoting posts on LinkedIn

Advertising on your social media profiles is a good way to get noticed by your target audience and there are a range of ways you can do this. As LinkedIn is your main source for candidates and where you want to focus on creating your personal brand, advertising on this platform is your best option. Promoting your job posts is one way to do this and it can increase your click rate by 40-50%.

This feature requires you to bid for the top spot in personalised job placements and allows you to adapt your spend in real-time, deciding when and how often your job post needs the extra exposure.

However, you can also promote your company or individual posts if you’ve created a piece of content that could increase hits on your website and profiles, but only do so if it’s a well written, longer piece of valuable content.

 

Create a unique brand hashtag

A company hashtag which is unique needs to be short and not confusing when written without spaces. For example, ours is #TRN which we encourage our members to engage with and use when they tweet about us. By including it in your updates and posts, it’s a convenient place to see all your content and adds to your branding. In any promotional material that you create, you can include this as a means of identifying your company on social media.

Whilst you won’t see much at the start, this becomes much more relevant when you build relationships with clients/candidates who can use your hashtag if they interact with you on social media.

 

Publish articles on LinkedIn

By publishing longer form articles, you’re much more likely to establish yourself as a thought leader and show potential candidates and clients that you are knowledgeable and can be trusted.

However, before writing your content, you need to consider what type of article you want to write and more importantly, what type of article your target audience want to read. One way to do this is to map out the problems which your candidates and clients face and how your services can help to solve them, based on your experience.

Alternatively, you could write about the industries you work in and any changes which are coming to them, offering your opinion based on your experiences.

How to do this:

– Map out the sections of your article & research what you want to write about

– At the top of the LinkedIn homepage, click Write an Article

– Give it a headline which is catchy, but is not clickbait

– Try not to write over 1000 words

– Add subheadings which will help to break up your content into manageable sections

– Proof it and add an image

– Publish to social and include any relevant hashtags

– Make sure you promote it more than once and tag people who would be interested in reading it

 

Create content that encourages engagement and replies

Content which tends to encourage engagement and replies will often be topical or targets widely known issues for the industry. These types of divisive topics are good to generate discussion and engagement, but they shouldn’t be your only way of receiving engagement. You ideally want to be providing valuable content/insight at some point every week.

If you’re putting this content out on LinkedIn, you need to make sure that you are asking questions, creating catchy titles and engaging with people who comment.

How to do it:
– Make list headlined topics such as “8 ways to…”

– Target pain points with your content

– Offer your opinion on the latest from the industry

– Ask questions and make sure that you always reply to any interaction

– Offer valuable content for free

– If you’ve written a blog, don’t just promote it the once, you need to post regularly

Click here to see how you can build a winning content strategy that will get results.

Start an industry podcast

Podcasts have seen a huge increase in popularity over the past few years. With so many options to choose from, it’s important that you only make a podcast if you’re committed to it. Podcasts can be a lot of effort and unless you plan your content in advance, you can quickly run out of guests/ideas and not meet your schedule.

However, if you think that there is a gap for your voice to be heard then a podcast can be a really good way to massively increase your brand/reach.

How to do it:
– Research other podcasts and look at: their length, style, content and branding

– Read more about the technicalities of how to set one up here

– Decide on the length of your episodes, and map out your content/topics

– Invite your guests/conduct research in advance

– Record and edit your podcast

– Host it online & promote it on your channels

 

Create regular surveys & share results

Surveys are incredibly easy and quick to set up using free tools such as SurveyMonkey. Once you’ve decided on your questions and the data you want to get, you need to actively encourage people to contribute via your social media channels. One way you can encourage engagement is by offering the results to contributors before you post them to your wider audience (If you decide to do this).

By creating surveys which provide you with useful data to share out, you’re able to generate really useful content which can be arranged in a variety of different ways, such as infographics, a blog post or a video. Not only does this put you in a strong position as a valuable person to follow, but it also makes for a great value-add to send to potential candidates and start discussions with.

You’ll need to consider what type of information you want from your survey and what topics you’ll be covering and this should be clear from your title, e.g. The Future of Web Development Survey. Ideally, you should be collecting results which are going to be useful for the candidates you want to attract in the industry that you recruit for, discussing the latest trends.

How to do it:
– Keep your questions brief – respondents don’t like really long surveys (ideally 5 minutes to complete, but no more than 10)

– Your first question is your most important, so make it interesting

– Avoid yes/no questions if you can – there’s normally more than one answer to your question (Try a scale such as ‘Most likely’, ‘Least likely’ etc.)

– Test it before you send it out by sending it to a colleague/friend

– Post about it regularly until you’ve collected enough results

– Don’t take too long getting your results out so people don’t lose interest

 

Contribute to the industries/communities that you work in

Another way you can add to your branding exposure is by contributing and giving something back to the industries/communities you work in. There are a variety of different ways you can do this, and it can even be as simple as a free webinar for job seekers or setting some time aside for taking part in charity events.

This time can, therefore, be a really useful opportunity away from the office but also adds to your own personal branding. If potential candidates can see that you are actively engaged within the industry/community, then it’s an effective way to increase your branding online.

How to do this:
– Choose a company charity to support each year

– Give back to your potential candidates by hosting events/webinars where you can help them

– Do a team event where you are out of the office, contributing to the community

– Answer online questions on sites such as Quora

– Offer some free training sessions in your offices for jobseekers

– Provide some salary benchmarking data

 

Host events

Similar to the above point about giving back to the communities/industries, you can offer a range of events that would be really useful for jobseekers or clients that only add to your reputation/personal branding.

These events ideally should be free and value-adding because if you provide enough value to the attendees, they’ll be far more likely to interact with you again.

Event suggestions:
– Consultancy sessions with clients

– Roundtable events for clients

– Candidate preparation sessions

– Breakfast/lunch meetings for industry professionals to network

 

Interact with communities on other social media platforms

Depending on what industry you work in, you could be missing out on a portion of your potential audience by not utilising a variety of social media platforms. Whilst LinkedIn is a great platform for those actively seeking jobs, a lot of passive candidates won’t be using it. Engaging with these is essential if you want to get the best candidates and continue to be successful.

How to do it:
– Use social media scheduling tools to help you manage your posts across a variety of platforms

– Research what your target audience likes/dislikes and what they post about

– Search local Facebook groups & online forums

– Consider interacting with people on sites such as Reddit & Stack Overflow if they are in the tech market

 

Organise a competition on social media

Giveaways will always get really good rates of interaction because people are always up for entering a competition. You can post these across your social media channels and use relevant hashtags to get even more interaction. If you’ve created a company hashtag, make sure that you include that too.

You can choose to do this exclusively on one social media channel or to do it across multiple and a competition can be as simple as sharing an image of the prize and using your designated hashtag.

How to do it:
– Set a goal and budget – are you trying to increase your followers or receive a lot of interaction? Also, how much are you willing to spend?

– Choose your prize – e.g. books, a gift card, stationery, an experience etc. (Try to think what your target audience like and would appreciate)

– Take a nice picture of it which will entice people to share it

– Choose how people can enter on social media – retweets, shares, likes etc.

– Determine how long you’re going to run it for (Check the rules for competitions on each social media platform)

– Promote and share your competition

 

Create a PR strategy/work with a PR agency

Interacting and networking with key members of the industry/media is a really good way to improve your brand exposure as well as get the attention of potential clients/candidates. As a recruiter, you should be aware of the biggest/latest issues that are affecting your industry and you should try to target these areas with your content. If you’re not sure, keep up with the news from your industry and make notes from what candidates/clients are talking about which will allow you to write your opinion about it.

With an effective PR strategy, you can get your content published in industry publications and other sources which is going to increase your reputation and exposure. However, doing PR successfully isn’t as easy as submitting your content to these media outlets/journalists. In order to be successful, you’ll need to build relationships with key influencers in the industry who would be likely to publish your content. You can do this by interacting with their content, continuously posting your own material and by networking effectively.

However, if you have an allocated budget to help you with your marketing and branding, you can also hire a PR company for a reasonable rate who will be able to help you create content. PR companies already have industry connections and a wealth of experience in creating content with major publications and brands.

 

About The Recruitment Network

This blog article was provided by The Recruitment Network.

The Recruitment Network is the ultimate support club for recruitment business leaders. We give our members an unparalleled level of support, guidance and tools to help them transform their recruitment businesses with the ultimate objective of improving business performance, increasing business efficiency and significantly growing profitability and shareholder value.