Everyone out there. Welcome to the employer. Content show part of the talent insights series brought to you by hire well, and before you apply, I’m your host James Hornick. Joining me is my co-host from before you apply and the shortest man on your screen.
And for the first time ever, we have a special guest hailing from London, England, a man who has made a career out of criticizing bad writing and contingent search and prove that parallel evolution exists. From copywriting for recruiters, Mitch Sullivan. Hello. Yeah. So I don’t, I’ve never actually, hopefully we don’t, everyone doesn’t realize why we don’t have guests on it because I don’t really know what to ask people.
But I, anytime I’ve been a guest on a podcast, people have asked me for a bio and it’s always some boring. I’m like, I’m just gonna, I’m just gonna do Mitch’s by myself. But Mitch, if you’d like to introduce yourself properly and just give everyone kind of your, background a little bit. So I think some people out there are probably familiar with you, maybe others aren’t, but.
Yeah, I suspect most people in the country in America probably. I haven’t got a clue. I am. , so I’m a recruiter. I’ve been a recruiter a long time, as you can tell from the state of my face and my hair. , I, I’m 32 years, I think. I’ve without boring you with my resume, a, , I’ve always taken content seriously.
Even before there were lots of places to put content. when I came into recruitment, the only places you could advertise yourself as a recruiter or recruitment business were in magazines, newspapers, trade journals. Yeah. Or sandwich. Yeah, bye I’m walking the streets. So the internet in general changed everything, took me a while to get my head around it.
but it’s the best thing that could have happened to our industry in my view. and I’ve been a big, because. Content has become, you know, omnipresent, you know, compared to how it was. It just makes recruitment far more interesting, , and complex in many ways, because there are so many platforms, that have different audiences that you can put content and.
I guess a lot. I’ll just sign off with, when I came into the industry, literally every single engagement we had with a candidate or client started from the telephone. And now. All of those interactions. Now start from the keyboard, learning how to write or to compose construct sentences and to write things that people want to read is just critical.
You know, I’ aware of the bias that would probably be coming across because I sell copywriting training courses to recruiters, but you know, it, just is a fact it’s, it all starts with people. Yeah, and we, were, so you and I have been in touch for a while now. I think we’ve maybe spoke for the first time, probably six months ago, but, Nate and I have been doing the show for almost coming up on a year and we, we discuss all kinds of all types of content issues.
A lot of it ends up being things that are you know, what we’ll discuss. Things are a little bit high. We we’re big into video. Obviously we’ll discuss things about how teams should be structured differently, how to engage hiring managers and get them involved in the process. And admittedly, a lot of it can, it involves buy in and it’s some of it’s a little higher level.
But probably a month back, we were talking about like, what are the two things that literally, like, what are the two most basic things that every recruiter needs to get good at from a content standpoint? And one of them is their outbound messaging. Another one is job ads. That’s something that’s universal, you know?
So we want to talk about that and then I forgot. So Nate hates your posts. That was what really works.
As the story goes. So you do a great job, really hammering that point about job descriptions and job ads are two completely different things. And, I think. It’s, it’s not innately clear to people why first, which is why I want to talk about it. And I remember the first time cause Nate, he cause one thing you do miss that I love is you love trolling people on LinkedIn.
At any time someone says job description. When they really mean job ad you, you make sure let them know in comments. And I think he did it to Nate one time and he’s just like sidebar with me. He’s like, what is what this Mitch guy? And then it did it again. You know, and , then he actually, but to your point, he took the time to actually look at the difference between a job description and the job ad and thought about it more.
And you gained an advocate in that process. So yeah, very much the first couple of responses were like, what the hell? What is this? And then, yeah, like, we were kind of talking before we jumped on the show, but, I’ve become a fan man and a believer. So. This is good stuff, but, but I think like to James’s point, like it’s an education process.
We’re, so used. I mean, when I say we, I mean, I think many people are just used to job description, job, description, job description. And then when you see an alternative version to that. Is structured differently, differently and written differently and is designed to do something that a job description isn’t yeah.
You’re like, Oh wait. And let’s dive in. Let’s get me here. But ultimately what’s the difference between the two. Okay. Well, let me, let me just give some context to the trolling of Nate that I was just being accused of.
of I as I think I’ve told you, I forgot that your. You know, I just assume you’ve been in the industry a long time, so I was just trying to provoke a conversation. you, you probably weren’t the right person to try and provoke that whip, but no, I’ve done that numerous times and lots of threads, mostly it would seem with on, threads that are mostly populated with us and Canadian recruiters.
and that’s because, you know, I’ve started talking about content and. Great and job ads versus job descriptions or LinkedIn to a UK audience for about five or six years now. And because it was six years ago that I had the idea that I was going to, I was going to build and run training courses on this subject.
And lo and behold, it took off really quickly. And so I’ve been, talking about this for a long, long time. I tend to only bring it up on, threats with U.S.And Canadian recruiters because. They seem to conflate the two more than recruiters in the UK. For some reason, I don’t really know.
I mean, UK recruiters do it as well, but it seems more prevalent in the U S so not that different, they’re different. There’s lots of ways of looking at the difference between the two documents. I, tend to look at most things from a marketing perspective and therefore in light of that, it’s like, well, who’s the customer who’s reading it.
Yeah. And why are they reading it? And that’s really what I think brings us to the, best definition. Nobody’s going to read a job spec right at the very beginning of the recruiting process. And the job posting is the very beginning of the recruitment process. For many, many people.
Most people, I, would. Iceland to add Knight would probably argue that there’s plenty of people that will research companies look at their content, maybe sign up some emails and they do. And that, that, is effective as well. But I think the job ads is probably the pointy. He as part of the arrow.
Yeah. So, the only people that might read a job description, people that need another job, but even then I would argue, they’ll probably scan it or skim, read it, just to save. It’s mainly representative of what they think they can do before they click apply and send a CV. So job descriptions are never going to do the work of a job ad because a job ad.
Is there to convince someone that this job might be better than the one that they’re doing or the last one that they did or other jobs that they’re currently applying for. Essentially a job ad in its true. Its definition is something that sells a job to somebody who might be able to do that job.
And you might want to do it now. You can’t, you can’t completely sell a job in a job ad or in 400 words, but you’ve got to start the process of getting people to think, actually this looks like it. This might be, this might improve my life in some way. And that is the purpose of a job ad is to get someone to want to read it.
First of all, to respond to it. On the basis that they think this job might improve their life in some way. A job description on the other hand is something that somebody will read once they’ve decided, but it’s a job that they’re interested in and that it might improve their life in some way. Then they will read 900 words of compliance Laden.
Because that’s got the nuts and bolts and the mechanics of the job, and they would probably want to read it just to make sure there’s no nasty surprises in that before they move on in the process. So, yeah, it’s important. It’s just not, it should never be used at the very front front end of the process.
The one exception is that if you’re running. If you’re posting a job where you know that there will be plenty of available candidates for whatever reason, then I would argue, don’t need to create a job ad. You just need to announce the fact that there’s a job available. Give them some details. What they’re going to need to qualify and give them some kind of cultural action, but camp, but jobs where there are relatively few candidates actively on the market at any one time looking, then you can have to sell the job to them.
One way, shape or form. And just to finish off a job ad can take the form of a job posting and email and in-mail or social media posts could even take the form of a phone conversation with some of the patients. But yeah. Okay. Do you want, wanna, do you want to, we talked about doing a quick screen share.
Do you have that up? Do you want to pop up just to give her one little visual context and the difference too, because when you and I talked about it, I kind of got it. But then afterwards you sent me some examples of a few different I think it might’ve been what some of your clients are and some are putting together and the difference is kind of night and day.
Okay. What I’ll do is I’ll show you I’ll show you.
Well, okay. Here we are. Here’s a job description. It’s a 851 words. And I blacked out the name of the client to, protect the guilty. And this particular company ran this ad for , you know a few years back, and contacted me to ask me to help them. Cause it didn’t work. Yeah, it looks boring was probably a copy of a copy of a copy.
No, one’s reading this it’s completely unreadable. So, I’m now going to show you. A treatment that Jackie and I put on this particular job, I, I ran an ad for this job. But I had to create something that people were actually going to read the original ad as I just showed it to you.
I think it received 17 applications of which one could have been suitable. So I ran a different version of the ad, which I’ll show you.
People in the podcast version and they really lost right now, but go to YouTube when you get to this part. Right? Yeah. So, so the second version it’s the first version is just a shorter version of that job spec. I just showed you, but it’s still a job spec because it, it only talks about the company we are.
We’re looking for where this, , here’s what you’ll be doing. And here’s what you need to have. Please send your CV to blah, blah, blah. Now our version tells people speaks in me that he speaks to her to inherit benefit. So it got promoted. Could you, Sarah, as was the person who used to do the job, she’s just been promoted.
Which illustrates the value of this company have some kind of succession planning going on. And that you can, you can move beyond this job. You probably want to know what’s involved. You can post a link where people can read this in, more detail later, but it just tells people what they be doing in a very conversational tone of voice.
Doesn’t go into real heavy specifics. It doesn’t use what I call demand language is you must do this. You must have, you must have this. It’s written as if you were go, you were talking to this person face to face. It’s got, an easy to respond to call to action. It promises that everyone that takes makes the effort to respond or get a response because my view is there anything you can write or do or say that would encourage Y to extra qualified person to respond?
There’s got to be worth doing. So I promise people that they’ll get a response, and. That’s it that’s, just one example. Did you, the metric, did you have metrics about how many more responses you got on that one? Yeah. That ad produced 48 responses. And how you put it onto job boards.
So it could have got a lot more, but I, I knew it worked on sale because it’s a relatively junior position it’s quite well paid for an admin role. It was working for quite a bit. Company PLC. So more than double the response rate, just by writing something, it’s actually reader focus as opposed to it wasn’t so much that that was interesting.
It was the fact that I had conversations with, I think it was 11 people and seven of them. Well, in my view, worthy of submitting to the client and I did this on a fixed fee basis. They just paid me to do this work. I wasn’t, yeah. I wasn’t owning a place for that fee. And and they interviewed all seven people.
Liked the the feedback was they liked them all. And ironically, this, this is interesting. This could take the conversation in another direction. They hired the candidate with the least obvious experience, really people who, so they ended up hiring someone who probably wouldn’t have ever applied to the first job based.
Cause you know, people are like, I don’t have the years of experience unless you actually tell them to apply anyway, which. Yeah, possibly we’ve done a full ad sales, admin support role in another company. In fact, the candidate, I remember him because he was a lovely guy. He worked at Windsor castle where the queen lives.
Oh yeah. When he was doing all that sort of multimedia stuff. So he, he was organized, he had an interesting personality and a good work ethic. He was young enough to be developed. He was trainable, coachable. That’s what they saw when they hired him. So yeah, what I like about the approaches that, you know, everyone talks about how we need to make.
Things more human and I never know what that really means. Like, you know, make things more personalized, make them more human, make them more empathetic yet. You’re just posting like a, like here’s a chance to actually do that. Like write something that you’re trying to put in front of people that’s written like an actual human would write something as opposed to just like a list of descriptions, you know, about a job and, and the results work.
So it’s interesting, you know, I’ve got a theory as to why people keep posting job descriptions and expecting them to behave like job ads. If you want to hear it, you want to hear, you know, because I’m old enough to remember when the internet first came along and, and, and job boards first started happening.
It suddenly became very, very inexpensive for agencies and companies to run ads. It went from costing thousands to costing. You know, literally almost pennies, you know, 20 job ads for a hundred quid, whereas a decent size semi display ad would cost you a thousand pounds. Let’s say depending on the, on the, on the publication.
So the novelty was. People could find jobs really quickly. They can apply to them really, really quickly. Everyone was happy, the novel. Yeah. But as, as time wore on and as people’s experiences with recruitment in general and maybe agencies in particular, in terms of not hearing back. Or not getting feedback.
If they get an interview or the job not quite matching what they understood to a random, the job posting and so on. And then the rise of social media and more and more people talking about their experiences with recruiters and recruitment, people, people. Candidates, I call them people, but people that apply for jobs became more and more jaded.
Social media has made as popularized this human approach to communication. It’s far less for what social media promotes. Just people talking, using emojis, using colloquial language, maybe using profanity from time to time. and that’s just where we are right now. So that’s sort of full compliance, driven.
Kind of content that you typically see in job postings. It just doesn’t work anymore, but it doesn’t, it only works. The only people that it’s going to work with, the people that need another job. But if you’re a recruiter trying to fill a tricky to fill job, the chances are that most of your target candidates are going to be in a job that they don’t need to leave.
Therefore, some persuasion is going to be, be neat to brought about how do you feel about like, what about, go ahead, Nate. You’re gonna ask him. Yeah. I mean, I definitely have some tactical questions. Yeah. When you were showing the differences, one thing that came up in my mind was does every job description need an accompany accompany job ad?
Or can you create a job ad that is like an umbrella for multiple job descriptions?
You can create, well, first of all, to answer that in secrets, not all job descriptions need a job ad easy to fill job. Then I don’t think you need to put in the time and the effort to create an ad that is going to be compelling in some way, unless, unless the one caveat to that is unless quality is of particular importance, there’s a particular type of candidate or your demands.
Of who is going to be qualified to do that job it’s particularly high, in which case you’re probably going to need to sell the job quite well. In the first half of the ad, if in the second half of the ad, you’re going to start laying down some quite heavy demands as to what the candidate is going to need to have to qualify, to answer your second question.
You, you can create a really good job ad for a particular job. And then once you’ve, once you’ve got that finished product, you can then create variations of that same ad that will sell two or three other. Aspects of the job because normally a job will have three or four things about it that the homing company thing should be attractive to the target genders.
It could be better training, better boss, interesting culture work-life balance. Remote working could be money could be a bigger challenge. It could be bigger scope. It could be better resources. A lot of people generally, but once in my view, you, and in my experience, most people who have achieved some kind of mastery over whatever it is, they do be it Java development or marketing or sales or mechanical engineering.
Most of those people, their primary motivator for most of those people is to want to get better at what they do. Hmm. And generally, and that can be achieved through either personal development, training, mentoring just having access to more things to play with more resources, better tech, or it could be, you know, dealing with with, with, with a bigger big audience.
Maybe the product is more ambitious that colleagues are smarter. I mean, there are a ton of things that can, that can show people how working at a particular place might improve their career prospects in general. And for me, those are the things that need to be worked. If you’re going to write something compelling, that’s going to persuade someone to send you there.
All right. Got more than eight. Keep going. Okay. This is, this is also why, like we like doing two person shows. So, you know exactly who’s turned. It is to talk. We’re not going back and forth like a who, who should go now? I know there’s just a lot of questions. You touched on metrics or measure measurements measuring this.
You knew the stats like pretty quickly. I think you said like seven qualified out of 11 and now is it is. When it comes to something like this. I also want to talk about distribution because I always think of content in like a there’s two sides of it. There’s like the creative and then there’s the getting it in front of people wherever they spend their time part.
Yeah. The first thing I’m thinking about is like, is the measuring, is this a is this a qualitative thing or is this like a quantitative, like numbers thing? How do you, how do you find out if this is working. Well, it can be quantitative if recruiters measure it. Well, I’ve collected evidence from a handful of recruiters who have measured ads, old ads, new ads based on the training they’ve received.
And then they’ve gone out and written a better ad. And the results that they’ve shared with me have been positive. Yeah, but wanted to really, and subjectively in terms of the quality, just from reading it, at least to my eyes it’s a, it’s a tricky one. Yeah, quantities can be a contentious area when it comes to recruitment marketing, because fundamentally I don’t think our job as success should be, should be, should be measured by numbers of responses.
There are lots of very, very, very bad, almost unreadable job postings that get hundreds of responses that can be down to the statue of the company, the type of job, the level of unemployment in that particular geographical region, or how in how many different places they put it, because the more places you put it, more people are going to see it.
More people are gonna are gonna respond, but For me, the, the metrics should always be more qualitative. And I know that there are some judgments that need to be made in terms of, well, where are we going to put it? You know, do we feed it out to the various channels slowly just to see what we get back so we don’t need to necessarily spend more money.
And that can then be related to the urgency of getting candidates into the pipeline. So it can, it can get complicated quite quickly, but for me, it should always be about quality because unlike other forms of creative writing or creative advertising job ads, don’t need to find hundreds of customers.
They only need to find one, right? Yeah. One at a one. Yeah. And that’s all the boxes that you’ve specified in the ad and they want to do the job for the right reasons. And it makes sense. There is some kind of logical procuring progression to then doing this job. Be it financially or whatever else from a learning perspective then.
Yeah. You only need one candidate. You own any continent. So if people are looking for a quick and dirty guide to measuring the quality of that, your posting or their job ad, and I’ve got quite, I’ve got quite pedantic about how I described your badge now. Cause the job ad is something that sells a job, but your posting is just content that tells people about a job, but the best way or a quick and dirty way of measuring the quality of an ad is to count up how many people responded, who are currently employed.
That’s always one. Yeah. Okay. How many other people responded? Who don’t need another job, but we’re intrigued. Question I got cause Nate and I talked about this a lot is how you can use content to also signal to people who really won’t be a fit for the job or for a company to not apply. Right. So I think that when it comes to job descriptions, when job descriptions have posted a job ads, they might just see.
They’ll probably look at the title and the company name, and that’s probably all they’re going to never, they’re going to pull the trigger or not. If they’re unemployed, they’re probably going to just, you know, whatever. Have you taken that approach or have you seen value from that standpoint and getting less people to respond?
Who clearly aren’t if maybe they won’t be, maybe they wouldn’t like the vibe of the company. I don’t know if you’ve, I’m just curious. Okay. I know not much. I’ll be honest. I’ve dabbled in it, but normally I only get involved where the perception is of the job is going to be tricky to fill. Okay. Which is why I’m involved or whether I’m sometimes I’ll bring in a partner or another recruiter who specializes in that particular job to sprint.
So together we’ll work the vacancies. So I’ll do the front end, but the kind of attraction stuff. And he, or she will do the assessment part of the process. I did once run an ad that carried some mild profanity because the culture of the company was quite swearing. And so I wanted to get that across Couple of job boards refused to run it, which should be slightly bullshit is not a swear word.
But, but, but yeah, so, so then people can then make a judgment as to if they don’t like that kind of thing. They don’t apply. Generally my attitude is if you want to be demanding as to the type of candidate you want to respond, then you have to do a particularly good job of selling the, selling the job in the first half of it.
So basically to dust it very crudely, you have an optimal word count for a job. Posting is 400 words. The first 200 should only talk about. The reader what’s in it for them, how their life might be made more rewarding, how the job might be more enjoyable or what they’re going to get out of it. It must use lots of new language and should be written in a, of a friendly sort of colloquial tone of voice.
That’s the best way of getting across company culture is the way you write the ad. Not saying we’re a fun, wacky place to work. Yeah. Is everyone saying that? And then in the second half of the ad, The the, the better selling job you’ve done in the first half the app, the more, the more demanding you can be in the second half.
And what you’ve done is you you’ve, you’ve got people to want to keep reading and that that’s the first objective of any job posting is to get someone to read the first sentence, because everyone will read the first sentence of a job posting. If they’ve clicked it to expand it. And. That’s that’s your opportunity to get them to want to keep reading and the two easiest ways to get people to want to keep reading anything is to why the explicitly tell them what’s in it for them.
If they keep reading. Or to use something that I call a pattern disruptor. We’re getting into advanced strategy here where you write something that kind of grabs their attention, because they’re not expecting to read that in the first sign of an ad, disrupts them, that, that pattern of thinking when it comes to job postings.
But if you do use that technique, you’ve then got to quickly explain whatever metaphor you’ve used and how that will relate to, to the candidate. But yeah, it’s got to be all about the reader.
What about, so the two things I want to, I want to hit on. We talked about some of these things a little bit, like the, sort of the inertia of it. I, I do want to come back to distribution because I want to talk about social media and how they can be distributed, but before we kind of skip over so inertia, this is not, I mean, I probably reading your posts maybe nine months ago.
It was the first time this even struck me as like a concept. And I’ve been in this industry in the U S for a long time. Right. I’m trying to determine it’s just not something that’s talked about here. And I think there’s just general inertia issues. In recruiting in general, this is not a, it’s not a progressive industry typically.
Right? So I have some thoughts on, on why I’m curious as to what you’ve seen there. And it seems like, it sounds like it’s a little more understood in the UK, but. do you have any other thoughts on the nurse in general? I want to, I can go off on a tangent here, but no, it sounds like an interesting moment.
Maybe we should come back and talk about that because that, that sounds fascinating. interesting. Maybe the UK has always been kind of at the forefront of creativity in general. Across ad agencies in general, perhaps down the years, there may be people that I follow some, some great ad people. Yeah.
Yeah. On LinkedIn who are American, who, who, who I know are very good at what they do and very creative. So I’m not sure about that anyway. Secondly, why more, so Americans? I, I don’t know. I think people have just. Got locked into a pattern of behavior. This is what, this is how you post a job ad.
This is how we’ve posted job ads since 1998 or 2001, or whenever it was. And when they don’t work, they blame the job board. Or the target audience for some reason. Yeah. I think I agree with all that. I, I do think that I don’t know enough about the UK recruiting market, but in the States here, like most recruiters start their career at one of the large firms.
You come out of school, you get hired by, I’m not going to name any of them, but and those places are very much run like. Boiler room operations, you know, it’s very metrics driven micromanagement, and it’s the kind of environments where creativity or thinking outside the box is just not rewarded whatsoever.
You know? I love the way it’s not thinking outside the box. I would argue that the taking the approach, I’ve just outlined to posting a job is just basic good salesmanship or good person ship. Yeah. And America being the home of the salesperson. I would have thought that via concept that most Americans could easily, easily latch onto.
I think there’s a lack of engagement because I think a lot of recruiters are overworked that vote. I think that’s particularly true of in-house recruiters. Many in-house recruiters have got way too many requisitions on their desk. So they’re kind of flooded. I think a lot of recruiters, both agency and in-house, and this is probably the biggest single reason for the inertia to create.
Content that people are going to want to read is that they actually think that the status of the company is going to be the attractive feature. That’s going to drive people to potentially win that job. and in my view, unless your name is Disney, Starbucks, Microsoft, or Apple, or, you know, something like that.
Google peak people that is just isn’t the case. The agencies do that. They run blind ads. Yeah, because obviously they’re working continuously. They can’t reveal who the client is and the client’s probably working with three other agencies anyway, but they pepper the content with exciting dynamic.
World-leading. Unrivaled unpowered allowed all these kind of, you know adjectives that oversell the company probably, but don’t speak to anything that’s important to the reader. The only types of candidates generally that’s turned on by the stature of the company, if true younger people that are in the beginning of their career journey album, there’s people in the middle.
Yeah. And it’s interesting. It’s not the same, but I mean, Nate and I always talk about similar things and just like. W it works. If you can raise the profile of your company, it works, you know, if you can just become more well-known through content or whatever else, but that’s not to say that that’s the only way you’re doing things.
Right. So, whenever I post or talk about this stuff, I I’m speaking specifically to hard to hire candidates. People like you’re, you’re talking about Mitch. It’s like people who are, who are employed. Heavily recruited really competitive market like that kind of a thing. And it’s like, it’s the equivalent of an enterprise level, you know, software sale where like enterprise level reps will work in account for a year, sell a million dollar deal.
Or something. And that’s like at a software company, those enterprise reps are paid extremely well. And it is known that this is not an overnight process and that it takes like a certain level of like engagement and awareness and showing up a lot and developing relationships and all this stuff.
It’s like, we’re like the whole, like golf course thing came from, right. Like take clients out on the golf course or steak dinners and stuff like that. But for some reason, like you transfer that over to recruiting. Recruiting like a senior, senior level data engineer who is, who is like already like gainfully employed and who has like, offers all over the place for some reason that same mentality doesn’t apply, but it’s, but it is the same.
Okay, great. Yeah. So like the behavior you’re trying to, like, you’re trying to cram like entry-level recruiting behavior to an enterprise level sale and it’s just, it’s. Yeah, there’s a big disconnect. It’s the only rational explanation I can find to why companies and the agencies that they use to represent them do that is because.
I think they’re doing the world a favor by having job vacancies. That that’s the only rational answer I can think of. Cause it doesn’t make any sense on any other level because somebody, you know, a data engineer, who’s probably only like a hundred thousand dollars a year typically. Yeah. You know, 120, 150, you know, they’re serious people.
They put a lot of effort into their career to become what they become and they probably manage their career. Quite seriously in terms of looking before they leave. So there, there has to be an element of subduction and transparency and information sharing to get them to a point where they they’re gonna ma make the decision to join another company.
And let’s not forget that changing jobs is one of the five most stressful things that we all do as human beings in our lives. Now it’s right up there with them falling in and out of love and, or getting married di public speaking, buying a house that may be one or two others as well, but it’s in that.
Yeah. So. Yeah, I think we should be affording a little bit more respect to the process. Absolutely. But that’s another subject as well. Yeah. Yeah. That’s just, it falls in, there’s a, I think there’s a misconception of how hard it is to your same point to do. And a lot of people who haven’t been in recruiting and maybe it’s heads of HR who don’t come from recruiting, maybe it’s business owners that they, they underestimate how hard it is.
And they think it’s way more transactional to them because they treat it like a transactional sell versus a consultative sale. So, yeah, I honestly, I think a lot of it have promoted that mindset in some, you know, just from their behaviors and what they hear about people’s experiences with recruiters, you know, in terms of them being sort of commissioned hungry chases, you know?
I think it’s a little bit about. Oh by stereotype. But but yeah. honestly, I, I, you know, the whole people are our greatest asset mantra that gets. Punch it out there by CEOs and directors, but, but none of that is ever reflected at any aspects of that visible recruitment process, that career pages, that job ads, that digital footprint generally.
Let’s we got a little bit of time here left, so I’m going to get down to the social media and Nate, I think you’re going to ask how, like, we don’t talk about distribution, right? Job, add a job, add on like a formal, like the job posting part of LinkedIn or any other site versus just like putting it in your social feed.
Right. Okay. What are your thoughts on like what’s the best way to maximize things? What are people responding to better? I’m curious what your clients are doing, what you’re doing. Okay. Since I decided to move into coaching, which I made that decision. 10 11 years ago. the first thing that I did was, was teaching good contingency recruiters, how to move to retained.
and I still do a bit of work in that area now, but, but the copyright thing has kind of taken over over the last five years. So in terms of my approach to social media, I mean, I went out deliberately to become well known amongst the UK. Agency audience, LinkedIn them all where, so it’s a perfect platform for doing that.
And I did it by, taking the piss out of contingency, by writing blogs that were. Sometimes accused of being a little bit overcritical or a little bit harsh. The sarcasm is a bit too heavy. I would start arguments deliberately on threats, to get noticed, but in my defense, and that sounds like very troll like behavior.
And to some extent it is ever said anything. I couldn’t back up ever. And if there’s one goal mall anyone should take to social media is say what you like to say in whatever way you like, but you have to be able to back it up. If someone questioned you. And that’s what I did. And eventually more, more recruiters grew to likely a bit more.
There is still a whole bunch of people out that can’t stand me because of that those early years. I mean, it was, Nate was one of them a couple months ago, so
it wasn’t Mitch in general. It was the once I was having it, I was having trouble having trouble seeing the difference between job districts. Hi, welcome. Welcome Nate. So look, the point I was going to make was I, I built a big network of recruiters. So on the, on the occasions where I’m asked to help a client of mine recruit recruiters, I can put an ad on LinkedIn and it will perform way better, the mid coat and that same ad.
For mainstream job boards, right? Yeah. so I, and I think the future for a lot of recruiters that work particularly niches that are embedded in a particular nature of particular job discipline, is to build audiences of people who do that, that kind of work, be it on LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram or all of them or Facebook, and build an audience.
And that way you never have to pay for an app again. Hmm. Well, for a lot of them, the absolute worst posts are the people who basically post slimmed down job descriptions, bullet points, and they’re in their LinkedIn feed. I have unfollowed multiple people, no insight into the mindset is where they start with.
We’re really excited to announce that. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody cares. Nobody cares what you think until they know what you can do for them. And if more companies adopted that mindset, that that job postings would improve like that, stealing that by the way, definitely gonna make a post making fun of that. So again, I have a few minutes.
I don’t know, Nate, do you have any other questions you wanted to get across here with Mitch or while we got them on the, on the show?
No, I think we’ve covered most of what I was thinking or what I wanted to ask here. Okay. Yeah. I feel like we have like more to talk about at another time. Yeah. If we wish we should have been better prepared, shouldn’t we really like a part two and then maybe even a part three or I don’t know who knows.
Yeah, we can come back to this. It’s people are going to get bored here and spend about 45 minutes, but there’s a lot that we could allow these topics, that things we can kind of deeper, deep dive around some, yeah, look, the whole social media thing is interesting. Cause I put a lot of energy into social media.
I never joined in with the threads that you see increasingly, or at least in my feed of people talking about. Social media and how to maximize readership and blah, blah, blah. I never joined in those conversations cause I don’t see the point. But there’s clearly an appetite for people to want to learn, to get better at it.
So you know, I’ve been doing it for a long, long time. I I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned. Okay. Last question. So this is observation. So Nate and I we’ve always been. You and Mitch, when you and I talked last, I think you were mentioning like commenting is really the long game in, in LinkedIn.
Right? Nate and I were all on board that until probably three or four months ago, like there was I’ve noticed two things. One I, both of us have lists of people we like to follow and I’ll just open those all up in one fell swoop. And that way I can kind of see what all they post every day. Right.
I’ve noticed that it’s dried up. Like I would say the list of 40 people. I really like to see probably half of them quit posting in the last, since this year started. And the other ones, , I’d say another quarter. I don’t know. I feel like they mailed it in and then I looked, I, then I looked at my feed and I feel like I like deliberately for this show.
Cause I know you mentioned that to me. I tried to find like post to start commenting on this week and it’s been really hard. And I’m curious your thoughts on like what is happening with LinkedIn? I, I know, I think we all have different experiences depending on who’s in our network and where we’re situation, what we do for a living.
Just to give you a quick, very quick and dirty overview of this. I, I connect with any recruiter, anyone who works in recruitment asked to send to me, can I connect with them? But I also look to actively connect with anyone who uses social media. Well, particularly recruiters who do I seek out recruiters who have opinions.
And I will occasionally do a search for certain types of people and look what they’re posting about because sometimes or often I’ll have an opinion. and sometimes I’ll do a search in the content. Area of LinkedIn, just y’all just put some keywords in and just see who’s commenting about a particular subject.
And then I’ll dive into the thread and just, just make some comments, like some other comments and just join the conversation. And often that provides me with much of my material, much of my thinking to other people. Presenting ideas, presenting theories, presenting opinions, and all I’m doing is piggybacking off the back of them.
And often I’ve been in these conversations, I’ve started typing something and I’ll get. 60 70 words in, or that hang on, this is too good for a comment. This needs to be come a blog as I’ll cut and paste it and put it into a word document and then go back to it later and turn it into something they a blog or an article.
So for me, joining in discussions is critical to my entire strategy of of, of producing content and, and, you know, being visible. Absolutely fundamental. So Mitch still has better followers than we do Nate. So his future working for him. Yeah. But you know, like Mitch, like James and I for a long time, that’s like kind of our emo is we use, we use comments as fodder for our own posts.
So, and I start encouraging, like if somebody drops like a really good comment on my, on one of my posts, I just reply to them and say like, turn this into a post. Like, I’m trying to get people to understand that you’re creating value in that post itself, but then you’re also helping yourself, like, just think through these ideas.
It’s, it’s just the best of both worlds. And when you can get into that rhythm you’re just like never lacking content or ideas. You’re just like, always thinking in terms of posts. It sounds very strange, but practitioners understand it. Certainly. I know people in the recruitment training industry who.
You think that there’s some sort of guardians of some, some mythical secrets too, or that there’s some magic bullets to maybe helping groups be successful, which is complete horseshit, by the way, one of the other fundamentals that I follow is just give it all away. Yeah. Tell anyone anything they want to know about how to do something.
Yeah. Because that’s the easiest way to establish credibility and respect from people is when you give them advice that that works. That makes sense. yeah, that’s what we’ve done. I’ve never been shy of, you know, trying to put, you know, I’ve never, never been consumed with thinking. I’ve got to protect certain areas of knowledge that I have or experience.
I, I just share it. Yeah. It’s not going to keep people from paying you the ones who are going to pay you are going to. Pay you anyway, and you’re going to help a lot of people who maybe can’t afford you and you can go take what you’re teaching them and do it themselves. It’s like, it’s a total win-win, there will be some people that will, that will pick up on things that people say in social media and maybe follow them.
And then people, a couple of people have said this to me that they just read my stuff for a year and then just applied it and made it work. there are people I’ve seen people over the last four or five years of recruiters who. Putting out decent ads that have never been through my training. So I’m not taking credit for that by the way.
But they clearly have people that I’ve got some natural ability and I’ve learned some theory and some best practice and put it together and things have clicked and, and then they start to produce decent ads without ever having any formal training. Yeah. There will always be people that can do it themselves, for sure.
Yeah. All right guys. Yeah. Let’s do this again some time. This is good. I think there’s a lot more, a lot more room. We have to kind of go into some of the stuff. So, that’s a wrap for the employer content show. If you want to hear more of what Nate and I and Mitch have to say.
You can subscribe to the higher world channel on YouTube, where we have a playlist of all of our episodes and the talent insights podcast, which is available on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Amazon and Spotify. Nate, thanks for coming as always, Mitch. It’s great to have you on this time and everyone out there.
We’ll see you soon.
