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 cohost from before you apply the keynote speaker at this week’s talent and Alliance summit,
Not invited. Yeah, they’re going to throw some shade out there. plays inside joke. All right. today’s segment the biggest missed opportunity in talent acquisition. So you and I we’ve talked about this a little bit and, , the bigger thing is like, I I’ve, I’ve made how this came up. Was I made a really tongue in cheek post about how inept pretty much the entire world is that using LinkedIn and absolutely no one got the joke because they thought I was talking about some other website.
Cause I apparently it was harder for everyone to connect the dots because I sometimes forget like how in the weeds we are with this stuff. Yeah. So, and I think we should bring it up maybe in kind of three threes. Like there’s what the opportunity is that everyone’s missing. Okay. I know what everyone’s going to say.
The challenge is why we can’t do it, but I have an easy how to process and how I actually it’s really easy to do. And whatnot. And also have, like, I can speak from personal experience. I can share a little bit about what we’ve done in this exact area, and we’re kind of doing it as we speak right now.
So LinkedIn is the biggest missed opportunity is. Properly using content in a way that can get your hiring managers involved on LinkedIn. And let me build a case for this. So you have to be, if you’re talking top of the funnel awareness where people get to know about your company to get interested, like you have to be where people hang out.
There’s a reason why Facebook and Instagram. Are worth like almost a trillion dollars, you know, it’s like people hang out there. So companies are able to like put ads and organic content whenever in front of their target market to get like, like the amount of companies that have built their entire business off Instagram ads.
Right. Is just astronomical. Right? Like it’s, it’s a real thing. Like when you look at LinkedIn, right? Who’s on LinkedIn, like who hangs out on LinkedIn recruiters, salespeople. Job seekers. So if you want to get in front of those three crowds in those three audiences, that’s, that’s where they hang out for all intents and purposes, especially job seekers, like there’s 40 million job seekers a week hanging out on LinkedIn.
Organic content is still huge on LinkedIn. It’s not even like it used to be really, really big, maybe two years back, but it’s still enormous compared to all the other social media sites and whatnot. Meanwhile, and this is actually the post I made today. This is be scrolling through my LinkedIn feed the other day, just to prove the point.
Of how bad and worthless it is. First 20 posts, a crappy ad. I use this pull some self-congratulatory business post Mike wouldn’t making a joke, which was great by the way about polls. Another useless poll, Chris Walker, actually delivering some value with a pretty pointed video on demand gen. Now other crappy, add a link to a career site with no description.
Some dude selling his book, some guy talking about his kids. Another crappy ad Mike, when it complaining about YouTube, anytime you get to, when it posts in a day, that’s actually a win. I shouldn’t complain. Some crappy video means somewhere. In other words, let’s pull another crappy ad, someone celebrating their work anniversary, some other self-congratulatory posts, some bad photo advice, another crappy ad, and then photos of someone, what they did on their day off does a 20 posts.
Like that’s what they’re feeding you nowadays. I don’t know. It’s kinda seems like there’s something missing. It kind of seems like if there’s 40 million job seekers coming to a website, like maybe there’s something people could be putting out there that’s a little more relevant that builds their brand and their audience.
Call me crazy. Yeah. Go ahead. So let me, let me ask you the question. Kind of load this one up in the past year, we’ve been talking about content, employer stuff. What’s the one thing that job seekers want to see that gets them interested. Yeah. They are you posing that question to me, posing a question to you.
It’s not rhetorical. Yeah. I think we got it. I think we should break down. What kind of job seekers too? if we look at like passive job seekers, for example, maybe they might be employed. They’re always kind of looking, they get hit up a lot by recruiters. They want to see, they want to see like how the people they’d be working with think they want to see what they’re building how they approach different challenges, just like smart people want to work with smart people, kind of bottom line, when you’re talking about, when you’re scrolling through your feed, there’s a lot of that.
And there isn’t enough of, there’s not enough substance. And substance really stands out. It doesn’t mean that it, that it gets the most engagement, but it definitely builds the most trust. And, and if somebody can be showing up over time consistently when these passive job seekers start thinking about like, they get a message from a recruiter and they go, Oh yeah, I follow that person stuff on LinkedIn who works at that company.
I should probably take that call. Those dots start connecting. And I think like that’s a real big opportunity. Yeah. I, I think of like half the company, half the people I follow who were actually good. I’d never heard of their companies before I started following them. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I stole this idea from someone else.
I was trying remember who it was the other day, like the only idea that people don’t quit companies, they quit. Managers. Yeah. But the opposite of that has to be, if you believe that, which is arguable, like the opposite has to be true. People don’t join companies. They join because of managers and the discussion I had, we had today kinda went back and forth, you know, and when people actually joined because of money, but yeah, they don’t join this because of money and no one like signs up to work with someone who sucks because they’re paying for.
But more importantly, like you don’t take the call from the recruiter, just because the recruiters aren’t like saying, Hey, we can pay 50 K more, like, come join us. Like. You’re getting back to people because you’ve actually heard of them and that sparks your interest, right? Yep. I think that, and I guess I can talk a little bit about this.
so I’ll speak from experience on this one. We, we did a couple things over the past year, like the past year. Are you going to be doing the show, but doing a show with Jeff Smith and whatnot? At no point was the intention, did we think like, Oh, this is going to help us hire. It just, wasn’t like didn’t really enter in our thought process yet.
The demand for recruiters right now is absolutely insane. Like next to software developers, it is the most in demand thing out there. I’m talking companies, hiring recruiters internally, or even, you know, recruiting firms trying not to build out their staffs. Like the, the demand for devs has increased the point where just the demand to find people who can find those devs is nuts.
Wow. Yet, we’re now 60 people. We were just under 50, you know, kind of coming out of like the end of last year. We’ve been able to make roughly a dozen hires since November, December or so. And it’s come up in every single conversation except for one, which was kind of funny of those dozen, like 11 of them, like they all mentioned.
I learned about you guys through the content and stuff you put out there. Not just me, but what everyone else does, you know, and it’s an opportunity to cut through the noise and everything. And, it’s, doesn’t get people to say, yes, it doesn’t get them to accept the offer, but it gets the conversation started a hundred percent.
Yeah. And so like, my take is that like you and I have some steps in how to do this, but like the whole crux of this, the missed opportunity is. Not getting your hiring managers. Yeah. And leaders to talk about what they’re doing, what they’re building, what they’re hiring for on LinkedIn specifically.
Yes. Yeah. Because if you can make that happen, not just the same person, but if you can have collective of your organization, the senior leadership, having some sort of general presence where on a regular basis, your organization is getting not just their recruiters, bothering people with outbound messages.
But actually like explain people, all the things they’d want to know before they apply out there in the collective consciousness. Yeah. You know it, a little bit of repetition. All of a sudden it’s gonna be so much easier to hire. Yes. There’s some objections here and I cannot overcome them all. But if you have any thoughts, please continue.
I do. I mean no, it’s just like, I feel like I’m just going to repeat what I’ve already said. I just like. It’s just the ability for your audience to just totally align and get bought in with the way that, not just somebody at your company, but thinks, but just the way that your company approaches things overall, it’s just represented through an individual.
It’s like, it’s so valuable. and you know, like if we step out of like engineering roles, turnover’s a real thing, you know, like it’s so even if you’re, if you have like hard to hire candidates who are like employed and like they’re just passive onlookers, there’s a good chance that like, at some point they’re going to be active.
They’re going to be like actively seeking employment. And it’s just, I mean, this is just like sales and marketing. It’s like, you just want to be top of mind when that conversation is ready to happen. I mean, we saw this like, you know, when layoffs happened at the beginning of COVID, but like, it just periodically happens.
We’re like some of the smartest people in the industry are suddenly like unemployed and they’re, they’re looking. And if you’re hiring for that role, they’re going to think of you first because you’ve just. Showed up saying really smart shit for a long time. Talk specifically about you guys though. Cause I know you’ve had the similar success that we did, like with your newsletter and everything else like with hiring.
Yeah. Yeah. I talked a lot about like using like content as like the filter at the top of the funnel. It’s kind of like this thing that I continually repeat probably too many times. But yeah, I mean like when, when we were. Actively hiring. We did some creative things. Like we kind of like, we eat our own dog food where the content that we create for our clients, we also create for ourselves.
We actually created, it, created a for ourselves first, where, like we interviewed team members and we ask them really pointed questions and we answered all the questions we know our candidates have literally before they apply. And we ran some like really strategic ads to, some like. To a really niche newsletter that drove to that landing page, which had the content on it, which then filtered people to apply.
But it was just like, it goes back to like, that’s just like one way to showcase. The people at your company and show like how they’re thinking behind the scenes, you know, you just like it’s, it’s all like, James, what we’re talking about right now is we’re talking about like different versions of interviews really?
It’s like, how can you move? Like the interview process up to the top of the funnel instead of gating it. Behind one-to-one conversations. It’s like, how do you start scaling interviews? And like, really like the substance and the context and the humanness and the feel that are represented in these like one-to-one interviews.
How do you just like, turn that into different iterations of content? Yeah. Now I agree. And here’s it. So let’s dovetail into that. Here’s the objection. Here’s what everyone says. This isn’t doable. This is pie in the sky. No one has a great mug by the way. No one has the time for this hiring managers.
Don’t have, they’re doing their job. They don’t have time to like make content, all this other stuff. I understand the objection. It’s BS. And here’s why, here’s how you would actually execute this in an internal organization where everyone’s strapped for time. First off. The head of TA or the recruiters or whoever this is their job, it’s their job to organize.
Now, what I would say is that what you want to do a regular basis, you want to have conversations like you and I are doing over zoom or whatever with your hiring managers. And you want to be asking these types of questions. What are you guys building? What sorts of people you need, who’s successful on your team?
Like all these types of questions that any, any job seekers go and want to know or things that are just impressive, whatever you. Take that conversation. You cut it down into short clips. You, your hiring managers, everyone else in your recruiting team, everyone else in their team, you get them all to share this stuff on LinkedIn.
Now people are going to say, wait, that takes time. And no, it does not. Why? Because you should already be having these conversations, your job as a recruiter, as a talent acquisition person is talking to hire your hiring managers. You’re supporting, making sure you’re having. You’re not just doing status calls, making sure you kind of understand what the challenges are when else we’re seeing, like you should already be doing this work in some iteration.
One say performer, another, maybe it’s doing it a little bit more frequently, which by the way is beneficial. Regardless. Like if you aren’t doing it enough to have these conversations, you’re doing your job wrong. Like you need to make sure you’re this tight with people you’re supporting. It’s just a matter of asking a couple more questions and clicking the record button.
Yeah, like everything is there. So, and I realized that there’s okay. There’s some level of editing afterwards. Right? We can talk about that for a little bit too. It’s not hard. It’s not that difficult. If you’ve got an admin or anyone who’s, maybe there’s someone in marketing or maybe there’s someone kind of your, your HR or recruiting and support person can do it really simple programs to make this stuff easy to do, but it’s, you’re not it it’s basically you should already be doing this work.
It’s just a matter of capturing it, putting some captions on it, editing down the size and then giving it to the whole team to share. Yep. And if you do this on a weekly basis, talk to a different hiring manager person, the organization you’re supporting, you can start building out a library of like really basic, easy to use content than everyone can be kind of posting for their individual accounts posting from their company accounts.
And it’s like I said, this is not, I speak from experience. This is not hard. No people ask me how you do it. Like it can be somewhat time consuming, but it definitely gets easier over time. And like, I firmly believe this is talent acquisitions job, and it’s not a, this is, this is an easier part of their job than everything else they do on a daily basis, which is hard.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, you and I both do it on a regular basis, both like with each other and then. Within our companies. And we’ve just like both created like really clean processes that make this stuff like super doable. I mean, if it, if it wasn’t, there’s no way that we would be able to do it.
No, like there’s not a lot of time. And if you just like create, Oh, especially like, if you’re the one leading this charge and you just like create a system where people just need to show up and talk. Yeah. It’s and it’s, it’s like I said, and you think as you can reuse the questions, it’s not like you have to come up with a crazy interview process for it.
And these are things you should be doing anyway. Like none of these questions you’re asking your hiring manager on this video thing you’re creating like, none of it’s in addition to what, like, if you aren’t already asking these questions, you’re not doing your job. Yeah. It’s just clicking the click on the frickin record button and we’re using it later.
And I know we’re talking about LinkedIn specific, but there’s also. Is an opportunity to take your outbound to another level. Like imagine sending a message and embedding one of these videos, like hear how our CTO thinks about building our product or like the product roadmap or whatever it might be.
I mean, there’s man, there’s so many cool things you can do. and this is like, I’m starting to feel like this is. Table stakes in a way, like, I don’t want to like it. It’s just like, we’re almost like at the point where it’s like, everybody should be doing this. Yeah. Because I was like, but nobody is, it drives me crazy because it’s such an obvious layup.
It works because I can tell you from experience and it’s not hard now. Oh. I mean, and then there’s so much, Oh gosh, there’s so much opportunity. Like once you start doing this one, right. I mean, think about the ability to get people featured on podcasts and like on webinars and all kinds of stuff, you know, like, like the level of like branding that can like, that can evolve just by starting to create this kind of content by like basically documenting the things that you should already be doing.
Like you said, it just like starts exponentially growing because you just go like, okay, we got this one down and now like these other opportunities just start naturally opening up. instead of like sitting here going, like, what are all the things we could be doing? You just start doing this one thing really well.
And then suddenly your, your level of like brand activity has evolved so far past what anybody else is doing. Yeah. And I can, like, as I was saying before, like our, our pipeline for people that we are hiring internally. Cause when I’ve talked with his recruiter, I’m not talking about doing this for our clients.
And I’m talking about actually like hire well employees, like this has helped tremendously. yeah, let’s, let’s cut to a couple of tools. Cause you mentioned this beforehand. Maybe this is something we should be doing. Yep. So I guess another quick plug free group, Slack channel, if you want to learn, if you have questions about how to like put together basic content, which isn’t a simple talking about here, DIY content creators, the group that Nate and I are in on Slack.
Like we have a whole crew of about a hundred people now that just like basic stuff like this, how to do it. My favorite, I think the greatest piece of software in the world and it’s super cheap descript. Yeah. Anybody out there, go to the descript. I don’t know if there’s a descript.com or descript .IO.
What’s amazing about it is you can take a few like this, what we’re doing here. This is what we do our actual process for kind of editing stuff. You take this video, you load it into descript. You give it 10, five, 10 minutes, and it’ll transcribe the entire conversation. Like take our voices, put them into text.
And then if you want to take like a clip out of the video, all you have to do is select the text. Clip that out. And it creates a separate video of just that. So you don’t need to have advanced video editing skills and going over stuff. It’s just a matter of literally selecting the words that you liked.
It’ll make a video and then you click a button to add captions. You click a button, add a title. Boom. You’re done. Yep. So it’s so easy. Yeah. It costs $11 a month. I think you can even use it for free up to a certain point. Yeah. Yeah, you can use it. You can use a free to test it out, but past that, like it’s still cheap.
So really cheap. I want to add something else. So if anybody is going to do this and you are going to like start posting these types of videos, let’s say on LinkedIn, the copy that you write is really important. the video. Here here’s I think you and I, you and I both do this. We take this approach, like assume nobody’s going to watch the video and write copy as if nobody’s going to watch it.
Because not everybody is going to watch the video or not. Everybody’s going to read the copy. And so like, you need to have both, I think like people, overlook that they, and be like, well, if I’m going to post the video, I don’t have to like focus so much on the copy and both are really important. The copy will sell.
The video itself. So if it’s a video with your head of marketing or whatever, talk about basically summarize what they’re talking about in the video, in the, in the text art of the post it’s, it’s just really important. And the best thing too is if you’re using something like descript descript transcribes it, it makes the captions for it.
You can also copy and paste that transcription to give you most of your copy. You need to write this thing. So you’ll, you’ll want to make it a little bit different, but it’s not like you have to kind of go from scratch. Like you’ve got, it does have to work for you. Yep. So the other key thing too, which another thing I love Hemingway app.
Oh way.hemingway.app. I think there is a downloadable part, but I just use the website. This is great. So Hemingway is basically, it’s not like it’s not Grammarly. It’s not a grammar app per se. It’s a readability app. Meaning most people write sentences that are too long or too awkward. So it gets, you used to kind of writing choppy copy and cutting out unnecessary words.
But if you just copy and paste it into the app, it will basically score it. It’ll highlight the different areas, things you can cut out or things you should change. and I think the script and Hemingway are the two things. Really the only two things I use on any kind of regular basis. But anyways, Yeah, that’s what I got.
So in summary, I don’t know if you have any other points you want to add onto this, but I can do the quick breakdown for the very end here. Do it. So the quick breakdown is this LinkedIn is dying for actually good content. There’s 40 million job seekers on there every single week. All they want to hear about, if you want to stand out is getting your leaders, talking to them and telling them something relevant about what your company is doing and why they’re hiring, not recruiters, actual leaders in the company.
Doing this as easier than people think, because if you’re a leader in talent acquisition, you should be having these conversations with those leaders. Anyway, it’s just a matter of recording them, maybe asking a couple of specific questions and then using some really cheap and easy to use apps to clean it up and then giving yourself some video content for you and your team and that leader to put on LinkedIn.
If you can do that on a repetitive basis consistently, you will get way more applications for all these positions that are so difficult to fill.
That’s it.
All right. That’s a wrap for the employer content show. If you want more of what Nate and I 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 again as always. All right, man. Everyone out there see you soon. Bye.
