The 10 minute talent rant is live.
I’m James Hornick joined by Jeff Smith and as you can see, we are on the clock. 10 minute talent rant is our ongoing series where we break down things that are broken in the talent acquisition and hiring space, and maybe even pitch a solution or two. This week’s topic, can LinkedIn stories make recruiting easier?
So if you guys aren’t familiar LinkedIn stories, the brand new feature, which I don’t think it’s in full distribution yet, but a lot of people are slowly getting it. It’s kind of their rip off of Instagram or Snapchat. To test this out, we actually did an experiment and that’s the first thing. So Jeff and a few other people internally decide to use this as a recruiting tool over the last week, we found out half the people we asked to try it out didn’t have actually have access to it yet. So Jeff you’re completely inept at social media. How was your experience so far? Well, as a hater trademark, I pleasantly surprised James. Per your instruction, threw out a couple of job stories and just kind of pitched a 15 to 20 seconds snippet.
I mean, there was very minimal information. It was really just kind of the nuts and bolts. Here’s our comp range, here’s the space, here’s the type of company and via just first connections because that’s all stories go out to. I had two individuals that I haven’t spoken to in quite some time that both of us acknowledged that we hadn’t, not remembered, but we just hadn’t had a dialogue from a professional level, in probably four to five years. That was their route into seeing some of my content again. And while both of those conversations weren’t exact fits for what I was looking for, I now have two advocates out on the market, kind of socializing these opportunities and hopefully building a new pipeline.
Yeah, so that’s great. I’m glad it worked because that was kind of my take is that it would. I didn’t know it was gonna work that quickly, but I’m glad that it did. I’ll take a step back. I talked about this a little bit this morning on LinkedIn, on a post I made, I think that people are a little bit off the mark in what they’re using it for, which is fine.
People are figuring out and there’s so many people would hate it. There’s like this visceral reaction to, Oh my God, they’re putting Instagram on- you, you hate it. If you break it down, there’s three things that are completely different about this than LinkedIn feeds. I want to go into that. Now first and foremost, everyone complains about the algorithm.
Like everyone wishes it was like Twitter where if you post something, people in your network are going to see it a hundred percent of the time it’s going to show up but LinkedIn doesn’t work that way. LinkedIn works where maybe your connections see it, maybe they don’t, maybe they see it later in the day. There’s no rhyme or reason for when things pop up.
That’s gone. There is no algo when it comes to this. You’re not going to get your content buried. Your first connections and your followers will see it pop up on their phone. So like the biggest complaint that everyone has about why they don’t like posting on LinkedIn or one of the things like that’s erased.
That’s like a huge win. Secondly, as you kind of mentioned, this goes out to your connections and your followers only, it’s a tight network. This is not going out to all kinds of randos. You’re not gonna have people you don’t know complaining about something you say. Really, I think kind of tying us back to recruiting, it’s an opportunity for you to get extremely niche with who you’re talking to. If you’re someone who focuses in a very defined space, whether it’s recruiting, whether it’s some other area of business, you can talk to just those people and talk about jobs relevant to those people and continue kind of just like staying relevant in that space and the kind of the third point, which kind of ties directly into that.
It doesn’t go to a comment section. Like this goes to a one to one interaction that goes to your direct messages. So if somebody wants to get back with you, they don’t have to put themselves out there and post on the internet because lot of people don’t like doing that. If they have something to say, if they’re interested, it goes right to your inbox.
And I can say my experience from this is like the interaction is off the charts. Like every single person I’ve messaged based upon something I saw was interesting, has responded hundred percent of the time and vice versa. Every single person has messaged me, like this is the best engagement I’ve ever seen on any tool in social media, especially in professional setting.
So there was tremendous value here and I think bringing it back to what ultimately this is a channel for, it’s the concept of push versus pull. And you could call this a few different things. You could call this the difference between sales and marketing, the difference between outbound and inbound.
But I think that recruiters are very used to push environments. They’re taught to, back in the day, make cold calls, message people, make your list, try to find someone for positions and whatnot. But this is an opportunity for people to have more of a pull mindset. How to stay in front of people who might be interested in either what you have to say or the jobs you’re posting, but they don’t want to get an email every single time.
They just get tired of that. Like they might like you, but like who needs to be messaged as often as is normal people do it. It’s an opportunity to kind of foster relationships and as you said, this is a perfect example, like the people who got back to you are people you haven’t talked to in years. There are absolutely people out there who’d be interested in a job you have posted.
They just, they don’t like email and it opens up a completely different Avenue of a different person, a different persona out there who you can engage with on searches. Yeah. When you talk about the pole aspect of it, it’s both sides. Recruiters get so used to feeling like they have to sell into stuff.
And boy, I just, this was an easy way to just kind of throw a bit of a feeler out there and let somebody opt in themselves. I think another interesting thing, as somebody who -I may wander in and out of social media, I’m currently in a totally anti phase who knows what will be, what will happen in the future.
But I think maybe me and you- I don’t know I won’t speak for you, but we forget that like while yes, Snapchat and Instagram stories, like seems like something that’s commonplace for us, maybe some of the business community isn’t used to that. So teaching people how to use it effectively and as it relates specifically to what we’re talking about, recruiting, early returns are positive. I have nothing but good things to say so far. Alright, looks like we kind of agree on this one. I wanted to kind of, I guess talking about push versus pull and I want to make sure I’m clear on this too.
Like I think as a recruiter, you have to do both. Your job is to find people, whether it’s for your company or if you’re a third party recruiter for your client, obviously you have to have some sort of outbound system, but I think there’s tremendous value in having kind of regular inbound.
If you can build credibility, if you’re a finance and accounting recruiter and people, and you’re talking to strictly accountants and people in that realm, and they’re used to seeing you talk about jobs, like it will become habit for a lot of these people and they will listen to what you have to say.
Again, it’s a chance for you to stay in front of people in a very non annoying way. Some people are going to be annoyed with stories, but guess what? That’s not your market. Those aren’t the people you have to be talking to. And on top of that, I mean this is just one application for it.
This is one thing that we kind of tried out in the last week that worked. So, I’ll be interested to see kind of what other things are kind of relevant to this area in this market. So. Exciting. We finally agree on something. As much as we love each other, I feel like it’s based out of this mutual adversarial relationship.
So it pleases me to know, and that you and I are aligned on this. Well, it looks like we were way under on this one and we were out of things to say, so we’ll just wrap it up. So that’s a wrap for this week. Thanks again for tuning into the 10 minute talent rant, which will always be available for replay on the Hirewell YouTube channel, as well as the talent insights podcast on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify and YouTube, and recently added Amazon. Jeff, anything else? Listen, for anybody watching or that’s going to watch, take a look at our stories. We’re going to keep doing this. So obviously we’re going to keep throwing new, relevant jobs out there. So any of our first connections, you know, keep us in mind.
We’re going to be out there. Watch your stories people. Alright man, I’ll talk to you later and everyone else, we’ll see you soon. Bye.
