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Attract and Engage the Best Recruiters to Grow Your Business

Is hiring the best recruiters for your business a key goal this year? It is for most of the recruitment leaders that I talk to. I was asked by APSCo to talk at their quarterly members meeting about how to attract and engage your own recruiters. Below are some of the tips I shared from my Internal Recruitment Workshops.Are You One of the 61% Of Recruitment Leaders?Recruitment leaders know that the key to growth in turnover and profit is having the right recruiters – and that means hiring the best recruiters out there. There’s a few recruitment stats knocking about which have made me stop and think:61% of recruitment leaders are worried about attracting their own talent this yearEvery recruitment leader I speak to:Wants their teams to be more effective, successful, inspired.They want them to have more phone and face time (critical sales tasks).They are all worried about the technology paralysis that is preventing this precious phone and face time.What Do These Hiring Stats Say About the Recruitment Sector?There are stats like80% of talent placed last year was already on your internal systems before you spent time (often 4 hours per day) sourcing from external systems such as LinkedIn.The recruiter demographic is getting younger – we assume that this demographic gets tech, but are finding out the hard way that this is not always the case. So, skills like digital marketing, CRM processes are becoming critical to the average recruitment consultant.What Do Deloitte and APSCo Say About the Recruitment Sector?The stats from APSCo and Deloitte’s annual study say it all:68% of leaders want access to new recruiters63% cited staff training as critical89% told APSCo that use of digital marketing was either very important or important86% said that they needed new technology to growBut still there is a lack of strategy around internal attraction. I run Internal Recruitment Digital Marketing Workshops to tackle attraction and engagement and focus on 4 areas.Attract (to Prevent Churn)Engage (to Increase Speed)Inspire (to Hire)Train (to Retain)I’ll talk about the first two in this blog and give some practical tips.1. Attract to Prevent Recruiter ChurnThe goal is NOT to attract – it’s to KEEP! I often find that the recruitment process is too heavy on the face time and not geared up to benefit from online.“70% of candidates come to your website before contacting you too – what does your website say?”Stats tell us that talent can spend around 2 hours engaging with you online BEFORE contacting you – do you have 2 hours of decent content about your culture, values, life chances?“72% of applicants want to know about your values and culture… what is it and where is it?”Or do you simply have a benefits list which include childcare vouchers and holidays (neither are benefits… they are rights…)Think about the online platforms that you are live on and use them to attract – yes an obvious statement, but recruiters are so keen to mend their clients’ shoes and recruit for them, that they are walking around bare-foot and ignoring their own recruiting strategies!Have a content plan aimed at attracting and hiring the best recruiters, not just a job advert and interview plan!Ensure managers’ LinkedIn profiles look like they are great to work for… Yes, innovate your adverts (we know a lot about this) but also create some engaging videos to help your ideal recruiters see and hear who and where they will be working (Health warning… dump the 2 minute talking heads, overly produced, serious, looking-like-you’re-going-to-a-wedding videos and get real).Pitch your business – don’t abdicate your employer brand to your marketing department and Rec2Rec firms – they are there to support you! Your goal in attracting is to attract people who won’t leave after 2 months as they made a mistake. You want them skipping into the interview, staring at their phone waiting for your call, being their best…Can you honestly say that your attraction strategy attracts the best and most engaged?Or does it attract recruiters who have you in a long list of prospects? If 61% of you are worried about your internal recruitment strategy, ask yourselves what % of your time you are spending proactively fixing the issue?2. Not so Fluffy Recruiter EngagementNow – this is a pretty fluffy word, which means many things to many recruiters. In my world, it’s pretty simple. What are you doing to get them to show their faces to you? They are unlikely to engage with you in a public place (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) – but Mailers?Mailers that you send to their private email address?Mailers that they can read on their mobile?Mailers that they can click on and if you have used a decent mailing system you can see who is clicking on what?You’d be crazy not to try this! And your internal recruiters would love to see the resulting call list from your campaign! Do you have a database of talent (ie. Recruiters) that you can mail about how to be a great recruiter, include tips for hitting target, demonstrate your culture, show your successes, survey their likes and hates, advertise your jobs and how much your clients love you?You should generate call lists from the ones who click onto your mailers. “Cold calls are great, warm calls are better! (Greg Savage told me this!)”There are other ways that you can engage. The marketing puritans out there would frown at my suggestion, but hey… I’m trying to be practical and fix a pretty significant issue.I’ll tackle my next 2 points: Inspire to Hire and Train to Retain in a later post.How about you try and tackle the first two points above and see how you get on?Is hiring the best recruiters to grow your recruitment business one of your goals?Read More About My Internal Recruitment Strategy WorkshopsHIIT Us, Recruiters!Our high intensity interval training - Recruitment HIIT - helps recruiters source, convert quicker, and develop healthy pipelines, and recruitment marketers attract, engage, and retain candidates, generate clients, and colleagues (3Cs).TRY RECRUITMENT HIITREAD ABOUT OUR RECRUITMENT TRAININGBOOK A CALL TO DISCUSS RECRUITMENT TRAINING

Recruiters! Don’t Expect a Return on Investment from LinkedIn

Recruiters need to make money from LinkedIn - they spend enough time on it! And I am often asked by Recruitment Leaders about whether LinkedIn Recruiter (and other LinkedIn licences) are with the money. So, what kind of ROI should you expect from LinkedIn?Do You Know How Much LinkedIn Is Worth to You?I am a massive fan of Return of Investment (ROI) when using social media, and I’m not talking about silly and vain “like”, “follower”, ”share” metrics. I get why marketers think these are important (I know they are), but the majority of my agency recruitment clients want £$€ stats.Now if you are a good boy / girl, you’ll know that what you find on social media in terms of leads needs to be recorded on your lovely CRM (no excuses, it’s your job!) If I came in to your business now and asked you for report on how many opportunities / leads / placements you’ve made from LinkedIn, would you be able to tell me? And would you know how many grade A candidates you’ve found on this platform? Would you know how much £$€ you’d lose if the CEO of LinkedIn pulled the plug, or worse made your free license totally chargeable?Most of the recruiters I work with are working on that metric (phew), but many more out there are not. They see using LinkedIn as a given; they don’t measure its success apart from the “it just takes one placement…” (yawn… I’ve heard this mantra since the early 2000s when job boards were a massive expense to recruiters, and it didn’t wash with me then).Placement Fees Are Down – Cost of Hire Is UpI have a horrid feeling that just like placement fees have been going down in recent years, the cost of hire has gone up (or worse recruiters don’t know what their cost of hire is). This is not good when you consider that most users of social media are not even paying for the privilege. Worse, they are spreading themselves so thinly with more systems / processes / devices, and their leaders have low expectations of these things that it’s just a total mess and the risks are massive. Time wastage, data loss, brand erosion is common.So, I think that the average recruitment director lives in the following world:Your staff are simply “on” LinkedIn – zero strategy for what they need to be doing with itYou have little idea what activities your staff are undertaking onlineYou are not measuring these activities (input or output)You have a low expectation of their online activityYour CRM has no clue that LinkedIn existsYour risk is massive – lots of recruiters behaving like hair dressers renting chairs, zero visibility over the data they are collecting on your watch and an assumption that your contract covers this (rumour control: the data they collect belongs to LinkedIn, not your recruiters or you!)If this is you, how do you feel about this? Are you are happy or do you think you deserve better? What would you do if LinkedIn removed free licenses? Are you actually in a position to constructively evaluate the value of LinkedIn Recruiter license without focusing on the cost? (Rumour control: I’m totally impartial but am nagging all of my clients to review the LinkedIn Recruiter product so they are better educated and ready for the inevitable change that their business faces).Although I don’t think that recruiters will ever be forced to pay for LinkedIn, I do feel that you get what you pay for. After all, there’s a reason why many recruiters don’t rate free job boards! There are some pretty decent functions in the Recruiter system and they are giving many a recruiter a competitive edge.I think that the era of “free” social media is coming to an end. The time spent on using it needs quantifying (many recruiters measure phone calls, sendouts, in branches, placements). Recruitment directors need to raise their expectations and implement business-process-led activities which are visible, measureable and the output of which belongs to the business. This will not only help the progression of the business in the digital world, but will also help with business cases for the competitive use (not free use) of social tools.What do you think? Are you a recruitment director/manager/leader? Do you have social media “nailed down” in your business? Do you know its £$€ value? What are your expectations of it? Please share your thoughts and comments below.(See part two of this LinkedIn series here)HIIT Us, Recruiters!Our high intensity interval training - Recruitment HIIT - helps recruiters source, convert quicker, and develop healthy pipelines, and recruitment marketers attract, engage, and retain candidates, generate leads, and colleagues (3Cs).TRY RECRUITMENT HIIT FOR FREEREAD ABOUT OUR LINKEDIN TRAININGBOOK A CALL TO DISCUSS RECRUITMENT TRAINING