Blogs by tag - Wayne Barclay

9 Crucial Recruitment Marketing ROI Questions ~ Answered

Recruitment marketers who want to make a real difference to the sales and recruiting process of their businesses need to read these recruitment marketing insights.Recruitment leaders who are looking to generate more from their marketing function can use Lisa's insights to help them drive marketing ROI.Vanity v SanityRecruitment marketing can often stray into "vanity" world. It's never been easier to "spray and pray" with marketing due to automation and AI. The sheer volume of platforms you can use for recruitment marketing, and the communities you can access and attract, can keep even the most well-intended marketer too busy to generate ROI.But with 69% of online content never even being read, and the vast majority of emails never being responded to, it's never been more important to be targeted with your recruitment marketing and focus on the sanity!Lisa has done a lot of work with recruiters over the years helping them shape their recruitment marketing strategies, so I made her a rare coffee and asked her 9 questions about recruitment marketing ROI.9 Questions I Asked Lisa About Recruitment Marketing ROI1. What is the Function of Recruitment Marketing?Crucially to attract, engage, convert, and retain your 3Cs – candidates, clients, colleagues.And to help your sales and recruiting teams turn them into the 4th C – cash!2. What is the Number 1 Benefit of Recruitment Marketing?Leads (candidate and client) are key...But often the expectations of what recruitment marketing can do are too low and KPIs are mistakenly around followers, impressions, blogging… The benefits of recruitment marketing need to be SANE not VANE. 3. How Should You Measure ROI on Recruitment Marketing?Stick to “sanity stats”: Leads generated. Relevant subscribers signed up. Automation click throughs. Don’t not be fooled by people telling you that it’s difficult to measure ROI in recruitment marketing.4. What is the Difference Between Outbound and Inbound Recruiting?It is the difference between the more traditional approaches to marketing (email marketing / events) and digital (social / web). Push and pull!It’s all about whether you’re interrupting someone’s day with your messages or whether they perceive that they initiate the contact. The key to successful recruitment marketing, whether it be in or out bound, is that the candidate / client feels that they are the initiator... But actually the marketer has stealthily exposed the candidate's / client’s and drove them to click / call you.5. Is Recruitment Marketing Only for Large Companies?All recruitment companies need recruitment marketing.And every recruiter needs to be a recruitment marketer in some way. (Another blog for another day...)Recruitment HIIT has some cool hacks to help recruitment consultants market themselves, their brand, and their services, too!6. What’s the Number 1 Pitfall in Recruitment Marketing?Too much content, not enough marketing! And too much marketing, not enough sales!7. What's Your Number 1 Hack for Content in Recruitment Marketing?69% of content is never even seen, so wasting time creating new content, especially in the current market, is nuts! Repurpose old content. Repurpose other people's content.Create blogs out of blogs eg. "3 Insights We Found Online That Every Accountant Needs to Read this Week"And if you really need to create your own content, ask your recruiters to ask the right questions on their screening and sales calls and then craft insightful blogs to attract and engage your community. eg...What 's the best tech every teacher uses to create lesson plans?How do you think AI will affect your job in the next 5 years?How has your legal firm been affected by WFH?My Recruitment Training platform, Recruitment HIIT has some cool hacks to try, too!8. What is the Recruitment Marketer’s Essential Tech Stack?You can get lost in the tech, but as a starter I'd suggest:Trello for planning.Google Analytics for website ROI.Bullhorn Automation (if you have Bullhorn).An SEO toolkit like SEMRush/AHRefs to turbo boost content – and Keywords Everywhere is flipping awesome!Speedy video and image software such as Canva to "stretch" content – remember, “less content, more marketing!”I mentioned other tech in My Recruitment Training platform, Recruitment HIIT.9. How Can Focus Your Time and Attention and Not Stray into Vanity Territory?Plus, I say to my clients who are looking to hire / get more from marketing and need focused revenue-generating outputs.“Imagine if your recruitment marketer had only 1 hour a day to make a real difference, what should they do? Then times that by 7 and that’s the job spec”. Often recruitment marketers spend too long doing things that people have asked them to do that offer no real value to recruitment and sales. Stay focussed on the WIIFMB - what's in it for my business?Automation BuddyWe are Automation Buddies set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses who want to increase speed and sales.We coach to inspire amazing automation ROI, and are a safe pair of hands to build your automations so you can recruit and sell more.READ ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION BUDDY SERVICE

How Many Candidates (and Clients) Do Recruiters Really Need?

Recruitment leaders and their resourcers / recruiters need to read this blog for insights on how much data they really need, and how much data they can realistically manage, to run a successful desk and recruitment business.We’re all human (even recruiters) and we all have limits. In recruiting world, our limits can be how many jobs we can work, how many calls we can make, how many temps we can manage. One significant human limit is our ability to nurture relationships. Data = Relationships = SalesRecruitment is a relationship business. A recruiter’s job is to build and maintain relationships. Candidates need managing, clients need managing, colleagues need managing. Dunbar tells us that humans have relationship limits – we have “a number” we can manage. Robin Dunbar is a Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford Uni he knows a few things about human behaviour. Think of your relationships a bit like a layered onion with you in the middle. 5 loved ones 15 good friends 50 friends 150 meaningful relationships 500 acquaintances 1500 people you can recognise People can move in and out of these layers. What is Dunbar’s Number? And What’s It Got to Do with Recruitment? Where does a “typical” recruiter sit in their ideal candidate / contact’s layer? And where do their candidates and contacts sit? Recruitment Leaders! What should you be considering if you want to maximise the value of your database, and the relationships you want to maximise, optimise, monetise? How should you focus on and nurture the right relationships? What’s the Number of Candidates and Contacts a Recruiter Can Actively Manage? Dunbar suggests that humans are capable of building, nurturing and maintaining 150 good meaningful and trusted relationships. Of course, there are variations to this, such as extroverts vs introverts and social networks – for example women tend to have more contacts in the closest layers. Dunbar v Recruitment Dunbar’s study isn’t focused on recruitment or recruiters, but it’s definitely food for thought. 150 meaningful relations is not that many people when you consider the average recruiter has a database in the 1000s. But could you really market your recruitment business on a database of “acquaintances” or “people you recognise”? Where do your candidates and clients fall within these categories? Have you got any in the magic 150 “meaningful contacts”? Is your database segmented in such a way, or do you have a “data dump” which needs a good clean?[link to clean webinar]. Recruitment in the Good Old Days Before tech and data began paralysing recruitment (too much / never enough), recruitment was much more of a relationship business. You knew your candidates, their dog’s names, their kid’s ages. Relationships were easier to sustain, they were more valuable, and we charged more for our services. It’s likely that Dunbar would say a recruiter pre-social media had 150 meaningful relationships with candidate and clients, and perhaps even some friends? Now with infinite data and technology allowing for massively increased reach and volume, relationships, ironically, are a harder to start and sustain. Are you / your recruitment teams engaging with the right people, or just lots of candidates? (Too many applicants, not enough candidates?) Are you working the right opportunities, or just a list of one-off jobs? (Too many jobs, not enough sales?) Is Your CRM Simply a Datadump of Strangers? Recruiters who try to maintain too many relationships actually limit their own success. They dilute the relationships they’re trying to build, resulting in weaker, less meaningful, and less valuable relationships. Could Dunbar help you run your recruitment business? For example: Recruiters who run a busy temp desk and managing 100+ temps might not have the capacity to take on more or even do other activities such as Business Development or Sourcing. 360-degree recruiters will have more relationships to manage than a 180-degree recruiter, so this could mean a less focused strategy and outcome. Is it always necessary to hire another recruiter to manage more relationships, or could tech do some heavy lifting? 4 Ways to Be Smart with Recruitment Contacts Social Networks can help. Publishing content to your “connections” can help keep you in and around the Acquaintances and People You Recognise category. Your goal, though, should be to get your ideal contacts on to your CRM so you can more actively work them. Ideally you should be aiming to nurture them in the 150 “meaningful contact” space! Your Recruitment CRM/ATS (ideally powered by automation) also has ways to identify and categorise your relationships. Status fields, rating and grading fields are great places to start and will enable smart ways to manage and work the data. Automation (and recruiters) can keep these vital fields current. Automation is helping Recruiters identify, engage, nurture (and monetise) Acquaintances and People You Recognise and capitalising on these relationships. In the automation projects we deliver we are creating functional data so recruiters can focus on segments of contacts and candidates. They can then “work” their data, rather than just collect it. Your recruiters (ideally powered by automation/CRM) need to keep this data updated to ensure you can track, manage and support where necessary. This should also protect your relationships when recruiters move on. Final Thoughts Engaging and nurturing your candidates and clients is an important part of the recruitment lifecycle. Recruiters often struggle with “too much data, too many systems, not enough process”. Any help and support you can provide to your recruiters to create focus, so relationships are stronger and profitable, is crucial. How could you use Dunbar’s theory to help you create focus, function, and sustainability?(Big thanks to Louise at UK Recruiter for initially posting this blog.)Bullhorn ROI + Trained Happy Recruiters = More SalesWe pride ourselves on helping recruitment leaders achieve Bullhorn ROI. We create a Bullhorn1st vision, reduce the need for other tech, optimise Bullhorn, automate their sales-prevention processes and data, and train recruiters to trust it and use it.ARRANGE A FREE CONSULTATION NOW