Digital Sinkhole
LinkedIn is a constant stream of news, opinions, sales material and job adverts; we have no end of information at the touch of a 'New Posts' button. You may linger on posts from friends and current or former colleagues, there may be posts that LinkedIn's (rather inept) algorithm has pushed your way based on previous engagement, however, I'd venture the average user will actually engage with less than 10 posts a day. By 'engagement' I mean, click on the link, read the article and / or make a comment. LinkedIn just doesn't have the same pull-factor as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or even YouTube.
My point is this, if you're going to get discovered as a Recruitment Agency or Talent Acquisition professional, you have to stand apart from the generic (often lazy) "Great opportunity" and "Contact me to discuss..." posts. A 'call to action' post is a perfectly reasonable option, however, if you're providing zero reason for that individual to engage with your post, it will just disappear down their digital sinkhole.
With this knowledge, and I know it's a known fact - why do SO many recruiters persist with the same generic posts?
And folks, the evidence is there...
...these posts seem to be typical of the 'standard' recruitment post. I'm not 100% sure what the thinking is behind this type of post, however, I'd take a guess that time versus return on investment is a factor. I appreciate, after 12-years of recruitment agency-side, that the feeling of never having enough time is still present in most agency environments. Having said that, a 3-line post, a couple of token hashtags, a 'smiley' and a contact number is not going to be enough to encourage the, often talked about, 'passive candidate' to rush to their phone to contact you.
Your post(s) need to have some thinking behind them....or at the very least, a basic understanding of your 'target audience'.
I WANT YOU!
Original process flow created by Glenn Martin for content sharing across social channels
If you want to attract individuals to your post, I would suggest at least having a template for your post content; to be more specific, I'd suggest answering the following questions:
What message are you trying to communicate? (i.e. call to action, brand awareness, engagement)
Why would an individual respond to your post? (i.e. action to take - 'click here')
Where does the link/hyperlink take the individual? (i.e. another website, blog post, event page etc)
What image are you using and why?
What time will you post? (i.e. check out this helpful post for timings)
What hashtags are you using and why? (research your hashtags)
What key information should be detailed? (i.e. location, salary/daily rate, client name, job title)
Can you / will you use the company logo? (do you have permission/consent?)
What contact details will you provide? Are these channels right for your audience? (i.e. individual, group mailbox)
: these are some basic questions that will help shape your thinking about the post template; also, once you have a template, it becomes easier to create them and look for relevant content (i.e. images, text).
GO CREATIVE! GO NATIVE!
As you become more of a digital native, there's a high probability that you will start to get more creative in your posts; this may lead to actually configuring posts for specific social media channels - how many posts do you see with the image cut-off or where it doesn't fully fit the image window? - this is not rocket-science to address, there are plenty of SaaS products to help you with this - I use Canva - it's a great tool for creating channel specific posts and even provides you with templates to get you started.
Another tool in my locker is Adobe Stock - while you build your portfolio of images for your client, you can use Adobe Stock to bridge the gap in the interim; it allows you to licence images on a monthly basis and provides a vast entity of images for all subjects (*this is far better than scouring Google Images for pics and then trying to right-size them into your post).
Another consideration are the hyperlinks you use for you post; you can use the auto-generated one's that are provided by Twitter for example. Personally, I use Bitly because (once you sign-up for an account), you can customise your hyperlinks. A nice little added touch that sub-consciously reassures the hyperlink is still linked to the post subject.
HEY HO! LET'S GO!
These are just some basic suggestions from my experience and I have found the results very pleasantly surprising and so have my clients. The next step - just go do it and please share your feedback, ideas, improvements and suggestions.
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