Coinciding with the announcement of LinkedIn’s Top 25 Most Socially Engaged Staffing Agencies, we find out how Charlton Morris, the runner-up, leverages LinkedIn to provide value, promote employee involvement and establish their brand on the platform.
Kris Holland, the Marketing Manager at Charlton Morris gives us a low down on how the company has had so much success on LinkedIn and why it plays such an integral role in maximizing their social engagement.
Accessing a global audience
LinkedIn has always played a massive part in our business. As we work at a senior level internationally, LinkedIn is a great resource – a professional environment where we can access a global audience.
We’ve placed in more than 50 countries on 6 continents, and LinkedIn has played a huge part in enabling us to do that.
Emphasizing employee advocacy
Probably the most fundamental thing that we do is to emphasize the importance of LinkedIn to everyone that starts with us on day one with the company. This involves making sure that profiles are complete, and doing things like sharing at least one piece of industry-specific content per day to start building more credibility in the market.
Naturally, as we’ve kept these strategies going with LinkedIn and the company has grown in size, this approach had gradually become more and more effective. Making these sorts of activities part of the daily routine for consultants also means that it’s not something that will be overlooked or forgotten about, as it just becomes part of the job to be socially engaged every day.
It’s all about the content
We tend to share multiple updates on our career page on a daily basis, and we also regularly create our own content too, but in June we did make a concerted effort to run a campaign to promote thought leadership from our management team.
This involved putting together 7 different pieces of content, all focussing on one of the totally different niche markets we work in. The articles ranged from covering point-of-care diagnostics to mining, but we were really pleased to see them all met with a resoundingly positive response.
The articles managed to organically generate more than 850 likes, 85 comments and 317 shares in total, which obviously had a massively positive impact on the size of the audience that was coming into contact with the Charlton Morris brand.
One of the key things we attributed to this success was the fact that there really isn’t a great deal of content that really drills down into very specific sectors on LinkedIn, so when candidates and clients notice an article that is right in the middle of their area of expertise, they’re naturally drawn to engage with it.
Establishing the brand
Frankly, we wouldn’t have a brand on LinkedIn if it wasn’t for our employees. People who follow the company page on LinkedIn have, for the most part, come to do that because they’ve been contacted or noticed a post from, one of our employees, and it’s the work they do in engaging with their ever-expanding networks that allow us and our company page to grow in terms of both followers and engagement.
My role personally is to handle the marketing and brand for the company in general, but there is no greater asset than having 50+ consultants from all levels of the business constantly reinforcing the positive things we do on LinkedIn on a daily basis.
The importance of thought leadership
Thought leadership, content curation, and content creation have played a really important role in our success with LinkedIn. As we work at a senior level in niche markets, it’s obvious that there are fewer candidates for us to contact for certain roles, and even when we do contact them, not all of them will necessarily be looking for a new position when we speak for the first time.
Therefore, we use content to try and keep that audience engaged with us even when they aren’t looking for a role, so they’ll think of us if and when they’re ready to start a search for a new role. That’s what we consider social engagement.
Too many staffing firms across all levels treat social media and particularly LinkedIn as a place to just ask people to like their page, or apply to their jobs, which will naturally turn those all-important passive candidates off, and stop them being engaged with their brand.
Content and thought leadership is a way to give back to that audience, without necessarily asking for something in return which naturally makes a company a much more endearing proposition to follow for the casual LinkedIn user.
It can also have commercial uses too: 57% of decisions to buy has been made before any commercial contact. Therefore, from a client perspective, if they’re looking to find a new search provider then using content is a great way of having a lot of non-commercial contacts which could then positively affect their decision making if Charlton Morris comes into a conversation about choosing a new search firm.
Social recruiting at Charlton Morris
Today, using social media is vital for every single company in the staffing sector, from firms specializing in short-term, temporary work, all the way up to super high-level executive search firms.
As many clients who receive hundreds of emails and calls will often bemoan on LinkedIn, there are a vast number of similar companies all saying that they have a ‘unique approach’ to recruitment, when in fact many of the fundamental processes involved in a search or the approach will be similar.
Social media gives recruitment firms a chance to prove they’re a different proposition to their competition, through demonstrating their expertise, personality, and skills to their audience of clients and candidates in a variety of other ways than just cold calls and emails.
For the areas we work, in particular, social recruiting is vital because of the reasons I mentioned earlier – the processes we are involved in can often take weeks or even months to complete, so any candidate we have involved is really important to us.
That means that the relationships we develop before, during and after the process has been completed must be well established. Social media and social recruiting enable us to do that much more effectively.
