Recruiters and recruitment marketers want talent. They want it quick and they want it to stick. The same can be said for great, easy-to-convert leads…
To help with this, I have a trusty hack which I call “feeders”. They are great for recruiters who want to improve speed of attraction and conversion, as well as for recruitment marketers who want to build their brand online.
Not Welsh or Fat!
What are feeders?
If you check out Google, you’ll get a Welsh Rock Band or the Urban Dictionary telling you that a feeder is “usually a male who likes to encourage weight gain in his partner through the consumption of food”.
Scrap both of those. In my world, a feeder is much more positive and more helpful to recruiters than a screaming Welshman or a bloke who force-feeds me cake (not that I need force-feeding of cake!)
What am I talking about?
I define a feeder as a website or stream which feeds you content; one that helps speed up the marketing process, improves your own profile, attracts candidates and moves contacts through the buyer’s journey for you. All the content you are fed from these feeders then becomes material which you can share to your wider network, helping you to attract the right kind of attention from the right kind of people, by adding value to them in the form of relevant online resources and entertainment.
In my mentoring sessions, I conclude the best feeders to be:
- YouTube
At first glance, these are all sites that might appear not to offer immediate (obvious) value, and quite complex to set up and get ROI from.
First consider this: you don’t need to create videos on YouTube to get value from it, and you don’t need to spend hours creating Pinterest boards or taking and filtering Instagram photos to get ROI from these sites either. Being on Twitter may be a less intensive ROI activity than you think…
Set up these streams to follow the right people (not candidates please… unless you want to give away your talent to competitors)! Check your homepage every day for food (content) – and share!
What should you feed your online community?
- Brain food – knowledge
- Funny stuff – often more engaging than the brain food
- Problem solving hacks (like this one?) to help your community love you and make their day better
What should you feed yourself?
Simple! Information about your talent, clients and wider industry to help you understand, nurture and convert.
This is what sales and marketing (and recruiting) is all about.
Get fed and stay slim
Perhaps being a recruiter or recruitment marketer can be a fattening job? Many recruiters and marketers that I work with often initially spend too much time surfing the web looking for the best content, often then to only post what I call “junk food” content… think ‘best ties to wear to an interview’ or ‘best ways to shake hands in an interview’. Be aware that you are what you share, and that kind of food will scream that you place people who can’t dress themselves or speak articulately!
What systems should I use for feeding?
Obviously Hootsuite is pretty good at segmenting Twitter feeds, Twitter lists are cool too, but don’t ignore your trusty homepages and the people you’re following on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and Instagram – and if your home feeds are pants, fix them by following the right people.
Feedly is a pretty damn good system for content collation, and can really help automate some of your content gathering.
What are you waiting for? Get feeding!
