I talk to recruiters and sourcers every day.
When I talk about the benefits of leveraging social media and content curation, I get the exact same response each time.
But it starts with knowing your talent. In this presentation from Nashville TANS earlier this year, you can see specific tools and examples for building personas and a content calendar.
Think it’s impossible? Will you get sucked into the infinite vortex of tweets, pins and pokes? Not if you break it down.
When you’re sourcing for candidate prospects, you know exactly which audience you’re looking for.
- Demographic
- Skill set
- Geography
- Personality
- Online habits
When you’re sourcing for talent attraction content, your search should be very similar. Focus on one audience at a time and look at their entire persona. Not just what’s in the roles and responsibilities of the job description.
What’s the goal of your content? In my experience there are two kinds for talent attraction:
- Conversion content – I want prospects to apply to the job.
- Conversation content – I want prospects to share their personality so I can learn how to engage them.
Conversion content is necessary, but it appeals mostly to people who are driven by finding “a job” not “the job.”
When I ran a 90 day case study on social media content in a previous role, I separated ALL of the content into these two categories. Then I looked at the response rates, which were tracked by URL. This was a very simple test, mind you.
What did I find? That conversation-based content increased response rates by 54%.
This supported my suspicions, but was the concrete evidence I needed to teach recruiters and sourcers to engage prospects in real conversation. Whether it’s on a forum, user group, blog, simple email or any social network, the conversation was the goal. 8 minutes out of every 30 minutes of television programming is commercial in nature. Your content feed should look similar because we’ve been conditioned to tolerate that noise-to-signal ratio.
25% Helpful – 25% Valuable – 25% Interesting – 25% jobs
How do you get people to start a conversation with you as a recruiter or sourcer? Begin by talking to them like you would face to face. It’s natural, organic, human. Talk to them about things they care about. Because you care about them, too. Real recruiters know their industry. They know the dynamics of their company. And they know their talent.