January 2025 - Search Stack

Recruitment marketing can be difficult, especially if you’re the only marketer in a team of consultants who would rather eat an entire lemon than be on the company’s LinkedIn page. Here are ten tips to help you make better marketing collateral for your company:

1 – Set SMART Goals

This might be teaching you to suck eggs, but if you’re struggling to get people to join in with (or provide the budget for) marketing activities, it helps if you can prove that your ‘silly little TikTok dances’ are making a difference. Use this framework to make sure your results are measurable and effective:

Specific – State the number of clicks, follows or conversions you want
Measurable – Avoid intangible goals like ‘increase brand awareness’
Achievable – Set realistic goals so you can celebrate meeting them
Relevant – Make sure your goals align with overall company objectives
Timely – Choose a date that you want to have achieved your goals by

Setting SMART goals helps to prove the impact your content is making.

2 – Write Better Job Ads

The biggest mistake recruiters and recruitment marketers make is writing lacklustre job ads. Nobody wants to read a company’s wishlist of unachievable qualifications and experiences. They want to know what’s in the job for them. What will they be working on? What support will they get from their team and the wider company? What’s the compensation package like? What’s the company’s mission? What are their values? You should be selling the job to candidates, not treating people like a commodity for your company.

3 – Build A Digital Hub

Your website is your digital home, but so many recruitment companies use it like a business card instead. If you fill it with useful content, compelling conversion copy and testimonials from other clients you’ve helped who had the same challenges, you can move your clients along their buying journey whenever they visit your website. Think of it like a hub that the rest of your digital presence links back to – whether that’s your email footers, LinkedIn pages, or anywhere else your company appears online. Everything you do should point people towards clicking that ‘Work with us’ button.

4 – Invest in Cornerstone Content

Making consistent content can take a lot of time, money, and effort. But, if you invest in making a piece of long-form cornerstone content, like webinars or a podcast, you can break that down into a stream of clips, graphics, quotes, blogs and posts that will sustain your marketing team for weeks or months on end. The cornerstone content itself can also be used for business development – inviting target clients to be your guest speakers is a great way to build relationships and trust with them before you start to sell them your services.

5 – Drive Engagement on LinkedIn

One of the best ways to market your recruitment company is to build a community of prospective candidates and clients. While events help create connections, engaging with them on LinkedIn is an essential part of becoming embedded within those communities. Commenting on their posts will also keep you top of mind when they are looking for their next hire or opportunity.

6 – Create a Content Calendar

The most important part of marketing is showing up consistently. If you want to make sure your clients think of you when they’re ready to invest in recruitment services, you have to regularly share engaging content. Creating a content calendar will help. It’s also good for visualising the various types of content you’re putting out, like brand awareness, value-adds and conversion-driven pieces that guide your clients through the buying process. It also helps you plan out your content in advance, which is especially helpful if you’re batch-producing it with the cornerstone content we mentioned earlier.

7 – Increase Trust With a Podcast

We’ve already explained why a podcast is a great source of content, but did you know that podcasting is also one of the most effective forms of trust-building content? Because podcasts are sources of independent media, lots of people look to them for unbiased information on niche topics. Regularly listening to the same host creates a parasocial relationship for your listeners, which makes them trust you and your recommendations more than celebrities or traditional broadcasters. That’s exactly what you want your customers to feel before they buy from you.

8 – Host Impactful Events

In-person events are becoming increasingly popular again, but the market is also becoming more saturated. It isn’t enough to promote an event for ‘London tech professionals’ anymore; you have to differentiate your event from all the others that are happening around a similar area or topic. Whether you choose to target a specific audience and offer them insights on how to solve their challenges or specialise in a niche skill that attracts interested parties from across the industry, figuring out a precise and engaging value proposition will help you stand out from the crowd.

9 – Gather Testimonials

Authentic feedback and reviews are like gold dust for recruitment marketers. People are becoming more sceptical than ever, so they’ll look for reassurance (or reviews) from other people who have tried your services before. While polished case studies are helpful, getting genuine testimonials about the impact you’ve made on a business, especially in their own words, will be far more powerful.

10 – Collect & analyse data

Recruiters are often deeply embedded in their niches. You regularly have conversations about what your clients’ challenges are, what they’re looking for and why they’re struggling to find it. If you collate and use that data, you can create insightful statistics that will help demonstrate your expertise, build trust with your clients, and illustrate why they’re struggling to fill open roles. This will not only help you market your offering as a consultant-level service but also allow you to create content explaining the issues in your industry, branding you as a thought leader in your niche.

Contact a member of our team today for tailored help creating a recruitment marketing strategy or to discuss launching a B2B podcast.

Usually, when a book makes me feel things, it ends up with a five-star review. Not this one. This one had me absolutely raging. BrandingPays by Karen Kang is one of the most frustrating books I’ve ever read. It ruined a perfectly good premise by including a shocking amount of sexism and some anti-neurodivergent advice for good measure. The annoying thing is that the first six chapters of the book were pretty good. It’s full of solid advice, engaging case studies, and plenty of frameworks and diagrams to help you do it all yourself. I was fully prepared to give it a solid four-star review until Chapter 7. But let’s get into why I didn’t.

What’s inside?

Before I start ranting about all the things that made BrandingPays my lowest-rated book of the year, it’s only fair that I tell you about the six good chapters that I would recommend reading.

First up is the foreword. Karen starts the book by saying that personal branding is an essential part of everybody’s job. Whether you think of it as your reputation, personal brand, or online footprint, we all have one, and being in control of it is one of the best things you can do for your career. So far, Karen and I are in complete agreement.

BrandingPays also includes some personal branding myth-busting, like ‘self-promotion isn’t boastful and bad – we need to dispel these myths so that you can start on your personal branding journey without being sabotaged by a brand-hindering belief system.’ As someone who passionately hates promoting myself online, sometimes I need a little reminder like that, even if it is a little brand-motivated for my tastes.

The first six chapters of the book set out a helpful system for establishing a personal brand. Karen reiterates throughout the book that your personal brand has to have ‘cake and icing’ – aka value and emotional connection. She also talked about who to position your personal brand for, with plenty of advice on how to identify and connect with your target audience. She even used a bunch of case studies of previous clients’ personal brands and how her framework helped them achieve their goals. Karen returned to the same people’s stories throughout the book, which gave it a nice consistency and narrative arc.

I do have to caveat this by noting that BrandingPays was published in 2013, so some of the language and references are pretty outdated. It also contains a lot of figures and tables, so it often reads more like a presentation or course than an actual book. I know books like this are written for chronically online people, and you can call me old-fashioned, but I like a book that knows it’s a book and reads like one.

Also, half a paragraph was repeated word-for-word two pages apart, which gave me an uncanny sense of deja vu.

Karen then told me to google myself, and all I can say is oh boy. Why is my Pinterest account on the first page of Google’s search results? How are there so many pictures of me online? (Spoiler, it’s because I put them there.) Apparently I’m the most famous Sophie Colclough in the world. Either that or Google knows who I was looking for, and I don’t know which of those options is more unsettling.

Now, let’s move on to the book’s downright bad bits. I’ve already mentioned that some of the language is quite dated, which, for the first few chapters, I was willing to overlook, even when it came to describing people’s appearance. That was before Karen started talking about makeup. She suggested that women should wear makeup to be more ‘pleasing,’ which immediately gave me the ick.

She then said that wearing makeup would help women be more ‘visible’ and avoid ‘blending into their work environments’. If women blend in, surely other people do too? Why aren’t we telling men to wear foundation to work, Karen? She even started giving specific tips like this:

“A woman’s makeup should enhance her beauty, not be a mask. Use a light touch with makeup so it looks natural. A little concealer dabbed under your eyes will eliminate dark circles that can make you look tired. Avoid overdone makeup – too much blush or eyeshadow or an overly dark lipstick shade will detract from your professional image.”

I understand that over a decade ago that was probably just standard advice on how to look professional, yet I can’t help but feel that it smacks of subtle sexism. Why are we policing women’s image in the workplace? It’s the 21st century!

Then there was the comment about kimchi. Karen continued to flout her double standards while discussing personal hygiene by strongly implying that women have to be fresh and perfect in the workplace, while men can wallow in whatever unwashed or unbrushed state they want. Karen said, “When I was in Korea, where a pungent pickle called kimchi is eaten regularly, I noticed that nearly every woman in the office building brushed her teeth after lunch.” Why just the women? Why are we pointing it out? Everybody gets bad breath sometimes, Karen!

She then went on to criticise people’s eyewear. By the time she’d said, “Pay for thinner lenses since thick, ‘bottle glass’ eyewear is less attractive”, my internal monologue was repeating the mantra ‘You can’t say that Karen!’ on a loop. Like, I’m sorry, are we shaming people for not having 20/20 vision now, Karen?

To top it all off, she sprinkled in some ableist comments on page 152. She seemed to be specifically targeting the neurodivergent community when she wrote, “A rambling elevator pitch punctuated by too many ums and ahs, fidgeting hands and nervous blinking can cast doubt on your presence and communications capability.” This was followed by comments about lowering high-pitched voices, modulating your voice to sound more interesting, and smiling to sound more lively. All of these mannerisms are indicative of anxiety or neurodiversity, and some of them, like ‘fidgeting hands’, are common regulation techniques.

I would hope that if Karen updated BrandingPays today, she would have done some inclusivity training and would be aware of things like unconscious bias. She would probably know how to write about coming across confidently in a way that didn’t directly discriminate against a huge proportion of the neurodivergent community. What irked me so deeply is that attitudes like Karen’s have led to underemployment for huge swathes of the community. These outdated ideas about what ‘professionalism’ is have led to disabled people not being able to work, even though they would really like to.

To be honest, that ruined the book for me. While I can acknowledge that those comments came from a time when saying them might not have been so wildly politically incorrect, I also have to acknowledge that I am reading them now with my current sensibilities. They might be too delicate, but I don’t think acceptance and equitable opportunities are bad things to care about.

My recommendation:

Overall, BrandingPays was a pretty good book. If you can look past dated ideals of what professionalism should look like, Karen’s advice for personal branding seems as solid as any other that I’ve read. Unfortunately, my reading experience was thoroughly ruined by her implication that I should reject comfort and authenticity in order to be perceived as worthy and respectable in the corporate world. Although it started as a four-star book, it lost one star for the rampant sexism and one for the slightly more subtle ableism, so I’ve only given it two.

Rating: 💜💜🤍🤍🤍

TL;DR

BrandingPays is full of really solid advice for building and tailoring your personal brand and has lots of charts and worksheets to help you do so. If you’re not bothered by some pretty old-fashioned ideas of what makes women and neurodivergent people acceptable to professional society, I would recommend giving it a read (but maybe stop at Chapter 7).

Want to chat about books? Find me on LinkedIn –> Sophie Colclough 🥰

Month: January 2025

10 Recruitment Marketing Tips