Author: Haydn Morgans

We bang our metaphorical drum about value-adding content all the time. It’s the key to successful marketing, because it’s the difference between screaming into the void and creating compelling content that drives conversions. 

Don’t just take it from us – Chris Cranshaw is a big believer in value too. Chris is the Founder and Director of Halt, another specialist recruitment marketing firm. 

We talked about it on Episode 10 of the Skill Point Podcast, then squeezed all the value out of the episode to give you this handy how-to blog.

How do you add value in recruitment marketing?

Valuable content is something that’s useful to your audience. To figure out what that is, you need to talk to your target demographics, whether that’s your clients, candidates or colleagues. Always have your audience in mind when you’re creating content, and make sure you’re speaking to their interests, pain points and daily experiences. Whether you’re offering a solution to their issues or sharing relatable and entertaining content that’s specific to your niche, it should always resonate with your audience’s lives. 

What makes a valuable content niche?

According to Chris, recruiters’ content should come directly from their day jobs. He said ‘you’re talking to clients, candidates and HR departments, so you’re building up knowledge of all these different trends, challenges and success stories, often without realising or documenting it.’ It’s these experiences that you can turn into valuable content, by making observations about the state of your industry or sharing your solutions to common problems in your sector. That’s where you can credibly build your expertise. 

Your expertise will often be niche because it reflects the sector that you work in. You might know things like the best way to attract talent in cybersecurity, which will be incredibly valuable to your target audience. People will recognise the specificity of your content and recognise you as an authority on those subjects. 

What are the next steps once you’ve made valuable content?

Create a clear plan for the content you want to share. Chris told us ‘that’s what you’re gonna become famous for; you’re going to be the place where people go to get information on X, Y, and Z’. To build a devoted audience, you need to be consistent and reliable. 

In order to build that reputation, you need to figure out a regular cadence for your content. Look at your capacity, skill set and budget before committing to becoming the next New York Times. 

Always do your research before you start making content, because the form it takes will impact how it performs with different people. If you’re trying to boost engagement, releasing interactive content like polls is a great idea. Scheduling this is important, because you also need to be able to respond to interactions and take the time to nurture your audience relationships. If you’re building your credibility as a source of knowledge, longer-form text posts could be the way to go. 

Planning your content well in advance can reduce last-minute workloads and improve the quality of your output. It also means that everything you make is intentional rather than scrambling to fill a gap in your calendar with something that isn’t valuable. 

What does great look like when a company is providing that value?

Ultimately, success comes from your conversion rate. Moving people through your marketing funnel takes time and meticulous planning, but when it pays off, it literally PAYS off. 

If you’re offering value to your audience on a consistent basis, they’re going to come to you when they need answers and solutions to their specific problems. Great marketing comes from meeting those questions preemptively and building your reputation as a reliable resource. 

As Chris said, ‘great is when your content or personal brand creates opportunities’. You can’t control conversions in recruitment marketing, but you can build an effective emotional connection that results in a higher rate of engagement, emotional investment and trust. That’s all done through regularly creating and sharing valuable content with your audience. 

To find out more about creating valuable content in the recruitment industry, tune into the Skill Point Podcast here. 

Reputation is an essential part of the recruitment industry. Because we rely on a relationship-based business model, how people perceive us will play a big part in how successful we are. Reputation can be a game changing differentiator, so how do we get it right as recruiters? On Episode 9 of the Skill Point Podcast we talked to Gordon Stoddart from The Recruitment Network about how we can build reputations to our advantage. 

What is reputation?

Gordon explained that reputation is how people think and feel about you. It’s the emotional connection that people have with you or your company as a result of the experiences they’ve had. It’s not how your marketing makes them feel, it’s a direct output of the interactions they have with you.

How can you build a positive reputation? 

In the recruitment industry, your reputation stems from your relationships. Whether that’s your internal culture or the connections that you have with clients and candidates, putting effort into those relationships will build your reputation in a positive way. An awareness of your reputation will drive your behaviours, because as Gordon said, “reputation is an emotional strategy.”

What does a great reputation look like in recruitment? 

If you’ve built an amazing reputation, your retention and loyalty will be high. You’ll also get referrals, introductions and feedback from the people that you’ve worked with. Clients will also be willing to give you exclusivity if they’ve had a great experience with you, because that will build your reputation and trust. They’ll be more likely to work with you again if you’ve provided an excellent service before, so repeat work is another way to gauge how strong your reputation is with your clients. 

Feedback is another essential part of measuring your reputation. Talk to as many clients and candidates as you can to understand which parts of your process are working and which ones have room for improvement. Gordon said that “how our clients and candidates perceive us is really dangerous, because our relationship with them might be at risk.” Not only that, unhappy clients could spread negative word of mouth and damage your reputation without you knowing. 

Can you repair a damaged reputation? 

Once a reputation is damaged it’s a lot harder to repair. When it’s a matter of underperforming your client’s expectations, there are things you can do to salvage that reputation. Offering alternative solutions or returning any payment can be a step towards preserving your reputation, as well as being honest about your limitations. Do whatever you can to turn the situation around and avoid a service breakdown, as long as it’s not costing your people. Well, rule number one, you do everything you can not to have a service breakdown. 

Feedback is the key to reputation repair. If you’re constantly gathering feedback from the people you work with, you’ll quickly see if something is going wrong, and be able to address any concerns before they become frustrations. Most people will recognise that things go wrong sometimes, so there will be some amount of leeway. It’s down to you to use that feedback to ensure that the same mistake doesn’t happen twice, because that will create a negative pattern and harm people’s perception of you, and therefore your reputation. 

Can you use feedback positively?

Feedback is also a great tool for creating a positive reputation for people who haven’t worked with you yet. If you’re able to showcase positive reviews or glowing recommendations, new customers are far more likely to buy into your offering. The most effective way to gather this feedback is from your frontline people, like consultants or customer experience professionals. They’re the ones talking to clients and candidates on a daily basis, so they hear how people respond to you. They can also directly ask people what’s working well and what isn’t. That creates powerful marketing collateral and evidence of how good you are. 

What strategies can recruiters use to build their reputation?

Firstly, gather insights. This works with the feedback to understand how you’re perceived. If you have a handle on that, you’re more likely to be able to manage expectations and meet them, which will create a positive reputation. 

The second strategy is to build an invested internal team. You need to find people who care about their role, then equip them to succeed. That starts with leadership and works its way down through the company until your whole team has a positive experience. Belief in your own excellence is the best foundation for a strong reputation. 

A third strategy is using a deliberate structure in client meetings to gain feedback. Whenever you meet with a customer you should be checking in to see how they’re feeling about your progress, and backing up your success with tangible statistics, such as the number of candidates placed and their retention rate. This will keep them excited about your work. 

Finally, using customer journey mapping will transform your reputation. This is an end-to-end understanding of the customer experience, which shows you which touchpoints people are interacting with successfully and which need more work. This is also where marketing comes in, which can manage and accelerate your reputation outside of your direct relationships. 

How can you measure your reputation?

Create a business dashboard. You can measure things like financial growth and inbound leads, but you can also measure things like retention, exclusive relationships, case studies and testimonials. Even simple things like your Google reviews can be indicators of how your reputation is shaping up. You should always ask for this kind of feedback or input from the people you work with, because not only will it strengthen your reputation externally, it will build a bond with them by showing that you care about their experience and want to address their concerns. 

Gordon’s last piece of advice was to ask ‘what a great reputation means to you, and figure out what you want to happen as a result. Take those things and measure them.’ that’s the best way to establish whether you’re meeting your own goals and upholding the standards that you set for yourself. 

To hear more about building a reputation in the recruitment industry, tune into the Skill Point Podcast here. 

Relationships are an essential part of marketing. As we’ve said before, people want to buy from people, so presenting your company as a human presence will create a far more engaged audience than stale, corporate branding. But how does that apply to the recruitment industry? On Episode 7 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Clair Bush about how she’s translated the psychology of sales into recruitment. 

What is Relationship marketing?

The term ‘relationship marketing’ existed before the onset of social media and the digitalization of relationships. It’s the psychology behind human connections, and the reason that reaching out to someone through a letter that explains your offer and the opportunity, then enables them to come back and say, ‘Yes, I’m interested’ on their own terms is more effective than cold calling. 

What does this look like in a modern day setting in the market?

In order to successfully use relationship marketing, you need a total end to end knowledge and understanding of your ideal client profile. It’s about being able to create impactful outbound marketing for a group of people that have the same characteristics and needs, and enabling them to come to you. 

When it comes to relational marketing in recruitment, these relationships have slightly different dynamics. You can get to know your clients by asking questions like:

• How’s your company structured? 
• Who are your hiring managers? 
• What’s your projected growth? 
• When’s your year-end? 

Having that kind of information will allow you to create groups of similar people and communicate with them around related topics. If you take an agency with 50 recruiters, there’s bound to be commonalities between their conversations. If all of those people reach out to around 20-30% of their contacts and say ‘We’ve got this topic, we’re going to tell you what we know about it’, that will put them top of mind for those clients, which means they can pick up open roles. It’s all about giving value to your audience so that they immediately think of you as the expert to go to when they need something. 

From a marketing perspective, you can use that information to reverse engineer a campaign. Clair said that these campaigns allow you to “collect insights and data, then also funnel it back into the greater content machine within the business.” The heart of marketing is understanding what industry conversations are being had. Relationships allow you to see where that information is coming from and where it’s going.

How can employer brands tap into the psychology of relationship marketing?

Clair’s view on employer branding is that it’s similar to ‘conscious parenting’. She said that “as a parent, I know what worked for me, and I know what really didn’t work for me. I don’t want to make those same mistakes for my child.” Employer branding is a similar space, because a fundamental part of any organisation is having an employee value proposition that is aligned with your business strategy. You’re paving the way for the people below you to have a better experience than you did. Having an understanding of what drives people to turn up for you every day (beyond their pay packet) is essential to building a successful employer brand. It’s more than letting people work from home three days a week. 

For anybody who hasn’t figured out their employee value proposition, think about this: 

• What are you doing that would be an exciting project to work on? 
• What are the pillars that you want to be able to talk about in a job advert? 
• What are the real reasons why someone would love and thrive in your environment? 

Marketing in recruitment needs to be less of a “spray and pray mentality” and more of a targeted, demand generated mentality. We should be moving towards a world where the people who apply are right for the role. The personalization makes filtering easier, which then makes shortlisting quicker, which then makes the decision faster. Using relationships and understanding your target demographic’s psychology to underpin your marketing strategy will level-up your workflow and bring incredible results.

To find out more about recruitment marketing, tune into The Skill Point Podcast or reach out to us on hello@searchstack.co.uk. 

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘candidate experience’ bouncing around the recruitment industry. 

Have you ever thought about your customer journey though? 

On Episode 6 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Rich Evans about how we can utilise the customer journey to our advantage across recruitment. 

The customer journey is where branding and marketing meet sales, and work together to give clients and candidates the smoothest experience possible. We can look at both a client and candidate journey, and use their experience to streamline our process. 

Wherever you’re looking to get more candidates into your market and interview for your business, every step between not knowing who you are to saying, ‘I want to come and speak to you about potential opportunities at your firm’ is part of their customer journey. It’s our job to break down that journey and support them through it. 

Here’s how to do that:  

Eliminating Friction

Friction occurs in the customer journey when people have to overcome obstacles to access your solution. 

Rich put it this way: “The more mental calories a buyer needs to burn during the process, the less likely they are to buy something. They’ll be looking for the next solution. It’s about clarity and digestible information.”

If you want to create an enjoyable customer journey, you have to anticipate their questions and have the information ready to go. 

Using Branding

The aim of branding is to make sales easier, whether that’s by creating brand loyalty so that new products are sought-after by loyal customers or by positioning yourself as an exceptional employer, where candidates are eager to apply for your roles. 

Successful branding communicates your purpose to your customers. Rich recommends building your brand around the questions “Who are we selling to? What are their pain points? What are their needs?” and “How are we going to position our business around that?” 

This will translate into purposeful content that directly addresses your clients’ pain points. Your sales team (or consultants in the recruitment industry) will have resources that are ready to share with prospects, removing that friction that we talked about earlier. 

Combining Marketing & Sales

Marketing and sales departments have to work together to create a successful customer journey. Rich’s advice was that ultimately, “your job during that journey, whether you’re marketer or a salesperson, is to help them buy.” 

The aim of marketing is to help consultants build a relationship with customers. You can do that by building trust in the marketplace and changing people’s perception of your business. 

Mindsets are one of the biggest obstacles in a customer journey. It’s the role of marketing and sales to change that, convincing customers that your solution will benefit them. It’s essentially education. 

Sales and marketing can also work together to use feedback. The consultants are the ones in the field, speaking to customers. They’re often receiving feedback about what your customers’ pain points are, and they know the points that are turning customers away. If that’s fed back to marketing, the two teams can work together to build those points into your solution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. 

Both teams are helping people decide to buy your product or service. 

Creating Conversations

The most important step of the customer journey is getting customers to talk to you. “From a marketing perspective, we’re not really selling the full solution,” Rich said. “We’re selling an initial conversation.” That’s the culmination of outbound sales, marketing and branding; one conversation. 

If you’ve got those areas of your business to work together, your customer will already have gone through most of the buying journey. They should already know what you offer, your price points, your turn-around time and how your product can help them. This conversation is just about giving them the opportunity to ask any really specific questions about their bespoke requirements. 

Customers should never have to work things out themselves during that conversation. It’s down to you to move them through to the next step of their journey. 

To learn more about the customer journey in recruitment, tune into the full episode of The Skill Point Podcast here. 

We all love a good podcast. 

They’re entertaining, educational, and easy to consume. They’re also surprisingly easy to produce. 

On Episode 5 of the Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Hishem Azzouz, the founder and host of Recruitment Mentors, about his dos and don’ts for recording a great podcast. 

If you’re thinking of starting up your own podcast, read on to find out our top tips for new podcast hosts. 

What’s the point of your podcast? 

From a business perspective, a podcast should be in some way benefiting your company. Whether it’s creating brand awareness, generating leads from guests or used as a cornerstone piece of content, you should have a strategy behind your podcast. 

From an audience’s point of view, you need to be providing value with your content. If you’re just using it as a sales tool, or you don’t have a clear mission behind it, your audience won’t resonate with it. You need to be offering them something they want to consume. 

Who makes great guests?

Hishem recommends a 30-guest strategy for your first episodes. 

The first 10 people you have on should be existing clients – the people that you do a bunch of business with. That enables you to hone your interview skills on people that you have a relationship with. It will also give you a unique digital asset that your team can use to recruit for your clients. 

The second 10 should be your prospects or dream clients. If you can get them on board for your podcast, that gives you an opportunity to tell them about what you do and create a relationship with them. At least 50% of people will say yes if you approach it in the right way.  

The third 10 guests should be influencers or subject matter experts. These are the people in your industry that people want to listen to. Have a look at your industry and see who has the biggest brands in your niche. Get them on the podcast and piggyback off their brand to rapidly build traction. 

Another way to gain traction from your guests is to hijack industry events. If you can find the guest list it happens, get them on your show and release the episodes during the event build up. Other people will be looking at their activity then, so aligning yourself with the relevant experts will build your credibility and act as free promotion. Add a hashtag to get more involved in the event, and that’ll get you in the conversation. 

Taking your content further by creating a white paper of insights from your guests’ input. You can share it with the people you meet at events, email it to your mailing list or post it for your network. That helps to position you as an industry expert and a go-to for insights and advice. 

If you’re producing a high-quality podcast, you’ll naturally generate interest. People will start reaching out and asking if they can come on the podcast. The best way to attract guests is to put in the effort to make it a great listen. Spend time building meaningful relationships with people, and take the time to reach out to inspiring people on LinkedIn. 

How do you manage conversation topics?

Once you’ve found an interesting guest, look at their profile and journey and figure out what people would be interested in hearing from them. Always have a prep call and write up a document of topics that you want to talk to them about or any audience requests for the episode. This doesn’t have to be written out as a script, it’s just a helpful jumping-off point that lets you and your guest set clear expectations. 

Spend time building relationships with the guests beforehand. That can be on a call or over messages, but it’s best to build a rapport before you start recording. In your prep call, always ask your guest ‘Is there anything that you want to talk about? Do you want to sell anything?’ Give them a set time to talk about it so you’re not wrestling the conversation with them. They’ll feel more comfortable and you’ll have a better conversation. The purpose of the prep call is also to make sure that you’re on the same page about your priorities. 

While you’re recording, it’s best to let the conversation flow naturally. Have a rough starting point or first question to begin with, and then let things unfold. You can experiment with a quick-fire round to end the episode or have a high-impact question that drives home the point of your conversation. A great conversation is just that – a conversation. 

Top Tips for New Podcasters:

Over-prepare. Don’t feel like you can just wing it because you’re good at speaking, because hosting a podcast is a whole new skill. 

When you ask a question, stay silent afterwards. It’s a lot harder than you think. Letting the other person speak without ‘active listening’ will make a real difference to the audience’s experience. 

Listen to your own episodes. This will help you pick up on things that you might not even realise that you do. You have to be willing to learn and improve. 

Learn to keep control of the conversation. If you feel the person is really going off on a tangent, then you have to reel them back in. It’s like peeling back an onion. You’ve got to be good at listening, being present, and being aware of what your audience wants you to ask. You also need to draw out the high-level answers that actually add quality to your audience’s experience by saying ‘can you unpack that a bit more’ or ‘tell me more about this’.  

Always thank your audience for supporting the podcast. Whenever someone tells you they’ve listened or enjoyed it, ask what topics they want you to cover or which guests they’d like to hear from. Take the time to understand your audience and show your appreciation for them. Keep notes of your feedback and learn from it. 

To learn more about hosting a great podcast, listen to the full episode of the Skill Point Podcast, or download our eBook here. 

As we face a looming recession, it’s essential for businesses to focus on offering value to their customers, and one of the best ways to do that is by presenting yourself well online. We’re level-up recruitment websites every day, so we decided to share our secrets to help you attract clients, engage with candidates and stand out in a saturated market: 

Tip 1 – Overhaul your company’s digital presence

Get away from the archaic, analogue ways of working and bring your recruitment agency into the digital age. Using automations to connect applications with your consultants gives you a seamless customer experience for clients and candidates. One of the best ways to do this is integrating your customer relationship management or applicant tracking system with your website. That allows your jobs to automatically post out and applications to come through to the right consultant. It’s all about using connectivity and the customer experience cycle in a way that saves you time. 

Tip 2 – Showcase your team

Create profiles for your consultants that act as a mini social media profile on your website. They can use them as a hub for their own network, acting as a virtual business card. It can include a biography, their niche specialism and contact information, all presented with your company branding. That’s a valuable resource for your internal people. 

Consultants can use their page as business development tools as well. Their profiles offer consistent messaging for their outreach, and it brings more traffic to your site. This section helps turn your consultants into a team of mini marketers for your company. Clients arrive on your site to book a meeting with your consultant, but they can flick around, read a case study, look at some blog content or listen to a podcast while they’re there. That will consistently promote your product offering. 

In order to optimise your consultant’s pages, you should connect them to a booking app like Calendly or Microsoft Teams. If you can, choose one that has an embedded form that allows you to track attributions and conversions. It helps to talk to your consultants through that process, and make sure that content on their page works well for them. 

You can also populate their pages with case studies (which we’ll get into in Tip 3). This provides proof of the work they do, and builds their credibility on your site. It also plays into storytelling, which is essential in any kind of marketing activity. Embedding a biography about their experience, personality and interests is great, because people buy from people. Your aim should be to create connections in these profiles. 

To really level-up consultants’ pages, get a video of them talking about their work. Including consumable, personal and entertaining content on your website is the best way to engage potential clients. 

Tip 3 – Create compelling case studies 

Creating a case study shows off the great work you’ve done and builds social proof. Simple testimonials are fine, but if you want to get the most out of your previous work, include KPIs and processes to showcase your skills. Any potential customers on your website can resonate with your stories, and imagine it working for them. They also speak to your customer’s pain points and explain how you would fix them, creating a valuable and time-saving resource. 

Some things to include in your case studies are information about the sector and location you’ve worked in, your time to hire and your service offering, broken down into who bought what and how it helped them. Integrating your team’s pages will build credibility for each of your consultants, as well as add personal proof to your site, which you can do by tagging the lead consultant in each case study. 

Another thing you should focus on is using storytelling in each case study. Writing engaging copy that discusses the challenge, the solution and how you overcame it will begin to persuade people that your services are the ones to buy into. You should also include the candidates’ perspectives to make sure you’re speaking to both types of people that you’re trying to attract. 

Tip 4 – Publish valuable insights 

Another great resource for your website is an insight hub. This goes beyond a simple blog by combining your activities into one place. Whether you’re publishing a podcast, newsletters, white papers, ebook downloads, etc, a well-branded insight hub is a powerful tool. You can filter your content for clients and candidates as well, because they will resonate with different content. An insight hub can house your SEO-focussed content too. This content will not only resonate with the audience on the website, but give you stretchable content that the whole team can use for their social media activity. 

Tip 5 – Focus your copy on the customer

In order to effectively market your services, you need to find a way to communicate how they will actually affect the life of the client. What you write and how you come across in your content will impact how your customers think about you. Do qualitative research and understand their needs, then communicate how your solution will impact them or their business in an emotive way. Remember that marketing is just making your product appeal to your buyers.  

Keep asking ‘why?’. Keep breaking it down. For example, you might want a client to submit a lead form. Why would they sign up? Because they want to use your services. Why? Because that will make their business work better. Why do they need to improve it? Because it’s affecting their home life. The further down you get, the more talking points you’ll find about what your website and product offering will solve. That’s the kind of thing you should put into your copy. 

Bonus Tip – Advertise your own career opportunities

Adding a Careers section to your website is a great business development tool. If you’ve got growth objectives for the next few years, showcasing your culture and values is super important. The recruitment space is highly competitive, so create video content with your team. Make it fun and different. Showing your personalities will resonate a lot better with candidates who are recent graduates or looking to move out of scalar companies. You need to show them that recruitment is a fun industry to work in. 

Some things to include in your videos are your commission structures, flexible working environment and company culture. Don’t present yourselves as just another corporate company with stock images, plain plain layout etc. Do some research with your designers to stand out in your market. 

To learn more about creating an impactful recruitment website, listen to the full episode of the Skill Point Podcast here. 

When we talk about copywriting, what comes to mind? 

Blogs? Emails? Websites? 

The truth is that copy is ALL of the writing on your site, socials and other online touch-points. Getting your copy right across all of them is important in creating a solid brand identity and engaging effectively with your audience. 

On Episode 3 of The Skill Point Podcast we spoke with recruitment marketing copywriter Luca Rosi, who shared his top tips for nailing your copy. 

What is the purpose of copy?

In most areas of business, copywriting is essentially sales writing. In the recruitment space, that means selling in a non-salesy way that’s engaging for your customers. 

Copy can be everything from a press release to an online blog or white paper, all of which require different disciplines and techniques to produce. 

Do this by addressing your audience rather than talking about yourself, because people want to know what’s in it for them. They don’t care how brilliant you are, they’re interested in your features and benefits. Your copy should focus on messages like ‘We will save you X amount of time and X amount of money’ rather than ‘I’ve got X awards’. 

Good copy also comes across as approachable. Luca says “Don’t overthink it, just give people a contact detail, show them that you’re available, give them the sense that you’re a friendly person. They want to feel like you’re interested in them.” Write with the goal of inviting your audience in.

How do you identify your tone of voice?

Your online presence should be written in the same tone of voice if you want to create a cohesive brand. While that seems like common sense, it’s a common error in our industry. To help you write consistent copy, it’s important that you can communicate your tone of voice to everyone who writes for you, even yourself. 

Brand guidelines will often include terms like ‘knowledgeable’ and ‘professional’ to describe their tone, but at the heart of it, a successful tone will be conversational. Especially in recruitment, your copy should feel like you’re having a chat with your audience. People should want to talk to you. 

Within that you’ve got to demonstrate your expertise and professionalism. Finding a balance can be difficult, particularly when it comes to using acronyms and industry lingo. Using clear, concise and comfortable language is the key to presenting yourself well online.

Luca’s top tip is “Never assume that anybody knows what you’re talking about.” Even if that means over-explaining a point, it’s important to make sure people understand your message, as that’s what gets them on-board. 

How do you write good job ads?

One of the most important pieces of copy in the recruitment sector are our job ads. But are we getting them right? 

When you look at most job ads, the first thing you see is the role description. 

That’s the first mistake. Remember that you’re selling the role to candidates, so you should start with what you can offer them. Think about flexible working, the salary, the benefits and why your company is great to work for. Give them a feel of the culture and slowly talk about the job as you go down. 

One common mistake is being too prescriptive. Companies expect miracles from people. It’s always worth putting in a sentence at the bottom that says ‘Even if you don’t tick all those boxes, we’d still love to talk to you.’ You can’t afford to alienate people that could be amazing at the job. You need to consider what’s essential and only state desirable experience or qualities as that; desirable. Don’t put people off.

The reality is that most consultants don’t get the time or training to understand how to write great job ads, but restructuring the process will improve your performance as a consultant and a company. 

Consultants will have visited the client, talked to the hiring manager and got a feel for the culture. When they’re calling candidates and saying ‘This is a great team, the culture is exciting’ etc, that takes time. Consider putting them in the job description instead and using calls to build a better relationship. 

When it comes to writing job ads, you can either take on a specialist writer to work on them or level up your consultants to grow your business internally. 

What is the ultimate benefit for a business for having great copy in it?

Your copy is your first point of contact with both clients and candidates. Getting it right means starting relationships on the right foot. 

Whether they’re visiting your website, downloading a report or reading an article, your copy is your first opportunity to show people your expertise. 

Making an impact with clear, concise copy will create positive impressions and increase conversions.

 

When it comes to marketing, making it easy for people to find you is one of the most important aspects of your path to success. 

Whether you’re using hashtags on social media posts or focusing on SEO to help your audience find you on Google, getting yourself out there should be the first step in your marketing strategy.

On Episode 2 of the Skill Point Podcast we sat down with David Ellis, an SEO expert and founder of Teranga. We asked him all our burning questions about how Search Engine Optimisation can help you level up your marketing game, and the changes that Google’s algorithms are making to the type of content that will get you to page one. 

What’s ranking well on Google right now?

Google is increasingly prioritising genuinely good content. While keywords are important, the algorithms are also looking at readability, dwell time and click-through rates. When you’re creating content you should consider the question:

Google wants to give its users the best and most relevant content as quickly as possible. If someone finds exactly what they’re looking for on page one, Google has achieved their goal. So what does that mean for you? We’ll get to that, but first, let’s look at what Google thinks is valuable. 

How does Google perceive value?

Value is increasingly being defined by the number of people linking back to an article, how long people spend reading it and how often people go back to it.

To create content in a way that Google will perceive as valuable, you need to ensure that people have positive interactions with your content and that Google’s algorithm can understand what it is and how to use it. That means using the right tags and alt text, as well as creating clear and readable content. Everybody who comes across your content should be able to see what problem you’re solving and what you’re offering, including Google. 

How can small recruitment agencies rank well? 

The key to ranking highly on Google is to pick your battles. More accurately, pick the right keywords to use in your content. 

If you’re still wondering ‘what are keywords?!’, the answer is this:

Keywords like ‘jobs’ are going to pull up a lot of results, so getting to the first page for a phrase like that will be difficult. More specific terms, which are called long-tail keywords, such as ‘senior financial technology roles in Kent’ will have far less competition, so that’s where you can hone in on your niche and start to rank well for exactly what you do. 

In other words, the more specific you are with your keywords, the more likely you are to rank well. 

Having said that, you have to be careful not to make your keywords too niche. Make sure that you’re using phrases that people will actually search for, because there’s no point making it to page one of a search that nobody’s interested in. The key is to find a sweet spot where there’s enough search volume and not a lot of competition. 

To build an authority in your niche, you need to create that all important value-adding content. Your website, blogs and social presence need to provide concise, clear information to the customer, with engaging images that load quickly. Make sure what you’re creating is well-written or produced, research-backed and clearly presented. Remember, it’s all about the consumer!

So how do you make value-adding content?

Our favourite method of creating genuinely value-adding content is – you guessed it – PODCASTS! Sitting down with industry experts and getting their perspectives, insights and opinions is guaranteed to give you mountains of great content. 

Once you’ve recorded a half-hour episode, you can get social media clips, graphics and blogs out of it, perfect for sharing to your network and on your website. These blogs are going to be rich in keywords because you’re discussing the things that matter in your industry, whether you’re talking about all things talent or diving into the topics that are specific to your niche. 

People value having content in forms that are easy to consume, and having a podcast that they can passively consume is a great way to do that. Once you’ve stretched it into bite-sized content that they can engage with on platforms like Linkedin, you’re really meeting your audience where they are. 

 

Creating a great brand can be difficult. Branding is much more than your visual assets and tone of voice; it should be based on your purpose, mission and vision. Building your brand in a way that reflects those core values will make it resonate with its audience and internal people.

On our brand new Skill Point Podcast we spoke to Richard Williams, the founder of the digital branding agency Unearthed about how he helps companies brand themselves effectively. Here is his step-by-step process for creating a brand identity that resonates with people:

1) Get Leadership Involved

Get the key people in your business in a room and have a conversation about your purpose, vision and mission. When you get people inside the company involved, your answers will reflect the core of the business. That makes it easy to get internal buy-in, because the people who are there every day have played a part in making it.

Start with the purpose. Ask yourselves ‘Why are we doing what we’re doing?’ The answer shouldn’t be about financial success or fame, it’s the thing that drives you all to get up in the morning and come to work.

Next comes the vision. Discuss what it is that you’re looking to achieve. That doesn’t have to be an achievable goal, it’s more of the overall aim of the company. Think things like ‘ending world hunger’ or ‘creating world peace’.

Finally your mission is your plan for how you’re going to achieve your goals in a way that matches your why. Think about what you do differently, the processes you’ll need to put in place and the culture you want to create for the people who interact with your brand.

2) Communicate With Your Whole Company

Once you’ve heard from your leadership team, look at the impact that their goals have on the workforce. Have roundtables to see whether those ideas are being reflected in the way that the company works. Take your employees’ perspectives and see what themes you can pull from both sides.

If you’ve built your brand successfully these two perspectives will match up. If not, that shows you where internal work needs to happen before you take your shiny new brand identity public.

Take the information from your leadership team and workforce and distil it into a powerful message. This will inform everything from website copy and visual assets to your service proposition. Your message acts as a guiding light, so whenever you make content or grow into a new area everyone in the company can see how that aligns with your purpose, vision and mission.

Your message becomes the glue that binds the company together and communicates the fact that your business is driven by more than profit.

3) Get Your Audience Involved

Your clients and candidates provide the motivation to keep the company going.

The most important part of a great marketing strategy is to listen to your audience and see what is working for them and what isn’t. Do the qualitative research that tells you why they do business with you, what’s keeping them up at night, why they chose you. Distil those answers down until it gives you a clear vision and mission so that your output speaks to your audience, making it resonate with their needs.

By aligning your brand’s mission with your audience’s input, you can craft a marketing strategy that adds value to all of your people.

4) Create Value-Driven Content

Once you’ve established your brand’s messaging, you can create content that your company can buy into and your audience resonates with.

Consider what value your content is adding for your customers or clients. Aim to translate your message into consumable content that people are excited about interacting with.

Find a tone of voice that speaks to the culture that you’re trying to create around your brand and comment on things that align with your mission. If you want to be positioned as a thought leader in your industry, share insights that you’ve learned from working in it. If you want to transform the industry, shout about what you’re doing differently and what’s working for you.

Once you’ve structured your brand around your purpose, vision and mission, your marketing strategy will make sense. If you’d like to hear more about how you can level up your recruitment company’s marketing game, tune into the first episode of The Skill Point Podcast here.