Author: Haydn Morgans

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.