Before joining Firefish, I worked as a marketer for a recruitment agency, and one of the biggest challenges I faced every day was trying to get our consultants involved in marketing campaigns I was running (even though these campaigns were running purely to get them more candidates!).
We all know recruiters are busy people, but if you can convince them to share more of your content or to be the face of a social media campaign, this will get you much better engagement. And the reason for this is that people engage more with people online than they do with brands.
In fact, research has shown that marketing messages are shared 24 times more when distributed by employees rather than branded accounts!
So as busy as your recruiters are, you need them as a marketing resource. Here’s my top tips on how to get them more involved in your campaigns.
Flatter them
Your recruiters might be confident people, but you’d be surprised how many crumble in front of a camera or panic when they’re asked to write something for a marketing campaign. Most recruiters won’t like being put out of their comfort zone, and as it’s not in their job remit, you’ll need to do some convincing.
From my experience, a bit of flattery goes down really well with recruiters. They’re a competitive bunch, so telling them that you think their social posts or job ads are better than most will motivate them to share more of the content you send them.
A good trick that will get recruiters more bought in to marketing is if you make it about them. If you know someone on the team has recently had a big win, ask them to work with you on a video, social post or blog that’ll show off their success. They’ll find it hard to say ‘no’ to an opportunity like that, and you’ll have some really positive content to go out with that people are bound to engage with on social media.
Make it easy for them
Recruiters ‘seem’ busy because they really are busy, so do some of the heavy lifting to make it as easy as possible for them to get involved with your marketing.
As marketer, you need to do majority of the leg work so taking part requires minimum effort from them so they can get back to running their desk.
For example, you could write a video script for them that they just need to read from an auto-script in front of the camera, or send them some pre-written statuses that they can just copy/paste to share your content on their social media feeds.
The easier you make it, the more likely they’ll get involved, so try to keep requests as simple as possible.
Sell it to them
When you’re asking a recruiter to get involved in your marketing campaign, you’ll get a better response if you sell it to them by letting them know what’s in it for them. And this shouldn’t be hard, as the goal of most of your campaigns will be to benefit your recruiters anyway!
If you offer them more candidates, a stronger social media presence or a foot in the door with a new client, you’re guaranteed to pique their interest as these things will help them towards their recruitment KPIs.
To ensure your sale pitch really pops, back it up with evidence. Use data from previous campaigns to show your recruiters what their colleagues have gained from working with you in the past. This will tap into their competitive nature and they’ll be jumping at the chance to take part.
Give them your time and they’ll give you theirs
When I was a recruitment marketer, I spent a lot of time helping recruiters post or sponsor jobs on social media and worked with them to improve their job ads.
Helping them out in this way meant that I could get to know the recruiters in my office better and earned me some karma points: soon enough, any time I asked for people to get involved in marketing campaigns, the people I’d spent time with would volunteer. So give your recruiters some of your time and you'll win some of their's in return.
Candidates love video content, so get some of your top recruiters in front of the camera. Download the eBook below for ideas on how to plan a video campaign that gets tangible results.
