When it comes to writing recruitment blog posts, there's so much more to do than simply putting pen to paper. It all starts with the idea. But in many cases, those ideas are hard to come by, especially when you need several good ones every single month. To help you come up with excellent blog titles, here's our list of the best brainstorming methods for writing killer blogs...
Individual vs. Group Brainstorming
Individual brainstorming is a good option for a recruitment marketer who may not have a dedicated marketing team to work with. It means you can come up with lots of ideas and then allocate them to relevant team members. The key thing here though is to provide your contributors with a couple of options so that you can get some feedback alongside their buy in, too. The benefits for individual brainstorming include working at your own pace, greater flexibility, and if you're more introverted, better results. Group brainstorming can quickly become noisy and overwhelming.
Group brainstorming, on the other hand, relies on in-person collaboration. Everyone needs to be in the same room, at the same time and these sessions can become chaotic. But from them you can generate lots of ideas, often far more than from individual brainstorming sessions. To get the best return from a group session, make sure there's a clear agenda for the meeting beforehand. A good approach is to send out an agenda prior to the meeting outlining what you hope to achieve, providing some focus for participants.
With those definitions of group and individual brainstorming in mind, let's now look at some specific ideas for brainstorming content for a recruitment agency blog. The following techniques can be used in both individual and group brainstorming scenarios:
Get Lots of Blog Ideas Quickly
If you want lots of blog ideas quickly, rapid ideation is a good technique to use. It involves quick fire idea generation. To use this technique effectively, a team leader provides some context to begin with (i.e. we need blogs for candidates looking for their first job out of uni) then a time limit is set for individuals to come up with as many ideas as possible, without filtering those ideas. If you’ve found brainstorming sessions last too long in the past, rapid ideation might be the best technique for your agency. It keeps everyone on track and it leads to more focused results within a carefully managed timeframe.
Focus on One Specific Topic
The next technique to consider is brain writing. This approach requires one person to take the lead and share topic ideas within a group brainstorming session. From there, every participant writes down their ideas on a piece of paper. Then, everyone shares the idea they wrote down with the group. This is a particularly efficient way to run a brainstorming session as it encourages everyone to add their thoughts and voice to the discussion. Plus, this is a more inclusive approach to take as it lets even introverted participants contribute. For example, your team leader could suggest topics such as ‘CV advice for candidates’, and ‘finding candidates your clients can’t.’
Read: How to Start a Recruitment Agency Blog
Create Long Lists of Relevant Words
A word storm is one of the simplest techniques to implement in a brainstorming session. It involves writing down the first words that come to mind when you see another word. For instance, your team leader can choose one or two words and then the rest of the participants write down any words that come to mind. This leads to a collection of words relevant to the topic you’re focusing in on and from there you can start to categorise these words and build ideas for blog posts. For example, you might look at ‘recruiting on social media’ and from there you might end up with words like ‘Facebook’ ‘LinkedIn’ and ‘Twitter’ alongside ‘Hashtags’ ‘Jobs’ and ‘digital tools’. These words can be put together to create specific research questions to write for your blog.
So, those are our tips for brainstorming blog ideas. Each one of the techniques listed will work for you and your agency, some better than others, so some trial and error is recommended.
Once you have a good idea of what works for your recruitment agency and your recruiters, develop it into a working habit. This way, you’ll never run out of blog ideas again and everyone will get involved. You’ll be able to stock your content calendar with months’ worth of great ideas quickly. A quick final piece of advice: do make sure to read around the recruitment topics you come up with and make sure there’s enough content to discuss for each one before you start writing.
