Recruitment Content Marketing Archives: The SmartRecruiters Vault (2011–2014)

Originally Published Jan. 28, 2015 on LinkedIn Publisher as Recruitment Content Directory. Pictured above is me looking at the art in the HQ made by Why Duck.

Recruiting is acquiring talent for your interests. IMHO I built one of the better blogs about recruiting, the SmartRecruiters Blog. In my three and a half years running SmartRecruiters content marketing and social media, I’ve recruited and edited 250+ writers and our work amassed 3+ million pageviews. I’d like to share some tips on how I did it and provide you with a directory of top recruitment content.

8 aspirational sources of content about the future of work because everyone who hires needs to think about and articulate the future of another’s work.

1. People Work for People First and Companies Second This post is a play off ‘people don’t quit jobs, they quit managers.’ It has 500+ social shares, explains a philosophy I believe, and includes an audio reading of the content (rich media rules!).
2. A Business is Called Company Because…
3. Hiring Culture: Creating a Recruitment Ecosystem. This TalentCulture post had 1,000+ social shares and improved our google rankings for a term I’m a huge fan of,”Hiring Culture.”
4. FWD.us Q & A. Why I come to work everyday markets how work should be.
5. Hiring Economics 101. This post explains some of my general assumptions toward hiring. It needs to be evolved, but is a fun read for anyone who hires and has some interest in economics. It got me thinking, how can a brand publish like an institution?
6. The ‘When to Hire’ Study. I worked with data scientist Kasia Senderowska & creative director Matt Pham to summarize our time of day / day of the week learnings of job advertizing behavior and engagement across 60,000+ jobs advertisements.
7. The Story of SmartRecruiters. This FWD.us video had 16,000+ views, and it highlights that success is dependent upon what you can do, and not where you’re from.
8. Also check out Jerome Ternynck’s hiring column on Inc. I used to edit his work withLena Waters.

7 interview style blog posts with recruitment leaders. Turning interviews into marketing assets can be a win/win approach to content marketing: it further grows the interviewee’s brand as an expert, and positions the company as a news outlet for thought leaders.

1. Social Recruiting Wisdom and a Drink with Bill Boorman. as part of my social media & leftover booze meetup group (subject to re-branding). If you want to learn more about how Bill Boorman growth hacks recruiting, also read and watch video of Recruiting Top Talent From Universities Using Farmville.
2. Zero Unemployment Video Interviews. These were very early in my time at SmartRecruiters, and I would do them much different today, but if anything, they show how low the barrier to entry is to start producing your own video content.
3. Talking HRTech & HRTech Europe. This walking, transcripted audio podcast with bullet points is a content format I have been experimenting with onDavidWalks.com. Not everyone is a writer but everyone can talk.
4. How I Hired 90 Tour Guides. Brands love making the customer the hero. The testimonial can take many forms. Every case study should also be a blog.
5. How PropertyBase Built a Great Team.
6. Marketo Says, “80 Candidates: 8 Interviews: 1 Hire” Leave it to top marketers to optimize the recruitment funnel.
7. Hegyessy Design: White Space Structures the Universe. Great insight into howJason leads SmartRecruiters design.

11 resourceful lists to scale your recruitment efforts. As evidence by BuzzFeed, and the historically high traffic volume to directories, categorized lists can be fun and resourceful. Top recruitment lists can also tap into the trend of crowd sourced content.

1. Best 50 Niche Job Boards This post exceeded 750,000+ page views, 15,000+ social shares and converted visitors at 1.5%. It includes one original and updated SmartRecruiters stat about job posting. It walks the line between blog post and storefront. Joe Hanson contributed a lot of the nitty gritty copy/paste and html work.
2. 50 Startup Founders Share Their Biggest Hiring Challenges One of my favorites. I really enjoyed talking to startup founders. This post had 750+ social shares.
3. 18 Best SmartRecruiters Blog Posts of 2013. I decided to do the posts of year awards by one for each of the categories, as opposed to the top posts by traffic or social shares, to further cement our editorial line.
4. 32 Quotes About Workplace Culture. Through our Twitter growth, the CEO was able to host a SHRM Twitter chat, then I repackaged the tweets to drive residual traffic here.
5. Best 10 Places to Find Media Professionals. This post was of a style I worked on with Lexie Forman-Ortiz; it’s more of, if it works, just spin it off into another vertical. I later worked with Paul Andre de Vera to turn these job boards lists intoSlideShares that totaled 45,000+ views. My favorite list style post by Lexie was Top 10 Corporate Social Responsibility Initiatives; not only did it recognize the good in brands, but it also created engagement with Fortune 500 companies.
6. People’s Causes of Unemployment.
7. Best 21 Tweets of #HRTechEurope.
8. What’s Social Recruiting? 25 Experts Weigh In. This one had 450+ social shares and is a mix of original content and repurposed content.
9. Tweets of the Unemployed.
10. Top 25 Zero Unemployment Influencers. For this I used an influencer marketing platform called Traackr, who later wrote about me.
11. 20 Questions for Every Employer Brand. This post had 500+ shares and is great Q & A for talent acquisition leaders to evaluate their employer brands. If you need more of these types of questions, also read Johnny Torrance Nesbitt’s 15 Questions to Align Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding.

4 examples of how everyone is a recruiter, especially every powerful person.

1. You Can Never Have Enough Talent, Says Pat Riley. I like basketball. One of my media properties is NBAmoney.com (under contruction). This post summarizes recruitment lessons from how Pat Riley built some of the most remarkable remarkable teams in NBA history.
2. 5 Best Hiring Quotes. This 2012 post used to rank #1 for “recruitment quotes,””recruiting quotes” and “hiring quotes.” This matters because of what job titles look for those terms. This post has been imitated by a number of recruitment vendors since. I also had some fun with a couple spinoffs: Economics Quotes Modified for Human Resources & Human Resources Quotes.
3. When we Refreshed Our Blog With Revamped Design and Content From Forbes, AP and The Huffington Post (press release) this opened up the blog to republishing of a lot more recruitment content that related to bigger business trends at large. Note: I contributed to all SmartRecruiters press releases from 2011–2014.
4. What The Recruiting Industry Should Learn from Steve Jobs. Very early in my career Steve Jobs stepped down as CEO of Apple. He was a great recruiter. Also added an update at the end of the post: SF Apple Store Memorial on Market Street.Later we compared him to a recruiter again. If you are looking for more flavor, read Laura Hong’s comparison of Harry Potter to a recruiter.

5 awesome recruitment infographics. People comprehend visuals much quicker than text. I enjoy the statistical research and story construction.

1. The State of Hiring 2014 Timed with the state of the union, this was republished byHRBartender.com, TheUnderCoverRecruiter, and more.
2. The Future of Bay Area Jobs. I worked on this infographic with Lena Waters &Bhava Communications as part of a local branding campaign. Amongst other publications, it was picked up by Inc.
3. We also worked together on the Hiring Revolution, which was picked up by many industry blogs.
4. Think Social. I wrote the copy for this infographic as a play off Think Different, and Scott Perket designed. Fun to make, but not my greatest effort…
5. Recruiting My Friends! If you have a chance to mix the Beatles into your work, do it.

18 recruitment events to learn from. Whether it’s job fairs, happy hours, panel discussions or volunteering, events are a great recruitment channel.

1. NextGen Influencer Panel: Mentorship, Implementing SaaS & the End User.
2. Startup Lessons Learned. I put together this event in Krakow with Kinga Wacławik.
3. Hosting the Brightest HR Tech Startups. This event featured a panel discussion, 25 booths of HR tech startups and over 300 attendees. I co-produced with Ben Klafter,Christian Perry and Michael Gold.
4. The Great Power Shift & 21 Best Tweets of #HRTechEurope. Despite having the title of Marketing Director, I was able to get a comped press pass to HRTechEurope. Your corporate blog can become a news source.
5. Marissa Mayer is Now Hiring at DreamForce.
6. #SmartUp Recruiting: To Outsource, or Not to Outsource. I put together this event — and most other Smartups — with Ben Klafter.
7. SmartRecruiters to Host HRTechTank San Francisco This is an event I co-produced with Taras Polischuk. If you are interested in HRTech, you also must read his 4 Pillars to the Future of HR Technology.
8. The Art & Science of Candidate Assessment at the SmartRecruiters HQ. This event followed the launch of our candidate assessment center.
9. Will Big Data Revolutionize Recruiting? on the HRTechEurope Blog.
10. Innovators Leverage Social Data to Find New Talented People.
11. Recruiting Unconference Video at the San Francisco HQ I filmed and edited this video.
12. The Future Demand for Talent. I created this speaking opportunity and covered the event. I like working with FWD.us.
13. Smartup: Beyond the Resume.
14. iHR 2012 Competition Hosted by Jerome Ternynck. You know the company is growing when you win the startup competition the previous year, then the next year they want you to judge the entire competition.
15. The Smartup Candidate Experience Engagement. This is a panel I set up, moderated, and marketed.
16. SocialHRCamp Thought Leadership. Cool event I co-organized with Jeff Waldmanabout where social media meets HR.
17. Give Labor Day is an event Jerome Ternynck and I came up with to give career counseling to those in need around Labor Day (2011–2013). Read more onServe.gov, Blogging4Jobs, or this event recap: Helping Job Seekers at the SmartRecruiters HQ.
18. Veterans Helping Veterans. Super rewarding event that I ran to connect unemployed veterans to veteran business leaders.

11 stories about the future of hiring and recruitment technology. An organization, like a publication, should comment on trends, reports, and acquisitions.

1. What Does CareerBuilder’s Acquisition of BroadBean Mean? I woke up at 4 am and wrote this in 2 hours. As the first to publish long form commentary on the acquisition, it drove quality traffic and positioned company as industry news source.
2. Recruit, An Ambitious Plan; Indeed.
3. Is Google About to Enter the Job Market? By phrasing your blog posts as a question, you have more liberty to pursue an idea. Yes, Google is well positioned to enter the job market (along with many other markets), but that is not the point of this post. Often times you can learn more through logic than news.
4. 4 Predictions for HR Technology in 2015
5. The State of Employer Branding Strategy
6. 82% of Recruiters, Hiring Managers, HR, Find Evidence Of Discrimination Against the Unemployed. I led this survey of recruitment professionals to measure the impact of unemployment had on the job search in 2011, when unemployment hovered around 10%.*
7. Free: the Price Point of Billion Dollar Websites.
8. Facebook Goes After LinkedIn with Professional Skills Category. When a giant announces a feature, there’s always an opportunity to position your brand as an expert on what that means to the players of your industry.
9. The Evolution of Internet Recruiting.*
10. Occupy Technology to Hire.
11. Employer Branding: People Talking About You. I presented this at the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference, and it has 5,000+ views.

*Note: all social share counts reset to 0 on July 1 2013 during a site migration.

5 use cases of new content increasing SEO rankings for business driving key words. These posts provide value ranging from the trend to industry terms to the definition of words as common as “recruiting,” but they are united in their design to drive residual traffic of target consumers by improving search engine rankings not only of these posts, but also of pages that rank for related terms.

1. Recruiting Software →Cloud Hiring This post dramatically helped our search rankings for “recruiting software” and “cloud hiring.”
2. Social Media Recruiting: Trending to Commonplace
3. Definition of Recruiting. This post received comments from some of the most influential people in the recruiting space (social signals!), and served as catalyst for bettering rankings of all terms that include the word “recruiting.”
4. Candidate Relationship Marketing (the Other CRM)
5. The Most Important Interview Question — “When Have You Failed?” This post hit that rare area where it ranks high in google and provides opinionated original advice I wholehearted agree with. Love to fail. Plus, it checks the boxes of rich media content with original images and video.

8 pieces of content to understand the evolution of social media recruiting. Running social media marketing for a recruitment technology in a time when social media recruiting took off, I’m uniquely positioned to tell this story.

1. LinkedIn is Becoming More Like Facebook & Facebook is Becoming More Like LinkedIn. 450+ social shares about how social networks become more similar as they reach saturation points. Now that just about everyone can be found online, The Most Connected Woman on LinkedIn says, “The Future of Sourcing is Engagement.”
2. The Best of Social Media Recruiting This post aggregates top social media recruiting content, maybe of which was by Jessica Miller-Merrell, and is currently featured in Walmart’s internal social media recruitment training.
3. Stop Writing Your LinkedIn Profile in the 3rd Person! This Undercover Recruiter post had 3,000+ social shares, including many powerful LinkedIn employees. It’s common sense.
4. Get Hired from a Tweet? I Think So. 250+ social shares, and one of the most complementary tweets from the CEO.
5. What is Social Media Recruiting? This post had 40 comments within a week. A year later a bug in Facebook comments plugin deleted the comments from the page. I curated the remains to make What’s Social Recruiting? 25 Experts Weigh In, which had 450+ social shares.
6. Did Two Hiring Mistakes Cost Facebook $9 Billion? This is me stirring the pot. For another example of stirring the pot check out Chris Fields’ 10 Most Common Illegal Job Interview Questions.
7. LinkedIn Endorsement Insights On J.T. O’Donnell’s Careerealism.com, this original video and presentation recap was amongst the first insight into value of LinkedIn endorsements from an official LinkedIn representative.
8. LinkedIn’s Virality Explained in 8 Words, a business poem via my first iPhone app MapShot.

3 long form pieces of content for a deep dive into recruitment technology.

1. The Evolution of Job Posting. I outline and edited this white paper. I cut it up in many ways to create more residual traffic, such as The History of Job Ads, Write a Job Ad that Convert, and Big Data is Critical for Job Ad Optimization.
2. Guide to Cloud Hiring Platform: 6 Requirements. I worked with Helen Yu to map our product competitive advantages in order to create this bottom of funnel piece of content.
3. Collaborative Hiring: Leveraging Social Software to Hire the Best. Tons of awesome stats here presented by Sharlyn Lauby. I outlined and edited this eBook to showcase how the software trend of workplace collaboration is entering the hiring space.

15 pieces of marketing collateral for new product releases. These types blog posts walk the line between documenting momentum and finding people who really care about the ins and outs of recruitment technology.

1. Announcing LinkedIn Recruiter Integration. I also led an innovative campaign where company leaders published a variation of this news on their own LinkedIn Publisher.
2. To Be LinkedIn. One of my first posts comparing the social networks.
3. Mobile Recruiting on Your Own Site.
4. You Cannot Recruit Top Talent Without Mobile Technology, on the RingCentral Blog.
5. 3 Recruiting Priorities of Bootstrapped Startups. This post started was inspired by a Quora question. Quora is not only a great content discovery platform, but it also provides you insight into what companies — especially startups — want to read.
6. HireLoop: A Social Feed for Collaboration I came up with the term “HireLoop”… It didn’t really take off.
7. Employee Referrals via Social Media.
8. Has LinkedIn Killed the Resume? Blogging about how SmartRecruiters was part of the beta group to offer Apply With LinkedIn back in the day.
9. 4 Reasons to Look Beyond Your Applicant Tracking System.
10. What Your Applicant Tracking System is Missing. If you’re interested in the ATS, also check out Jason Buss’ 10 Signs That Your Applicant Tracking System is Stuck in the 90s.
11. Where to Post Jobs? There’s an Algorithm for That. This post marketed a great competitive advantage for SmartRecruiters and moved us up for the common search of “where to post jobs.”
12. Mobile Hiring App Helps Close Top Designer in 6 Days. Post about the internal use of our beta app helped us hire our next designer.
13. Facebook Recruiting: Turn Fans Into Hires.
14. The 6 Pillars of Hiring on Facebook.
15. The Science of Candidate Assessment. Where does science meet gut when evaluating people?

6 examples of contributing to other people’s work. Collaboration is key to your blogging strategy. I quote people, people quote me.

1. Your Next Job Application Could Be Via SmartPhone, reports Mashable.
2. Smartup: The War for Startup Talent.
3. Is a Free Applicant Tracking System Right For Your Business? via New Talent Times.
4. Paul Andre de Vera understands where social media meets SEO. I contributed toThe SEO Optimized Job Posting, 10 Job Interview Questions to Ask an SEO Expert, and 11 Sources to Drive Traffic to Your Job Listing. Remember, “social shares — retweets, +1s and likes — are the SEO currency of the common internet user.”
5. 5 Tweets That Epitomize Social Recruiting.
6. Kissmetrics Blog explained how I got my foot in the door.

And 5 pieces of content about general B2B blogging advice.

1. BootStrapper’s Guide to Guest Blogging. This is my presentation from speaking at the Scoop.it HQ. If interested, also check out the accompanying blog post, How Blogging Accelerates Startup Growth.
2. If You Only Have 5 Hours a Week to Build Your Blog. This is from panel discussion at the VigLink HQ.
3. Video on Video Marketing Strategy.
4. Bizzaro Content Marketing Map.
5. The Internet is a Real Estate Game. I published this blog post — Can You or Can You Not Create Land? — by reading it at Tech & Marketing’s inaugural event at The Hub.

I hope you find value in my recruitment content directory. Would be great to hear examples of how you leveraged similar content marketing techniques to drive real business growth.

You can read the read more on my author page. Don’t hesitate to reach out, or learn more about my new marketing firm, ArtMap Inc.