Inspire
On June 19, 2019, I was invited to speak at the Inspire event in London hosted by UK Recruiter. During the day, I attended the Technology Showcase and had the opportunity to see the best of what the UK has to offer to help take HR Innovate to the next level and I met a lot of really wonderful people.
The speakers were instructed to give presentations in Pecha Kucha style, meaning there was 5 minutes, 20 slides on automatic transition and no clicker. I had never given this type of presentation before — but as a former Teacher — I have given my share of presentations. I decided to package the topic into a story.
I didn’t read my presentation, but I did prepare. The following is that story.
2019 Digital Recruiting and Social Media Trends in the Mediterranean
In 1997 a Cypriot teen decided to take the great American road trip. She flew to New York and rented a car to drove across the nation to see the sights. I had never met a more beautiful person. 20 year later — I married her and together we started HR Innovate — an HR company based in Nicosia Cyprus with a strong focus on recruiting.
While I do have a background in HR, I am not a recruiter. By trade I am an academic and project manager and rely heavily on numbers. I have spent the past year focused on social recruiting trends in the Mediterranean and today I am here to present my initial findings.
In 2012 the economy collapsed around the world. Cyprus was no different. The banks crashed and many people lost their jobs. Locally the crash was known as the haircut. This year, we have all seen that the impacts of the haircut are past and the economy is booming with unemployment sitting at 7%.
Because of my background in academia, I work with both quantitative and qualitative data. I began this project with a digital asset audit and have been tracking and adjusting our strategy weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually.
As a double tax haven, Cyprus is mainly known for its finance sector. In fact, our portfolio is about 50% finance. But it’s the other half that’s the most intriguing to me and that is the growing tech sector. Junior developers earn about 1000 euros per month. This is the group that I see you having the most opportunity — especially in the new era of digital nomads.
I began targeted a and b testing of campaigns. I found that the best response and cost per engagement across platforms are in Nicosia, Limassol and Athens (meaning central Greece). I have yet to figure out what Brits respond to best– I guess that remains to be seen.
25 to 35 year olds are the group that is most engaged with our content these days. That has dramatically shifted as just a year ago it was the 35+ crowd.
Pause for cause. In the Mediterranean — there is big business in referrals and reputation. The community is small and people like to go to someone they know — or their cousin knows.
So using the data, I have collected, I am able to shift the numbers and targets quite easily. When I first started collecting data we were heavy on males from 30 to 40. Since then we have evened out on gender and trended more in the mid-20s range. We believe this is due to a heavy focus on tech as well.
So in our new target demographic, I can tell you, without a doubt, that live videos are fire. People seem to love them and our engagement metrics have gone through the roof. Facebook live video do better across all metrics than even most of our paid campaigns. It’s quite astonishing and not something that most other recruiting agencies are currently doing.
Coming from Washington DC, I have been frustrated to find that people in the Mediterranean do not really use twitter the way we do back home— and seem to have low engagement with Instagram as well. I read a lot of posts saying Facebook is dead but every time I look, it seems to be the number one place we are able to reach our base.
And of the variety of posts we post across channels — all signs keep pointing back to those live videos. So what is it about the videos? Qualitative data suggest that they are the most authentic engagement. Let me make a side note here and mention that it is the one thing that makes me the most uncomfortable as well — but they are free… and I like free.
Speaking of which — for a year I have been trying to move the needle on Linkedin and then bang…. It appears there was recently a significant change in the algorithm that has prioritized photos. (We don’t have LinkedIn Live videos yet.)
At the base of all of my data, I see one main underlying trend which is story telling. We can tell a story in many ways — and it is important to note here that the data suggests that reading is the least popular format.
After analyzing and triangulating data on about 50 medium articles, I have found that written stories that are about 400–700 words and use an authentic photo of a persons face and not stock photos do the best. Even though the stock photos can be be prettier — people like the real ones.
In this age of AI and CGI, DeepFake videos and photos and fake news…. It appears that real and natural plays very well to our audience. So for my key learning over the past year — just act natural.
I challenge each of us here to create our own story and to tell it well. Today is my next step in this process. Will it be yours?
