Recruitment Marketers are F*ckin’ Cowboys
You pull up in your half-totalled Ford Fiesta that you purchased off an old fella, down the road, for £8 quid, a pencil sharpener and a taxidermy budgie.
Parked in your reserved parking space(your driveway,) you make your way to the door, put the key in the lock as you’d logically expect, turn it and ‘bingo!’ the eagle has landed.
Congratulations, you’ve survived another day in the shark pen! Have a bowl of Fruit Loops and get yourself to bed, kitten, these 20 hour days aren’t going away until you’re off of performance improvement.
Recruitment life can suck, I’m just saying that to win you over. My background is in marketing so I’ve literally no idea but judging by the sherbet Dip Dab around your left nostril, there’s a high chance you fell asleep in your snack drawer, this afternoon.
What I do know for sure, is that most of the recruitment marketing advice out there is absolute junk mostly written by failed recruiters or magpies that spotted a shiny shiny and decided to niche off into the Rec market. You guys shouldn’t be worrying about it too much, unless you’re failing miserably at business OR you want to expand your marketing efforts to grow.
Odds are you’re very good at direct marketing, cold calls and using job boards, which can be a great model of business. It doesn’t HAVE to be complicated.
If you scroll through LinkedIn you’ll notice every expert/boob from here to Mars chatting gas about how Tik Tok is the future of candidate engagement.
The experts aren’t usually experts. If they were, they probably wouldn’t call themselves that. I never met an actual ninja that referred to himself as a ninja nor have I ever met a genius who came to the conclusion themselves. I may never have met an actual ninja but whatever.
These experts are reliant on the ‘content for the sake of content’ policy across marketing channels. Here are some of the current shoddy messages I’ve seen of late, completely crushed like the hearts and souls of the candidates you toy with so cruelly. After that, you’ll find some important considerations with content creation.
5 steps to sweet F*CK all
You’ve seen the blogs, re-purposed into videos, infographics and sometimes posters. 5 obvious tips ranging from the incredibly vague:
‘Make engaging content that potential clients might like’
to the unbearably obvious:
‘To increase your sales, close your deals.’
These folk are advising you on content marketing but usually work in the sales department of SaaS businesses and the lack of expertise shines through like a one legged pigeon in a flock of albatross. That’s why the advice is absolute garbage, it’s less advice and more ego waving.
This approach can be great but the lazy or less experienced content creator will pick a number and a ‘pain’ but fill the gaps with pointless statements that a 5 year old could conjure up. It’s like supermarkets filling the shelves with empty boxes of Coco Pops…
VIDEO ABSO-F*CK!NG-LUTELY EVERYTHING
I’m confident you don’t have Tik-Tok, but you’re unlikely to get much candidate engagement on there, unless you’re targeting 13 year old girls…Don’t video everything. Don’t video ANYTHING if it’s going to suck or take as little thought as microwaving a small portion of haricot beans.
To quote the wonderful Cheryl Cole:
‘If it’s worth having, it’s worth fighting for’ 👸🏻
I love how the quoting skewed the emoji face like a back alley surgeon…
You’re going to have to put in a bit of effort to get results from video. Ideally, instead of an hourly snippet of you in a nappy, yelling at the wall with bean juice around your mouth because you think it’s hella funny, you might want to step back, go see a doctor and come back when you have your degradation fetish under control. Examples of sh!t video content include:
Boomerangs of your team looking like you made them pretend to like each other.
Tik Tok videos of you and the CFO in an unwanted, loving embrace.
A video of you and your team waving gherkins at one another.
If you don’t have the time, skills or requirement, there really isn’t any need to pursue video content. There are so many ways to get business, don’t buy the hype of any of these ‘golden eggs’ of business development.
If you rely on job boards your recruitment business is doomed in 2020
I won’t lie, I saw this one and it triggered me. I had to walk out of the room, splash my face with alpaca milk, take a slice of happy cake and come back an hour later to avoiding publicly murking the guy who made the content.
These are morons trying to scare you into complying with their garble so you familiarise with their brand and one day buy their dumb solutions. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed but 9 times out of 10, the only people liking and engaging with anything they say are their own employees.
It’s not size of the boat but the motion of the ocean, she said about 20 times before leaving me to cry into my yoghurt and flax seed breakfast and never returning. It is the size. Size matters, soz Malcolm. It’s the size of the presence. If you can stand out a mile on job boards, you’ll ascend the throne and this comes down to effective copy.
So what can we do, oh overlord of content creation?
Instead of describing a method, let’s define engaging content that you can apply to almost all marketing materials. Excuse me while I quote something I said to myself earlier, while pressing one of my kimonos:
Engaging content touches the emotions of the reader, it caters for self interest, speaks directly to them about ideas they can relate to, encourages their participation, tells a story….or….polarises. You could create a blog describing the colours of the rainbow but it would be better to build a story around it full of brilliant imagery that might annoy half the planet and have the other half thanking the lord for your existence, not realising , you are actually the guy they’re praying to.
Don’t worry little fella, if this ambiguous ramble doesn’t help, we’re about to dive deeper.
Polarisation: bring the muthaf*ckin ruckus
Think about polarisation, arguments in your industry, what disgruntles employees or employers? Off the top of my head, I’d go with:
If you’re ugly, you’re more likely to be unemployed
A little brutal perhaps? This isn’t clickbait, the content that follows has to plough through the chosen subject but most importantly, you need to pick a side.
Be tactful brethren, for the ice ahead is extremely thin….If you’re particularly pretty, expect to be mauled silly by angry inferior specimens. Remember that so long as you’re making them bleed with the truth, you’re on the right side of morality.
I’d take a guess and say it’s probably true anyway, humans are superficial and Janet from finance has no idea what she’s doing but looks fabulous while she messes up your management accounts.
Curiosity: kill their kitty
An alternate and less divisive approach is leveraging curiosity to tickle those trouts into your funnel.
Earn free lasagne with this approach to recruitment
How my Sausage dog, Stephen McBoneo, helps me sniff out the best candidates
How to get your soul back, after leaving the recruitment industry.
This is curiosity. We’re being deliberately bizarre but tapping into true, yet playful stories. Again, avoid clickbait and stay true to the content titles and obviously, both yourself and reality.
Participation: they love talking about themselves.
This is a highly abused strategy on social media. You may have noticed everyone is involving questions in their posts on LinkedIn and other social platforms? Here’s how I’d do it with polarisation and a little humour too.
My a$$hole candidate didn’t turn up to interview today. What do you think his excuse was?
a) His kitten died after getting in a fight with yoots, while catching a train on the Jubilee line.
b) The pizza delivery guy was stood, wearing only a sock, at the end of the driveway singing the Ketchup song and the candidate was afraid to leave the house.
c) He accidentally inhaled a pretzl, coughed out half a lung and gave birth to a baby deer.
d) something else(please specify)
Don’t do the ‘tell me your fave biscuit to dip in tea,’ thing because you may get engagement but the seas of grey are rising and you’re going to drown, I’ll be cheering when you do because you bore me silly.
I want you to understand this:
Indifference is the worst possible outcome for any marketing campaign. If nobody feels anything when they encounter your messaging, you’ve failed as a marketer.
Ultimately, what really matters is that your marketing efforts match your business needs and resources and you monitor progress to make sure you’re moving in the right direction.
Right my spicy Quorn nuggets, if that hasn’t sent your cute little cabbages into overdrive with ideas then something has gone horribly wrong and maybe I’ve recently turned a shade of magnolia without realising?
Sit tight and belt up for more, we’re getting ready to make the jump to recruitment marketing hyperspace….✌️
