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Personal brand and marketing tools for recruiters

The personal brand is at the heart of any professional’s success, regardless of their niche or position. A recruiter should have an active page and regularly post helpful content like an experienced business coach, PR manager, or CEO.

By developing a personal brand, a recruiter:

Introduces potential candidates and gently reminds them of themselves and their company;
Builds loyalty among the target audience of candidates by posting functional materials and tips for them;
Demonstrates competence in recruitment and high awareness of the specific niche of the candidate search (IT, Marketing, Design, etc.).

Actively developing your personal brand will increase your chances of being added to the contact list and being more willing to listen to your offer by at least 50%.

Top 5 marketing tools for recruiters:

Content

Write articles, set up polls (yes, they are still relevant and people like them), create internal articles on LinkedIn and on your company’s educational media or blog. Build a competent perception of your expertise in the niche, even if you don’t have 20 years of recruiting experience.

Content Distribution

There are many profile groups, pages, and channels on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Telegram. You can post open positions or useful publications for free and get to know your target audience in detail: what interests them and what can attract their attention. This will help you be “on the same page” when creating your unique content and subsequent interviews with candidates.

However, it is important not to get carried away and spam such channels, as this can result in a negative perception of professionals and, in some cases, banning.

Promotion

Sometimes, running targeted ads on a test budget on Instagram or Facebook can get you more benefits and responses than a paid job posting on various job sites. Take a good look at your audience, where your candidates spend the most time, where they go in search of new opportunities, and what they care about first – use all this in your future advertising campaigns. And from there, convert leads into candidates and subsequent new hires for your company.

PR

Analyze carefully where your future candidates spend their time and get new information. By posting valuable articles or comments in industry-specific publications, you will gain recognition and develop loyalty among your readers (your target audience) without direct contact. In the future, when you send a new proposal to the potential candidate, you will know that you may have already attracted them.

Discussions

Engage in exciting discussions if you have something to say. Take part in polls and be active on your colleagues ‘/candidates’ pages. Create new discussions in profile groups and blogs among recruiters and candidates. This kind of practice helps you get into a certain community, which will give you recognition and the sharing of useful knowledge with your colleagues.

Where to post your articles in a personal blog format?

The most effective marketing tools for recruiters today are social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Let’s take a more detailed look at each of them.

The network is geared towards establishing business contacts. You’ll find a minimum of memes here because the main target audience comes here with a specific purpose: to find new clients, employees, a job, or sell themselves.

Number of users as of 2021: 675 million from more than 200 countries.

Tools for recruiters on LinkedIn:

Post a job opening to the open.

Add a job posting to your page, put a “hiring” frame on your profile. Use all available tools in your profile layout to get the best possible results: the visual structure of the profile cover, the main description under your name, the section with general information about you, the definition of your tasks under “work experience” – all these items can be filled with the information that you are in search of candidates for a specific position or several.

LinkedIn articles

Post useful content and your notes in the articles section. Any social network ranks internal content more effectively than links from external sources. Build your recruiter’s personal brand with helpful content and increase your page visibility through this tool.

The more active your profile is, the better it is completed, the better your chances of getting your page featured in search and successfully expanding your network of contacts.

Posting in the feed

Keep your newsfeed posts short but informative, add a photo or video to your post (increase engagement on the page). Create a small but versatile content plan, so you don’t have to think about what to post online today to remind yourself.

For example:

Monday: a competently designed new job post;
Wednesday: a post/article with recruiter’s notes (confirmed cases);
Friday: a poll on a current topic.

Make a plan based on your interests and capabilities choose a rubric where you can always prepare helpful content, and you won’t have to worry about the next new post. Try to post in the morning (before 12:00). Online users are more likely to be active during their regular working hours, as this network is perceived only as “working.”

Important: Don’t rely on expert advice about posting on any particular day of the week. Each page is unique. To understand which days and times of publication are most effective for you, test.

Groups on LinkedIn

One of the few social networking platforms where you can post your job vacancies in public groups and send personal messages to users for free.

I recommend choosing profile groups rather than recruiting groups to post jobs. Recruiting groups are better for keeping in touch with your colleagues and getting new and valuable information. In the “Vacancies and Resumes,” “Vacancies remotely,” etc. groups, it is better to post a selection of vacancies or manually search for candidates in that group.

But suppose you are looking for a specific expert, for example, with a unique stack. In that case, it is necessary to search and post vacancies in the profile groups, which these professionals inhabit. It is no secret that the probability of finding a developer with a rare stack with a salary starting at $4,000 in the “Looking for a job” group is approximately 0.

Targeted promotion on LinkedIn

The ad cabinet on this network is not as complete as on Facebook, but it is more adaptable for finding candidates and promoting your job openings. If you are just starting your search, use different advertising formats, then choose the most effective one based on the results. For example, the “Conversation Ad” advertising format allows you to target professionals and send them a relevant job offer message.

The main disadvantage of this item is the cost. Advertising in this network will cost you more than any other network (unless you count the new Telegram ad office).

At the start, you have the opportunity to try and get your job up for free as part of a test period.

Use all of the publishing formats available to you on LinkedIn to diversify your content and improve its prominence in the general newsfeed.

Facebook

The social network with the largest number of users, commercial pages and groups. The candidate audience here is not as active as LinkedIn, but there are still good tools for finding it.

The number of users as of 2021: 2.7 billion from more than 106 countries.

The primary advice for working with this network isn’t much different: you need to keep your profile up to date, be active on the page by publishing helpful content, be proactive in communication and networking.

Posting in groups or pages of relevance to you is much more likely to be moderated by the group administrator, so in most cases, you will find yourself paying to post even a single job in the most active and valuable groups. In practice, however, these groups are often allowed to have one free test publication of your job or post a job for free if it is properly designed using the group template.

Also, as with LinkedIn, focus on profile groups: look for your specialist in their environment. Often profile groups can give anyone access to post a job or start a “discussion” on the page – which is your primary tool.

Tools for recruiters on Facebook

Job postings section

Posting a job publicly causes it to be displayed in the job listing section for users who are locally close to the location specified in the job and experts who have configured their job search specifically for similar positions. If you are already a member of one of the job search groups, you can automatically post a new job in the groups you want by ticking the checkboxes next to it when the job is posted.

Job promotion

Once your job has been posted on the business page, you can set up your promotion. Facebook Ads gives you step-by-step tips and advice on setting up your campaigns, so you won’t have any difficulty choosing the right playlist or budget for your promotion.

When choosing your audience when launching your first campaigns, don’t narrow it down too much or limit its expansion. Choose the essential criteria for which you’re looking for candidates. The first seven days of your promotion will be in a learning phase, where Facebook algorithms will determine the best audience segment and placements to maximize results while optimizing your budget.

Content formats

Don’t be afraid to try different formats and styles of content. Only by testing will you be able to determine which one will be most effective for you. Facebook allows you to create many variations of visual content presentation, host lives events and save them to the page, post content and interact with users on their pages, and create and develop your brand business page.

Other social networks

In addition to the leading candidate search networks, platforms such as Instagram, Telegram, and even Tik-Tok are now gaining momentum.

By taking a creative approach to content creation, job posting, and candidate sourcing, you’ll increase the likelihood of finding your specialist there.

It’s essential to bear in mind that Instagram and Tik-Tok are purely visual social networks. To get a response from your work on these networks, it’s important to submit content with the highest quality graphics possible. Active recruiters worldwide have already built their brands with really creative, applicable content on these networks.

Use these social networks to find professionals such as SMM manager, Marketing Manager, Account Manager, Video Maker, Graphic Designer etc.

Examples for inspiration in Tik-Tok:

Telegram is an information platform. To post your job on relevant channels you just need to create an interesting text description and submit it briefly with a link to your job.

The wide range of relevant channels allows you to post your job up to 50 times a day, but it is essential to consider that posting your job to a quality group with your target audience will cost a fee.

The cost of promotional posts in Telegram channels varies greatly and starts at 300 UAH per post, and the maximum cost can be up to 10,000 UAH per post in the top. The most effective way to find IT, Marketing, BI specialists, and exciting candidates for C-level positions.

Most of the channels advertise only one job for free, as long as you follow the channel’s rules: post a job using a template or a particular form and get it moderated by an administrator.

In addition to posting to various profile channels, Telegram allows for quick and easy communication with potential candidates directly. For example, you are an IT Recruitment UA group member and regularly post news about your company’s latest vacancies. At some point, you’ll see a post from a member saying they’re looking for a job and a short description of their stack – here you’ll be able to very quickly contact the candidate in private messages and invite them for an interview as the speed of replies in Telegram among users is much higher than, for instance, in private messages on LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger.

Modern recruitment requires modern solutions. By developing your brand and actively using all available marketing tools for recruitment, you can cut the time to close a vacancy by two to three times.

Put enough effort and work into filling your profiles, developing your expert personal brand, PR and communications, and a savvy approach to seeding content. You will have a successful personal brand ready for a strong recruiter. Not a recruiter who is constantly searching for candidates, but a recruiter who candidates know, respect and recommend.