Act Now Before Competitors Steal a March on You!

This is a guest post from Tony Restell of Social-Hire.com. As well as being really interesting he shares some useful links at the end.

I’d like to gaze into my crystal ball with you – and see if we can’t spy something that you really ought to be acting upon today. Before I do though, I should say that this exercise is aimed at the bulk of the recruitment industry who work on a contingent basis. If you’re working on retained search assignments, what I’ll be sharing here probably won’t resonate so much.

Still here? OK. Then let me ask you a question:

In the sectors you operate in, can we agree that any recruitment firm who owned the leading job board in that niche would be at a distinct advantage? By which I mean that they’d have an edge over other firms when it came to pitching for work. Quite a nice USP I think you’d agree? Depending on the track record of the niche job board, potentially an edge when it came to delivering on hiring requirements too? It wouldn’t be a killer blow, enough to stop others being successful in the market. But they’d always be playing catch-up with the recruitment firm that had got their hands on this asset. Does that sound like a fair assessment?

Let me tell you why I ask the question.

Nearly 15 years ago I set up a niche jobs board. It serves a lucrative niche, one that many mainstream job boards and other niche players have tried to break into since. But do you know what happened each time? None of them ever succeeded. Would you like to know why? They were too slow off the mark. Yes you’re reading that right. In the decade and a half since that business was founded, numerous well-known job board businesses have tried to enter our market. They all discovered the same thing. The head start we’d gained in winning over candidates and clients was simply too great for them to claw back without incurring prohibitive losses.

Now why am I telling you this?

Well fast-forward to today and I now work in social media marketing, helping recruitment businesses figure out what they should be doing with social media – and how they should be doing it to accelerate the results they achieve. The relevance of the job board prelude above is that I’m now seeing the exact same scenario unfolding in the social media space.

You see a recruitment firm that invests in their social media presence today – if done right – is likely to never be caught up and overtaken by a recruitment firm that only takes action a year from now. There’s a time investment required to build up a following – and money alone isn’t that effective at closing the gap unless you really have pots and pots of the stuff to burn!

So what do you need to consider in your business?

My question to you would be: if one recruitment agency in your niche had built themselves a readership and fanbase on social media that others couldn’t replicate without significant expense, what would the impact be on the other firms in that niche? The leading firm would undoubtedly have more opportunities to strike up dialogue with potential clients and prompt business development meetings that otherwise would have taken considerable effort to secure. They would undoubtedly enjoy a situation where more people were exposed to their marketing messages, job orders and brand than any of their competitors. Just as described above, this wouldn’t be a killer blow, enough to stop others being successful in the market. But all the other firms would eternally be playing catch-up, trying to make up for the social media reach and influence that their business simply didn’t enjoy.

Now something that’s played out time and time again since the arrival of the internet is that trends we see taking hold in the US we usually see replicated in the UK a little while thereafter. So what’s particularly interesting here is that you can now see lots of US recruitment businesses and recruiters taking the leap and striving to build up an unassailable lead in social media. So if the normal pattern is followed, we’ll see this year and next characterised by UK recruiters thinking they ought to be doing the same as their US counterparts.

I’ll leave you to ponder whether you want to be a recruitment business blazing the trail here, or one that’s eternally playing catch-up.