At a time when qualified candidates are hard to find, people are nervous about moving jobs, and trust really is key, developing a strong personal brand is more important than ever. Wave‘s Emily Buckley investigates what personal branding is, why it should matter to recruiters, and how to build one.
Every recruiter is also a marketer – recruiters just don’t always recognise what they do as marketing. Each time a recruiter talks about their jobs or their agency, each time they give advice or share insights, each time they work their networks when sourcing candidates and clients, they are marketing. What they are also doing is building their personal brand, which directly affects the agency they work for. Personal branding can be incredibly beneficial to recruitment agencies for one major reason – people trust people.
A LinkedIn post from an individual’s profile is likely to get far more engagement than a post from a corporate profile. An individual consultant is also able to spark conversations and forge relationships with others more easily than a faceless company profile. Knowing who you are engaging with – seeing their profile picture, reading a post that might be more personal – enables clients and candidates to connect in a way that they never could with brand posts.
Personal brands have more reach, gain more traction, make more connections, build trust to a deeper degree. Wave’s monthly Recruitment Trends reports show that the market continues to be candidate-short, thereby increasing the importance for a recruiter of furthering their reach and nurturing networks. Many candidates aren’t actively searching for a new position so being visible, known, and connected is vital. And that is where personal branding can prove to be an incredibly effective marketing device.
What is a personal brand?
Personal branding refers to the way an individual presents themselves to the world. This involves building and maintaining a profile by demonstrating your views, skills, values and personality in an authentic way. This doesn’t have to be done exclusively on social media but in order to strengthen that brand and further your reach, regular engagement on social media platforms (especially LinkedIn) is crucial.
Influencers are experts at this, consistently posting valuable content on their niche subjects in order to grow a following that turns to them as experts in their field. A recruiter’s personal brand is essentially no different. The idea is to showcase the unique set of resources, skills and knowledge that the recruiter – and, by extension, the agency they work for – can offer, instilling trust in both candidates and clients that they can deliver. It’s a way for a recruiter to stand out in a crowded market.
How can a recruiter build their personal brand?
- Be human
Always remember the central tenet of personal branding – people buy from people. Write and speak authentically, with passion and with compassion. This is what will instil trust in your audience and encourage them to engage. It’s essential that you build your brand around you or it won’t be sustainable or believable. Your opinions, your values, your advice. A personal brand is not about selling but about setting out who you are, what you stand for, and the value you can offer. Some of the most successful posts are simple video messages recorded on a smartphone while the recruiter is in the car on the school run/walking the dog/waiting at the train station. It humanises and adds authenticity. It’s also important to engage with others – think of social sites as digital networking events. Don’t be the robot that simply advertises their jobs and disappears. Be involved, show an interest in others, forge relationships.
- Write about what you know
Not sure what to write? If you’re stumped, simply think about what you are saying to candidates on a daily basis throughout the recruitment process. Take what you’d say to individual candidates and put that into pieces of content. For example, you might want to offer advice on how the interview process has changed in the last five years, how to deal with counter-offers in today’s world, or how to return to the workplace after an extended break from it. These are all things you know, that you are dealing with on a daily basis, but that others might not have inside knowledge of. Writing about what you know won’t only make it easier for you to put out content, it will also come across as more genuine.
- Share valuable content
Create content that is relevant to your business, your market, your demographic. This could be in the form of an article, video, podcast, quiz, or something else. It could be company news, industry news or advice. It’s about pushing out value rather than a service that you’re trying to sell. Give value to candidates other than just promoting your jobs. There are a range of advice topics that would work but referring to the point above about writing what you know is important to keep in mind. Sharing other posts that you connect with and believe will be of value to clients or candidates is also key. Adding a comment to show why you think the content is interesting further builds your brand, demonstrating your views and values. It also helps to ignite conversations.
- Be consistently active on social media
LinkedIn rewards you for being consistent over time – their algorithms are skewed to favour consistency and so you will get more visibility. Consistency isn’t just important to achieve on LinkedIn but across your entire recruitment marketing campaign. Everything you post on any social media site and your website together builds a picture for candidates and clients. They will know that you understand the industry, have insightful opinions, and publish interesting job ads. You may have built a relationship with them over time – both seen and unseen – from comments on posts but also from engaging with other content that you’ve published and shared. The more they see, the fuller the picture. It’s a branding exercise built over time.
Why recruitment agencies should encourage personal branding
It is very hard to feel a personal connection with a company brand but not so with a person that works for and therefore represents that company. It’s a topic that has been discussed in several of Wave’s Talent Matters podcasts. Well known recruitment marketer Mitch Sullivan and co-founder of Paiger, Rohit Kapoor, are both staunch believers that clients and candidates largely choose an agency because of the personal brand of the consultant rather than the brand of the agency itself. “People buy from people,” Rohit maintains, so it makes sense to utilise the individual brand your consultants build over social media. It’s irrelevant whether they choose to move on to another agency in the future – use them while you’ve got them.
Research has shown that content shared by employees receives eight times the engagement of that shared by official brand channels. It’s also shared more widely, achieving a bigger reach. When you consider that every individual recruiter will have their own personal networks, the potential reach of the agency brand is magnified hugely. In addition to the heightened reach, content posted by an individual will naturally have more impact and engagement than that posted by a company. Some social media sites also prioritise personal posts over branded ones – Facebook is one such site that boosts individual posts over brand posts.
How can recruitment agencies help to reinforce personal brands?
- Personalise the Meet the Team section
RecWebs recommends a Meet the Team section on all recruitment websites as a way of humanising and adding personality to recruiters that many will ‘meet’ online before they do in person. Giving each member of the team a profile that includes more than just their role within the company, some sort of insight into them as people, will help to humanise them, forging those connections at an early stage. Adding a button that links to their LinkedIn profile will make it easy for people to immediately do a little research and increases the likelihood of a connection.
- Provide social media training
You might consider organising training on how to use social media professionally. Most people will use social media but have not had any guidance or training as to how to build engagement, nurture networks, or even how to optimise their profiles. There are numerous easily and instantly actionable tips that can elevate social media networking and recruiting, alongside knowledge as to how to form a longer term strategy. This could be outsourced, performed by the marketing department, or simply guided by someone in the agency that has experience utilising socials for personal branding.
In a tight market, standing out and being remembered (for the right reasons) will help you to distinguish yourself from other recruiters. Building and evolving your personal brand will enable you to connect with more candidates and clients, further your reach and forge relationships. Importantly, personal branding helps to build trust, and trust is required to enter into any sort of professional relationship. In a market where economic and political uncertainty has meant that job security is hugely prized, the ability for a candidate to fully trust a recruiter is paramount – and could mean the difference between attracting and placing a talented candidate into one of your jobs and losing out to a competitor.
Wave aims to create a world where talent is never missed by providing recruitment solutions through a mix of cutting-edge technology and creativity, via WaveTrackR (data-powered multi-poster, analytics tool and CV Search), RecWebs (tailored recruitment websites) and WaveMedia (strategic recruitment media buying).
