Being engaging on social is hard when you're in the recruitment business. Candidates are only really interested in hearing from you when you have the right role for them - so how can you make sure you stay interesting over time to both professionals and potential clients?
I recently spoke to Catherine Gutsell of Hays, a global recruiting group that was recently recognized as the most socially engaged staffing agency on LinkedIn globally.
Have a listen to the interview on iTunes, SoundCloud or keep reading for a summary.
How did Hays become the most socially engaged staffing agency on LinkedIn?
"Our content - we have the highest LinkedIn content marketing score in our industry. The Content Marketing Score is a measurement of how our audience engages with our content across the different facets of LinkedIn, including our LinkedIn company page, employee shares, employee blog posts and in LinkedIn groups. Every day, across each of these facets of LinkedIn, we share high quality content, which helps our audience tackle a challenge they are facing, or helps them solve a problem. We use social media to provide our audience with something of value, we make sure our social sharing copy speaks directly to our audience which grabs attention in busy news feeds.
Buy-in from senior stakeholders across the business has also been important, starting with Alistair Cox, our CEO. Our managing directors understand the value of LinkedIn, they advocate its use, are personally active, which sets a great example to our consultant population, which leads me on to my third point.
Our recruiters actively use LinkedIn. We educate and empower our consultants to use LinkedIn every day to engage with clients and candidates. We have a very strong training team at Hays, and it starts with new joiners. New starters are trained on how to set up an effective LinkedIn profile and provided with tips on how to maximize LinkedIn as a candidate generation and business development tool. This training is delivered through a variety of factsheets, face-to-face training and webinars.
We provide our consultants with the tools to share relevant content consistently on social media in a time efficient way, and in a way that demonstrates the results of social sharing to them. Why? Employees who are socially engaged are 57% more likely to generate more leads and content shared by employees drives 8x higher engagement than company content.
And finally, we also have nearly 100 employees actively using LinkedIn Publisher to post blogs. In October alone, this generated 173k page views and 18.9k interactions."
Alistair Cox, the Hays CEO, has been a LinkedIn Influencer since 2012 - what impact has this had?
"Alistair publishes LinkedIn Influencer content on a monthly basis, and has now amassed over 185,000 followers around the world. In fact, he was named by LinkedIn as one of the top 10 leaders on LinkedIn, alongside Richard Branson and David Cameron, which was a fantastic achievement, for both him personally, and for our business.
Alistair's presence and activity on LinkedIn, has really helped not only drive his reputation as a respected leader, but it's also helped Hays become perceived as a socially engaged company. Also, some research indicated that 82% consumers trust a company more if the CEO has a social media voice.
Lastly, as I said previously, Alistair's presence on LinkedIn sets a great example for our consultant population, and also empowers them to be active on LinkedIn."
Follow Catherine on Twitter @CatGutsell and read the full article on the Link Humans blog.