Having a strong online presence in the recruitment industry has never been more important than now.
We are all experiencing changes throughout the industry and are having to adapt our businesses in response to COVID-19. With the UK in lockdown, undoubtedly having an online presence is more important than ever for recruitment agencies. Equally, with this industry-wide shift towards online candidate attraction, how do you ensure your recruitment website can be found amongst the competition?
One route is content creation. For many of you, generating marketing content week after week is new territory and will be a real challenge.
So here’s five ways you can dial down on new content creation.
1. Recruitment agencies generate more content than virtually any other B2B business. Your jobs are your (not so) secret weapon in the battle for relevant web traffic. They are rich in keywords that resonate with your target audience. So long as the jobs appear on your own website, and are not just posted on job boards, they are helping with your SEO.
Make sure they are not confined to your CRM because they can be filled from your existing database — happy days from a speed-to-fill perspective, but less so from a brand building aspect.
Every job needs to be posted on your website. And your website needs to be built so that it archives job posts to maximize on the brand equity in every advert, rather than deleting them once they are filled. This is where selecting a website platform built specifically for the recruitment industry pays dividends over a WordPress site.
2. Nurture your brand ambassadors. Lean on them to help fill your content funnel. Do your consultants have an industry background in your area of specialism? Tap into their knowledge. Perhaps now is the time for them to write a blog of their own (it’s a rare breed who will), set up a monthly quick-fire call to quiz them about what’s happening in the market.
Better still, video interview them (you can record meetings via Google Hangouts, Skype or any other video conferencing tool you might use) for a variety of content that can be published more quickly than long-form content, with the added benefit of video content being the most engaging form of social media content out there. In fact, it’s estimated that the average person will spend 100 minutes every day watching online videos in 2021 according to Smart Insights.
Are your candidates and clients satisfied? Ask them to write a testimonial. Peer-to-peer recommendations give an authentic credence to your brand, especially as younger generations are more sceptical about corporate messaging.
3. Build relationships with influencers in your field. Get connected with the industry press, membership bodies and partners relevant to your key sectors. There has never been a better time for collaboration and partnerships! Offer insights and commentary from your leadership team in return for backlinks to your site when they mention you. Ask your senior managers and team leaders who they know in your target industries that you can reach out to for quotes or to tag when they are sharing your content across their social channels.
4. Repurpose your existing content. Take a look at the wealth of information you already provide to support your candidates. Or the tender documents you send to clients. Consider how can this be repackaged into blog posts, web copy or social posts.
Content has an online shelf life. Who reads articles that are more than a few years old for fear they are outdated? Look back on previous articles you’ve written. Simply updating and republishing old blog posts with new content and images can increase organic traffic by as much as 106% according to Hubspot.
5. Distribute more widely. Think reach: same content, populated across more channels. It goes without saying to share your content across social media. But are you always encouraging the reverse by providing links to your social media on all content pages as a call to action? Obtaining backlinks on social media shows Google that you’re creating valuable content people are actively engaging with, improving your rankings. As well as sharing content on your own website are you aiming to get it published by other industry sources relevant to your target candidates and clients?
Content is king in the quest for inbound candidate attraction and wider brand awareness. We just have to work smarter not harder to feed the beast.
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