The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast

There’s a lot of confusion about short-form and long-form content, and we hear it almost every week in our coaching conversations. Some people are convinced short-form is all they need. A few LinkedIn posts a week, the occasional quick video, and that’s the marketing taken care of. Others know they should be producing something more […] The post The Content Mix That Actually Works This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Last week, we talked about why strategic prioritisation matters and how it creates your unfair competitive advantage. We looked at how the spray-and-pray approach is costing you 5 times as much to acquire clients, resulting in 52% lower marketing ROI and 40% higher client churn. More importantly, we discussed how strategic prioritisation transforms your business: marketing spend decreases whilst results increase, you grow 30% faster, and you build sustainable competitive advantages that can’t be easily replicated. So now the question becomes: where exactly should you focus your limited resources for maximum impact as you plan for late 2025 and into 2026? Today, I’m going to walk you through the critical areas that research shows demand attention. Let’s dive in. What You’ll Learn in This Episode Identify your true business driver by analysing conversion data—discover which activities actually close deals versus those that just create awareness (one agency increased conversions 40% using this method) Niche specialisation delivers 300% higher profitability than generalist approaches, with specialist agencies filling roles 2.3x faster and commanding 20-30% premium fees Client retention strategies that boost profitability by 25-95% with just a 5% improvement, including proactive communication frameworks and multi-stakeholder engagement tactics The Lead Generation Triad framework for building predictable sales pipelines using current connections, content marketing, and systematic cold outreach 2026 recruitment marketing priorities, including AI-driven solutions (81% of agencies investing), social sourcing strategies, and authentic employer branding approaches Technology stack essentials that reduce time-to-fill by 60% and help agencies close 40% more deals through integrated CRM-ATS systems Identify Your Key Business Drivers Before you dive into any of these priority areas, there’s one critical step that far too many recruitment business owners skip: identifying your key business driver by reviewing actual conversion data. Here’s what I mean. I was speaking with an MD recently who was convinced that their time should be split equally across all their marketing activities. They were doing a bit of LinkedIn, a bit of email, some cold calling, and attending the occasional networking event. But when we sat down and analysed where their converted clients came from over the last two years, you know, the ones who signed terms and generated revenue, we discovered something fascinating. Their LinkedIn content was absolutely working. It was creating awareness, generating engagement, and booking initial meetings. But here’s the thing: those LinkedIn connections only converted into actual clients when they transitioned to messaging, face-to-face meetings, or structured follow-up calls. The pattern was clear: LinkedIn opened the door and built credibility, but it was the in-person meeting or the strategic phone conversation that closed the deal. Without that crucial next step, the LinkedIn engagement rarely converted to revenue. This revelation completely changed their strategic priorities. They didn’t stop posting on LinkedIn; it was a vital awareness tool. But they realised their true business driver was the face-to-face meeting. So, they restructured everything around getting more of those meetings and making them count. They used LinkedIn to create awareness and credibility, then systematically moved prospects toward booking virtual coffee meetings or office visits. The result? A 40% increase in client conversions over the next quarter. So, before you commit to any strategy for 2026, I want you to do this simple exercise: Look at your converted clients over the last two years. Trace back through the entire journey. What created the initial awareness? What built the credibility? And critically, what was the final touchpoint that actually converted them into a client? Was it a face-to-face meeting after connecting on LinkedIn? A follow-up call after they downloaded your content. A presentation at their office that you arranged through email outreach. Whatever that conversion moment was, that’s your key business driver. Everything else is supporting that driver. Once you’ve identified this, you can build your entire priority framework around creating more of those conversion moments, whilst using your other channels strategically to feed that pipeline.  Market Positioning and Niche Specialisation One of the most fundamental strategic decisions you face is whether to operate as a generalist or specialist agency. The evidence overwhelmingly favours niche specialisation for agencies seeking competitive advantage. Listen to these numbers: • Niche recruitment agencies fill roles 2.3 times faster than generalists because they know the industry inside and out. • They earn 3.2 times more referrals due to the trust and credibility that comes with deep industry expertise. • They command 20 to 30% higher fees thanks to demonstrated specialisation. • They achieve 89% client retention rates, far above the 62% average for generalists. • And they see a 300% boost in revenue and profitability compared to generalist counterparts. The qualification rates tell the story: niche recruiters achieve 20-25% qualification rates, compared to just 5-8% for generalists. With 72% of hiring managers struggling to fill specialised roles, niche agencies are uniquely positioned to meet this challenge. Client Relationship Management and Retention Though new client acquisition often dominates business development discussions, client retention represents one of the most profitable priorities. Here’s a stat that should make you sit up: increasing client retention by just 5% can boost profitability by 25-95%. Let me share some priority actions: Exceptional service delivery: The temps and contractors you place are your frontline ambassadors, but this principle applies equally to permanent placements. The care you show the people you’ve placed directly impacts on your client relationships. Research indicates that highly engaged placements are 59% more productive and 87% less likely to experience premature departure. When you invest in looking after the candidates you’ve placed, checking in regularly, and ensuring they’re settled and supported, this directly impacts client perception and repeat business. Your client views you as someone who prioritises the long-term success of placements, not just someone who fills roles and then disappears. Proactive communication: The best partnerships are built on regular, strategic conversations, not just transactional job orders. Quarterly hiring roadmap sessions keep you close to client businesses, even when they’re not actively hiring, transforming you from a vendor to a strategic partner. Value-added services: Agencies providing strategic insights into workforce management achieve 33% higher revenue growth than those focused solely on transactional recruitment. Sharing data-driven insights, market trends, and salary benchmarks positions your agency as indispensable. Multi-stakeholder engagement: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to identify key decision-makers beyond your primary contact. Companies increasingly want relationships at the strategic level where budget allocation decisions are made, not just where job orders are placed. Business Development and Lead Generation A robust, predictable sales pipeline separates recruitment companies that thrive from those that merely survive. We teach the Lead Generation Triad, which provides a framework for balanced business development: Current Connections: Your existing network of clients, candidates, and industry contacts represents your most valuable lead source. Regular re-engagement of your database through targeted campaigns can generate hundreds of downloads and follow-up opportunities. Content as a Convincer: Strategic content marketing establishes your agency as a trusted industry resource. Recruitment agencies with active blogs generate 126% more leads than those without consistent content publication. Cold Outreach: Whilst uncomfortable for many, systematic cold outreach, when done consistently across multiple channels (phone, direct messages, texts, video messages, emails), revolutionises business development over the long term. The key is integration: all three components working together create momentum across short, medium, and long-term horizons. Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding As we look towards 2026, recruitment marketing capabilities have become essential competitive differentiators. Successful companies are prioritising: • Media diversification: Reducing dependency on just LinkedIn posts by using images, polls and videos on multiple platforms. • Employee advocacy programmes: Leveraging authentic employee-generated content to showcase company culture. • Candidate quality focus: Moving beyond volume metrics to emphasise quality of placements and long-term retention. If you haven’t listed/watched Sandra’s post on candidate care click here. • Content marketing: 45% of agencies plan to use content generation as a main tool for candidate and client attraction. • Social sourcing: 75% of agencies plan to utilise social sourcing strategies for candidate attraction. The shift is clear: recruitment marketing in 2025 and beyond requires authenticity, strategic channel selection, and consistent value delivery. Technology Investment and Automation An integrated tech stack that powers both growth and operational efficiency is potentially transformative for recruitment agencies in 2026. By the end of 2024, 81% of agencies were investing in AI-driven recruitment solutions, and 67% of recruiters believed that increased AI usage would be a top trend in 2025. Strategic technology priorities include: Integrated CRM and ATS systems: Disjointed systems cause inefficiencies, outdated data, slower sourcing, and missed opportunities. Research indicates that automation can reduce time to fill a position by up to 60%, whilst integrated ATS-CRM solutions help agencies close 40% more deals than those using standalone systems. Workflow automation: Automation eliminates manual, repetitive tasks, from candidate engagement workflows to AI-driven CV formatting and chatbot-powered lead capture. This enables recruiters to focus on high-value activities, such as building relationships and nurturing talent pipelines. The key insight: technology investment should drive efficiency and enhance human capabilities, not replace the relationship-building that remains central to recruitment success. Performance Measurement and KPIs Strategic prioritisation requires measurement. You can’t manage what you don’t measure, as they say. Essential recruitment KPIs include: • Financial metrics: Cost per hire, revenue per recruiter, gross profit margin. • Efficiency metrics: Time to fill, time to hire, candidate pipeline health. • Quality metrics: Quality of hire, first-year attrition, offer acceptance rate. • Relationship metrics: Candidate satisfaction, hiring manager satisfaction, client retention rates. • Activity metrics: Conversion rates by acquisition channel, source of hire effectiveness, and recruiter performance dashboards. The most successful agencies use applicant tracking systems and recruitment CRMs to automate tracking, pull reports, and monitor pipeline health. Here’s the key: define your objectives first, then identify the questions metrics will help answer, and finally determine which KPIs to track. Avoid tracking metrics simply because you can. Every KPI should inform strategic decisions. Putting It All Into Action Your Strategic Planning Process For broader strategic planning, follow these essential steps: 1. Conduct a Year-End Review: Reflect on what worked and what didn’t in 2024 to 2025. Assess financial performance, operational efficiency, and alignment with your broader vision. 2. Define Clear Goals: Avoid vague aspirations. Instead of “grow revenue,” set specific outcomes, such as “increase contract placements by 25% in Q1 2026” or “expand into healthcare recruitment niche by June 2026.” 3. Prioritise ruthlessly: Focus on just a handful of well-defined goals. Prioritisation isn’t about deciding which goals are most important; it’s about understanding what needs to be done now to enable progress later. 4. Build a Detailed Roadmap: Break down each goal into smaller steps or milestones. Assign clear responsibilities and set realistic timelines. Connect long-term objectives to everyday actions. 5. Establish Measurement Systems: Define success metrics for each priority. Ensure you have tools and processes in place to track progress. 6. Create a Decision-Making Framework: Use your strategic priorities as a filter. When new opportunities arise, ask: “Does this align with our strategic priorities?” If not, the answer should be no. Avoiding the Common Pitfalls Strategic implementation fails when companies: • Try to do too much at once, spreading resources too thin. • Set goals without clear measurement criteria. • Fail to communicate strategy throughout the organisation. • Don’t review and adjust plans regularly based on results. • Allow short-term pressures to override strategic priorities constantly. The most successful companies view strategic planning as an ongoing process, rather than a one-time exercise. They hold regular review sessions, celebrate progress, and adjust course when evidence indicates change is needed. Wrapping Up: Your Competitive Advantage Starts Here So, as you plan for 2026, the choice is clear. You can continue with scattered “spray and pray” activities that feel productive but deliver mediocre results. Or you can embrace strategic prioritisation that focuses your limited resources on high-impact areas. The evidence is compelling. Companies that set real priorities and execute with discipline consistently outperform those that don’t, whether measured by revenue growth, client retention, placement quality, or recruiter productivity. They’re not just busier; they’re more effective, more profitable, and more resilient when market conditions change. Strategic prioritisation transforms recruitment businesses from reactive order-takers into proactive strategic partners. It allows smaller agencies to compete with larger competitors by dominating specific niches rather than being mediocre generalists. It creates sustainable competitive advantages that can’t be easily replicated. Warren Buffett wisely observed: “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” For recruitment business owners, success in 2026 begins with having the courage to say no to scattered activities and yes to strategic focus. The question isn’t whether you can afford to prioritise strategically. It’s whether you can afford not to. Thanks, Denise How We Can Help If you’re sitting there thinking, “This all makes sense, Denise, but I don’t know where to start,” I completely understand. That’s exactly why Sharon and I created Superfast Circle. We work with recruitment, search, and staffing companies just like yours to help you set the marketing and sales priorities that drive growth. If you’d like to discuss how we can support you, book a call with us here. The post Setting Priorities for Your Recruitment Business – Episode 2 appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

How often have you spent hours crafting the perfect blog post, hit publish, shared it once on LinkedIn, and then watched it disappear into the digital abyss? If you’re nodding along, you’re not alone. Most recruitment business owners treat their blog posts like one-hit wonders, missing out on the goldmine of content opportunities under their noses. Here’s the truth: creating quality blog content takes considerable time and effort, but the real magic happens when you multiply its impact through strategic repurposing. One well-researched blog post can fuel weeks of content across multiple channels. In last week’s podcast, we discussed the foundations of content marketing. This week, we’re diving into the practical side—how to extract maximum value from every single blog post you publish. 1. LinkedIn Carousel Posts Transform your blog’s key points into visually engaging LinkedIn carousels. Break down your main insights into 5-7 slides with compelling headlines and supporting visuals. This format performs exceptionally well on LinkedIn and positions you as a thought leader in your niche. 2. Video Scripts, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn Reels Convert your blog outline into video scripts for talking head content. Use your blog’s structure as a natural flow for your video, addressing each main point as a separate segment. This works particularly well for educational content and industry insights. Extract quotable moments, statistics, or quick tips from your blog to create short-form video content. These bite-sized insights work perfectly for Reels and can drive traffic back to your full blog post. Pro tip: Record multiple short videos from one blog post – one for each main section. 3. LinkedIn Newsletters and 4. Email Newsletters It is so easy to use your blog as your newsletter. Ask your favourite AI tool to make it more like a newsletter, and you’ll be ready. Break your comprehensive blog posts into digestible email segments sent over multiple days or weeks. This approach keeps your audience engaged while providing deep value from a single piece of content. 5. Podcast Episode Topics Use your blog posts as detailed show notes or expand them into full podcast episodes. The research is already done, and you have a clear structure to follow for engaging audio content. Bonus: Invite guests to discuss the topics you’ve covered in your blog posts for additional perspectives. 6. Social Media Quote Graphics Pull compelling statistics, quotes, or key insights from your blog and turn them into shareable graphics. These work across all social platforms and help establish your expertise. Design tip: Create a consistent template that reflects your brand for easy recognition. 7. Lead Magnets and Downloadable Resources Transform comprehensive blog posts into PDF guides, checklists, or templates that serve as lead magnets. To add extra value, include worksheets or action steps not found in the original post. 8. Email Signature Content Include links to your most valuable blog posts in your email signature, rotating them monthly to continuously promote different pieces of content in your regular business communications. 9. Client Presentation Materials Use insights, statistics, and frameworks from your blog posts in client presentations and proposals. This demonstrates your expertise while providing valuable context for your services. Application: Reference your industry research blog posts when discussing market challenges with prospects. 10. Multi-Platform Content Campaigns Create themed campaigns around your blog topics, sharing related content across multiple platforms simultaneously. Use the blog as your cornerstone content, then create platform-specific variations. Campaign example: Blog post: “2025 Recruitment Trends” LinkedIn: Professional insights post Instagram: Behind-the-scenes Reel of research process Email: Key findings summary Podcast: Deep dive discussion Stop letting your blog posts gather digital dust after one share. Your content deserves to work harder for your business. Thanks Denise and Sharon How We Can Help If you’re ready to maximise your content impact and want guidance on strategic repurposing, we can help. Our Superfast Circle program provides recruitment business owners with ready-to-use blog posts, frameworks, templates, and support required to turn one blog post into weeks of engaging content. We help you develop systematic content multiplication strategies whilst building your authority to stand out in today’s competitive recruitment market. The post 10 Ways to Leverage a Single Blog Post for Maximum Impact appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, we’re going to talk more tactically. In our first episode, we discussed the challenges that recruiters face. In our second episode, we covered creating content for two distinct groups. Whether you’re in a candidate-rich market, a candidate-short market, a client-rich market, or a client-short market, you need content that speaks to both groups. Content Formats That Deliver Results Our industry’s content works across the spectrum for both candidates and clients. You can often leverage content for both groups, making life much easier. When you think about recruitment, it has both B2B and B2C elements but generally operates more like a B2B environment. What do I mean by that? Purchasing decisions in a B2B environment often have multiple stakeholders and several reasons why people buy. It’s not the same as going to Amazon, checking which air fryer has the most reviews and the best price, then clicking to buy. Thought leadership really makes a difference in this environment when it comes to influencing content. We’ve discussed short-form versus long-form content in the past. The great thing about working in recruitment is that you can create longer-form content—informative reports, videos, webinars, and blog posts—all thought leadership content that positions your company as an authority. These can then be leveraged, sliced and diced, and used differently on all your social channels. Thought leadership positions your company as an authority in your recruitment space, building trust with both employers and candidates. Industry Reports And Salary Guides First, industry reports and salary guides. Any chunky piece of material will be read by a CEO or MD because it positions you. It could be about interview skills – either for candidates going for their first interview or for employers looking to improve their interview process. Reports on building culture, creating high-performing teams, or succession planning are all valuable. These cover the soft skills of building teams and developing careers—questions people have that can be addressed in excellent short reports. We’ve been working with recruiters for nearly 18 years, and our experience (backed by data) indicates that well over half of decision-makers consider white papers and in-depth reports to be extremely valuable sources of information. These reports serve dual purposes – attracting employers who need benchmarking data and candidates researching compensation expectations or career development. For those who’ve looked into working with us at Superfast Circle, you know we provide these for our clients, who use them incredibly well. Salary guides are particularly effective on both sides. Candidates want to know if they’re being paid enough, while clients want to know what they need to pay to get the right people. Creating a salary guide may take work, but it will be downloaded multiple times from your website. Think about a 2025 tech salary guide that includes compensation ranges for different roles, insights on the evolving workplace, how remote work has affected compensation, skill demands, and emerging roles. This elevates you from supplier to trusted advisor because people value the information you’re sharing. Educational And Value-Add Content Educational content like how-to guides will always be popular. These can be created as blog posts, reports, or snippets shared on social media. The great thing about recruitment is that educational content serves a dual purpose – building awareness while providing genuine value to prospects. Frank Kern, a marketer I admire, has a motto: “Show people you can help them by actually helping them.” That’s what value-added content does. We give away lots of free content. I always tell Sharon, if people went through all our blog posts and podcasts and put the pieces together, they’d never need us (though they’d still need to do the work and write the content). Think about the value you can add. People want to “touch the coat” – they want to work with someone they recognise as an expert. For hiring managers, you could create guides on writing effective job descriptions, conducting structured interviews, improving onboarding (many companies get this terribly wrong), or building inclusive hiring processes. For candidates, career development resources are valuable. Our research reveals that career growth and skill development now rank higher than salary when it comes to switching jobs. You could create skills assessment frameworks, career path mapping for emerging roles, professional development roadmaps, or guides to transitioning between industries. Webinars And Video Content Webinars and video tutorials are a bit more advanced but hugely impactful. LinkedIn prioritises video content. One of our clients, who does pro bono work helping people from underprivileged areas prepare for the job market, is converting her PowerPoint presentations into videos. Webinars and video tutorials work incredibly well and aren’t as difficult to create as people think. They help you stand out because people get a different experience of you – they see and hear you, creating a closer connection. You can also slice and dice all that content into short-form videos for LinkedIn. Video allows you to tell more complex stories through visuals and audio. We’re human beings wired for stories – we all love a good tale. By creating video content, you can break down complex topics in a more engaging format. You can explain hiring processes, demonstrate interview techniques, showcase company culture, or present market research findings. Social Proof Is Critical Social proof is critical in any market, particularly recruitment. When we share testimonials and case studies, they’re always among our most-viewed content. We have heat maps on our websites that show which pages get the most attention. I call this “horse’s mouth content” – it’s much better if somebody else promotes you rather than you promoting yourself. Take the time to create a structured process where you share testimonials and case studies in your marketing. For example, after an initial conversation with a potential client about supplying people for a project, send them several case studies. This works well in a B2B environment because those case studies will likely be shared with other decision-makers in the department. Personal Branding Matters Personal branding is important. You can choose to do it or not, but be mindful that if you don’t, somebody else will. The market has shifted to a more collaborative environment. People buy from people and like to know who you are, your values, vision, and mission. Make sure that alongside your other content, you’re creating personal branding posts. Not about what you’ve eaten for dinner or your deepest secrets – people don’t need that. They can form connections with you in many other ways. Be authentic but strategic. Look at the personal branding posts Sharon and I share to get a sense of who we are. Many people who start working with us have accessed some of our content, particularly our personal branding posts. So when considering what content works well, don’t overlook this aspect. Email Marketing And Automation I won’t say too much about this, as we have extensive content on our website about these areas, but email marketing still delivers the highest ROI of any marketing activity. People always open their emails, and both candidates and clients will engage if your emails add value. Email marketing makes a massive difference because you’re in constant connection with people. You’re not just working with the 3-5% who are ready to buy now – you’re building and nurturing relationships. Similarly, LinkedIn messenger campaigns can be effective. Sometimes it’s easier to reach people on LinkedIn than by phone. You can have meaningful exchanges and build connections. Think about how you can adapt and repurpose your content. You can use AI tools to cut blogs into smaller email campaigns. Consider using automated sequences, particularly for email marketing. Your Website As A Content Hub One thing we always emphasise is building awareness on social media, but your main asset is your authority website. We want people landing there because it’s a repository of all the ways you can help them. Your website is your content hub, housing all your blog content (which Google will pick up), downloads, videos, and other resources. Remember, you own your website, unlike your LinkedIn profile. No matter how much you pay for a recruiter license, you don’t own your LinkedIn presence. On our website, we have podcasts that are all transcribed. I get the audio recording transcribed, then summarised in a document with all the key points, and publish it on our website. This is really useful for people. Think about all the content you can create that answers the questions your clients and candidates have when you’re not actually there. Next week, I’ll pull this together and look at content planning frameworks, thinking about the matrix of awareness, consideration, evergreen content versus just-in-time content.   Thanks   Denise How We Can Help If you’re struggling to create consistent, valuable content that positions you as an expert in your recruitment niche, we can help. At Superfast Circle, we provide our members with ready-to-use content, from industry reports and salary guides to blog posts and social media updates. Our members don’t have to worry about what to post or when – they have a steady stream of quality content that attracts both clients and candidates. If you’d like to have professionally written recruitment-specific content that you can customise for your market, check out Superfast Circle at www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/superfast-circle. The post Content that Converts: Recruitment Marketing Content Assets appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This week’s post and podcast are the second part of our mini-series on content marketing for recruitment businesses. We’re diving into one of the most critical aspects of successful content marketing: truly understanding your audience and creating content that resonates with them. If you’re new here, welcome! Our website has 469 more podcasts that you can download and enjoy. Understanding Your Dual Audience As a recruiter, search owner, or staffing owner, you’re in a unique position compared to other businesses. You’re simultaneously serving two distinct audiences: employers who need talent and candidates seeking job opportunities. This duality can be challenging, but it’s precisely what makes recruitment marketing and content creation complex and powerful. It’s important to remember that even if you only need clients at the moment and don’t have a problem with candidates, you should still create content for both groups. Things in recruitment can flip-flop quickly, so maintaining a balance is crucial. According to data we’ve examined, including the Manpower survey, over 80% of companies across multiple sectors are experiencing skill gaps this year, whilst more than 20% of workers plan to change jobs. There’s tremendous need, uncertainty, anxiety, and opportunity on this equation. For those who can provide valuable, genuine content, you’ll significantly increase your chances of getting on the radar of the people you want to reach. Creating Content For Employers Generic business content doesn’t work when creating content for client companies. Recruitment is highly personal—you’re helping companies find people who will help them scale and grow. Your content needs to reflect your understanding of where candidates are, what it means to run a company, and what it means to build a team. When thinking about your client segments, consider: The main vertical you’re working with Company size (SMES, enterprise, etc.) Geographical location (UK recruiters recruiting in Europe, US recruiters recruiting internationally) Growth stage of the companies (startups, scaling businesses) It’s also essential to understand the decision-maker’s pain points. People will buy your service if they have an issue or problem they want to solve. Some common pain points include: Pressure to find talent quickly Budget constraints ROI concerns Predictability challenges Cultural fit concerns Administrative burden of recruiting Your goal should be to position your content as a premium value-add, creating a halo effect that shows you’re the person who can help them. This will make a significant difference in attracting clients. I currently favour Perplexity Pro alongside Google and other tools for researching client needs. Industry trends analysis, client conversations, and surveys are also valuable resources. It’s easier now to conduct client and candidate research than ever before. Developing Candidate Content Strategies When developing content for candidates, consider that they can be at very different stages in their journey: Early career professionals just entering the market Mid-level candidates with varying skill levels and specialisations The growing segment of “new collar workers” – people without traditional degrees but with specialised technical skills Active versus passive candidates According to our research, about 76% of UK professionals report looking for a new job in 2025, but only 48% are confident about opportunities in their sector. This reveals a significant gap you can address with your content. You also need to understand candidates’ motivations for moving: Career growth opportunities Skill development possibilities Work-life balance concerns Wellbeing priorities Cultural alignment needs Job security concerns, especially with ongoing layoffs and redundancies You’ll never have trouble finding candidates for your roles if you get this right. For deeper research, consider talking directly to candidates, conducting surveys, interviewing them, mapping their journey, and reviewing industry reports. Content For The Buyer Journey When creating content, consider both the employer and candidate journeys. Consider the buyer cycle I often mention (you’re probably tired of hearing about it!): awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. For each stage, develop specific content types. For example: Awareness stage: Salary and health trends reports Consideration stage: Case studies on “How we helped X achieve Y” You can also create content that serves both audiences simultaneously: Workplace trends reports Industry salary guides Skills development resources Culture-building content Productivity tips Soft skills development materials Thanks, Denise and Sharon  How We Can Help Understanding your audience and creating content that resonates with employers and candidates is complex but rewarding. Our Superfast Circle membership provides ready-made content that you can use and adapt for your specific sectors. This saves you time while maintaining consistent communication with clients and candidates. If you haven’t taken our new marketing scorecard yet, which measures your candidate and client attraction score, you can access it here. The assessment takes 3-5 minutes, and you’ll receive a personalised report. For those who download the report, we’re offering a complimentary 45-minute consultation, during which Sharon and I can provide specific ideas tailored to your sector.   The post Recruitment Content Marketing: Engaging Both Audiences appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This week’s post and podcast discuss content marketing and how it can help recruitment companies address today’s market challenges. As one of our lovely clients once said, “The thing is, Denise, you don’t know what you don’t know.” Making connections about how content can help and where you can use it effectively can be incredibly valuable for recruiters and search companies. If you’re new here, welcome! We appreciate all our listeners. If you find this podcast useful, please give us a shout out on social media or leave a review – we appreciate it. For those relatively new to marketing or even if you’ve been doing it for a while, remember we’ve created our candidate and client attraction scorecard, which you can use to assess your progress. It provides a personalised assessment with low, medium, and high scores and fundamental actions based on which aspects you excel at (or not). Visit Superfast.co.uk/scorecard, enter your name and email address, and complete the questions. It takes 3-5 minutes, and we’re happy to discuss the results. Current Recruitment Market Challenges I’ve got my ear to the pulse on what’s happening in the market, and there are several significant challenges affecting recruitment companies right now: Slowly intensifying skills shortages across the globe and every sector Rising turnover and declining engagement in workplaces Longer hiring cycles and increased costs for everyone Tension between remote and hybrid work models AI is disrupting every industry, particularly recruitment Administrative burdens associated with recruiting Market and economic uncertainty Trust and credibility issues throughout the industry Candidates experience problems For instance, I ran a training session for our Superfast Circle members this morning as part of our Personal Branding Bootcamp. One of our key focuses was differentiation in a crowded market and how to stand out, which makes personal branding more important than ever. Skills Shortages and Content Solutions If you go to any research tool, LinkedIn, or online resource, you’ll find that 87% of companies are experiencing skills gaps in key areas this year. Manpower did the original study, and the situation only seems to worsen. There are many factors behind this—cutting back on training people in the past is now coming home to haunt us. Sharon was recently at an NPA conference, where someone shared that birth rates have dropped drastically, which will further impact talent availability. This skills shortage isn’t going away anytime soon. There’s also an evolution in the skills needed. LinkedIn’s Work Change Report predicts that the skills needed for jobs will change by up to 70% by 2030. We’re also seeing the rise of the “New Collar Worker”—professionals without traditional degrees but with specialised skills needed to make the world work. When people face problems, they search for knowledge and understanding. That’s where recruitment content marketing can help. Imagine clients and candidates looking for roles who find your recruitment website or LinkedIn profile filled with educational content that adds value. Content that helps them develop talent pipelines, improve employer branding, and provides industry knowledge positions you as an expert in specific skill areas. People work with those who “get them.” Simple blog posts, reports about market trends, and guides on building talent pipelines can differentiate you as someone who understands specific skill areas, whether hiring data analysts or building sales teams. Addressing Turnover and Engagement Issues Be prepared for some concerning statistics: According to McKinsey and Deloitte reports, 23% of workers plan to quit this year. Before the world went “absolutely bonkers” five years ago, the average turnover was 10% across the board—that’s increased significantly now. Professional services sectors are experiencing turnover rates well over 50%. Perhaps most concerning is that only 32% of employees are actively engaged, and up to 15% are actively disengaged. How can lead generation content help? For clients, you can create content about how to engage and retain staff. While large corporations theoretically should know how to do this, many small SMES don’t. As recruitment consultants and experts, you have valuable knowledge to share. Consider developing: Retention-focused content for clients Career development resources for candidates Culture-building content that improves organisational atmosphere Engagement strategies that acknowledge different generational perspectives on work Streamlining Longer Hiring Cycles The recruitment process is becoming increasingly time-consuming. Some companies perceive it as expensive (though it’s not). AI is entering the mix, and some companies are misinformed, thinking that multiple agencies pursuing the same role would be a better option for them. This is where education comes in. Develop thought leadership articles for your website and LinkedIn about best hiring practices – what works and what doesn’t. Personal branding helps you stand out while delivering this valuable information. Create candidate-nurturing content that reduces time-to-hire and educational materials that streamline decision-making processes. People will read these posts, watch videos, and engage with content that helps them solve their problems. Digital marketing for search companies can play a crucial role here. Managing Remote and Hybrid Work Tensions There’s tremendous tension in the market around work arrangements. Just this morning, I read a newsletter from a recruiter discussing their current market experience. They often have to tell candidates, “Look, what you’re asking for now isn’t realistic. We can’t design the perfect role for you because this client wants everyone back in the office three days a week, and that client no longer offers remote working opportunities.” This presents content opportunities: Market intelligence reports on workplace trends Guidance for handling hybrid work arrangements Resources for successful remote work practices Several Superfast Circle members receive yearly reports from us that they can customise for their sectors. This kind of recruitment blog optimisation positions you as knowledgeable about current workforce trends. Differentiation In a Crowded Market I’m in a Facebook group with about 100,000 women, and someone recently posted a question about market saturation. I firmly believe there’s no such thing as market saturation—we have 8 billion people on the planet! However, many people offer similar services, and clients choose to work with different individuals based on what they see, hear, and experience. Standing out in a market where people appear to offer similar services can be challenging. You must articulate your unique value proposition – why people should work with you specifically. This is where content marketing for recruiters makes a significant difference. Here’s something interesting: approximately 900 million people on LinkedIn, but less than 4% post regularly. If you posted just a bit more, you’d have an excellent chance of getting in front of your market. Don’t focus on vanity metrics – focus on impressions. If you have knowledge and experience from years of successful recruiting, share that more through value-added content. Give tips, advice, specialised industry insights, success stories, and highlight your unique approach. Social media for recruitment agencies is a powerful tool when used consistently. Even if you feel like you’re giving away your best information (as we do with our podcasts), the personal connection brings people to work with you directly. Content can make an enormous difference in helping you stand out in a crowded market. Thanks Denise How We Can Help The challenges in the recruitment sector I’ve outlined aren’t going away anytime soon. Content marketing strategies for recruiters offer practical solutions to each problem area, helping you educate clients, attract candidates, and position yourself as an expert. If you’d like to learn more about marketing a small recruitment company or how we could help your recruitment or search business develop effective content marketing, visit superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call to schedule a conversation. The post Content Marketing: The Recruiter’s Solution to Market Challenges appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

  As recruitment business owners, we’re all too familiar with the challenges of attracting, retaining, and developing talent. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Howard Greenwood, a seasoned recruitment expert with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Howard shared invaluable insights on the current state of recruitment, the evolving landscape of business development, and the role of technology in our sector. Howard identified three primary challenges that recruitment companies are grappling with: Attracting and retaining recruiters Adapting to changing business development practices Effectively utilising technology Let’s delve into each of these areas and explore Howard’s advice on tackling them. 1. Attracting And Retaining Talent: A Focus On Behaviours And Team Fit Regarding attracting and retaining talent, Howard emphasised the importance of focusing on behaviours and team fit rather than solely on skills. He pointed out a common pitfall in recruitment: “We recruit for a position, and we recruit based on skills. We remove people from those positions because of their behaviours.” This insight highlights the need to shift our approach when hiring for our own companies. Instead of fixating on finding someone with the perfect skill set, we should prioritise candidates whose behaviours and attributes align with our team’s ethos and values. Howard suggested a three-pronged approach to hiring: Behaviours: Identify the behaviours that align with your company’s values and culture. Will to do the job: Ensure the candidate is genuinely motivated to perform the role. Skills: Consider the technical abilities required for the position. By prioritising behaviours and motivation over skills, we’re more likely to build a cohesive team that works well together and stays with the company long-term. Developing Your Team: The Importance Of Ongoing Training One of the most striking points Howard made was about the need for continuous training and development. He challenged the traditional approach of providing minimal training and expecting immediate results: “We recruit easy and train hard. And I think we’re going to start to change that around. We’ve got to start to train hard so we can make recruitment easier.” Howard advocated for a comprehensive training programme that extends well beyond the initial onboarding period. He suggested implementing: A 13-week initial training package A second 13-week training package Ongoing development throughout the first year and beyond This approach helps new recruits become more effective more quickly and contributes to higher retention rates and increased billings in the long run. Understanding Individual Strengths And Team Dynamics Another crucial aspect of developing your team is recognising and nurturing individual strengths. Howard shared an example from his own experience: “I hated the candidate side of the marketplace but loved opening doors, and I started to really excel. And I got a resourcer because that resourcer took that pressure off me of finding candidates, but opened up, you know, I think I doubled the following year the amount of money I was billing because that person was finding candidates, and I could now concentrate on developing my own clients and developing new business clients.” This illustrates the importance of understanding each team member’s strengths and allowing them to specialise in areas where they excel. By doing so, we can create more effective teams and increase overall productivity. 2. Adapting To Changing Business Development Practices and Social Media Howard’s second major challenge was adapting to evolving business development practices. He stressed that buying habits have changed significantly, and recruitment companies need to adjust their approach accordingly. In today’s digital age, potential clients often research companies online before making any decisions. Howard pointed out: “The first thing you do is you go on to Google, you know, I want to buy something, I’ll find it on Google, and then you find a plethora of different prices on Google. So, you look at the cheapest, and then the first thing you look at is the reviews.” This shift in buying behaviour means that recruitment companies must pay close attention to their online presence and reputation. Howard recommends something we do with our Superfast Circle clients all the time here at Superfast Recruitment! Developing a strong social media presence Gathering and showcasing client testimonials Maintaining an informative and up-to-date website Utilising email campaigns effectively While digital presence is crucial, Howard emphasised that the human element remains vital in business development, with many clients craving personal interaction. “Now they get 20 to 30 email campaigns every single day. And when we went and talked to the end clients and said, right, what is it that you want? They go, oh, we want someone to ring us up and talk!” This observation suggests that we shouldn’t rely solely on digital marketing efforts. Instead, we should strive to balance our online presence with personal outreach, such as phone calls and face-to-face meetings. Building Deeper Client Relationships Howard stressed the importance of developing deeper, more meaningful relationships with clients. He suggested moving beyond the traditional “build the pain” approach and instead focusing on how we can make our clients look good: “If we change that conversation so right, what can I do? Sharon, to make you look good. How can I make you look good? Well, I need to do this in this project. I need to get that done on this. I need to get these people in here. Right. If I can help you do that to make you look good, that gives you a very different thought process of how you’re working with me.” This approach helps to position us as partners rather than just service providers, leading to stronger, longer-lasting client relationships. Howard introduced the concept of viewing client relationships as a flywheel rather than a traditional sales funnel. This approach involves continually engaging with clients at different stages: Social engagement Human acquisition Hearts and minds Retention We can maintain and strengthen relationships over time by constantly moving clients through these stages, even when they’re not actively buying from us. 3. Leveraging Technology In Recruitment The third challenge Howard identified was the effective use of technology in recruitment. He pointed out that many companies aren’t fully utilising the tools they already have: “You speak to all the CRMs. Most companies only use 20 to 25% of our CRM capability.” Howard advises that we make sure we’re getting the most out of our existing systems before investing in new technology. This might involve: Providing thorough training on current CRM systems Exploring additional features of existing software Ensuring different systems are integrated for seamless data flow   When considering new technology, Howard suggests focusing on tools that can automate repetitive tasks. This will free up time for recruiters to focus on building relationships with clients and candidates. The Role Of AI In Recruitment While acknowledging the potential of AI in recruitment, Howard cautioned against over-reliance on these tools: “AI is, I think, a really good thing, but only if it’s used correctly. And so, if you want to, you know, make all your job specs and, you know, adverts written in AI. Fine. But then you use that element, you use your behaviours, and you lose those behaviours because AI isn’t quite good enough.” This advice underscores the importance of maintaining a human touch in our processes, even as we embrace new technologies. Key Takeaways And Action Steps As I reflect on my conversation with Howard, several key points stand out: Focus on behaviours and team fit when hiring for your company Invest in comprehensive, ongoing training for your team Recognise and nurture individual strengths within your team Develop a strong online presence and gather social proof Balance digital marketing with personal outreach Build deeper client relationships by focusing on their needs View client relationships as a flywheel, continually engaging at different stages Fully utilise existing technology before investing in new tools Use AI and automation judiciously, maintaining a human touch in your processes Howard left us with crucial advice: prioritising and tackling one improvement at a time. He suggested: “Write them down in a list, then prioritise that list. Do one thing at once. Otherwise, if you try to do ten things simultaneously, you’ll fail all those ten things.” This approach ensures steady progress without becoming overwhelmed by the many areas we want to improve. In conclusion, while our industry faces significant challenges, there are also numerous opportunities for growth and improvement. By focusing on our people, adapting our business development practices, and effectively leveraging technology, we can build stronger, more resilient recruitment companies that are well-positioned for future success. Remember, change doesn’t happen overnight. Take Howard’s advice and start with one area of improvement. With consistent effort and a willingness to adapt, we can all elevate our recruitment practices and achieve greater success in this dynamic industry. Thanks, Sharon About Howard Greenwood Howard Greenwood, co-founder of Jump Advisory Group, is a prominent figure in the UK recruitment industry with over 25 years of experience. He has a proven track record of driving revenue and profitability growth, notably at Computer People, where he led the North of England to become the most profitable business unit. Howard’s leadership philosophy emphasizes people first, focusing on motivating, training, and mentoring individuals to exceed their ambitions. If you want to learn more about Howard and the team at Jump Advisory, go here. The post The 3 Key Challenges Facing Recruitment Companies Today appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hello, everyone. It’s Denise here. Today, I’m excited to share three specific ways to uplevel your marketing, activities, and potentially the type of response you’re getting. These strategies are straightforward to implement, and I’m confident they’ll make a real difference in your recruitment business. Before we dive in, if you’re new to our podcast, welcome! We’re thrilled to have you. If you find our content useful, please give us a shout-out on LinkedIn, leave a review, or share it with your network. We’re available on iTunes and Spotify, and you can find transcriptions and summaries of most of our podcasts on the Superfast Recruitment blog. Let’s explore these three leveling strategies that can help you stand out from other recruiters: Setting up a podcast Using videos Running training sessions for candidates or clients Let’s Start With Video. 1. Using Video as a Marketing Tool When I first ventured online about 18 years ago, there was a lot of buzz about how video would take over the world. It grew in popularity, then saw a slight dip during the pandemic when everyone was suddenly on video calls. However, it’s now experiencing a significant resurgence. Recently, I watched a programme about the BBC, which highlighted an interesting trend: many people, especially in certain age groups, are now more likely to watch videos on YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok rather than on traditional television. This shift isn’t surprising when you consider the immersive experience videos offer. You get to see and hear the person and even pick up on their energy. One reason video works so well is related to how we process information through our senses: visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic (how things make us feel). Video engages all these modalities, creating a powerful communication tool. You might think creating videos is more challenging than writing, but the opportunities it brings are well worth the effort. And here’s the good news: getting started’s easier than ever. Video Technology Made Simple We have some high-end video equipment at Superfast Recruitment, but we often use our iPhones too. The technology you have in your hand is truly amazing. As Gary Vee, a well-known marketer, pointed out, the level of technology we now have in our phones wasn’t even available in Hollywood 20 years ago. Smartphone audio quality is generally quite good, but you can enhance it with an inexpensive plug-in mic like the Boya (available on Amazon for about £10-15). Add a simple tripod, and you’ve got yourself a mini studio setup. For optimal results, film in good lighting – standing facing a window works well. It’s that simple to get started. Video Content Ideas Spotlight Job Opportunities: Discuss current openings you have for candidates. Many platforms now automatically add captions, making your content more accessible. Value-Add Videos: Share quick tips or insights. Aim for under a minute if you want to use them as YouTube shorts or on TikTok. Check out Sharon’s or my LinkedIn profiles for examples of how these can look. Testimonials: Ask candidates or clients to record video testimonials for you to share on LinkedIn. Outreach: Use video in your outreach efforts. Send personalised video messages through LinkedIn to stand out from the crowd. Remember, no one expects you to be the next Tom Cruise or Meryl Streep. You’re adding value by helping people develop their careers or improve their recruitment processes. Video will help you stand out because, surprisingly, few recruiters are using it consistently. 2. Podcasting: Your Audio Platform Podcasts are an excellent way to reach a certain demographic that prefers audio content, and they elevate your brand. Remember, iTunes and Spotify are search engines in their own right, increasing your discoverability. I recorded our first podcast in September 2013, and while it was quite technical back then, it’s much simpler now. You can even outsource the setup process on platforms like Fiverr! I use Audacity, a free recording software, but there are many options available. You can record directly or capture audio from Zoom calls for your podcast. Podcast Content Ideas Career advice for candidates Interviews with successful candidates in your sector Discussions with clients about team building Career or recruitment clinics Reading your blog posts aloud Offering multiple ways for people to interact with your content significantly affects your reach and impact. 3. Running Training Sessions Training sessions are an excellent way to showcase your expertise and add value to your network. As a recruiter, you’re an expert in creating CVs/Resumes, interview techniques, offer negotiations, and talent pipelining. Why not share this knowledge? You could create a masterclass on interview skills, for example. It’s as simple as sending an email to your database, inviting them to a Zoom meeting where you’ll cover specific topics. The impact on your brand can be significant. People remember these sessions and the value they received, which can lead to future business opportunities. Training Session Tips Use platforms like Zoom for live sessions Create PowerPoint slides to structure your presentation Record your sessions to repurpose as content later Host your recorded sessions on platforms like YouTube or Vimeo Imagine being able to offer candidates a series of helpful videos to boost their confidence before an interview. This level of support sets you apart and encourages word-of-mouth referrals. Wrapping Up These are just three ways to uplevel your recruitment marketing, but there are countless others. I encourage you to start with videos – they’re accessible and impactful. When you upload your first video, tag me on LinkedIn if we’re connected. I’d be happy to comment and help boost your visibility. Remember, upleveling your marketing efforts doesn’t have to be complicated. Start with these strategies, and you’ll soon see the difference in how you’re perceived in the market. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Are you looking for ways to improve your lead generation? If the answer is yes, we can help. To find out how book a quick call with one of us here. The post 3 Powerful Ways To Uplevel Your Recruitment Marketing appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Hi everyone, this is Sharon from the Recruitment, Marketing, and Sales podcast. I hope you’re all doing well! Today, let’s dive into an incredibly important topic for recruitment business owners: how to choose the right coach, consultant, or mentor to help grow your business. Understanding Your Needs First things first, it’s crucial to understand what specific challenges your business is facing. Take a holistic view of your business and pinpoint the areas where you need support. Maybe your team needs upskilling in business development, or perhaps you require help with leadership and management. Writing down these challenges will give you a clear picture of what you need from a coach or consultant. Defining Your Goals Once you’ve identified the problem areas, think about your goals. Where do you want your business to be? Understanding your desired outcome will help you choose the right person to guide you. For example, if you need more clients or want to improve your marketing strategy, look for someone with expertise in those areas. Evaluating Experience and Expertise When considering potential coaches or consultants, look into their background and experience. How long have they been working in the recruitment industry? Do they have a deep understanding of the market? It’s essential to choose someone who not only has the technical expertise but also understands the nuances of the recruitment sector. Assessing Compatibility You’ll be spending a lot of time with this person, so it’s vital that you get along well. Schedule a conversation to see if your values align and if you feel comfortable with them. This is someone you’re trusting with your business, so having a good rapport is crucial. Clarifying the Scope of Work Discuss how they will help you and your business. Will you work directly with them, or will they delegate some tasks to their team? If it’s a team effort, find out who the other team members are and their levels of experience. Ensure you’re clear about what you’re getting for your investment. Exploring Support and Accessibility Understand the level of support you’ll receive. Will there be regular check-ins, face-to-face meetings, or online sessions? How accessible will they be when you need help? Consistent support and easy access to your coach or consultant are vital for maintaining momentum and addressing challenges promptly. Realistic Expectations and Timeframes Ask about the expected results and the timeframe for achieving them. While we all want quick wins, it’s important to have realistic expectations. Understanding the timeline for results can help manage your expectations and keep you motivated. Reviewing Case Studies and References Look for case studies and ask for references. Seeing proof of their success with other clients, especially those similar to you, can provide confidence in their ability to help you achieve your goals. Making the Decision To summarize, here are the key points to consider when choosing a coach, consultant, or mentor: Identify your business challenges and goals. Evaluate the experience and background of potential candidates. Ensure you have a good personal and professional rapport. Clarify the scope of work and who you’ll be working with. Assess the level of support and accessibility. Set realistic expectations for results and timeframes. Review case studies and ask for references. Final Thoughts Choosing the right coach, consultant, or mentor is a significant decision. You’re investing time and money, so finding someone who can help you move your business forward is essential. Don’t hesitate to get on the phone and have an in-depth conversation with potential candidates. Ensure you feel confident in their ability to support and guide you towards achieving your business goals. Thanks Sharon I hope you found this helpful! If you have any questions, feel free to email me at [email protected]. If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with your colleagues and leave us a review on Apple. Have a great week, everyone! The post How to Choose the Right Coach, Consultant, or Mentor for Your Recruitment Business appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

  BD is a huge focus for everyone this year, and a key part of BD that supports the deal’s success is follow-up. As you or your consultants start to work that pipeline, we need to remember that follow-up will deliver the deal. The Sales Executive Association in America published data many of you will have come across. Some of the figures you’ll remember and maybe others that you’ve forgotten, but do you remember that 48% of salespeople never follow up on a lead? Which is quite staggering, isn’t it? So, think about it. As a business owner, you have invested a lot of money in building different ways of feeding that pipeline for your recruitment consultants, both with clients and candidates. Yet, they’re being lost quite quickly because so many people don’t follow up, and with only 2% of sales made on the first call or contact, which is small, you can see why follow-up is so critical. Your Pipeline Needs To Be Followed Up What we need to remember as salespeople is that we need to really work that pipeline and follow these individuals up time and time again. Interestingly, 12% of your consultants will follow contacts and leads up three times. The thing to remember, though, is that if we are going to hit targets this year, 80% of those sales and conversions are going to come between five and 12 points of contact. Some data also suggests that if let’s say, the leads are completely cold, we can have 30-plus points of contact. You’re probably wondering, “How on Earth will we do that?” Well, think about all the different mediums we’ve got and how we can communicate with people today. So yes, we can pick up the phone. It’s the obvious one. There seems to be some firm reluctance, and I think we need to get over that. We need to blend in with WhatsApp, Messenger, Voice notes on LinkedIn, and all the ways we can text-message people. New School and Old School Follow-Up Work Well Together We can do emails, of course. Now, think about some of the video software you guys use to interview candidates and share those interviews with clients to speed up your recruiting process. How about using some of those video platforms to send sales videos and follow-up videos to prospects, clients, and candidates? Let’s go back to traditional methods: picking up a pen, picking up a card or a note, and writing a personal note to a client or a candidate. When you receive something through the letterbox, and it’s not your birthday or Christmas, how good is it to receive something handwritten? It stands out, doesn’t it? It’s something that I’ve been doing a lot, and we always get positive feedback. So, there are lots of different ways that you can blend, whether it’s 12 or 30 points of contact. If you varied all these different mediums, you could keep following people up. You could also add some reports you might have and drip-feed those at different points in your follow-up cycle. Here is an important thing: If you’re going to invest all that time and trouble in building a pipeline, please also invest a little bit more time in building up a follow-up process. Thanks, Sharon How We Can Help We help our Superfast Circle clients design the ideal BD and follow-up process for them. If we even provide the template scripts and content they need. If you want to find out more book a quick call with us here. The post Facts About Follow Up For Recruiters appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, we are discussing what legal requirements a recruitment company needs to have with our Recruitment Expert, a Solicitor specialising in the recruitment sector and founder of recLAW, Barry Cullen. In this video and podcast, Barry talks about the legal journey from start-up to scaling and the various stages of growth, from how to handle restricted covenants to having your T&Cs work for you as part of your credit control process, the best way to handle legal issues when they arise so you maintain your valued client relationship, and much more. Below is the full, unedited transcription. Well, we are talking about the law! Sharon: I know it’s taken a few months, and many people are waiting to hear what you say today. I will let you do a bit of a longer introduction to yourself, just a little background. Essentially, you are the owner, MD. You’re an ex-recruiter and a qualified lawyer. Rec law is your business going from strength to strength right now. Before we talk about what today’s conversation will cover, there’s so much that we could talk about when it comes to law, isn’t there? For the sake of the listeners, maybe share a little bit about your background and how you came to set up recLAW Barry: As you said, I’m Barry Cullen. I’m a solicitor in the recruitment industry and a founder of a firm called recLAW, and we are lawyers in the recruitment industry. That says who we are. How did I get to this? Wow. I was going to be an engineer; that was the plan. It turns out my maths was nowhere near good enough. Therefore, that career– or, in fact, the degree didn’t even last very long. Like most of us in this lovely industry, I fell into recruitment and spent three and a half, four years working through resourcer, a recruitment consultant during the dot-com bubble and the year 2K testing period, but I was never good enough! I left recruitment to get what my mum calls a proper job. I went off to study law and became a lawyer. As a result, I have been in recruitment, and all of my working mates were in recruitment, so my phone calls became recruitment. I knocked around doing more general practice. Then, ultimately, came to a realisation: I live and breathe recruitment and know it. It’s what I know. Why don’t I do that? I went in-house to what was then Lawrence Harvey but became LHi Group. I was their general counsel for four years and then decided, at that point, that the stars had aligned, and it was time to set up my firm. That’s recLAW, which celebrated its third birthday last week. I completely forgot that until just now. What are we? 11 of us now. As you say, growing and growing. Hopefully, adding another person in the next two months. That’s ultimately us. The recruitment industry’s problem solvers, or enforcers, are more likely. Sharon: The recruitment industry law enforcers. I like that. Of course, there are undoubtedly many different parts to the legal conversation, aren’t there? We’re going to try and condense that into almost 30 minutes. Just thinking about the market today, we’ve still got people who are startups. We’ve got people who started during COVID and are a couple of years in. Then we’ve got the whole spectrum of the clients we work with. They are incredibly experienced, have been around for a long time, and are still looking to grow to whatever level that might be. We’ve got bigger organisations, and people are experiencing different challenges in the market right now. I guess, irrespective of size, every business will have some legal requirements that they need to put in place to protect their business now and as they’re growing. Maybe a great start for today’s conversation is to think about if I could say, “Well, look, think about your client and the kind of journey they go on as they’re growing and their legal needs.” They put themselves in the strongest position right now, wherever they are, and then how they evolve that. How does that sound? Barry: Yes, it sounds like a great idea. Much like you, we’ve got clients that are startups, first week, first month. Some haven’t even started yet. Then we’ve got others still in that early startup phase, growth phase, or much more established, from 1 to 2 people in an agency to 100 or 200 people in an agency and everything in between. You’re entirely right. Everybody, at some point in their recruitment career, will have some legal issue to deal with; whether lawyers are involved in it or not, there’s some legal issue. Whether you are a business owner or an individual recruiter within a business, empowering yourself to have the right tools to deploy at the right time is invaluable. Otherwise, you do all the hard work and don’t get paid, which is not ideal. Sharon: It’s not. It’s not when we know that, for many companies, contingency is still their main source of income. They’re already regularly doing a lot of work and not getting paid. Then, it’s like a bitter pill to swallow. When you’re expecting to get paid and not get paid. Barry: Exactly. When you’re contingent, you don’t get paid on the ones you should get paid on, rather than just the ones you didn’t close. Yes, I completely agree. I think maybe we’ll talk about it from the life cycle of a typical client for us because I think that covers most of those bases. At the starting point, we assume it’s a startup. Typically, you get two recruiters who are freshly minted directors of their freshly incorporated recruitment company. They come to us and normally say, “We’ve had some nasty letters from our previous boss. What are we meant to do?” It’s the allegation of breach of post-employment restraints. Most of these people don’t come to us saying, “I want to get away with it.” Most of them come to us saying, “I want to know what I’m allowed to do and what I’m not allowed to do. If I agree to anything, I want to ensure I agree to what I should agree to.” It’s that sort of advice that most people want. A massively sensible thing to do. Understand those restraints because there’s this wonderful fallacy within the recruitment industry. I say it’s a wonderful fallacy because it makes me lots of money. This fallacy in the recruitment industry is that restraints aren’t enforceable or worth the paper they’re written on. We love that because they are enforceable when they are well-drafted and deployed. If the employer doesn’t make some of the typical mistakes we see, then they’re enforceable. The fact that everyone thinks they’re not means that people breach them more often. It’s a sensible starting point. Get someone to have a look. It doesn’t have to be us; I’d prefer it was! But get somebody to look at the restraints and critically analyse them because, most of the time, these things are written by lawyers. They’re massively verbose and difficult to understand. The starting point is that you need help understanding what they mean to ensure you’re not tripping up. The second point is for someone to say that they are reasonable and therefore enforceable or not. In restraints, we could talk about restraints for not just hours; armies of lawyers apply their whole careers from the day they qualify to the day they retire, just dealing with post-employment restraints. It’s a massively contentious area of law that makes lawyers a lot of money. We won’t bore everyone with the full details, but broadly speaking, it’s what I call the mum test. If your mum knew what you were doing, would she be embarrassed? If it falls into that category, you probably should look at yourself and think, “Is this okay? Isn’t it okay?” Because restraints broadly work like this, the starting point is that you can’t prevent somebody from carrying out their chosen trade or profession. Those liberal ideals are diluted down by generations of lawyers who came along and went, “Ooh, but what about–” and, “Ooh, what about–” and, “How about–” and, “What about–” and carving away at it. The state of the law now effectively is that you can’t restrain somebody from their chosen trade and profession, except where the purported restraint goes no further than reasonably required to protect a legitimate business interest. That’s a nice long sentence; everyone understands all the words in that sentence. As I say, armies of lawyers apply their trade in saying what that sentence means in any given fact and scenario. Here’s the short layperson’s version. Your employer can’t overreach. If they try to put you on a restraint of 100 years, that’s unreasonable. What a judge won’t do is say, “100 years is unreasonable; put a line through that and change it to 1 year.” A judge will say, “That’s unreasonable, therefore not enforceable,” and knock that whole restraint out. When gauging these things, people need to consider, “For this employee at this level that we’re hiring and putting it to this role in this market, what is a reasonable period to restrain them from clients, candidates, contractors, suppliers, and soliciting key staff out of the agency?” There are 101 mistakes you can make as an employer. I think of the outgoing employee, that life cycle of someone coming to us for that first bit of advice; that’s often what we’re trying to do: see what’s enforceable and what’s not enforceable. That’s the first thing they normally do. Then they say, “Oh, we’ve heard we probably need a shareholder’s agreement.” As the name suggests, a shareholder’s agreement effectively governs the relationship between the shareholders and the company and the shareholders themselves. It sets out what a shareholder can and can’t do. Certain decisions, such as if somebody wants to hire someone and wants to enter a contract on behalf of the company, what rights do they have to do that? Is there a limit to getting permission from more than one shareholder? That sort of stuff. It also then potentially has its restraints. Glibly, I usually say to people, don’t get a shareholder’s agreement. They say, “But everyone else tells me to get one.” I say, “Yes, because everyone else is a commercial lawyer. I’m a litigator. I don’t want you to have a shareholder’s agreement because if you have a shareholder’s agreement, then when you fall out with your business partner, and at some point, you will, there is a document there that sets out everything very clearly, and everybody knows what they have to do.” One makes it very difficult for a litigator to make much money. As I say, it’s glib. It’s glib because you should get one. I say it with my tongue in my cheek: don’t bother because I get to charge one of you a lot more money in a couple of years when it all falls apart. People’s motivations change, and people’s drivers and objectives change. Look, people get married, split up, and divorced. If you could do that in a marriage, you could do it in a business. You need to make sure those rules of engagement are very clear. That’s all a shareholder’s agreement does. Sharon: Also, when you’re setting out in business, you will have certain thoughts about, “We’re okay to have a single person decide on this, but then these are the things that we want to have joint decisions on.” When you’re starting, or even when you’re in the early couple of years of your business, you can’t possibly anticipate what might be individual and collective decision-making further down the line, can you? Barry: 100%. Also, on day minus one, starting up a business, or Day 1, or Week 1, or whatever it is, when there’s no money available. There’s no money on the table; it’s much easier to negotiate what the business looks like, its structure, how it should work, and what the rules of engagement are at that point. I can tell you, once the business is worth 1 million, 2 million, 5 million, 10 million, 50 million, it’s much harder at that point to start negotiating because it’s a real thing, there’s loads of money, and then you’re not all necessarily on the same path anymore. We often get people coming to us saying, “We set up a company, and there were three of us. We’re all directors; we’re all equal shareholders. One of them is not pulling their weight; how do we get rid of them?” It’s like, “Well, where’s your shareholder’s agreement?” They go, “We haven’t got one.” I go, “Brilliant. It’s going to cost you a fortune.” Again, tongue in cheek, right? A shareholder’s agreement makes it easier to point at it and say, “Here’s what we agreed would happen in this situation.” Whether “We, as these two directors, can now serve you notice and buy your shares off you,” or whatever it might be, you set out those rules in advance so everybody knows this is how it works. Restraints, shareholder’s agreement. The next conversation is always in terms of business. This is business-as-usual stuff, right? It’s not, “We’re at the beginning, we’re starting up,” it’s “What should I be doing within my business to ensure I get paid and it’s all dealt with fairly? Our commercial team does it. That’s a shameless little plug; we can support you with that side of things. We normally find nine times out of ten, these two people who set up their own business normally ‘nicked’ their terms from their previous boss or nicked them offline somewhere They’ve gone, “Here’s a set of terms. They worked for my boss; they must be okay.” They don’t realise that their boss did the same thing five years before, and their boss did that five years before, and nobody’s looked at them since day dot. They may be massively out of date, not up to date with the latest regulations, not up to date with the latest best practices within the recruitment space, and often don’t work. From time to time, we still see a set of terms, and I love this. The recruiter comes to us and says, “XYZ owes me money. Can you get it?” “Yes, yes, yes, sure. Send us all the documents.” They send them through. We get their terms; they have a pretty logo at the top of their company name. They’ve got all this lovely stuff. It looks great, and it all works. Then, on pages 3, 4, or 5, they got bored and stopped remembering to change the old company name to their new company name. Their old employer’s name is still in the terms somewhere; that’s always fun. Then, some people are using document automation, such as AI-driven, LLM-driven drafting; they’re pulling together this weird Frankenstein document, which is all written in English, but part German law, part French law, part English law because a lot of people. As a failed recruiter, I say this with love in my heart; many recruiters don’t know what good looks like. If you put a bad and good contract in front of them, they are both just contracts. They don’t know what good looks like. Therefore, when an LLM model throws them a document, they go, “Great, that must work.” They only then find out it doesn’t work when they come to us six months later. Sharon: When there’s a problem. Barry: Asking us to go and recover some money for them. Sharon: It’s that classic thing, isn’t it? Whatever area we’re talking about, whether it’s law or marketing, there are always going to be times when you don’t know what you don’t know. Unless you go and have a conversation, and you talk to someone who does know and is the expert, things then get highlighted, don’t they? Barry: Yes, it’s the little things. There are some really easy wins for having your terms. For example, most people are going to have conditional fee rebates. If you’re a perm recruiter, if a candidate drops out in the first two weeks, we give you 80% of your money back. Some people even 100%. Then, there’s a tapered-off rebate. That’s all pretty standard. What’s also pretty standard within most recruitment terms is that those rebates are conditional. They’re often conditional on the client paying the bill on time or the client telling you that they’ve hired the person. They can’t backdoor me and then get a rebate as well. You’ve got to pay your bill on time. All of these little conditions that are attached to these rebates are useful for several reasons. Number one, it can stop you from having to pay a rebate. Number two, it can be a really good credit control lever. You might be on 14-day terms, and your fee rebate might be conditional on payment on time. You’re on day 16, and your bill hasn’t been paid. What you could do to your client at that point is say, “Hey, look, just so you know, because you’re late on your invoice, that rebate provision, if this doesn’t work out, won’t apply anymore, I’ll tell you what, if you get it paid today, or get it paid by the end of the week, I’ll reinstate that for you. I’ll still honour it if you get it paid by today, tomorrow, or this week. It’s a credit control lever. You’re showing them the stick but giving them a way out. That’s a nice business-as-usual way of levering these things. Another one that we don’t see enough of, and I shout about this one from the rooftops, is conditional fee discounts. If you’re in the UK as a contingent recruiter, many people can probably count on one hand the number of times you’ve done a deal at standard rates. With our client coming back and going no, we can’t work at 30, we can’t work at 25, how about 15, how about 16, 17, 18? Whatever your particular space, you generally won’t be working on full rates. If you have a conditional fee discount provision within your terms, you’re effectively saying, “Our standard terms are 25%; we’ve agreed to discount those to 20% for you on condition that—” much like the rebate—”you pay the bill on time. You tell us when you’re hiring somebody.” All of these conditions, because then if they don’t tell you, why should a client get a discount if they’ve backdoored you? Why should clients get a discount if they’ve not paid the bill on time? Do you see what I mean? Having those conditions in there means what you can then do is turn around to this guy and go, “I’m sorry about that. That £100,000 placement, £20,000 fee, it’s not £20,000 anymore,” or £15,000 anymore, “it’s back to £25,000 because you didn’t pay on time.” Again, you can use that as a lever if it’s a good relationship. “Look, technically, you owe us full fees, but if you get it paid today, we’ll honour the discount.” You’re showing them a big stick that you’re being a good girl or a good guy who’s going to them, “Actually, do you know what? I’m going to look after you because this relationship means more to me.” Sharon: Exactly. That was the thing I was thinking about. It made me think about there rather than getting into tension and friction, which impacts the long-term relationship. What you’re offering here is a way of preserving that so the future business will also come. I guess also things happen on the client side, let’s say, the recruiter’s client side. We always know that people are human, mistakes are made, and there are genuine things, but even those genuine things cross lines, don’t they? If somebody’s on holiday; I was talking to somebody yesterday, and their finance person who was meant to be covering, something had happened, nobody covered, so of course, their invoices had not been paid. They had to wait another week for said financial person to return from holiday. That will potentially impact contracts and rebates and everything else. Barry: Imagine their temps. You’ve got a £100,000 invoice on temps, £80,000 of which you’ve got to pass on to somebody else for doing the work. Now that you’ve not been paid on time, you’ve still got to pay those temps. If you’re self-funding it, and some people do self-fund their temps, that’s a lot of money you’ve got to find, right? I’d say that’s massively important. Something else that goes with that is the conditional fee discount, which doesn’t work for everybody. This doesn’t work for everybody because some people’s accounting systems won’t let them do it. For other people, it might cause them VAT reporting challenges. Check with your accountant and finance team whether it’s possible before you do this, but you might be able to put that discount on the invoice itself. Use my example: £100,000 placement, 25% is your standard, so it’s a £25,000 fee. You do that, placement of Jane Bloggs, and £25,000. The next line on the invoice is “Timely payment discount, minus £10,000.” The total on the invoice is £15,000 (£15,000 + VAT), but that timely payment discount is included. I’ll tell you why that’s useful as a practical tip is this: if your client has a proper accounts payable team, even if they don’t, even if they use a bit of software for accounts payable, what normally happens is your email with the invoice, the invoice gets stripped off the email and gets shoved into an accounts payable system. Then you’ve got an accounts payable clerk or whatever their job title might be, going through the invoices and going, “Who should I pay today?” They’re not going to look at the email; they’re not going to look back at the terms of business; they’re not considering anything other than the invoice in front of them. If that invoice in front of them says, “Pay this one by the 11th of April,” picking today’s date, “and it costs you £10,000 less,” guess what? That’s the one getting paid today, not the one that doesn’t have it. Even though the other one might have the same power and the same consequence of being late, they will look at that one and be more likely to pay it faster. It also stems from another thing my training partner told me many years ago: “If you ever give a client a discount, remind them at every opportunity.” You give them a quote; they want a discount; when you do your contract, clarify there’s a discount in the contract. When you raise your invoice, make sure it’s clear there’s a discount. It doesn’t just become normal because they know they’re getting it. They come to expect and understand that you’re doing them a favour by giving them discounted rates. Sharon: Yes, and the reality is, I think, in our industry—well, not just our industry—people love a discount, don’t they? That’s a great bit of advice. I wonder how many people do that currently. Barry: I was out in November, and I saw a client. I’d not spoken to you for ages. I said, “Why haven’t we seen you for ages?” Basically, “Where’s my work? Why haven’t you given us any work?” He said, “You know what you said about putting discounts on your invoices?” I went, “Yes.” He said, “Nobody’s not paid since because they see that, and they pay the invoice.” I said, “Hang on, I should stop telling people this. I’m doing myself out of work.” Thinking about how humans deal with this, what’s their motivation, and what’s their driver? It’s a bit like, you know if you call a call center, it’s a massive, big call center bank, right? You’re calling because you’ve got a problem with your phone and bank account and need it fixed. On the other hand, the human doesn’t care about fixing your problem. Their motivation is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible because that’s another stat of a call answered and got rid of. Do you see what I mean? Yes, so that’s useful. Then, look, next, it becomes training humans. Get your terms right, and then train your humans. Sharon: To implement the terms? Barry: Well, not just to implement, but to understand them. Understanding them is the starting point. Because, I tell you what, I’m trying to come up with a stat, and I’m not going to be able to come up with it all on the fly. Let’s say the overwhelming majority of disputes that our team has to deal with when it comes to fee disputes are caused by the humans in the process, not by the contract, not by anything else. Often, that comes about. I love and hate this, but we often say, “Oh, I knew him well, so I didn’t send our terms.” It’s like, “What? What? Do you want me to sue someone on a contract they’ve never seen?” “Okay, yes, let’s give it a go.” This is going to be fun. In my experience, most people don’t send terms or don’t talk about terms with their clients because they’re scared of them. They don’t understand them because some lawyer has written them in what we call legalese, ridiculous words that no human has ever actually spoken. They don’t understand their meaning, so they’re uncomfortable talking about them. They’re not comfortable negotiating them. They’d much rather pretend they didn’t exist. Training your people and ensuring they are comfortable with understanding the terms, how they work, what points should be negotiable, what points should be red lines, what they should be pushing up to more senior people to get sign-off, that sort of thing, massively powerful. If your people know what your contract means and how it works, their clients will be much more accommodating and think, “Actually, I’m dealing with somebody who knows what we’re talking about here.” That would be my next bit: get the terms right, then train your people to use them properly. Then, the next step is to train them on how to resolve and handle disputes. There’s a problem within some parts of the recruitment industry: People jump off a cliff very quickly. They go from a perceived grievance to full throttle and a heavy-handed approach. They’ve been backdoored. They pick up the phone to the candidate, “I can’t believe you’ve done this to me, all that work I did for you,” blah, blah, blah, then they’re banging an invoice over to the client and say, “If you don’t pay in seven days, I’m going to sue you,” all that sort of thing. Then, if they just chilled out for a minute and remembered that resolving disputes is just like sales, it is a sales process, yes? You need to identify the problems and then find solutions. You won’t find out what those problems are by having a go at someone. You need to open your ears. We were all taught this, Sharon. I imagine you were taught the same. You have two ears and one mouth. Sharon: Absolutely, yes. Barry: Use them in that ratio. I would prefer if we had ten ears and one mouth and used them in that ratio. Listening is much more important than talking in a dispute, like in a sales process. You’ve just got to listen to everything said and everything that’s not said and identify the issues. I’ll give you a case in point. Sorry, go on. Sharon: Before you gave the example, I was going to say that this reminds me of what you described right at the beginning when you were talking about shareholder contracts and things. It’s a business relationship, like a marriage, and marriages break up. What it’s making me think about is, in the law world, there’s mediation, isn’t there? You can go through mediation if you’re breaking up a marriage. That’s the process that a lot of people will go through. What you’re talking about here is dispute resolution, but it makes me think it’s the same thing. It’s asking questions to understand what the issue is and its consequences. Before then, we think about solving it, as you say. I never considered it as it mirrors the sales process, but yes. Barry: For example, I have a client who is a tech recruiter. They’ve placed somebody, and the fee was, I want to say, £19,800 and change. They had been banging their heads against a brick wall trying to get this money paid for nearly six months. They contact us and ask us to take over. We do. I send a friendly email. One of my colleagues sent it and said, “Our client has instructed us to come and get this money. We understand there’s an issue. Let’s have a chat.” Let’s have a chat. Let’s figure it out. See if we can figure it out. We got on the phone. It was the head of HR and the HR director for this tech business. I came on the phone. I said, “Look, yes, I’m a lawyer. Yes, I’m instructed to recover this money, but I completely understand that I’ve only one side of the story now. I would love to hear from you about the issue here. Why the fee isn’t payable.” Then I just shut up. It was music to my ears because she turned around, the loveliest woman in the world who’d been fighting tooth and nail with my recruiter for six months, and got on the phone. She was as nice as pie and said, “Do you know what, Barry? I’m quite embarrassed by this situation because I know your client should be paid. I know we owe this money, but the problem is that my CEO won’t sign it off because he has a problem with them about something else. Because he has a problem with them about something else, he’s not willing to sign off on this invoice.” I said, “Oh, that’s a shame. Does he have to sign off on all the invoices?” I was surprised because they were quite a big business. She went, “No, no, no, it’s just because of the threshold. The invoice is over £15,000, so he has to sign it off because it’s over £15,000.” I said, “Oh, that’s a pain. If it were less than £15,000, you’d be able to sign it off yourself.” She said, “Yes, it wouldn’t be a problem.” I said, “I think I’ve got a plan.” She went, “What’s that?” I said, “I’m going to get that invoice credit noted. Then I will send you two invoices for half the amount each. Then you can sign those both off, can’t you?” She thought about it briefly and said, “Yes, that works. Can you do me a favour, though? Can you do them a week apart so it’s not quite so obvious if anybody–” “Yes, fine.” Straight back to my client, went, “There you go. Credit note that one-off. Give me two more invoices a week apart. Let’s get it done.” Sent them over. They were paid within the week. Sharon: Fantastic. Barry: It is all about listening. Sharon: It’s looking to understand. Barry: Most people jump in and start sending nasty letters. So, get your terms right. Train your people to understand how to resolve disputes. Knowing when to push things upstairs is equally important because sometimes, you can converse like your consultant can with the hiring manager and get nowhere. Then you could push up to a manager or a team leader, and they could speak to a mid-tier person at the client and have that conversation again. If that still doesn’t work, then you could go up to a more senior position, like an associate director or a director. Those escalation points are really valuable. I talk about how it isn’t easy to un-press the big red button. If you hit the big red button of, “I’m going to sue you,” it’s very difficult to de-escalate from there. In contrast, regular contact and escalation, not pressure of sorts, but in a calm way, can get you where you need to be a lot more easily because eventually, you get to the right level of person where they get it. They’re willing to engage and resolve it. They’re empowered to make a decision. The further away from the humans involved in the original situation, the less emotional baggage there is. Your consultant and their hiring manager probably feel strongly about it. Whereas your manager or associate director and their director care less about right and wrong emotions, they care about the solution and the money. Having an escalation process, understanding here’s what we do, a playbook, if you will, “In a dispute, here’s what we do. If that doesn’t work, we move in this direction. If that doesn’t work, we move in this direction. If that still doesn’t work, you come to recLAW, and we will go and do it for you.” There you go, shameless plug. Sharon: Do you know what, half an hour has flown by? There are some absolute gems in there for everybody that will be listening. Thank you for that. Is there any last little gem that maybe you’ve not mentioned that you think, “Do you know what, there’s just one thing I want to leave people with”? What might be that one extra thing? Barry: I like that. I like that. Beyond using your ears more and listening and not assuming it all? I’ll mention a product we’ve got, which is probably the right thing for it. Apologies for this, but we’ve got a product called RecProtect. It’s a site called RecProtect.net that gives you the best-in-class terms. It trains your salespeople. It also does all the debt recovery letters and everything else. It’s a subscription service. I’m describing it as an out-of-the-box legal function for recruiters. That’s well worth checking out because we’ll fix the terms, train your people, and complete all your debt recovery tasks. We even host legal clinics so recruiters can ask questions they want advice on without having to go to lawyers every time. They come to lawyers because they’re coming to us, but they don’t have to go and get a bill from a lawyer every time. It’s all part of the same subscription. Sharon: There was a question that I thought about as you were chatting. We’re seeing increasingly more clients going out into markets outside the UK. I was talking with a client this morning who concentrates on Germany and a particular state in the US. I know this trend is growing, and people want to expand. Of course, I guess then that will have implications when it comes to T’s and C’s. What’s the general advice if you’ve got a UK-based company that is providing candidates in other markets? They may have a legal entity in another market, or they may not. They may have a UK-based client that’s got an operation in, let’s say, America. Of course, they’re providing a candidate for that business operating in the States. Barry: No, I get that. The starting point is not to let the legal tail wag the commercial dog. I would love to say, “Oh, the law says this, the law says that, do this, do that.” The reality is I and my team only deal with that small element of dispute that needs a lawyer, gets a lawyer in England and Wales, and comes to us. I’d love to say that’s every dispute under the sun, but it’s not. We get a small sliver of it, meaning most disputes are resolved before a lawyer is involved and anybody even looks at a contract. If the commercial opportunity is brilliant, then you may be willing to take more commercial and legal risks around it because of the return on investment. That’s the starting point. Commercials should drive the decision, but then you should get legal to do what it can to mitigate and minimise any risks. What I would say, and what we’re predominantly talking about here, is the law that governs the contract and the jurisdiction that decides any disputes. You must consider whether you would be happy to take a client to court or defend yourself in that foreign country. If you would, because you might have the operational backbone and legal support in Germany or the East Coast or wherever it might be, and you feel comfortable, then that’s fine. If you don’t, it’s tough enough going to court in England, let alone going to the court in a foreign country in a foreign language, which is often how it will play out. That’s what to be aware of—not wary of, but aware of. We often get clients who go to the US and say, “Oh, do we need a new version of our terms for every state in the US?” No, no, no, you choose where you do your business from. You’ve given two examples there, right? UK-centered recruiter operating ad hoc in other countries. Generally speaking, English and Welsh law, courts of England and Wales, and then trade that way. You’ve got a legal entity in the country, and you might have people in the country. There might be a commercial expectation that you’re holding yourself out as a German entity in a German business; therefore, your client might expect to see German contracts. That’s the commercial decision, right? The commercial decision is that we will potentially get more business because we’re using German contracts for our German entity. Therefore, you commercially might say, “Therefore, it’s worthwhile doing that.” Just be aware you may have to use German lawyers, a German process as Germany was the example. You have no legal obligation to say, “I’m placing into Germany; therefore, it must be a German contract.” Sharon: Listen, thank you so much for your time. Lots of gems that you shared there. It was also a great way to do it in a client’s life journey. People can pick up lots of different things. I’m sure it makes some people think that those who aren’t in the start-up stage have some of those things in the way they need to have. To learn more about how Barry and his team can help you, visit recLAW. The post Keeping On The Right Side of Recruitment Law With Barry Cullen From recLAW appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, I want to discuss how marketing specifically grows your recruiting and search business. I want to talk about this today because it has come up on several calls recently. As I mentioned in the podcast intro, how marketing works is a logical question, especially if you’ve never really done marketing before. Maybe you’ve always been somebody to whom business has come. You’ve worked with bigger clients, or you’ve been in a fulfilment role because vacancies have come to you. Then you’re probably wondering, “Why do I need to do marketing now? Or maybe you are wondering why other people are marketing, and they’re getting results, and you are trying to do it but are not getting results? What can it really deliver for me, anyway?” These are all logical questions, which we will answer today. Marketing: A Definition Why should you invest in marketing, and how will it help you attract the candidates and clients you want? Let’s start with the classic definition of what marketing is and does. Marketing is about creating demand, AND Sales is about converting that demand. Marketing puts your message and brand out in front of your ideal clients and candidates, and then you talk to people and hopefully convert that person to work with you. Whether that’s a candidate that you’re working exclusively with, whether it’s a client that you’re delivering a retained project for, or you’re working contingency. This is how marketing starts the process of supporting your success. Because, as business owners, we want more demand. We want more clients. We want more candidates. We want more people to work with us. We want more revenue flowing through our business. The only way we can do this is by creating more demand. Many companies are sales-led, and the recruitment and search sectors have been very sales-led over the years, where people pick up the phone and start talking to people, and the power of their communication converts them. However, the market has changed so much over the years. When it comes to leveraging your time and the ability to grow, sales is very much a one-to-one strategy, particularly when looking at a B2B environment, which fundamentally is what recruitment is. Companies and Candidates Have More Choice When It Comes to Who They Work With Recruitment is a high-value transaction business. Some of you will be placing candidates and gaining fees of four, five, or six figures. When that’s happening, a process goes before you about how you stand out in a market and demonstrate to people that you are the person to work with. People now have a lot more choices when it comes to deciding which company to work with. By marketing you and your brand, you have a strategy known as a one-to-many process rather than a one-to-one process. Let me give you an example of how this works. Earlier this year, we did a webinar about standing out on social media, and I shared a marketing strategy about the value of posting on social media. I was looking at somebody’s profile the other day who had a lot of followers. This was a recruiter in the UK, and they had 28,000 followers. Imagine if they start posting more regularly on LinkedIn. A large percentage of those people are likely to see their content; they’ll get an experience of them, and they’ll start validating whether they could work with that person. An easy win. Why? Because you are using marketing in a way that’s going out one-to-many. People Can’t Work With You If The Don’t Know Who You Are A very simple phrase goes along with marketing: People can’t work with you if they don’t know who you are, what you do and how you can help them. That’s where many recruiters struggle; they are great at what they do, though not at promoting who they are to the market. Recruiters we work with are good at what they do, but the challenge is that they haven’t done much marketing before. On the upside, once they start using different strategies, they succeed quite quickly when they start communicating consistently through the different marketing channels, strategies and processes that we work on. Think of marketing as the vehicle that gets your offer in front of the people you want to serve. Be that candidate and client; be known as your ideal business persona or avatar. You’ll have heard me talk about business personas/avatars before. We have many podcasts and posts about identifying your ideal business persona because marketing is marketing to the people you want to serve and the people you serve best. Let me give you an example from our perspective to make it logical for you guys and a shameless plug for us! Our main offer is Superfast Circle, which you can learn more about at the link. In addition to Superfast Circle, we provide other support around consultancy and performance coaching. Fundamentally, that is our key main offer, and that is for micro businesses, solo recruiters, and small SMEs: That’s our market. Corporate recruiters listen to our podcast. I know because I see them on our subscriber list, and they open all our emails. That isn’t our market. Our offer is designed to support people we know we can help. Yes, of course, we could help a corporate organisation, but let’s be honest: you would hope that the likes of Hays and  Page, etc., all have a marketing department that works well for them. They have several marketers doing everything and have all of the strategies. They are working together. A smaller organization doesn’t have that. We are an outsourced CMO for many organisations we support with their marketing, providing content for them. That is our market. Think about you and your market; the marketing you create and the messaging around your offer will attract people you know you can support and help. When you focus your marketing in this way, you repel some people and attract others—obviously, the people that you want. Marketing gets your message out in front of the people you want to work with because it’s all about consistency. If you have marketing systems and processes in your business, it will help you be so much more consistent. Marketing Is Part of Your BD Process Our last podcast was around BD and why it isn’t working. I think one of the things with BD is that people don’t bolt on the marketing systems around their BD that will make it work for them. That’s how marketing will support you as you move forward. We always need a supply of new customers, as any business does. We need to create demand with a new section of the market or people who have never heard of us before. That is where marketing will create demand for you. Marketing Works With The Buyers Cycle Something I want to talk about, which I have mentioned before, is how marketing helps you when it comes to the buyer’s cycle. The great thing about marketing is it enables you to leverage the buyer’s cycle. The buyer’s cycle relates to people buying when they want to, not when we want them to. We don’t always need something straight away. A classic example is when buying a new car and deciding what car you want to buy. Let’s say you want to buy a 4×4 or whatever. You decide, “Okay, I need to buy a 4×4.” There are hundreds of different 4x4s on the market, and you hone down to specifically what type of 4×4 you want to purchase and what will be the best for you and your family. Because what’s happened then is we are moving through the buyer’s cycle. It starts with becoming aware of a brand or a supplier and then going through that validation process where we engage with their content. We’re then deciding whether this person is the sort of person to work with. We then probably have a conversation with them. All of this time, we are going through the buyers’ cycle before we make a purchasing decision. What is great about marketing? It’s the classic buyer cycle in the form of a marketing funnel. This is the beauty of marketing because marketing isn’t just getting people into that funnel initially. Marketing is about how we interact with that individual, how we then have a conversation with them, and how we start to provide the information that’s important for them to make that buying decision. Say, for instance, you want to attract new clients. You want new clients to work with, and they come across you. You’ve been posting on LinkedIn and your social media. Maybe somebody shared a post, or you’ve reached out to them on LinkedIn and connected with them, but it’s gone no further than that. They start to see your content. They go to your website and begin to look and think, “They provide a lot of really useful information and share some ideas I have not seen before. They are very different from other recruiters who email me asking if I’ve got any roles. These guys are educating. They know what they’re doing,” so they’re all over your website. They’re reading your social media. They may be downloading the odd report. They’re engaging and opening your emails. And reading your testimonials and watching your videos. Maybe some of you are listening to your podcast. They’re doing all these different things, helping them decide about you and whether they work with you. All of this is because your marketing is creating demand throughout the buyer cycle from first coming across you to reading your case studies and watching one of your videos. All of these things help make you the person they are now going to work with, whether a candidate or a client. That’s how marketing works. It takes you from unknown to known to the person they start working with faster, easier, and in a repeatable way. The key thing about marketing is that it does not have to be complicated. You can market in different ways. You can get your messaging right. You can be out in front of your market on social media. You can produce content. If you want to know where and how to start, watch one of our masterclasses, the lead generation triad. It explains this entire process and how marketing across all different channels will help you. All you need to do is go to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/LGT, lead generation triad, add your name and email address, and watch our hour-long training, which you’ll find useful. Hopefully, today, we’ve explained more about how marketing can make a difference by creating more demand for your products and services. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You We work with recruiters to get marketing working for them in their business. If you want a conversation about how it can work The post How Does Marketing Grow Your Recruiting and Search Business appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

I want to talk about planning today because we are coming to the end of Q1 and moving into Q2. As you know, I am a girl who likes to plan in 90-day cycles, so it is time for review and planning. 90-day planning was one of those amazing things I got from corporate life, and I have kept it along with many other things because you can do an awful lot in 90 days, and it focuses the mind. My experience is that sometimes you plan a year and forget what you must do in October and November. Yet you can have a great focus using a 90-day process we always teach. I wanted to talk about planning because I have been binge-watching several TV programmes with a planning theme. Planning Lessons From The TV I love a planning programme. I love planning, and Denise is very happy because two of her favourite planning programmes are on TV on iPlayer. One of the programmes is called Interior Design Masters; here is a quick summary. It’s based around several budding interior designers. They probably want to do it as a full-time job. Some do interior design and want to have this as their full-time gig. Alan Carr’s the presenter, so there’s also a good fun element. Several top-notch designers judge these individuals throughout the process as they are given different tasks. This week was the first in the series, and the task was to design a B&B space in what used to be an old convent in Norfolk, in the UK. It was really interesting, and what was funny related to planning was there was one lady called Sheree, and it’s just that you knew, unfortunately, that Sheree was going to go out in the first episode. Alan Carr, the comedian, says to her, “Sheree, do you not think you should have a plan? When are you going to get this plan together?” They had a room; they had to design it. She had no plan. The TV company gives the budding designers a team of professionals to help them. For example, decorators, electricians, joiners. So, they get all this physical help; they must tell their helpers what to make, etc. Sheree wanted a wardrobe/closet making. She’d drawn out this particular wardrobe, which was, fundamentally, just three lines on a bit of paper not that helpful or specific! The whole point of mentioning this story is that she had no plan, which is fundamental if you want to make anything happen in your business or life. She hadn’t thought through what she wanted to achieve. She had no idea about what she wanted to create. She had no signature design she wanted to be known for It was just absolutely a disaster. What is Your Plan? From your context, imagine the clients you want to attract and the candidates you want to bring on board. This programme demonstrates that having a plan does change the game. Talking to recruitment and search companies as we do every week. That’s why I think a lot of smaller recruitment and search companies struggle because they don’t think through. A, what they want to achieve; B, how they will make it happen; and C, maybe creating a plan is a good idea. The Many Benefits of Having a Marketing Plan Now To convince you to get this plan created for Q2, let me share several benefits of putting together a simple marketing plan. If you have a plan, you will be more focused, and things are much more likely to happen. We talked about Sheree. Nothing was happening at the right time, in the right place. Nothing was sequenced, which creates havoc, which happens a lot. Think about it. If you have things mapped out in your plan, put them in your diary, and allocate time and financial resources, you allocate people to make things happen, and they happen. That’s what moves the needle. If you have a plan, ensure that a key element is to ensure that you are out in front of your market. If you plan, you will get the brand recognition you need and want. As part of Superfast Circle, we provide monthly marketing collateral for our clients, including reports, email and messenger campaigns, blogs, and social media they use in their marketing, ready to go with minimal tweaking. Many members plan their time around when the content is dropping on their platform. One individual tweaks and brands the content, which is out and working within twenty-four to thirty-six hours. What that does is because this particular individual is an amazing planner and gets things up and out, and then the brand recognition of this specific company is starting to go off the scale because they’ve planned it, and it’s out there. By planning activities happen. I know we’re all very busy people, and we can forget things, but if you know, let’s say, there is a trade show going on or there is an event that you know you should be at, then if it’s in your plan, you can focus things around it. If you’re going to an event, you want to make the most of it and make sure you’ve got something for the delegates. Maybe you want to do some marketing before the event. Having that all mapped out in a plan significantly affects your results. Of course, when you’re thinking about your plan, then you can adapt. Currently, we’re in a market where there’s uncertainty. People have to do more BD than they’ve done in a long time, definitely more than they’ve done since 2019. Over the last five years, there has been a huge shift in the recruitment sector. Knowing that, then, in your planning, you’re allocating time and resources, so it’s no surprise. You should be allocating more time and resources to reach out to BD. It all makes sense. When you stand back, and you’re probably listening to this recording now, this podcast, and thinking, “Yes, I need to make sure I’m thinking longer term, and I’m planning.” We have a particular masterclass that will help you plan around making the most of your BD. You can access it here. It’s important to make sure that you are planning your BD your marketing with a view to, “Okay, it’s probably going to take me 60 days to refill this pipeline, or it’s going to take me 90 days,” or whatever it might be in your sector. It’s true that we get better results when we stop rushing and start thinking ahead and planning ahead. One final observation to leave you with about planning. This is what grown-up companies do; bigger companies always have a plan that’s mapped out and related to their vision and business goals. They think about it and plan things weeks, months, and sometimes years in advance. That is something that you can do as a small business as well. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You You can access Sharon and me as your virtual marketing directors and CMOs when you join Superfast Circle. We help you create the marketing plan that will work for you; if you want to talk, book a call with us here. The post Planning Your Marketing is a Gamechanger appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Marketing funnels in the recruitment and search sector? Let’s discuss why they’re important in recruitment and some of the things that you could be doing differently to get better results. Let’s start with a definition. What is a Marketing Funnel? What is a marketing funnel? A simple top-line overview takes somebody from unawareness about you and your brand to awareness, to a level of engagement, to having a conversation, and to consider working with you. Finally, hopefully, I will work with you and shout all about you on LinkedIn and everywhere else about how good you are and that you are the recruiter or search pro of choice to work with. That is fundamentally what a funnel delivers for you. One of the reasons it’s called a funnel is because we are funnelling potential clients and candidates. We want to work with them from a big area to a smaller one because not everyone who comes across us will want to work with us and vice versa! Some people will come across you, and they will like you, what you’re about, and your approach, and they will start working with you. Now, that number will be much smaller than those you first start interacting with. That’s the reason it’s called a funnel. The Many Benefits of Marketing Funnels For The Recruiting Sector That is why it is so important in the current market that you have several marketing funnels where you are conversing with your market. You are funnelling them down to conversing with you and working with you. It’s pretty straightforward. Let me share with you some of the many benefits of using funnels in your marketing and then explain how they can help you. Firstly, they help you to avoid sales resistance. Let me share an example. It has been interesting that we’ve been talking to several people recently who are considering working with us. We’ve talked about why what they’re currently doing isn’t working. As recruiters become ‘desperate’ to bring on new clients quickly, they are ‘over pitching.’ Yes, you can overpitch, and that puts people off. They’re selling to people who are just not ready to buy yet. This is a normal phenomenon in the market because, at any one point in time, only 3 to 7% of people are ready to buy. This is how we work as human beings. We go from unaware to aware, from thinking about our problems to wanting to solve them, and then to being in a position where we are happy to have that conversation. This is one of the beauties of using a funnel: You can help move people through the buyer cycle from being unaware to ready to work with you. I don’t think recruitment and hiring are any different. People have to go through a phase to get to know, like, and trust you before they’re ready to start collaborating with you. That’s the beauty of a funnel. Now that we’ve discussed this, 3 to 5% of people are ready to act; however, what about the other 93%? The benefit of using a marketing funnel is that you can continually be on the radar of the other 93% of people who aren’t acting now and who will be your clients and candidates of the future. Your particular marketing funnel can take a candidate or client from being unaware of you and your brand to collaborating with you when they are ready to do so. The upside of having a marketing funnel in recruitment is you have two distinct groups that you need to work with, three if you’re also building your team. Clients Candidates Your own talent Using marketing funnels in this way means you can nurture these different groups in multiple ways. You can set your marketing funnels up very easily. As an example, you might be in one of our marketing funnels. You may have heard this podcast, encountered us at a networking event, or seen our content on LinkedIn. You might also have entered your name and email address into one of our funnels to receive our marketing checklist. You are now on our email list, and you receive one or two emails a week from us about marketing, which adds value. People on our email list will then contact us when they are ready. Of course, we will also reach out and speak to them, helping them make the decisions. You can see the multiple benefits of having an actual funnel in place that works. Creating a funnel is easy. You can provide something of value. People get into your LinkedIn feed, they become a connection, and they join your email list. Then, you can start connecting and working as they go through their own buyer cycle funnel about when they are ready to work with you. Ironically, we were on a call with one of our clients today. Her business model is that she finds really, really good-quality candidates, talks to companies, and represents those candidates. She has a 12-month funnel, as her market does not jump into action quickly, so she’s nurturing them all the time. All this is happening in the background for her, and people constantly contact her. We support her because she’s part of Superfast Circle, and we provide the marketing collateral and consulting she needs. This is how using a funnel can work in your business, and it has done so for years. We all know that people do not make snap decisions about career moves. Candidates and clients will work at their own pace, not yours. A funnel supports this process. People say, “Ah, but I want to stand out in the market, and funnels aren’t going to do that for me because everyone’s doing them.” Fact: Let me share that everyone is not using marketing funnels. Because of my role in our organisation, I will often enter my name and email address on a recruitment company’s website. And it’s sad that unless I do it with Hays or Adecco or somebody like that, I put my name and email address into forms on several company websites that have significant numbers of recruiters, and I have Zilch. Nothing! I’ve not even got an email to say thank you. I could be somebody that is looking for a job or is looking to hire. You can see the difference that having a funnel will make and how most people aren’t doing it; they really are not. They are missing out on so much by not being able to nurture candidates and clients who will get back in contact with you because you are the person who can help them. Today has been all about funnels, which I encourage you to use. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You As a member of Superfast Circle, you can benefit from our support in building your marketing funnels. We provide all the email campaigns and reports you need, and our Tech genius can teach you exactly how to get your first funnel up and running. If you want to learn more, call us at +44 (01524) 920 700 or book a slot in my diary here. The post Why Marketing Funnels Are Important In The Recruitment and Search Sector appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today let’s talk Business Development (BD). BD takes time; not easy for a recruiter to appreciate, especially when it hasn’t been front of mind in the last few years. Recruiters can be quite impatient; be honest now; hold your hands up. I’m sure that many of you can relate to that. Here is the thing. When it comes to BD, people forget that inputs don’t always result in outputs as fast as we want, even though we try to convince ourselves that they will. The Impact Of The Last Few Years on BD Let’s put some context around this and what’s happened over the past few years when it comes to BD in the recruitment and search space. Let me take you back in the day to 2019. Everything was pretty normal before COVID arrived, and BD was something that people did as required, though not necessarily enthusiastically! When things were not going as well as people wanted, and there weren’t enough jobs on the board, some BD would happen. This is particularly for micro businesses and smaller SMEs. Some of the bigger organizations have a BD system dialled in; I will talk to you about a system you can put in for you as well. When we look back in 2019, people did some BD, but it wasn’t anything they did with any great gusto, with any systems in place, and then COVID-19 appeared. Then suddenly, everyone had this experience of all those really good clients they had stopped working with. Candidates were being furloughed and being made redundant and laid off. All of those things were happening. I think it just brought BD up to a level of focus for people. However, what happened then was that the market started to shift. As we all know, as we moved toward the end of 2020, people discovered video interviewing, and companies started recruiting. There were talent shortages, and many recruiters didn’t need to do a lot of BD. People were coming to them because there’d been a pause in recruitment and a backlog of vacancies. Consequently, Recruiters didn’t have to do much BD. Of course, because they didn’t have to do it, they didn’t do it!! Then suddenly, we move into a much tougher time for some people in 2023. Some businesses had over-hired and were shedding staff, laying people off, and making redundancies, and for other people, that assumption that the movement in hiring was going to continue didn’t. People suddenly thought, “OH, Crickey, I need to start being focused on BD again.” The thing is, people forget that BD takes time to build and fill a pipeline. Depending on the sector that you’re in, this process can take anywhere from 60 to 180 days or even longer. Therefore, you must create a system that you implement consistently around it. Going back to making half a dozen calls here, maybe half a dozen calls next week, and then stopping isn’t going to work for you. Several famous sayings remind us to do the work. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Do you remember Colonel Sanders? He didn’t get good at what he was doing until he was in his 60s, and we all know about sowing and reaping, but the trouble is we forget that this is how life is and that it does take time to build momentum in anything. Please do not throw Teddy out of the cot if things don’t work immediately. Instead, keep doing the work. Build A Two-Part System Instead, create a system and expect it to work for you because it will if you give it the time and the energy! One of the most predictable methodologies you can use to succeed in your business is to create a BD system. It works like clockwork as long as you work it. Now, it does take time to build. You’re going to get results as you build your system consistently. Remember, initially, this is a volume game until you build momentum. Getting four or five appointments might take a hundred calls, but you accept that is how it is. It improves over time because, obviously, your skills get better. Remember that this is what you must consider when thinking about BD. I won’t get into too many tactical things regarding BD here. I’d like to give you an overview of the system you must implement. You need two types of systems, and people forget the first one, which is your current connections. The second one is your cold outreach. If any company wants to grow, it must keep filling its pipeline with new people because people drop in, drop off, and drop out. Mine Your Current Connections The first one is your current connections. I imagine most people listening to this have a database of candidates and clients, which should be your first port of call. You’ve already worked hard to connect with those people. Don’t assume that “Oh, they won’t be interested.” Don’t let that crazy brain of yours, that primitive brain, kick in and say, “Oh no, no, no, they won’t be interested.” You just might be surprised because things change fast. As a quick and easy start, ensure you are reaching out to all your tier-one connections. Some people have 10,000 or 15,000 connections on LinkedIn. Are all of them relevant? Maybe not, but I suspect a remarkably high percentage are. Reach out to those people; that is one area to start with your BD. You’ve got a database because most people do not mine the gold around their feet because they get lazy and think people won’t be interested. The other thing you can do with people like that, of course, is ask for referrals. You can talk to the candidates that you place. Maybe they know somebody. Maybe they’re working in a new organization. Ask for referrals. Make it a more active process because the challenge with referrals is making them predictable. Referrals are great, aren’t they? I always like to say that they are the jam on the bread. However, if you leave them to chance, you don’t know when they’re going to appear, and you cannot rely on referrals unless you take a more active stance in asking for them with people that you’re working with. If you do that consistently, you will be able to plot the data, and you can see how that works for you. We’ve talked about current connections. That needs to be in your BD system. Remember, I’m talking about multiple points of contact here. I’m not just talking about emails. Emails are great. They’re brilliant for creating demand. They are a must-do marketing activity for anybody. Remember: At the end of the day, picking up the phone and speaking to somebody will make a massive difference to your results. Remember, this is not a transactional sale we’re involved in here. This is an expensive item. This is a person. This is a human being. This is a team. This is a chief operating officer being placed somewhere. Think about the conversation you will have with people, people you know, and people on your database. Remember, don’t just rely on email. Help your email work by picking up the phone and speaking to people. The next thing is cold outreach. Create New Connections You have to fill the pond continually. If you are not reaching out to new connections, you will never grow because you will always lose people, whether you like it or not. You cannot hold on to everybody forever. Plenty of places exist to reach out and find people’s contact details. There are multiple connection scraping tools out there you can use. I won’t name any because, to be quite honest, they come and go. I think Apollo is one at the moment, but who knows? Snov.io is another popular tool, but you only need to go online. Google contact scraping tools, and you will be able to find various tools that will go and get you names, email addresses, and telephone numbers of people you want to reach out and connect with. A BD tool that is especially useful on LinkedIn is Sales Navigator. You can pull lists of ideal people in your market that you want to reach out to. This is something that you should be doing daily. You’re continually building a pond to fish into. Don’t just do it when you think, “Oh, gosh, I’ve not got enough business.” Do it now. Make sure that you do this as a regular thing. You can even go on to some of the freelancer sites and find some real ninjas who will go and create a list for you that you can then work on. Then it is all about consistency and it’s about daily activities. What are you going to do daily? How many people will you reach out to in your current database daily? It doesn’t take as long as you think. Then, how many people are you going to reach out to on LinkedIn? How many messages are you going to send out? How many phone calls are you going to make? Map it out daily; do it consistently. Let’s just start with this quarter. Obviously, I know we’re halfway through a quarter, but just do it for 90 days. Measure your activities and look at the difference that will make for you. Most people just do not build the volume; They give up. They just make 20 calls and 15 calls, but they don’t consistently do this daily because momentum starts to build. Then, once momentum starts to build, you will see results. This is about building that muscle back up. Start somewhere. Thanks   Denise How We Can Help You This Year As a Superfast Circle member, we help you build your marketing to align with your sales and BD. If you want to find out how, drop us an email or book a call here. The post Building Back Your Business Development Muscle appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Recruitment BD is on most people’s agenda this year. 2022 was an amazing year for many recruitment and search companies. After crazy Covid, everything felt easy; clients approached recruiters, and candidates weren’t hard to find. 2023 wasn’t quite the same, yet companies did the same things. So why weren’t the same BD strategies working? It’s a question many business owners and recruiters have found themselves asking. This week, we chatted with 20-year recruitment expert Ali Braid, the “Recruitment Trainer” who is passionate about business development. Ali talks about why the same strategies didn’t work last year and why business development is a top priority for owners who want to grow their companies and have a standout service and offers. In This Week’s Video and Podcast We Shared Strategies Working Today With technological advances, which accelerated rapidly during the Pandemic, the tech stack available to recruitment companies is ever-growing. Combining this with marketing automation makes many options available to support business development. The question is knowing where to start and what to focus on when it’s easy to be dazzled by the latest bright, shiny new object or piece of tech. Why The Phone Must Feature In Your BD Process If we are all honest with ourselves, we use our phones differently than 5 or 10 years ago. We often send a “how are you” What’s App when it would have been a quick call ten years ago. As an industry, we talk about being “partners” with clients and looking for long-term relationships. Yet, so many colleagues in the industry are no longer in the habit of using the phone for BD, and newer team members are more familiar with messaging, emailing and texting. If we want long-term partnerships, we need to build deeper relationships, which means we need to take time to talk and engage with clients, including getting out and meeting with them. The challenge for many owners and Directors is how to engage teams in BD when many won’t have experienced a market like today in their careers to date. Ali shares ideas and strategies that she uses with her clients and their teams that allow them to create a culture where BD is embraced. This includes having a team focus on 20-minute BD outreach sessions, encouraging people to fail and then learn, And recognizing the importance and value of feedback. To find out more about Ali, you can visit here website here. Thanks Denise                       The post Recruitment BD : The Year of The Phone appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

  We are privileged to work with so many clients who are incredibly experienced and have been in business for 20, 30-plus years. There are not too many privately owned recruitment businesses who are been operating for over 50 years, and fewer that have only been led by female owners. Castle-Employment is one such business. Kerry Hope’s career started at Badenoch and Clark. Fourteen years later she became MD at Castle-Employment and today is only the third owner of the company. The business was originally started in Scarborough, Kerry’s hometown, and its head office is still based there. As someone who is passionate about Yorkshire and supporting the growth of the county, Kerry is leading the company on an accelerated growth plan which has resulted in rapid expansion. Sharon has had the opportunity to grab some time in Kerry’s busy schedule to sit down and learn more about Kerry’s background, how she became MD at Castle Employment, and the highs and lows of taking a hugely well-known and highly regarded local recruitment to new heights. The post Growing Yorkshire Kerry Hope’s Story of Leading The Castle Employment Vision appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This is the second podcast of November, and I thought it would be useful to talk about productivity, a topic ever present for recruitment business owners and their marketers at this time of year. Today, I want to share several strategies we have tweaked and ideas working for us now to do more in less time. We are a small team, so being productive is critical for us. We focus on several key areas to make things happen how we want. Our goals Where we are spending our time Minimising distractions Deciding what needs to get done each week. Using a calendar and diving into the detail Giving personal and professional tasks equal value Using our energy cycles Using our own templates and SOPs Practising constraints on time and much more. Please email me if you would like a copy of several of the resources we mentioned. Enjoy! Denise How We Can Help You Being a productivity ninja is something we help you with as a member of Superfast Circle and in multiple ways. Including all the templates we provide and the productivity training we give every member. If you want to find out more, book a call here. The post Epidose 402: Recruitment Marketing Hacks: Powering Up Your Productivity appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

In this week’s podcast, Sharon interviewed our client, Paul Card, the MD of Paul Card Recruitment, about hitting the milestone of ten years of running his successful financial recruitment business. Paul started his career as a successful big biller in one of the UK’s most respected and recognised corporate recruiting firms. Then, as Paul and his wife decided to start a family, Paul took the leap to start his own business. It wasn’t easy at first, with a few wrong turns before Paul started to build momentum as he became one of Teesside’s most respected financial recruitment companies. Paul has always been innovative and wants to create a great life for himself, his family, and his employees. He has a thriving team, and we first met him as he was about to recruit a marketer to help create the demand he wanted for his business. In the podcast and video, Paul shares his growth strategy and the various steps he has taken along the way, from his focus on his vision and mission to being a lifelong learner and goal-setter. Enjoy! Thanks Denise The post Decade of Success: Celebrating Paul Card’s 10 Years as a Thriving Recruitment Business Owner appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, we will discuss marketing a new recruitment service or product to your client and candidate market. This is all about launching a new recruiting service for you and your brand, which many people are considering at the moment. We are helping several Superfast Circle members launch different iterations of their service. Today, I want to share the seven key areas to consider. 1. Validation Let’s start with number one, and that’s validation. You probably think, “Denise, I want to launch this service.” The question is, do you want to launch this service? Is it viable? Is it what the market requires, wants, or will buy? Is it just an untested or validated idea? A very short story, an amusing story. When I left my corporate job, I decided that I was going to create a product for sales managers. It flopped because I didn’t validate my offer. The questions I forgot to ask were, “Would people want this? Would they buy it?” I was a very keen sales manager. I was obsessive about studying and assumed everyone else was , learning new things, and always improving. The course was only a couple of £100 at the time. I was teaching how to be a really good sales manager. I just thought, “This is going to fly off these shelves. I’m going to be a millionaire; everybody will want this.” We had five people buy it. Now, this was a very good product, I have to say. However, the market was all wrong because the market that I was approaching was corporate people who wouldn’t put their hands in their pockets. They expected their company to do that for them rather than taking charge of their growth. I hadn’t validated my offer or chosen the right avatar either. That is the first thing that I would say to you when it comes to making that decision about the products that you want to launch because it could be, “Well, I’m going to have a consultancy arm to my business,” which is fine, and have you spoken to anybody who has shown interest? Do people buy consultancy services in your sector? I’m going to have a training part of my business, which will align well with a recruiting service, but will people buy it? Because there’s nothing worse than putting hours, days, weeks, months, and effort into something people won’t pay for. When it comes to a recruitment service, maybe you’re going to have a new temp desk. Perhaps you’re going to launch a temp side to your business; maybe you’re going to establish a contracting side. Maybe you’re going to have a retained side to your business or a new exec search desk; that’s fine. First, establish if this is solving a market problem that people will buy to solve. If you are in the contingency space and it isn’t easy to get people over 12 or 13%, then maybe retained isn’t necessarily going to be the best thing for you. As you validate your new offer, make it irresistible. What can I do with this product? What can I add to this product? How can I make this product/service and make it the best on the market for my clients and candidates? Here is a quick personal story to help you understand the products and services you develop. As some of you will know, we had a complete service side to the business, content marketing, and social media in all its many forms. It came with a price tag that was a challenge for many micro and small SMEs, which are our preferred markets to work with. That is one of the reasons we created a unique product in Superfast Circle: we could provide virtually everything people need for their marketing, consultation and direction, training, and marketing collateral and campaigns. A question? Could something like that work for you and your market? What could you do so that your offer becomes irresistible? You’ve got a great promise, the price is right, you’ve got a vision for how that will work for clients, and the clients can see how that would work for them. That’s important. Think about your client, your candidates, and what’s in it for them because once you know that, it’s much easier to communicate what you have. There is something else you must understand as you are validating your offer. Remember that launching a new product takes time; It will not fly off the shelves as fast as we want and will take a lot of work. It’s like when you first start your own company, you have never worked as hard in your life, and launching a new product can feel like that, too. If you still want to proceed, let’s set up a beta test. 2. Beta Testing With Current Clients Next, let’s run a test of the product and service with some of our current clients. There are three benefits to doing this that are going to help you. First, you get used to talking about this new service offering to a human being. You’re talking to a real-life client or a candidate where money will change hands for what you’re selling. It is important to beta test with some people you have identified. What this will do for you is it will help you iron out what is important to your customers and what they want when it comes to this new service offering because what you think they might want and what’s important to them might not be what you think it is. The other thing that I would suggest that you do, and there are a couple of things here, is get case studies and testimonials from your beta users. It might be that you’ve reduced the price of your new service offering. I’m not saying you give it away for free, but you might have a reduced price because you’re testing it in beta mode. You might be talking to someone, and they would agree to give you a case study or a testimonial because you will do whatever the offer might be at 10% off or 15% discount. Decide who would be an ideal client I would like more of, more of this type of client, because those are the ideal people you want to have in your beta testing. We’ve looked at viability and beta testing, and now let’s look at creating a launch plan. 3. Create Your Launch Plan What gets planned happens. Have you ever noticed that? If you don’t have your plan written out, your day sometimes seems to crash and burn. Make sure you have your launch plan created so you know what your deliverables will be, have a target, and know your timelines. Are you going to do a countdown? What will happen at month one, month two, and month three? When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the machine kicked in when we were launching a product, and we had a plan that would count down the days. When you plan your launch, consider your deliverables, timeframes, resources, and who will be involved. That way, when you have a brainstorm about what are all the things that we need to do, and obviously, I’m giving you some things here, then you can put that in your spreadsheet. You can put that in your launch plan so you don’t miss things like, “Oh, hang on a minute here, we haven’t got any case studies or testimonials as part of our marketing collateral. Oh, hang on a minute here; the web page isn’t loading.” If you create a launch plan with dates, times, activities, and who’s responsible, that’s number three; next, who are you selling it to? 4. Define Your Ideal Avatar and Target List Number four really alludes to what we were talking about with the beta test: who is your ideal avatar? Who is the target list to which you will launch this new product? Depending on the features of your product, the advantages for your clients, and the benefits they’re going to get from working with you will help you identify who is the ideal avatar for this particular product or service because it’s likely that it will be different. That’s where many people make a mistake because they think, “Well, I’ll just launch it to everybody that I’ve got. I’ve got this great idea for a new service; everyone will love it.” They might not. It might be a sub-sector of your market that will be the ideal person for this. That’s why it’s important to do your avatar work. Who’s ideal, and will they buy? One character in the classic film Jerry Maguire says, “Who’s got my money!!!? This, my friend, is key! Who has got your money and is willing to purchase your new offer? Make sure you do your avatar work based on the propensity to buy and the propensity for you to serve them in the best way possible. Then that leads us to your target market because you will, I’m certain, have clients within your database that you could work with, so the first step is to create a list. In addition, those of you who have watched The Lead Generation Triad will understand that when it comes to generating leads, there are three key areas you need to focus on: current contacts, cold outreach, and content. What you need to do now with this is to look at, “Okay, I’ve got my current connections; I’ve pulled off a sub-list that I’m going to work on.” (I will talk about content next.) I also need to think about “I need a cold list to approach. Get a cold list of contacts and start reaching out to them. Fact: You need to have some new people in the pond that I’m fishing in with my new product to have conversations with and ensure that I’m selling my new product. Next, we need to craft our message. 5. Creating Your Marketing Message Now, we need to create your marketing message. I have already mentioned the holy grail: your product or service’s features, advantages, and benefits. Remember, People need to understand what’s in it to consider working with you. Let me remind you to reflect on when you first started selling and you had features, advantages, and benefits about your product that you communicated. Ditto for your new product. What’s the gap that they have? What is it that your product will do for them that fills that gap? This isn’t a sales tutorial here, though you need to get your messaging right. For example, our messaging is designed to attract solo, micro, and small SME recruitment and search companies. We work with really good recruiters, amazing at what they do. They care about the clients and candidates they work with. One of the things they’re not particularly good at is marketing themselves, creating demand and getting their message out there. Look at our messaging on LinkedIn and how it communicates to a certain person. Consider your particular avatar, ideal client or candidate and what will resonate with them. 6. Creating Your Marketing Collateral Next, once you’ve got your marketing messages, you can start putting them in your collateral. You need to use marketing collateral consistently and constantly to bring people into your funnel and do some pre-selling. For example: Your social media. Reports/Guides Articles/Blogs Pitch Decks Email Campaigns Scripts and objection handlers are critical, too. We have covered a lot today. 7. Set A Goal and Take Action Number seven is to set a goal and go for it because it’s easy to say, “Oh yes, I want to do this.” Do all that work and then start to procrastinate: “Well, I’m not quite ready to launch yet, I’ve not quite tweaked this bit yet, not quite done this yet.” There comes a time when you have to press go, and you have to go and get you and your product or service out into the market. I was listening to a Gary Vaynerchuk video on YouTube the other night. I love Gary, and he was saying something so obvious. It’s not that you haven’t got time to create the social media, it’s not that you haven’t got time to do, ……pick any excuse from 20, he was saying………… it’s the fact that you’re frightened of getting out there. You’re frightened of standing out in the market and saying, “Look, this is what we’ve got for you. This is what a difference it will make in your life.” Number seven is to ensure you implement the plan you’ve decided; these are the sorts of things to say to yourself. “Okay, this is what I will do, and I will have a plan. This plan, I’m with it. I’m in this for the long game. With the new service, I want to achieve this by Q1, Q2, and Q3, and this is where I expect to be in year three.” The market needs great products and services, and let your service be one of them. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Marketing creates ongoing demand for all your recruiting services and products, whether already established or about to launch, and this is where we can help you with your planning, messaging and collateral. To find out more, send us an email or drop us a message. The post The 7 Step Marketing Plan to Launch a New Recruitment Service appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today’s podcast is number 399, and we are heading to the big 400 next week. So, as we start October, it seemed a good idea to interview one of our original podcast listeners, who is now a client. That individual is Mike Richards, the MD of Treasury Recruitment. Mike has always been a huge advocate of investing in marketing to build a recruitment brand. After listening to The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast, he decided to launch his show five years ago, which has gone from strength to strength, which Mike shares in the interview. I asked him multiple questions about developing his team and handling the challenges of the last few years as he built his company on the global stage, working with Treasury pros in every household name imaginable. Mike shares several nuggets, including. • How teaching led him to recruitment • His ‘why’ honed by his 8-year-old daughter several years ago • Launching the podcast, which led to multiple speaking ‘gigs’ in Europe and the US • How letting go of micro-management was the best thing he ever did • Why marketing systematisation was one of the reasons he joined Superfast Circle • …. And several life and business lessons he would now share with his younger self You can find out more about Mike and Treasury Recruitment here. Enjoy! Thanks, Denise How We Can Help You Market Your Recruitment Brand If you want clarity and direction on your next marketing steps and would like the support of two marketing directors, consulting, training and the marketing collateral and content you need. Access our case studies here to see how we help clients, and then book a call with us here. The post How Treasury Recruitment Uses Podcasting as a Lead and Brand Generation Tool appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Creating content and using it consistently is one of the key drivers of generating both client AND candidate leads for your recruitment business in today’s marketplace. Today, we have a special podcast where we share one of our trainings. If you are an experienced recruiter and know you can help your candidates and clients, becoming front of mind will be critical for your success. People can’t work with you if they don’t know who you are. The days of relying on referrals only are long gone; the pandemic saw to that. In the current up-and-down market, you need multiple ways to access your market and convince them that you are the recruitment or search form to work with. Content is a critical vehicle to do that, so we are giving you access to this training recording as a podcast. What This Content Training Covers On day three of our Recruitment Marketing Week free training, we cover creating your content machine, where we share the key elements of your system. We explain how content impacts the buyer’s and customer’s life cycle process to your benefit. The four content guidelines to follow. The three content themes to base all of your content around with examples of each The content options and resources available for every budget on the market   Enjoy! Thanks Denise P.S. If you would like access to the video recording, drop me an email How We Can Help As a member of Superfast Circle, we provide the content resources you need as part of your membership, along with the strategy of where and how to use it from your personal marketing directors. This includes reports, email and messenger campaigns, scripts, blogs, and social media. To learn more about the results this delivers for our clients, check out our case studies here. The post Creating Your Content Machine Training For Recruitment and Search Owners appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

  Today, we have the next in our series of expert interviews with Simon Bliss, serial entrepreneur and the current chair of TEAM. Having built an incredibly successful logistics business that he scaled from a start-up to 100 national branches, Simon had the opportunity to buy a recruitment company. With no industry experience, he went on to scale and sell his recruitment business. Simon started his business career delivering packages from his motorbike as a self employed person. Building and selling two companies has been quite a journey. Here, in today’s video and podcast, Simon shares the lessons he learned along the way and how he brought his business philosophy to a new company and industry, which eventually led to his current role as Chair of TEAM. Enjoy! Thanks Denise The post Transforming Business Acumen into Recruitment Growth Acceleration An Expert Interview With Simon Bliss appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

    Sourcing the quality of talent with the right skill set continues to be a challenge for many recruitment companies and their teams. As tech companies look to help, do they hold all the answers, or are there other skills a recruiter can draw on and develop that will help them as they go hunting for the ‘best candidate match for their client? This week, we chat with the fabulous Gabi Preston-Phypers of Tooled Up Racoons as we talk about everything from deciding what rec tech you need in your business to whether passive and active candidates require different sourcing techniques. The answer is yes. You can watch the video here and on YouTube or listen on iTunes and Spotify. As a Superfast Circle member, you can access our yearly in-person event in November this year. Gabi will be one of our guest speakers, and she will be doing a deep dive into all things candidate sourcing. If you want to find out more about becoming a member of SFC! Book a call here. Thanks Denise The post Hunting For Candidates Guest Interview Series appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today we are talking about marketing systems and what you need in your recruitment and search firm. We’ve just come off the back of Recruitment Marketing Week at the end of last month and had a lot of positive feedback. Potentially, we will run it again later on in the year, definitely after the summer, because I think people found a lot of value in it. One of the things that came out of the five days that we spent with, I think it was just the best part of nearly 100 people, is what systems do I need? Now, we have done a deep dive into all the different elements. I thought it would be a good idea to record this podcast today and share with you seven marketing systems that you need to have in your business if you want to be successful if you want to maintain the clients and the candidates that you’ve already got and if you’d like to make more placements. Let me go through all of these each in turn. A Marketing System to Identify The Right Clients and Candidates I want to start with what is critical: creating a marketing system to I.D. the right clients and candidates you want to work with. One of the questions we often have for clients when they start working with us relates to data. Sometimes people haven’t done the math related to their numbers. What they’re hoping to achieve from the candidates they want to place is probably not going to happen because; the data does not add up. They want to deliver deals that are not going to happen with the current clients and candidates they are working with The first thing you need to do is have some form of a system so that you can identify the best clients for us to work with and the candidates we want to place. Now, you’ll have heard us talk in the past about your ideal client avatar, your ideal candidate avatar. If you are listening to this on the Superfast Recruitment website, go onto the blog and put in the search bar “avatar.” I know I’ve recorded several podcasts on that, which will help. That’s the first thing you need to do because if you are marketing, you want to create demand. The important thing is creating demand with the right people. It’s about having a system to identify that, which is number one. You’ve got the right people then, so you’ve got the right type of companies you want to target, the right candidates. A Process To Establish Authority and Credibility The second thing is you must have a process for establishing your authority and credibility in the market. This is something where many people miss out on the opportunity building a brand presence, can bring. This big chunky bit of marketing starts the whole process moving. Some of the things that we’re talking about are, firstly, your brand and how you stand out in the marketplace, how you capture attention, how you continue to grab attention, and how you become the authority because when you work in the recruitment sector, you are working in a B2B environment. I know you work with candidates, so it’s slightly different. However, you are working in a space where you have to establish authority and credibility because when it comes to recruitment, and for many B2B services we’re a B2B service as well, you have to build a much higher level of trust with potential clients before they say yes. Now I can go onto Amazon. I went onto Amazon the other day. We were looking for one of these robot hoovers. Our nephew suggested it might be a good idea for us to get a robot, Hoover. Off-topic fact, and do you realise you can get robot hoovers that will mop the floor as well? How amazing is that? We’re probably not going to do a huge amount of research; we will look at a couple of reviews, I’m sure we’ll look at the price point, and then we’ll click purchase. It’s different when you’re talking about human capital because we don’t do that. We think a lot more before we start working with another service supplier. That is why establishing your authority and your credibility is key. The good news is that in today’s marketplace, as a small business owner, you can compete online if you are a micro-business or you’re a small S.M.E. The internet, the Googles have made that more than possible for you, whereas maybe in the past, it wasn’t quite as easy to get in front of your clients. You are listening to a podcast. We do not pay to promote this podcast at all. There isn’t any paid advertising around it currently. Yet you come, and you listen to this every week. Many of our clients listen to this; for many people, that’s the first place they found us. On top of that, you’ve got every social channel on the planet. You’ve got LinkedIn that doesn’t pay you to be a member. You have Facebook, Instagram, and all of these places you can get your message out in front of your customer. You can write blog content, our Superfast Circle of clients, and get their content from us. You can write blog content; you can put it onto your website. People can find you; you can demonstrate your expertise. You can upload information to LinkedIn. All of this is going to establish your authority and credibility. You can write a report, and that report, someone can give you their name and then give you their email address. We’ll come onto that in the next system later on. You’ve got all these different things that can establish you as an individual who knows and understands hiring and the sector. That is a system you must have because consistency was one of the challenges many people talked about last week on Recruitment Marketing Week, and they know that sometimes they weren’t as consistent as they could have been. That’s because sometimes they weren’t sure what to do. Consistency is key. If you actually can nail this around being credible and being out in front of your environment– When I say your environment, your business environment, your candidates, and clients make a massive difference. Create A Lead Generation System Next is creating a lead generation system. If you haven’t watched our on-demand training, you can access it here. How are you going to attract these leads? Where are you going to get them from? You can mine multiple places, including your own database and every social channel. A task for you go and access this free training where we give away the system our clients use. The lead generation triad. Create Your Sales System Number 4, and I know this sounds probably a bit different, but this is your sales system because you’re thinking, “I thought we were talking about marketing here, Denise.” Yes, we are, but marketing and sales work together. Remember that when creating leads, what’s the next step in the process? Then you have to convert these leads. Of course, as we know, unfortunately, people rarely say yes straight away. That is why you need a sales system. If you haven’t listened to the last podcast, number 387, which is around follow-up, then you need to have a sales system so that your consultant, and maybe you, can follow up with people consistently. That will create your sales system that uses marketing collateral to help them convert. Create a Client and Candidate Onboarding System Now, number 5 is you need a client onboarding and a candidate onboarding process. As recruiters, you all know when onboarding goes awry, often when a candidate doesn’t stay in a job or a client comes back to you and doesn’t like the candidate. The fact is that onboarding is key to your candidates and clients getting the best results out of your service. Imagine that you have a candidate that’s uploaded their CV, nothing happens, or their resume. They’ve put the name and email address into your webpage and uploaded the document; they don’t hear anything, crickets, or even get an email. Maybe they get an email acknowledging, “We will be back to you should your CV or resume fit any opportunity. If you haven’t heard back from us the next month, assume it doesn’t–” I’m sorry, that is outrageous to be doing that when you have so many other options. I know we’re all busy, but it doesn’t take much to set up a system so that people get a bit of T.L.C. and feel good about the process. Even if they don’t get a role with you, they still talk to friends about, “Do you know what? Acme Recruitment was amazing. I didn’t get the job, but oh, the process I went through, and they gave me lots of help and support.” It’s the same with clients. When a client comes on board– You know what it’s like when you’re a client, and they’ve contacted you, maybe you’re on a contingency basis with them. They’ve given you a job, but then they start thinking, “Do you know what? I’m not getting much conversation here. Nothing’s happening; nobody’s getting in contact with me. I think I might also give this to another recruiter and see how that works.” These examples happen consistently when you have not created a system related to working with candidates and clients. Mining and T.L.C.:  The Gold Around Your Feet Next one number 6. This is all about upselling and outreaching your current clients and candidates because who knew that these individuals might know many other people? It might be that you’ve got, in the nicest possible way, a foot in the door with a particular company. What if one of the M.D.s or one of the directors happens to know somebody else in another division that you could also help? Think about what you will do about upselling all the different elements of your service and how you will use this with the people you are with so they continue working with you. I’ve already alluded to it around the client and candidate onboarding, but how will they continue to work with you for the longer term? What marketing, what continual demand experience can they have from you as well? Measuring Your Marketing Systems Then the final one is you need a system for measuring your actions. Now, depending on how new you are to marketing or how long you’ve been doing it, I think starting with your input is good. We were talking with one of our Superfast Circle clients about inputs. She wanted to measure some different things, and we were giving her some input suggestions. “How many email campaigns have we got out? How many outreaches are we doing? How many blogs are we sending out? How many times a day are we posting on social media? Correspondingly then, what’s our website traffic? How many people are opening our emails? “How many people are registering on our website and uploading their C.V.s? How many client meetings and conversations do we have?” You need to create a marketing system around that, so you can analyse all your hard work because this isn’t about beating yourself up emotionally; this is about data. We don’t want drama; we want data. We want to look at the data and think, “Is this up? Is this down? If it’s down, I wonder why it’s down. I wonder what part of the process we might have dropped the ball on.” There are no guilty feelings here. It’s about, “What have I done right, or what else could I have done? I remember we had a landing page earlier this year, and it was like we were getting people to the landing page, but when they got to the landing page, things were going awry. The number of people that normally put their name and email address on the landing page was much lower than normal. When I checked the landing page, some of the copy was wrong. We changed the copy around. We removed some of the copy and added some slightly different things. I think we added a new colour and a bigger button. I know, crazy. A bigger button. That made a big difference. Sometimes it’s asking the uncomfortable question; “Are we doing enough?” I know I was talking to another client about the recent shifting market. If you look at cold outreach, which works incredibly well, you still need to do more than you used to do. There you have seven marketing systems that will make your marketing work better. You need to be able to identify who’s your ideal client and candidate; then, you can create your messaging around that. You need to establish your authority and credibility as the go-to person in the market. Number 3, get your lead generation, and qualification system dialed in. Then you need your sales system, which will include marketing collateral because, remember, very few people say yes, the first time you talk to them. Client and candidate onboarding make that work, and then we’ve also got upselling, creating more demand and referral, and measurement. Thanks, Denise How We Can Help As part of Superfast Circle, we help our clients design and develop marketing systems for their businesses and provide all the collateral they need. If you want to find out how we can help you stand out and deliver more move-ready candidates and job-ready meetings, then book a quick call with us here.           The post 7 Marketing Systems Every Recruitment Company Needs appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Follow-up is critical and more than most people realise: Finalising deals, whether that is persuading a client or candidate to work with you, happens in the follow-up; it’s a fact. When it comes to high-value B2B sales, which recruitment is nobody buys straight away. They might have only ‘just’ become aware of you or your brand and need to know more before they say yes. Here are a few scary stats 65% of companies don’t follow up on a lead they have paid to get 73% of B2B leads are not sales-ready 50 % of qualified leads are not yet ready 79% of leads never convert due to a lack of nurture This is especially relevant when it comes to building your marketing process and funnels, which we are talking about this week during our free training Recruitment Marketing Week here. This is why it is so key to use marketing to follow up with your potential clients and candidates. In this week’s longer podcast, we share the recording from a monthly Superfast Circle training event we ran, where we did a deeper dive into follow-up and how to use it to convert the deals you want. Enjoy! Thank   Denise How We Can Help Wondering how to build follow-up into your marketing system? That is where we can help. If you want to find out more then book a quick call with us here. The post Fact: Finalising Deals Happens in The Follow Up appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This week we are discussing recruitment marketing actions for our to-do list for summer and what we might want to focus on over the coming months. As we’re talking about the midyear and tasks over the summer, we have decided to do something we’ve not done for a while. We often would run physical events in the past, and people came along, and in a day, we would teach an overview of where to get started when it came to marketing. This year we have decided to take this online and run Recruitment Marketing Week over five days an hour each day starting on June 26th at 1 pm BST and 8 am EST. You can register here for Recruitment Marketing Week There are workbooks and frameworks to download, and every session will be recorded for you, which we will give you access to for up to ten days after the event. There’s plenty of time to do a deep dive. We’re going to Let’s get back to what we need to be considering when it comes to the summer period for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere; for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, I know that it’s mid-year for you, but many of you, the financial year is changing. Of course, this process you can use at any time. I wanted to cover several things to action over the coming weeks as we go through June, July, and August, and we move into September so that you’re prepared to finish the year strong. Don’t slow down in summer! We were talking to one of our clients a few days ago about how you might think business development would get easier and easier when you’ve been around a long time. Unfortunately, it doesn’t You still have to have your foot on the gas and consistently do outreach because we are in a different market. It’s much more competitive, so ensuring that we’ve got things planned and in place, as we move forward is key. Analysis: Where Are You Now? What’s the first thing you want to start doing? It’s exactly what I’m referring to now. It’s reviewing where you are now versus your original goals. Has the year panned out as we wanted? Is it better than we thought? Is it worse than we thought? Have we maybe not anticipated that there would be a shift and a change in the market?” As I say, maybe you’ve taken your foot off the gas. What I would do, first of all, is ask, “Are we doing okay? What are we doing, and what are we not doing?” This leads to what is working and what isn’t working. Because of this, the first thing to look at is, “Okay, where are we doing well? Where are we doing not so well? Where are we against our goals and objectives? Where are we against the company vision?” If we need to make some changes that these areas that we set out at the beginning of the year are still important to us, then what do we need to do to rectify them? That would be the first thing because it’s easy to stick your head in the sand and think, “Oh, everything is all going to come right.” Will it be if you don’t take some action? Getting Ahead For The Final Third The other thing is to get ahead for autumn. For many people, that period, that last third of the year from September to December, is a really busy time. You don’t always seem to get enough hours in the day. For some reason, across the summer, we do seem to get a few more hours in the day; sometimes, we’re not quite as busy-so how can we use that time? What do you need to get ahead for in autumn? It might be that you’ve got events or trade shows you are involved with or want to kick off several campaigns. We run campaigns in September, October, and November. I am now getting ahead with the campaigns ready for that period when I know it will be really busy. We also tend to onboard new clients into Superfast Circle at that time of year. We run a Superfast Circle physical event with presentations which we need to get ahead with. We already have campaigns in our email system that will be going out in July and October because I’ve created them ahead of time; That’s something to think about. What campaigns would I like to run? We were on a Superfast Circle call today and talking with one of our participants who was planning their next 90 days with a particularly focused campaign. They wanted some help and support around that, which obviously is part of our process. They are thinking ahead already. Connect With Your Current Connections A question what are you doing with your current connections? When did you last do an audit? When I talk about your current connections, they are everywhere. They’re going to be in your database; they’re going to be in your CRM and personal email system. Maybe they are a cold list you downloaded from somewhere or bought that you’ve never done anything with. They are all your LinkedIn and other social channel connections. One of the things that always fascinates us is how many people you probably are connected to on LinkedIn that you don’t leverage. There was one particular client we were having a conversation with, and by the time we’d added up the number of people, it was him and his business partner, and they worked together. By the time we’d worked out how many connections they had on several channels, it came to something bonkers like 60,000 or 70,000 connections. I appreciate that not all of those will be ready to act now, and they are such an untapped goldmine. Remember that when you’re running email campaigns, you can also run a campaign through LinkedIn to these individuals, which would make a difference for you. One of the things that we are doing with our Superfast Circle members, we’ve got a challenge going on at the moment, and it’s around converting current connections. We’ve got ideas and strategies that we’re sharing with people. We’re working with them so they can leverage what they have and be in a position where they don’t have to press restart as the summer ends. What if you didn’t have to do that through the next few months? Build New Campaigns Campaigns, I’m sure many of you are already running campaigns. Are you analysing them? What’s working? Could you tweak something? Does a bit of copy need to change? Has your messaging changed on your website? Is your new business persona your new avatar? Are they different? Consequently, do you need to alter what you’re currently doing? One of the things I always like to think about is, “What new campaigns am I going to run at the back end of the year?” What about a new candidate campaign for you, a new client campaign? While you maybe have more headspace in the next few months, what could you be doing ready so that you kick things off in September? So that you are the person who is already ahead of the game. Here are some ideas. Get Ahead With Content What is a new candidate campaign that you might want to run? What is a new client campaign? The other couple of things that I like to do is I like to get ahead with graphics. We have somebody that creates our graphics for us. We have two people that we work with. We’re getting ahead with some of the graphics we will need. Then also, to get ahead with content, what content do you need? Our Superfast Circle members get the majority of their content from us. I’ve already planned all that out until the end of October. They know exactly what content they’ve got, and they can create campaigns around it. For you, what do you need to do at the moment? If you’re thinking about email campaigns, if you’re thinking about other things that you might want to be doing on social media, maybe different advertising that you’re doing, then now is the time to get all those things together. A to-do list for you to be covering over the summer. I want you to do it now so that you can get ahead. How We Can Help You Our Superfast Circle members get multiple campaigns they can use from us throughout the year. Would you like to find out more? Then grab a quick call with one of us here. See you next week! Thanks Denise The post Recruitment Marketing Actions This Summer appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today let’s talk about marketing communication and emojis and how and why to use them as part of your marketing. First, I think it’s good to explore where did they come from, what are they all about, why are they suddenly being used everywhere; AND why you should consider using them in your marketing? The Emoji Concept Isn’t New Now, it’s not uncommon for people to communicate in pictures as well as text. You only need to think about pictograms from years ago, which have always been part of the human experience of how we express our feelings, our emotions, and how we communicate. I remember years ago, I went to Egypt on holiday and went into one of the pyramids and saw all the amazing hieroglyphics; of course, that was a way that people communicated so they used text and they used imagery. Now, the first smiley emojis appeared on message boards in the early to mid-’90s, but they really came to fruition through a Japanese guy called Shigetaka Kurita. He came up with the concept of the emoji, and he worked for a Japanese cell/mobile company. This happened in 1999, and those were the first emojis. He came up with 176 emojis that then started to be used on mobile phones. They were something novel. It was something innovative, and they started to take off. Now apparently, there are around about 3,000 different emojis that you can get hold of. I’m going to share some places where you can find them as well. We went from having a couple of hundred through to now we have 3,000 emojis. Contrary to popular belief, the word “emoji” does not come from emotion. It comes from a Japanese word that means picture and letter. They combined the two words, even though emojis are very good at expressing emotion, and that’s the whole point of talking about them today when it comes to marketing. The Increasing Popularity of Emojis Over a period of about, I don’t know, 10, 15 years, emojis started to increase in popularity, and, of course, that was aligned with smartphone usage. Then, of course, they appeared on keyboards to the point where in 2015, the emoji actually appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time. I think it came out that emoji was the most popular word or voted the most popular word in 2015. Who knew? Anyhow, that is the journey, and, of course, if you consider how we now live in a digital environment more so than we have ever done and what’s happened over the last few years with the pandemic that people are using their smartphones to communicate. We have Millennials/Gen Y, and we have Gen Z, and both of these groups communicate online and via email as their preferred choice. I love them both, but they can be a tad ‘lazy’ when it comes to picking up the phone! As a general rule, they often will communicate via emojis, and that is something that, whether we like it or not, or whether we agree with it or not, it is now part of our environment. It’s part of how we communicate. It’s part of how other people express themselves. Emojis Can Warm Up a Conversation Emojis are a great way of actually saving brain power sometimes in how you communicate, or you’re sending a text, or you’re sending an email, and it can be slightly cold. Emojis are a way to enrich the communication piece. Sometimes it also helps to clarify and strengthen what we are saying, so that is one of the many benefits of emojis in how you communicate. There are several benefits to using emojis in your marketing. As with anything, anything that’s overdone loses its impact. You also have to think about your customer Avatar, who you want to reach out to, and whether will they work with that group. Emojis= A Universal Language A great thing about emojis is they are a universal language. With digital marketing, you can reach just about anybody now online, and they could be from a different country, and you can use an emoji, and everyone understands the laughing emoji; everyone understands the annoyed emoji. They really can bridge a communication gap. Also, when you use them as a writer, I never thought I’d say this, but they can make your communication clearer with regard to the intentionality of what you’re saying. Of course, emojis humanise your brand; your brand is all about connecting with people and communicating who you are and what you do. By using them, you most certainly connect with people at a different level and in a different way. If you come back to our Avatar, understanding your Avatar and their use of emojis will then help you to work out which ones you could use and what difference that could make. Now it’s quite common, and it’s a well-known fact that emojis definitely drive up audience engagement; It’s such a pity that our email provider does not have them as something I can use in emails, but they most certainly do improve engagement on social posts. Are you listening, Keap? It’s something to consider that when you are posting on social media, could you make your communication, particularly from a personal branding point of view, communicate and improve the level of emotion in what you were saying because people really do respond to emotion. [Fact: Always remember, people buy on emotion. They justify their purchase logically afterwards.] Remember, a lot of us are visually referenced. If you are seeing a big block of text on a post on LinkedIn, it might not be as welcoming for you to read. Whereas if there’s a couple of emojis there, you’re going to get a sense of, uhm, what is this talking about? It really draws the eye because you can use different emojis. You can shorten your communication. You can make it really punchy, really clear, and people get it. Using a using a few thumbs up, using one of my favourite ones is a woman holding a hand up . Doing all of these different things can make a difference for you. Where Can You Access Emojis? Now, where do you find emojis? All the social platforms have them. If you’re on LinkedIn there’s not a huge number on LinkedIn, but if you’re on LinkedIn, it will automatically give you emojis to use. Exactly the same with Facebook. If you are a Windows user, hit the Window key and full stop, and that will bring up a set of emojis for you. If you’re a Mac user, again, I think it’s Control–Command–Space, something like that, that you press, and it will come up. There’s a great website as well called Emojipedia. If you just go to emojipedia.org, you can find the emojis that you want to use there. To be honest, as with most things in life, just go and Google it because, with new up-and-coming rising trends, there are always multiple options for you appearing all the time, so just go and Google best emoji websites. Something I would say to you is if you are going to use them, use similar ones, so rather than always doing random emojis, give people a sense of you and your brand. I mentioned the fact that we often put the hand up, the woman’s hand up, the male hand up , and we have ticks , and we have thumbs up and we have thumbs down . Use a pattern of emojis so people get to understand you and your brand and how you’re communicating. So where could you start using emojis in your marketing? Thanks, Denise How We Can Help You With Your Marketing Marketing and especially digital marketing, are evolving all the time. And as our lives become busier, you want to ensure you are on point with the strategies and actions that work. As a Superfast Circle member, we got you We share all the strategies that are working now, and as part of your membership, every month, we run an additional training session. If you want a quick demonstration of how Superfast Circle could work for you, book a call here.       The post Marketing Communication: Using Emojis in Marketing appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This week, we’re continuing our series on how to leverage your recruitment website. We’ve talked about your About Us page and your homepage, and this week, I want to talk about your blog; And how that can truly build your business in a way that many people don’t appreciate. Your blog can be a great source of lead generation, which is a continual challenge for recruiters across the globe. [If you haven’t accessed our Lead Generation training which is now available on demand, you can grab the recording here.] The Many Benefits of Blogging Blogging has proven to be a highly effective strategy for B2B businesses. Here are several key pieces of data and evidence that show the impact of maintaining a business blog: Increased Traffic According to a HubSpot survey, companies that blog receive 55% more website visitors than those that don’t. Blogs act as additional indexed pages on a company’s website, which boosts its visibility and SEO performance. Lead Generation The same HubSpot report found that B2B companies that blog generate 67% more monthly leads than those that do not. Blogs provide a venue for businesses to demonstrate their expertise and provide value, which fosters trust and encourages potential clients to engage further. Consumer Trust A study by Demand Gen Report found that 47% of buyers view 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep. This means that a blog can be vital to establishing trust and authority with potential customers before they ever make contact. Long-Term Results A report by HubSpot showed that 1 in 10 blog posts are compounding, meaning organic search increases their traffic over time. Well-crafted blog posts can attract new visitors months or even years after publication. Social Media Engagement Blogs provide fresh content that can be shared on social media, which can help increase a business’s reach and visibility. According to the Content Marketing Institute, LinkedIn is especially effective for B2B marketers, with 97% using the platform to distribute content. Remember that for a blog to be effective, it needs to be updated regularly with high-quality content that’s relevant to your target audience. Simply having a blog isn’t enough — it must be a key part of your overall content marketing strategy. Thanks Denise How Can We Help? As part of Superfast Circle, you get access to all the blog content you need as a small recruitment business. Would you like to know more? Then book a quick demo with one of us here.   The post Recruitment Websites 101: Business Blogging To Build Your Business appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Continuing our April series of guest podcasts, I am delighted to introduce and welcome the fabulous Katy Green from Centred Excellence as a returning guest. Katy has 23 years of experience in the recruitment industry. Following a successful career with Aspire, where she became MD of Aspire Digital, Katy joined Centred Excellence as Nicky Coffin’s business partner. With her business partner Nicky Coffin, Katy specialises in helping business owners who want to scale to 7 and 8 figures. As a result, Katy knows a thing or two about what it takes to build a high-performing team. We cover a variety of topics in our conversation, all of which are fundamental elements to have in place in any recruitment company if you aspire to grow and scale and want to build a high-performing team. Listen as Katy expands on the critical elements of a strong foundation: Vision Mission Values Principles Katy emphasises that the company’s vision needs to be clear, inspirational, and communicated effectively so that the vision becomes a driving force that motivates employees to act outside their comfort zones. In addition, values and principles are vital to the culture and must be cascaded down to each individual’s job and responsibility. Building on this, Katy shared that it’s essential for team members to understand their roles and responsibilities within the team and the organisation and to know what behaviours and actions are expected of them to achieve high performance. She expands on the role of leaders in identifying and utilising individual strengths within a team. Katy explains that productivity and energy are multiplied by recognising team members’ unique abilities and assigning tasks accordingly. Katy suggests that leaders also need to understand the mindset of their team members, as self-sabotaging beliefs and lack of skills can prevent them from acting. Helping their team overcome these emotional states and acquiring the skills required to perform at their best is a fundamental part of a leader’s role. During the conversation, we explored what needs to be in place to ensure that a business is future-proofing teams by understanding roles and responsibilities and having clear expectations and measurements of performance. Here we discussed the significance of having measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) and transparent processes and systems in a business. Katy stressed that having measurable KPIs is essential for giving people something to strive for and perform above and understanding the importance of their role within the company. She also highlighted that clear business processes and systems are crucial for consistency, accountability, and growth. Katy explained that developing and implementing systems and processes is crucial for small business owners who want to scale their businesses. She stressed the need for owners to work in their area of strength and recruit additional team members to buy back time, as time is more valuable than money. Expanding on this, Katy suggested that by spending 70% of your time in your super strength, you can generate 10-100 times more profit for the business. As our conversation turned to marketing, which is critical in scaling and growing a recruitment business, Katy described the importance of understanding your clients and candidates and their pain points and desires to create a message that stands out from the competition. We discussed how marketing messages work most effectively when they speak directly to a company’s ideal client and candidate avatar. This makes attracting and retaining them so much easier. You can contact Katy by email: [email protected] or connect with her here The post The Art of Building and Retaining High Performing Recruitment Teams An Expert Interview With Katy Green appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

  Miles and Sharon discuss the importance of maximizing client potential in this podcast conversation. Miles shares some of the strategies he implements with his clients as part of their growth plans. He explains the importance of: Building strong client relationships The risks of having too much business with too few clients Adding value to clients through the recruiting process not just filling jobs Adapting to changing client needs Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the recruitment industry As the co-founder of a recruitment company specializing in using a non-biased process in the sporting world, Miles talks about how organizations are pressured to increase diversity and must start conversing with clients about what they are doing to bring about change. He explains that smaller clients are feeling pressure from more prominent organizations in the supply chain and how companies must differentiate themselves and find clients receptive to their messaging. Adding Value To stand out in a market such as recruitment can be challenging. There is, however, an opportunity and huge potential to become a go-to recruitment company and ideal partner for clients and candidates. Miles and Sharon discuss the need for business owners to understand their ideal clients and invest time and effort in those relationships. Miles suggests: “Having mutual respect and finding clients with the same values is essential. Companies need to invest in themselves and their value propositions, explore new geographies and sectors, and find ways to facilitate a better recruitment process”. If you want to grow and scale your recruitment company or know how to capitalize and maximize your client’s potential, listen in as Miles reveals what’s working today. You can get in touch with Miles  here Miles discusses the importance of managing change effectively and avoiding overstretching oneself in this conversation. He emphasizes the need to delegate effectively, empower others in the organization, and surround yourself with a great team. Miles also highlights the importance of choosing partners carefully, taking time to go through change, and doing things with real purpose and conviction. He uses the analogy of climbing a mountain with Sherpas to illustrate the importance of having a great team and treating a business with respect. Miles offers valuable advice for business owners and leaders to successfully navigate change, delegate effectively, and build a great team to achieve their goals. Thanks, Denise and Sharon The post Maximizing Client Revenue Miles Lloyd Expert Interview appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

In this special episode and the first of our April series of expert interviews, we are delighted to interview a true expert in her field. Cheryl Wing is the MD of GSR2R, and a leading award-winning Rec2Rec specialist based in London, and the founder of the GSR2R Masterclass Programme, which helps you attract and retain talent. In the space of five years, Cheryl has empowered over 40 companies to hire their own recruiters, saving them time and money and improving their time to hire while increasing retention. Most importantly, these recruitment organisations now have a pipeline of the right recruiters to hire. At the same time, Cheryl continues to run her rec2rec company, GSR2R placing candidates for clients in central London. In this episode, Cheryl shares a wealth of insights into how the Rec2Rec market today compares with previous challenging times. She explains why candidates are moving; YES, you can recruit fantastic recruiting talent for your company, including BIG Billers. Cheryl describes the changes she is seeing in the sector and details what candidates are looking for in a new company and how the ESG [Environmental, Social, and Governance] agenda influences candidate attraction. If your company’s ability to grow is dependent on your ability to recruit your own talent, you will not want to miss the strategy Cheryl teaches clients to enable them to attract the talent that will support their growth. Whether you have just started recruiting or have been finding it challenging over recent times to find the right talent for your business and would value the inside edge of how companies are successfully building large teams, this podcast is for you. Thanks Denise P.S. If you aren’t subscribed to our podcast, you can subscribe here on iTunes and listen to the full podcast from Cheryl and over 370 other podcasts we have recorded! The post Recruiting The Right Recruiters In Today’s Market An Expert Interview With Cheryl Wing appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today, I want to talk about cold outreach and some good facts and some not so-easy to hear. Cold outreach is a pretty simple process; however, it’s not easy, and getting your mind around it is hard for some people. I remember back in the day; I cut my teeth on cold outreach because, in the pharmaceutical industry, we used to go and knock on doors. That could be a doctor’s surgery or a door on a hospital corridor. We used to sit and attempt to see consultants and people like that so we physically could turn up, so they couldn’t just put the phone down on us! I often share my story of going to a particular doctor’s surgery in Ancoats in Manchester. It’s very trendy now, Ancoats. I assure you, when I went, it wasn’t I asked the receptionist if I could see the Dr, and she led me down a corridor. She pointed to the door I went through to find myself in the carpark with the door locked behind me, but there you go, which is what occasionally happens with cold calling. I’m sure we all have our thoughts and stories we can tell, and I think cold calling is much maligned, and I don’t think people appreciate that. If you want to scale and grow at some point, you can’t keep fishing in the same pond. You have to do different elements of cold outreach to build your database of people you can start to have a conversation with, and then you can find them a role or help develop their team. Different Cold Outreach Strategies There are multiple ways to do this, but I wanted to give you some ideas and prepare you for the road ahead, as occasionally, parts can be rocky. One of the things about cold outreach is people give up too soon, and because of that, they don’t get the wins they could if they just persisted with the process. Now, cold outreach will support your scaling goal, and as I’ve said, it is pretty simple; however, it’s not always easy. Our minds go crazy when we get rejected, or a call doesn’t go to plan, we don’t get the same response and reaction, we were hoping for, and consequently, people give up. The Truth About Cold Let me talk about a few things you need to remember about cold outreach, some of which you need to have in place and be aware of. The first thing is there are multiple ways to do cold outreach. It’s not just picking up the phone these days. You can connect with people in numerous ways, and we encourage people to do several things. The first is to get people on your database by offering them something of value. Now, that could be a report, an invitation to a webinar, or an event, because what happens when you do that is you are highlighting and connecting with those who have an interest in what you do. Many of you listening to this podcast will probably be on our database. You’ll have downloaded a couple of reports, you might have been to several webinars, and probably you’re even a client listening to this. Here it works; “I want to get that person on my database. I need to use reciprocity. I’m going to give them something of value. Here you are. Here’s a great report. Here’s something else. Come onto my database, and then I can show you how to help. Because what’s happening then is that person is going from stone cold to lukewarm because they’re becoming more aware of you. That is one thing you must have in place as part of your process, which forms part of your cold outreach strategy. How can you do that in multiple ways? Cold Platforms You can post on social media and send cold emails to clients. Cold emailing works, and you can do it because when it comes to GDPR when someone has a work email address, it’s a legitimate interest; you are using this as a marketing practice. All you need to do is ensure you have an unsubscribed button, and there are many different ways to do cold emailing. Go and have a look at the Superfast website on the blog. I have talked about cold emailing several times before. I’ve also shared the story that when it comes to cold emailing, that’s how we started our business. I remember I still have it imprinted in my mind, 23 email addresses. We went out and looked for these particular email addresses of people that would be right for us. Until a couple of years ago, we were still working with one of these individuals, who ironically has just retired. There are many different platforms that you can use that can do cold outreach. Of course, another way to reach out to people who are cold to you, and, of course, these are people that you want to put into your actual funnel, your sales funnel, is you can use paid advertising. Now, there’s Google; there is Facebook and Insta; now called  Meta, and, of course, you also have LinkedIn advertising; You can use any of those. Don’t dismiss using advertising like that to build awareness of your brand to get people to engage. You can do it cost-effectively, particularly when using different advertising techniques. No matter what, when you do reach out to people, I know many of you will have done a lot of cold calling over the years; you do know that a certain percentage of people will be interested. It’s usually around 3% to 7%; usually, we find you get up to 10% of people interested and willing to have a conversation with you, but you can build, and you can scale from this. You look at any organization that’s done well, any smaller micro to SME organization, they will always have a cold outreach strategy as part of their process. However, there are some things to make you aware of because it’s not all sunshine, lollipop, and roses. You will come up against things when you’re doing cold calling and outreach because, unfortunately, our brains get in the way, and when we get a series of nos, we can very easily want to give up. Please remember this, the only way you will scale and grow is you have to go to newer audiences, and at some point in the process, creating demand with these newer audiences is going to be some level of cold outreach. When you do that, remember that it’s not somebody being referred to you, it’s not a candidate that’s come to you, and it’s not a referral from one of your favourite clients to one of their friends who’s also in business. That referral process is great, and conversion is so much easier there. You’re going out to people who don’t know you; your conversion rate will drop much more than you anticipate. Remember, that won’t be forever. Your conversion rate will be lower, but you are going out to new people, building that opportunity. Remember that cold outreach is a longer-term strategy. It’s for the long term, and it will build your business. You need to do cold outreach for at least six months before building momentum. Now, I know that everyone wants quick wins all the time. I shall get off my soapbox now, talking about cold outreach; it’s something you need to factor into your business if you want to grow, even if you want to maintain where you are because there gets a point where that database you have is going to start running dry. As many people have experienced over the last few months, we’ve had many tech people laying people off, freezing recruitment. This is when you probably wish, “I wish we’d done more outreach.” The thing about it is all is not lost; Start now and start to build the process. How We Can Help? In our Superfast Circle membership, we support you in building your marketing through multiple strategies, including cold outreach, and we have systems for you to use. We’ve also got email and messenger campaigns that you can use too. If you want to know more about that, drop us an email or book into our diary here. See you next week, Denise The post Why Cold Outreach Is Simple Though Not Always An Easy Strategy To Use appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

This week our focus is your marketing review. As many of you know, we’re big fans from our corporate days of the 90-day planning process, which works incredibly well if you want to keep on track and keep things happening in your business. Today I want to share the questions we use that we’ve been honing over the years and brought with us from our various roles in bigger organisations. Until you review, you don’t know what’s happening in your business, you’ve not looked at the data, and you don’t know where you’re going as you move forward. If you don’t review, how do you know; what’s going well and what’s probably not going so well? We have used and tested several processes to review our marketing and business activities for many years. It was schooled into us when we were both in our corporate roles, and I thank the organisations for teaching us their system. Over the years, we have adapted our review process and now use two styles of question. The 4 Rs and The 5 Whys The first one, very easy to remember, is the 4 Rs, with r standing for review questions. Then the next one is the 5 Whys which will make sense in a second. Let’s start with the 4 Rs. I will give you the questions, dive into each, and then explain how the 5 Whys fit in. Now, I’m assuming when you sit down to carry out your 90-day review, you will be looking at data, you won’t just be basing it on emotion, and the 5 Whys questions will help remove. So here are the questions in the particular order we ask them. What did we achieve? What worked well? What did we miss? What are our priorities this quarter? Now, I ask these questions in this particular order because it’s very easy to get into with a negative frame, for example, “Well, what didn’t work? What did we not do?” This rarely ends well and wastes time. Here is the thing; driven business owners and entrepreneurs, we always like to look at the gap rather than the gain. There’s a great book by Dr Ben Hardy and Sullivan called the Gap and the Gain. I’ve mentioned it before; you can download it here. It is well worth looking at because Ben and Dan explain how we’re always looking for that horizon moment as entrepreneurs. We’re moving towards what we want, but just like a horizon, it will always get further away in the distance because we’re always building and building and building. It’s really important to look at, “Well, hang on a minute,” this is the great thing about reviews, “actually, where did we start versus where are we now?” Two of the ‘r’ questions are important around this. It’s like, “What did we achieve, and what worked well.” I would always ask you to look at that and don’t do the “Ah, but” or “Ah, but we could have done more.” Ask yourself, what did we achieve? Then this is where the brilliant questions come in: the 5 Whys. Sakichi Toyoda’s 5 Why Questions The 5 Whys was developed many years ago, in the 1930s, by Sakichi Toyoda from Toyota, who wanted to improve processes that were not working as well as they could on the shop floor. Toyota still uses it to this day. The 5 Whys is a process where we ask why questions. This particular framework of questions is based on seeing what’s working and asking questions about what and why things are and are not happening. Why questions challenge us; occasionally, people can get defensive when you ask why questions, but of course, that won’t be you because you understand the logic around why we’re asking them. For example, let’s take one of our review questions; what did we achieve? We say, “Well, we achieved, let’s just say we achieved 50,000 in sales, 100,000 in sales,” and then we ask some questions. We ask five why questions because this will dig down deeper into why things happen so that we get to the truth. It is very easy to ask, “Well, why did we do that?” You get a fairly straightforward, not very detailed answer. However, when you keep drilling down into why, that makes a huge difference because it reveals more data. When you’re talking about what we achieved, maybe 50k wasn’t what you wanted, you wanted 100k that month, and it’d be, “Well, why did we achieve that?” The first answer could be, well, we didn’t implement everything, or because we implemented everything on our plan, and why did we do that? “Well, we did that because we started planning properly at the end of December last year, so we got our head in the game.” Why did we do that? Can you see where this goes, That you start to reveal what’s going on? What it does for you is reveal what you’re doing well and potentially need to do more of it and where you’ve had those challenging times. It reveals maybe where you didn’t do as well and what you could have done differently. We’ve talked about what we achieved and what worked well, and what could be why things worked well. Let’s look at the other two R questions, and that is around, what didn’t work as well, and what did we miss? What did we miss? Why did we miss those things? “Well, we haven’t got enough resources. We weren’t doing enough cold outreach,” which, ironically, I will be talking about in next week’s podcast. Why did that happen? Why did this happen? Then, you really start to drill down and say, “All right, okay,” so it could be, why did we miss certain things? You could come back to the point that we didn’t send out enough emails, we didn’t nurture the candidate database that we have, or we didn’t get any quick wins because we weren’t emailing our current database to check in with them. All of these questions will reveal data that will make a difference for you because what you’re doing is you’re revealing the next stage of the journey for you. Yesterday I was chatting to one of our marketers in Superfast Circle about the 5 Why process. They are carrying out an analysis of their customer satisfaction levels as a company using the NPS process. Some of the data it throws up is uncomfortable, which is a positive because it can be changed. Take that emotion out of it, we’re looking at data, and data is always good because we can do something about the data. Imagine asking yourself these why questions, what a difference that will make. Because when you look at, what didn’t work as well, and you start to challenge yourself, you will notice that as you do this, you get down to more and more detail, and it starts to reveal areas of focus that you missed and need to focus on more now. The fourth question is, what is critical for the next quarter? Because you have been asking questions, your next steps will be better informed. Because sometimes, when we are talking to people, I say, “I want to do x this quarter.” We ask, “Why do you want to do that? Why, and why?” The questions start to flow. Several times people have said, “I don’t know why I’m doing it this quarter.” For example, some people want a new website, and after a few questions, they realise they don’t need a brand-new website now; maybe they could be utilising what they have in a way that will work for them. Then they can get a new website later and spend their resource, both time and money, on something else. Next Steps For You? I encourage you to take the time as we enter the last few days of March to review the first part of the year this process and questions. Ask the tough and uncomfortable questions, and the five whys will enable you to do that. We help our Superfast Circle clients review their process as their virtual marketing directors; that is why they are doing so well. If you would like to explore how this can work for you, book a quick call with one of us here. See you next time, Denise The post The Best Questions Ever To Use In Your 90 Day Marketing Review appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Last month we ran a live training class on creating a lead generation system for your recruitment company. We shared a process called The Lead Generation Triad which we have developed over the years; when you implement all the parts consistently, leads will arrive in your business One part of the process is the content machine which enables you to build authority and credibility in the market. Content is a huge convincer of your expertise and that you are able to do what you say you can for both candidates and clients. So, what exactly is authority content for recruiters, and why is it important? What Is Authority Recruitment Content? Authority content is marketing collateral and material that positions a recruitment brand as an expert in their sector to; candidates, clients, AND any new talent they want to attract. This content provides valuable insights, ideas, and solutions to the problems that both candidates and clients have when it comes to moving jobs and building their careers or attracting engaging, and building a team. The fact is in the B2B world, where decision-making is often based on trust and credibility, authority content plays a crucial role in attracting, engaging, and converting potential people to your brand. Authority content will establish you and your brand as a thought leader in your sector. That might be THE construction recruiter in Manchester or THE legal recruiter in Leeds. It helps you stand out while at the same time differentiating yourself from your competitors. Examples of Recruitment Authority Content This type of content includes reports, guides, whitepapers, case studies, webinars, email campaigns that add value, videos, podcasts, blog posts, research reports, salary, and workplace surveys. This collateral is longer-form, in-depth, and highly focused on a particular topic or issue that a candidate or client might have. It provides detailed information that helps your clients and candidates solve their problems or make informed decisions about their next steps. This post and podcast are an example of authority content. So is our on-demand email training class and the various reports and videos you will find on our downloads page here. Fact: Authority Attracts Quality One of the main benefits of authority content is that it attracts high-quality leads, the best clients, and candidates to YOUR business. Why? Because this type of content is focused on providing value and solving problems, it tends to attract people who are actively searching for solutions to their challenges. By creating content addressing these issues, you can position yourself as the go-to source of information and expertise, leading to increased brand awareness and a more engaged group of candidates and clients. This content style will help you establish trust and credibility with your target audience; think of ideal client and candidate avatars. When a recruitment or search company provides valuable insights and solutions to problems, they demonstrate that they understand their sector at every level. The challenges candidates have to develop their careers and how the biggest issue for clients is attracting skilled people who stay in the current climate. This logically builds trust and credibility. Why? Because when your audience sees you adding value, reciprocity kicks in, and they are more likely to start responding to you. For instance, opening emails and answering your calls. This then leads to increased placements and more interest in your recruiting brand. 3 Elements of Effective Authority Recruitment Content To create effective authority content, recruitment and search brands should focus on three key elements: relevance, quality, and promote it! Relevance Relevance means the content should focus highly on your candidate and client’s needs. If you don’t know what they are, ask them! Make sure it answers the questions going on in their head. When you do this, you will stand out head and shoulders above other recruiters in your sector; trust me I see some pretty irrelevant and unhelpful content out there so it isn’t going to be that hard. When you do this, you will start to create your own tribe of followers because your relevance and value shine through. Quality Quality refers to the overall quality of the content itself. Authority content should be well-researched, well-written, and useful; and delivered in an easy-to-digest format. I know this might sound cheesy, so ensure your formatting is easy to read. I know I am a writer; spell and grammar check your work. I know even the best of us can have the odd apostrophe missing or weird typo, and when your work is littered with mistakes, your credibility goes down the toilet fast. Break it up with subheadings, as I have in this post, which leads people logically through the post and sequences your content. Notice I gave you a definition first, then an example of content and the many benefits using it will give you. Make sense? If you have ever read an article and struggled to understand what they were ‘trying’ to communicate this was probably why. Promote Your Content Every Where Your Candidates and Clients Hang Out I know this saying from a field of dreams is often misquoted, and “build it, and they will come”- isn’t true. You have to promote your content consistently everywhere your sector hangs out. The good news is that most of the content you can use in the recruitment sector is evergreen. In other words, it won’t date significantly over the years. So, guess what? You can share your content multiple times over a few years; yes, you read correctly. Use a variety of channels to promote your content, including social media on all channels, not just LinkedIn. Your website, Youtube, iTunes, and your email list. Authority content in the recruitment sector is a powerful marketing tool that can help you stand out as you establish yourself as the go-to sector recruiter to be working with. How We Can Help? Did you know that as a member of Superfast Circle, we provide you with all the authority content you need? It is written for candidates and clients by a trained copy and content expert. For less than a pretty average placement fee, you can become a member and get an R.O.I. on your investment in a matter of weeks. If you want to have a quick chat, book a call with one of us here.   The post Recruitment Marketing: The What and Why Of Authority Content appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today we celebrate International Women’s Day with an interview with one of our amazing clients Dawn Bannister the M.D. of KSB Recruitment. A thirty-year recruitment ‘veteran’, midwife, and innovative business owner Dawn has an amazing story to tell today as we celebrate IWD and all things that embrace Equity. Sharon: Hi, Dawn, and welcome to the Recruitment Marketing and Sales podcast. Thank you, first of all, for your time today. We are here in celebration of International Women’s Day and its theme of #EmbraceEquity When I thought about who would be a great client to interview on IWD, you came to mind because of some of our conversations while working together. Could you start by telling us about KSB Recruitment, and then maybe go back in time? As we are talking about Equity today, where did your journey begin? Dawn Bannister: Firstly, Sharon, thank you. Thank you for inviting me along today. It is an honour and a privilege to be here, especially with, as you say, International Women’s Day and that of Equity. I feel like the universe guides it with the story I must tell. I am honoured to be here today, Sharon. Dawn: Firstly, a little bit about me. My name is Dawn, and for those who don’t know me. I’ve been a recruitment business owner, and it’ll be 32 years next month. I was obviously a child when I started this business! We specialize in temporary and permanent placements across the U.K. for the catering and hospitality industry. That can be from the southwest up to the top of Scotland. Having a business, sometimes people say if you could go back in time and tell your 12-year-old self, what would you say knowing what you know now? If you look at me as a 12-year-old self, I would never in a million years have imagined I’d own my own business. I had a mum and a dad who grew up in a traditional, very working-class family in a market town with a small-town mentality, and I went to a traditional school. My story starts at school because whilst my family was very traditional, I went to a school where I was badly bullied. Back then, in the early 1980s, bullying was not dealt with by the teachers, let alone anybody else. I would fear going to school in the mornings. I would stress the bell ringing for the break. I would fear the bell ringing for lunchtime and going home again because my walk home would probably be my hair being pulled, punched in the back, kicked, and told I was ugly and all the rest. Nobody heard me; nobody listened. I wasn’t seen, I wasn’t heard, apart from with these bullies. My life was really miserable. I lived in fear, which is no place for a 12-year-old to be. My parents didn’t listen. I did what, I guess, instinctively, I could do. I reached out to be heard and became very naughty. I was a naughty child. I played truant from school. I’d go out and stay out late. I’d disappear. I would run away from home. At the time, I was never going to surmount to anything in my life. I’d be lucky if I’d pass my CSEs, which they were back in the day. I had this label of being a naughty child, a label of somebody who would never achieve anything; I couldn’t even get into college to study hairdressing. I’ll press the fast-forward button. I left home at 16 to fend for myself, and at 19, I fell into recruitment like many people do. I fell into it in a job as a receptionist at a recruitment business. I really did love recruitment, and I worked seven till seven, pushed for promotion, which I got, and was trained to be a consultant. This is where I met my ex-husband, Mike. We worked together for a couple of years in this recruitment business. We got married, had a baby, and were made redundant in March 1991. I think we were at the height of the recession at that point. I remember interest rates were 15%. Mike and I had been working for a recruitment business, and the chap that owned it had other business interests and, because of the state of the economy, wanted to focus on his core business, so he wanted to close this recruitment business down. He said, “You’ve got a handful of temps working for you. Do what you want. If you want it, take it. If you don’t, then that’s fine.” We faced deciding whether to be unemployed or take over the business. We didn’t have a choice. I said to Mike, “We have to do this. We’ve got no choice.” We found an office in Birmingham, in Kensington House, shared with a photocopier. We had £37 in our pocket, and that was it. Our company cars were about to go back, and on the next Monday, KSB Recruitment was born. KSB stands for Kensington Staff Bureau, which is Kensington House, and the story goes with it. Sharon, I need to tell the story with that: I will never forget that our temps would go to work. We would raise an invoice the following Monday. We would hand-deliver the invoice, and the next day they would raise us a check, which we would run to the bank and cash to pay our temp payroll for that week. That’s how it built from there. I was pretty good by this point at survival. Bear Grylls Eat Your Heart Out because I knew what survival was back then. Mike and I were formidable. We were a great team. We moved forward with this business, and it was important for us. We didn’t know what we were doing; it was very much on a wing and a prayer. Sharon: Learn as you go. That’s very similar, isn’t it, for a lot of business owners. We learn as we go. Dawn: Yes, sure. We certainly did learn as we went. We certainly did. Because I’d always had this label and this belief that I wasn’t clever, I was never going to make it in life, and I had to pursue this. A: I was a woman in the early ’90s in business. B: I was only 23, 24, so I was young. How on earth would I have the credibility to go out there and face companies, and business leaders and tell them how good we were at supplying temporary staff? For me, it became the Wizard of Oz syndrome. The scarecrow didn’t have a brain and things like that. I had to go and resource myself to prove to the world that I did have a brain, and yes, I’ve got initiative, and yes, I’ve got balls and big balls, but I needed to prove to the world and for my confidence as well, that I’ve got a brain. I’d work with the Chamber of Commerce and people like that, but then I went and did an HNC in business at college, and I excelled in that and did really well. Fast forward, I had another baby as well, on top of that. We’d got some money coming in by then and started to grow the team. We’d got to four or five staff members by the mid-’90s. Then we were faced with a challenge with one of our members of staff whom we trusted implicitly, we found out she was being blackmailed, and she stole about £/S18,000 from us through the payroll. That was challenging because she became a friend as well as part of the workforce, so that was hard. We’d go after new business, and we’d win new business. We had some great clients. We’d lose clients because they signed a deal with Reed or Manpower because they were the big guys and could monopolize in terms of cost. There were lots of challenges that we faced. Sharon: In terms of how the company grew over time, I know that there was a time when you chose to take your career in a different direction, even after everything that you’ve just described you’ve been through, to go off and do something different. That’s an interesting thing to share. Dawn: In ’99, I had another baby. That’s it, I stopped, but my inner drive was about serving others and how to deliver great service or be of great service to others. How can I serve, whether staff, customers, temporary workers, or whomever it might be? That was in-built in me. I’m going to rewind and fast-forward. In 1999, we were one of the first recruitment businesses in the West Midlands to be successfully awarded the Investors in People Award. That was a real badge of honor for me. Gaining this accreditation was a huge process that we’d had to go down to ensure we had the right processes and systems in place. Achieving that was just amazing. Sharon: Massive. Dawn: It was massive. Then early in 2002, by this time, we’d got to three branches and about 30 odd staff. We had an industrial driving team who, unbeknown to me, had spent probably at least six months working behind the scenes on lining their pockets and winning clients, winning candidates to take to a new business they took. The staff left simultaneously and took it over to this other business. That was one of the biggest fights in my life because I was personally wounded as these were people that I’d looked after in my business.  It took a long time to get over that, in terms of accepting it wasn’t about me, it was about their agenda, but they took the business for about half a million in gross profit. It made me angry and bitter, and the knock-on effect affected my marriage. It was a factor in my marriage breaking down, which was hard with three children and a business. To cut a long story short, we split the business. I kept Birmingham, and my ex-husband took the other two offices. Again, I had a different battle, a different fight, a different survival, but we worked through it and were okay. We were doing all right. We came through it all right. Then we were faced with another recession coming up. Sharon: Before we talk about what I knew you went on to do. In hindsight, what were some of your key coping mechanisms? Dawn: When I sit down now and look back, I was 20-odd years younger, so I had a lot more energy and fight, but for me, it did come back to that survival because the children were so young, and I had to provide the roof over their head and keep that going for them. Where I am today in business, looking back and what keeps me going is having resources around me and surrounding myself with great people. Having podcasts that I  listen to. Meditation is a great friend of mine. I’m a big advocate for Meditation and mindfulness exercise. My spiritual journey and my spiritual practice are really big for me; Exercise, yoga and just about having the right people. I think one of the biggest, biggest things is being true to yourself. All those years, I was trying to be, I guess, Karren Brady. I didn’t want to be Karren Brady, but Karren Brady was the managing director of Birmingham City at the time, and she had this amazing world. Well, why couldn’t I have that? She was my role model. Sharon: Was there an element, do you think, because I guess you and Karren, at that time, were very young women in key roles in business. A lot of women at that age it was not necessarily the norm, was it? You were different. How much was that an element when you think about your childhood that you shared with those, and what you believed about yourself was driven by that need to prove yourself? Dawn: Oh, 100%, prove it. Everything. Everything I did was to prove to my family. I didn’t want to put my head above the parapet. I didn’t want to be seen because I didn’t want people to poke me in the back or say, oh, here comes ugly again or whatever that bully might say that day. I was trying to be this business owner, business leader but not put my head above the parapet because of fear. Ultimately, you’ve just got to overcome your fears. You’ve got to find ways to overcome those fears because your limiting beliefs and fear stop you from doing the things you want to do. That brings me back to where I didn’t walk away. I structured the business in such a way in 2008 so that I could pursue something more heartfelt. Because the business world wasn’t heartfelt. My life didn’t feel authentic. It wasn’t the real me. That’s when to answer your previous question, that’s when I moved away from the business. I could never have survived without the income coming from the business, and I went and retrained to be a midwife, which was such a privileged In hindsight, what I can look back at and say is everybody loves a midwife. If I was truly me, then people, again, I was looking for that validation, people would love me because I was a midwife, so I wasn’t going to be faced with these bullies. It would help me to heal, I guess. It’s that external validation again. Sharon: Of course. Dawn: All I needed to do was build my internal validation. Sharon: Interesting. I suppose when we think about the NHS and, let’s say, how that compares as an environment to the environment that you’d come from, what are some of the highlights of your experience there and some of the lessons perhaps that you had, that you brought with you in the next stage, which is the almost the third stage of, I guess, your professional journey? Dawn: Wow. The three years of training were intense, and I met some incredible people. Truly, incredible midwives. The doctors, the midwives, the support workers, the admin team, and everybody worked relentlessly to provide that service to women and their families. What’s sad sometimes is that people don’t see what goes on behind the scenes in the NHS. Midwife having a glass of water while she’s doing her notes is not a bad thing, but the management would say, “You’re not allowed a glass of water on your desk because the public see you sitting there drinking water or a cup of tea, and it’s seen as not professional.” Which is crazy because that might be the only glass of water, a cup of tea you get. There are things about the human element that is very much about the customer, but the human element of the staff, certainly in the trust where I worked, is lost, which is sad. In terms of opportunities within the NHS, no matter who you are, what you are, or what your background, there are fantastic opportunities and career progression within the NHS. I had some life-changing experiences regarding what I saw, which completely humbled me. It was an amazing, incredible experience, and I’m so proud I could do it. Do I miss it? Absolutely. Every day. Would I go back? Not a prayer. Sharon: What then led you to leave something you care about? What led you then to transition into your business again? Dawn: Certain events happened which, had they not happened, I probably still would be a midwife today. I want to lay that out. I may have started to progress, who knows, but ultimately, that’s where I would’ve been. In November 2017, my mum had a massive life-changing stroke that changed my world from that day onwards. I had a period of time off sick to work out what was going on with mum.   At the same time, we had downsized the business to only catering and hospitality with only a handful of staff; but it ticked over and became a lifestyle business. My accountant, who had been with us for several years at the same time, had real mental health issues unbeknown to me. He tried to take his own life simultaneously, as mum had a stroke. It was one of those “whoa” moments where everything happens simultaneously. I returned to the business because there was nobody to do the invoicing or the payroll. I worked five days a week in the business and then did my weekend shifts at the hospital to keep my midwife job going. Going to see mum at night because she was in hospital. I did end up taking some time off sick, and in the end, ultimately, in the March of 2018, I left. I had to resign from the NHS. The business was in a mess. My mom was learning to walk again and talk again. That was a long road. I needed the income from the business to sustain my lifestyle, pay my mortgage and bills, and allow the flexibility to look after my mum; It was a no-brainer. I always thought I would go back as a community midwife, even if it were a weekend. It was always going to be short-term back in business. I returned to the business in November 2017, and we are in 2023 with over 900% growth! Sharon: Wow. 900%? Dawn: 900%, yes Sharon: Let’s say, when you came back in that November 2017, what were some of the goals, let’s say, at that point? Dawn: It almost was like being back in 1991. It was to be able to pay the temp payroll and invoice the clients and get the money in. Everything was left in such a mess with what Andy had done. I am grateful to him for what he did. I’m sad that he couldn’t be honest and talk to me about it, but I am grateful because I wouldn’t be back here if he hadn’t done what he’d done. I do feel that that was something that happened for me, not to me. It was about survival, and then it was, let’s get through. It was week to week. In early 2018, I got involved with the amazing Nicky Coffin and talked to her; she helped me with my mindset. We had a mindset session, and then I think, early in 2018, I got involved with you and Denise, and Superfast then, to start formulating a plan for how we will grow this business. What’s the potential? If I’m back, I’m going to make it happen. I’m going to do something with this business. It’s been a long journey dealing with my limiting beliefs, insecurities, and fears. Sharon, how long have you been asking me to go on video? Probably two years. To finally say- Sharon: Maybe a bit longer. Dawn: Probably, put my head above the parapet and say, “I’m not scared anymore. I’m not scared to put my head above the parapet and stand up and say in the face of adversity; I made it.” Sharon: Several times, when you think about all the challenges you’ve overcome now, do you remember that first time we met in person and had that strategy day? Do you remember something that you said to us as a goal? Dawn: I think 1.1 million, wasn’t it? I don’t know. I know that Denise said to me, “You will do 3 in 3,” and I did. Sharon: Absolutely. I think it was 1.1 was the first goal. Then that’s when Denise said, “Do you know what? How about this, 3 in 3?” That happened. It’s almost like you came back into the business. It wasn’t in 1991, and it’s like rebuilding. What were the key challenges and lessons from that, and how have you overcome them? Dawn: Wow, I guess the number one would be the big C, wouldn’t it; COVID? Sharon: Absolutely. Dawn: In 2018, we doubled what we did in 2017. 2019, we did slightly more; I can’t remember the exact figures. I know it was over 1.2 million because I took the team to Disneyland Paris to say thank you. We had an all-expenses-paid trip for the weekend to Disneyland, Paris and had an amazing time. Then we were growing and focused. We had 90-day plans. Our marketing was going great; we were designing lead magnets and testimonials and did great marketing work with you guys, and we were also moving offices. We all fell off the cliff in March, didn’t we? When Boris said, that’s it. We furloughed all the staff, and John and I worked relentlessly throughout COVID. I was in the office at home, and he was in the conservatory. We looked at; how we can pivot. Catering in hospitality was one of the biggest affected sectors. It was gone. I was looking at the call centres and how they were doing the COVID; how could we get into that? The fruit pickers were another one. We went along the journey for our gang master license. Gosh, that was tough. Sharon: I remember. Dawn: I don’t think I’ve ever been through anything as so tough. My goodness. That inspection was hard, but we got it. There’s nothing I’ve gone after in life that I have not achieved when I look back. If I want something bad enough, I will get it. Legally, obviously Sharon: Glad for clarification there. Dawn: For clarification purposes, legally, I don’t do illegal. We’ve had tax inspections. We’ve had B 18 inspections, and we’ve had gangmasters licensing inspections. We’ve had a major client who refused to pay the bill. It was £250 grand at Christmas. That was nail-biting, but we finally got the money, thank goodness. We’ve had the threat of losing one of our big clients; We’ve had many things happen that we have got through. Everything that happens now I have a mindset which I’ve worked through around when several big things happen at once; I know it is the breakdown before the breakthrough. Sometimes I don’t welcome them, but I embrace things that happen. Ultimately, I know that there will be a break. I’m up-levelling, and there will be the next part of my journey; the next season is coming. At the moment, I’m having a bit of a breakdown before the breakthrough because there’s stuff going on. Sharon: There’s another level? Dawn: Yes, there’s another level coming. I’ve always had a relentless determination, never ever to fail. I might moan, whinge, and cry but dust myself down and return stronger. Whether male or female, you must be pink-green with yellow spots. If you want something in life, go get it because nothing can stop you if you’ve got the determination. I’ve got a business now, whereas as a midwife, I could be kind to people. I could be seen and make a difference in women’s and families lives. I’ve brought that back to KSB. Business doesn’t have to be about how much money you can make or the next deal or big thing. It can be heartfelt. My business, I can honestly sit here and say, is truly heartfelt. My staff have Meditation Wednesdays by Carrie at Serendipity Wellbeing. She is fantastic. She does meditations for all of my team. We have that every Wednesday, every month. We have our massage lady who comes in, and the staff have a menu. They can pick what massage they want because, for me, mental health is really important, and you look after your staff, look after their mental health or help them to help themselves because you need to empower people, and then as you help them, they help you. One of the things that I’d like to say today is the theme of Embracing Equity for International Women’s Day; my business truly already embraces that. Becky, my marketer and I are about to launch our community page, our community hub for the outside world. The staff want to call it Aston, but I’m not sure my ego will allow that. The community hub will help resource people like me who think I will never make it in life. I haven’t got any qualifications. I am rubbish. I’m going to go and smoke pot, I’m going to take cocaine, I’m going to steal. Right? Because I could have gone that way. Sharon: I think all those things can impact us, and there are so many people who get so far down their journey, particularly women who experience imposter syndrome. It doesn’t matter whether it’s somebody starting out, someone that’s more mature, that has experienced success,  is constantly coming up. Dawn: Oh, I had imposter syndrome in abundance in my 20s. It was a male-dominated world. Every client I saw was an ops director, a man, and the manager at Barclaycard was a man. They were always men that I was up against. They were always nice to me; surprisingly, it was women in H.R. who weren’t. Maybe they were suffering from imposter syndrome as well. Sharon: Yes. We don’t always hold each other and raise each other up, do we? Dawn:  Yes. Which I found really weird. Really strange. Again, the ’90s were a peculiar time anyway. Going back to facilitating Equity. Everybody, no matter who they are, has a chance in life. Our page, our hub, will have resources from people who can help with money, and finances, help with mindset and help with Meditation. I want to be able to offer what I offer to my internal staff to the external world. KSB will enable me to take that next step in the world. Sharon: Is that something you have created as a resource hub for the hospitality industry and the people you’re working with, or is this going even wider than that dorm? Dawn: It’s going to go wider than that. Initially, we’ll roll it out to our database of clients and candidates. Hopefully, through the power of social media, then we will roll it out to anybody. Sharon, it’s been worth it if it makes a difference in one person’s world. It will have all the telephone numbers for Women’s Aid Refuge, Mind, Samaritans, and places like that. People always know where they can go. Google’s great, but having everything in one place is useful. It is about being kind. Sharon: It is about doing business differently and being able to contribute. I know just through some conversations we’ve had with you and Becky about this really important project that marketing will play a key role, and you’ve been able to communicate that to your clients and candidates and then more widely. You mentioned earlier perhaps the role that marketing had played amongst several things that had helped you rebuild KSB. Can you share your thoughts on its role and how it has helped the business? I’m sure people listening and thinking about their marketing would be interested. Dawn: I think marketing goes hand in hand with what we do going forward, or certainly for the past few years. It’s as essential as having a mouse for your computer. It’s enabled us to look at the bigger picture of the business world to analyze the business strategically to say, look, where do you want to go as a business, but ultimately, how are you going to get there? How will you demonstrate to your clients or prospective clients how good you are? We do that through testimonials, case studies, surveys, and all through the work we do alongside the Superfast team and Becky, our internal marketer. You put a lot of work into many things behind the scenes. Marketing is one of the top things that, as a business, you’ve got to do. You must get in front of your customers with the right marketing collateral. We’ve got some great case studies that we’ve written and turned into a glossy brochure we can download and send to the client, but it’s all about being visible and seen. What’s the next step? It’s not just social media; what do the customers think about us? What is our brand? The brand is really important. When you look at our colours, the colours behind us on the marketing board today flow nicely with those on our website, our CRM system, and the colours in our office. Everything is streamlined, and it must be that brand. Becky, she’s fantastic. Sometimes, we lock heads over certain things, but ultimately she’s fantastic. Sharon: Different opinion is good. It’s about debate and challenging what’s going to work. Dawn: One of the things I love is the six-week sprint we do, which you introduced to us as a process in the marketing training we go through with you and Denise. We can look at six weeks of targeting a particular industry. Having all these almost signposts within our marketing toolkit. We have so many resources available to help win new business because the message is always the same; streamlined, consistent, and branded. Marketing, for me, goes hand in hand with business growth. People talk about sales. Well, you can’t sell unless you can market your business first. Our website is one of the most interactive in how it adds value; when I look at other hospitality recruiters. It’s always updated. Which means we’re always appearing on those Google searches. There’s always a new blog or a new story. When I look at our competition, they haven’t put a new blog on since early 2022, which doesn’t help their candidates and clients. In a competitive market, you have to keep on point and know what is going on in the market to serve your sector. That’s what I feel my marketing team, which you are part of, does. Sharon: It is interesting to hear you say that because one of the things that we often talk about with Becky and other members in Superfast Circle is the consistency of marketing. When it’s not consistent, there’s a message that we don’t realize we’re communicating through that inconsistency. I know that for Becky having access to all the content saves her so much time because she’s part-time as well, isn’t she? Dawn: We have been working together since 2018, and it is a testament to; A: how well we work together. B: The content you guys are always on point, and you’re always updating your material. Denise does a fantastic job in her writing and the content that she sends to us. Becky can tailor or pinch bits out of it and use it in her material. I know I couldn’t attend the event last year, but the SFC events are always fantastic. They’re always on point. They’re always absolutely up to date with what’s happening in the real world. Which is vital because sometimes she can get lost in it all. Sharon: Let’s say there is someone in the early days of setting up and leading their recruitment company who is perhaps having some challenging times right now because we are still in an uncertain recovery phase depending on the sectors people work in. What would be some of your key messages to people? Dawn: Yes, the first one has got to be, don’t give up. Don’t, don’t, don’t give up. Ensure that you’ve always got a sales funnel. One of the key things that I learned from you guys, Sharon, was your funnel. You’ve got to keep feeding it in from the top. Don’t be reliant on one single customer because that has the potential to move on for whatever reason. Always ensure you fill in your bucket and don’t let it leak! You taught me well. Don’t do it alone. Don’t be a lone ranger. Ensure that you are compliant. Compliance with HMRC. With the employment agency’s standards. Human trafficking, people trafficking, that’s something that’s big out there at the moment. Know your rules and regulations and live and breathe them, but don’t do this alone because it is a minefield. If you want to grow a business, enlist the help and support of experts around you. Richard Branson, apparently, according to a podcast I listened to the other day, didn’t know until only a few years ago the difference between gross profit and net profit. People will go, “Really?” Sharon: Really?! Dawn: You know what, he never needed to know because he had the experts around him. Who said, “This is how much money we’re making.” He was fine with that. He will say he built a business or has become a billionaire and built businesses by having a team of successful people around him in terms of experts in their field. That’s the message  I want to share. It’s great being a business owner, but you cannot be a master of all because you will be a master of none. I use analogies all the time, as you’ve gathered. Ultimately, you’ve got to buy in the expertise, and buying in your expertise has been an investment well worth making, as it was with Nicky Coffin. She’s an amazing advocate in a different space than you. What she does is fantastic, but you must buy in that expertise. Please don’t do it alone and be brave. Stick your head above the parapet and break through the fear. Sharon: Nicky is a huge reason why we entered the recruitment space.Having worked with Nicky for so many years, helping her and her clients with marketing and through Nicky, how we met. We work together collaboratively and are kind to each other. I remember seeing a quote somewhere about how we can lift each other up together, and we can all grow, and we don’t have to have that competitive mindset that I know some people have. I guess we bring our conversation to a close because I appreciate your valuable time. I want to say thank you because you and I have the odd glass of wine or G&T, and I’ve learned more about you and your story today. For anybody listening, it truly is an inspirational story because when you think about the hurdles you’ve overcome on multiple occasions, it has made you successful. When we think about Equity as we celebrate women, I think of your phrase Dawn about building self-belief. Dawn: I was going to say in there, Sharon, you’ve got to develop yourself. I have done an awful lot of self-development work. Working on myself externally and internally, and you have to do that work on yourself. Again, going back to the community hub, that’s what hopefully I’ll be able to resource people to do that, but I’m only where I am today because I’ve done that work. You have to face your fears. Years ago, my ex-husband made me go to Tony Robbins and unleash the power within, and I walked along those hot coals because everybody else did it, but I did it. I faced the fear, and I did it. That’s what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to believe. If you don’t believe it, fake it. Pretend you believe until you truly do believe. Sharon: It’s funny; you mentioned Tony Robbins because he will be in Birmingham this year. Doing UPW, which we’ve both done. First time since COVID and supposedly the only gig in Europe he is doing this year. Interestingly, you share that because reading his book, Unleash The Power Within, was my first personal development book. When I left corporate as I was setting up the business, I also walked those hot coals down in London! Dawn, thank you for sharing your story and being so honest with us because it fits so lovely into the theme of International Women’s Day, and I know that it will inspire many people, not just women. Thank you for sharing, and thank you for your time. Dawn: You’re more than welcome. As I say, Sharon, it’s been an absolute pleasure and a privilege, and I hope we can work together for many more years to come. What Next? To learn more about #EmbracingEquity and International Womens Day, click here. To find out more about Dawn and KSB Recruitment, click here. To find out how we can help you get results like Dawn and the KSB Recruitment team, book a call with us here. The post International Women’s Day- Handling What Life Throws At You and Scaling Your Recruitment Company With Dawn Bannister appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

SEO was ‘THE’ thing companies wanted ten years ago. Then Google went off the wall with multiple updates and challenges to the SEO community and the shift in focus for many moved to social media. And now more SEO conversations are happening again as companies look for different ways to stand out in their market as we all use Google as our answer to any service or product-related question we have. So, let’s talk about SEO and what you need to consider in the recruitment space. According to the most recent data from February this year, there are approaching two billion websites, though they aren’t all active; Surprisingly less than twenty per cent are Remember websites are full of pages and according to Tilburg University’s research, there are nearly 5 billion active web pages now online. Of course, they aren’t all recruitment websites though it gives you an idea of the competition to have your page and websites rank above all others. The argument as to whether recruitment and staffing companies should use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a complex one with valid points on all sides. On one hand, SEO makes your website more visible and therefore easier for potential clients and candidates to find you online. Yet SEO isn’t easy. While it can increase visibility and bring in more leads, it can also be a huge challenge for smaller companies to stand out. Let me give you an example. I have just Googled Engineering Jobs and page one is dominated by adverts from Total Jobs, Google Jobs, Indeed, Reed, and CV Library. There were also another 1,820,000,000 search results displayed with that term Ummm……. Competitive, isn’t it? All huge players with a budget much bigger than yours who you just can’t compete with. Making sure your website is found when people search for your company is step one and that you have content related to recruitment hiring and careers in the sector you serve will help your website appear are key steps. So, here are several things you can do to improve your chance of getting found online.  SEO and a  Well-Structured Website Make sure your website is user-friendly and optimized for search engines. This includes having a clear structure, and well-written content that has relevant keywords added on every page. Some navigation bars are confusing. Make it very easy for people to find what they want and have a clear value proposition front and centre on your home page; so, when people land on your page they stay; something Google monitors. Your website should also load quickly and be mobile-friendly, as more people are accessing the web from their mobile devices. User experience is everything. SEO Can Help Candidates and Clients Fact: Candidates are searching for jobs and content to help them either build their careers or help them get an interview. Clients are looking for ideas on building teams and searching for specific recruiters who can help them find candidates. Make sure on your website you have specific words and phrases on pages that will help. This is why it is so useful to have a blog on your website. The more pages you have, the more chances you have of your website and all its pages being found online. Whoever builds your recruitment website needs to have a way for you to add relevant keywords and phrases because this is how Google can find you in the first place. Let me clarify. Imagine having a filing cabinet with multiple folders. To find what you are looking for each folder needs to be labeled correctly. If every folder says ‘folder’ it’s hard to find what you are looking for, logical right? Yet I still see many websites online and the home page is called ‘home page’ rather than the company name. For instance. Acme Recruitment |Engineering Jobs in Carlisle Is a much more descriptive phrase that says what the page is about and more likely to be ranked by Google and be found by your candidates and clients than, ‘home page’. Use Local SEO Phrases and Words If you run a local recruitment company, it’s essential to optimize your site for local search results. This can be done by creating a Google My Business page, adding your business to local directories, and using location-specific keywords. I shared an example before about engineering jobs. Be more specific and optimize (add words and phrases) with local words. For example, engineering jobs in Carlisle. Do You Need to Outsource SEO? Outsourcing SEO? As a micro or small SME recruitment company, I wouldn’t recommend it. Head over to Google and tap in a few classic keywords into the Google incognito window which gives you a true indication of the competition you will have. Of course, make sure you leverage Google Jobs so your roles appear and get as many Google reviews as you can. The truth is you don’t have the budget of Total Jobs or Indeed. A good SEO company’s fees start in the thousands, and it will take time. There are so many other things you can do with that money. Plus, so many other ways you can improve SEO on your website yourself. Thanks   Denise P.S. Have you checked out Superfast Circle? As part of your membership, we share several strategies that will help you make more placements. To find out more book a call with us here. The post Recruitment Marketing Questions: To SEO or Not To SEO ? appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

As a recruitment business owner, measuring the impact of your marketing and all the effort you are putting in is critical to ensure that you are getting an R.O.I. on what you are doing; whether that is increasing your brand awareness or the number of candidates and client leads you are attracting into your pipeline. This podcast will explore the key metrics that recruitment business owners should be tracking and provide actionable tips for measuring your marketing efforts. First of all, what do you want to achieve? Establish Clear Goals Establishing clear goals is the first step in measuring your marketing efforts. This includes setting clear goals for website traffic, lead generation, inputs, and content. You can track progress and make data-driven decisions to optimize your marketing efforts by setting clear goals. Marketing And The Multi-Channel Approach As we start to talk about measurement, let’s talk about some home truths. Marketing works: however, not everything you do will work or deliver the results exactly as you expect in the time frame you want For instance, if you use referral as a lead generation strategy, your conversation might happen fast because the person in question has been referred to you. All good though measuring referral conversion rates fudge your figures because they will be inflated. Why? Because it is so much easier to convert someone who already knows you. Now if that person comes across you for the first time on LinkedIn, the chances of them taking your call and moving to the next stage aren’t the same as that referral someone gave you. The moral of the story is don’t look at everything in isolation because marketing builds; I wrote a quick post on LinkedIn about it earlier this week. That social media post someone reads that you posted or the emails they open every week, the video they watch, or the testimonial they consume all build over time. As you identify your criteria to measure, remember results take time to build. Before you open up your Excel spreadsheet, here is something else to factor in. Identify Your Key Business Driver Every business has key drivers that are indicators of conversion. This might be the number of client calls leading to client meetings, candidates registered, or CVs/resumes sent out. Identify your metric, and then you will know if things are working as that figure increases. So here are several inputs to measure that indicate your marketing is moving you in the right direction. Website Traffic Website traffic is a crucial metric for recruitment business owners. It provides a comprehensive view of the number of people visiting your website and engaging with your content, posts, and job board. Tools such as Google Analytics can help you track website traffic and understand where your visitors are coming from, how they interact with your site, and how they convert into leads. Lead Generation Sources  Lead generation is a key metric for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. This includes tracking the number of leads you generate through your website, email campaigns, and other marketing initiatives. Currently, we are running a personal branding challenge with our clients, which is part of the lead generation strategy we teach, and one individual has paused posting because she is getting so many leads. She has been tracking the posts that work, and those that don’t and what other process elements accelerate what is happening. Tracking your lead sources is vital; where are people coming from and why? To optimize lead generation, consider tracking lead sources and testing different tactics to see which generates the most leads. Conversion Rates In marketing, conversion rates refer to the percentage of visitors to your website, landing page, or LinkedIn connection request who say yes by taking a specific action, such as filling out a form or accepting your request. If you measure what happens when you change the headline or an image and get more page signups, you know what to do next time. For instance, we are promoting a lead generation training class- you can grab a place here.  As part of our marketing measurement process, I can identify where people are coming from so I know if we should post more on LinkedIn, send more emails, or up our ad spend on Facebook or Instagram. Measuring conversion rates provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and helps you identify areas for improvement. Final Thoughts…. Always keep a record of what you do and when. This will help you plan your marketing in a way that will make all the difference to the results you achieve. Don’t overthink it. A simple excel spreadsheet will do the trick where you measure your web traffic, your job applications, your LinkedIn connections, and the number of posts you make, and then you will be able to correlate where an input leads to an output Thanks, Denise P.S. Wondering what strategies you should be using this year? Then jump on a call with one of us, and let’s have a chat. Book a call direct here. The post Before You Start Measuring Your Marketing, Read This appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

The recruitment and staffing sector has gone through a few crazy years from the weird start to this decade: talent shortages, the best years ever, counter offers galore, and a recession impacting certain tech businesses that no one expected. All of this brings us back to something critical for any business, especially where people are involved; you have to have a marketing and sales system dialled in as a workable process; otherwise, you will continue to be at the mercy of whatever ever is happening. So what are the biggest challenges you will need to manage this year? I have listed several to factor into your plans ASAP. Standing Out In a Competitive Market Standing out in a competitive market has to be on your agenda whether you like it or not. With many recruitment businesses vying for the attention of both clients and candidates, it can be difficult for owners to differentiate their brands and establish themselves as leaders in the industry. Especially when they are ‘doing’ minimal marketing and NOT connecting with candidates and clients at all parts of the buying cycle. When did you last update your imagery? How often are you posting on social media, and I don’t mean just job adverts? Do you add any value to candidates and clients with the content you share? Are you sharing anything about yourself and your personal brand? Maintaining a consistent brand image across all marketing channels is vital to gaining the attention you want; remember, attention is THE currency for business growth. Developing a brand is easier than ever for a small business; you have no excuses. You can get a good website for a few grand and Canva at £100 a year. Our Superfast Circle members even get blog posts, multiple email campaigns, reports and social media for less than a pretty average placement fee each year. Never before has it been as easy for a small recruiting firm to stand out. Now let’s talk about an issue for everyone. Attracting High-Quality Candidates Consistently Attracting the right candidates can be challenging for recruitment business owners in every sector, especially in a highly competitive job market. The golden days are gone, at least for now. Continuing to complain to anyone that will listen isn’t particularly useful. Time to get your creative juices going and implement strategies to increase your reach to potential candidates and build your CRM. You will need to do more than you have in the past, and candidate nurture will be critical; look at last week’s post and podcast on the need to nurture to give you some ideas on what you need to consider.  Measuring Your Marketing Success Do you know if that job board you are using is working? How many people visit your job page? What are your key drivers of success? When it comes to creating demand, marketing can work immediately, and sometimes it takes months to build before you see consistent lead flow. However, business success is all about the long game; as a serious business, that is what you need to plan for. Next week I will record a podcast on this topic for you, so come back here then. Keeping Up With Digital Marketing Trends A few years ago, I heard Greg Savage speak about recruiters being digital dinosaurs and how they need to get digital or die. The start of this decade saw a digital explosion, and current research suggests the digital environment saw five years’ worth of growth in five months. You only need to go to Rec Expo in the U.K. to see how the tech stack has changed. When we first entered the market fifteen years ago, email marketing was a bit scary for people, and Facebook was a definite no-no, and LinkedIn was a sourcing tool only; not any more! Now we have A.I. bots who can help business processes and CRM databases and email systems that actually work. The rise of digital marketing has led to a constant evolution of marketing strategies, and recruitment business owners must stay on top of the latest trends and technologies to remain competitive. How are you keeping up with marketing trends? Reading this post is one way, and joining our Recruitment Marketing Mastery free private Facebook group will help you. Building and Maintaining A Strong Online PresenceThat Creates Demand Building and maintaining a strong online presence, including a professional website and social media profiles, updated consistently and developing your company and personal brand voice and message is crucial for recruitment business owners across the globe. Why? Because this is the most effective media today to generate awareness that leads to demand for your recruiting service. Would You Like Access to Marketing Consulting and Campaigns? The recruitment market has several marketing challenges for business owners, including standing out in a competitive market, attracting high-quality candidates, measuring the success of marketing efforts, and maintaining a consistent brand image which generates demand. The good news is that you can stay on top of industry trends, refine the strategies that work and grow your brand. If you want a quick call to find out how we can support you and your brand, call us at +44(0)154 920 700 or book into our diary here. Thanks Denise The post The Biggest Marketing Challenges For Recruitment Owners This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Lead generation is one critical area for any business. However, once you get those leads, they are not always ready to buy immediately. That is why being able to nurture both candidates and clients in today’s market could be the difference that makes the difference for you and your marketing this year. What Is Nurturing? Let’s clarify what nurturing is, why you need to do it first, and why particularly now. Now, what is nurturing? Nurturing is about getting people to know more about you, your product, and your service before they decide to work with you. These individuals may need multiple touchpoints before they are at a place where they are ready to say yes. This process is based on research from an amazing guy called Eugene Schwartz. He is one of the godfathers of marketing and advertising, and he identified a process called the Market Awareness model. The Market Awareness Model Schwartz teaches that as buyers decide to purchase, we go through different phases of awareness. There are certain phases of this model I want to share. It makes sense for you that people go from unaware of your offer, product, or service to aware. Let’s say you work in engineering, and an engineering professional comes across you. They want a new job, or they’re an engineering company expanding; both groups have a problem to solve. Now, for some people, I know this sounds crazy; they may not even be aware of how a recruitment company can help them. They may be cynical about the recruiting process, so they’re unaware you can help them in the way you can. This is particularly true of candidates. Now, of course, when it comes to B2B marketing, some people are aware that they have a problem, and then they move into this the next phase, which is awareness. They know that they have an issue, and they want it to be solved. The problems will be; I need a new job, or I want to develop my career, or I need to build this team. They’ve got a problem, and they are becoming solution aware. That means they go out and look at solutions for their pain but haven’t decided yet what is the best solution. Now, this is where they can become what’s known as solution aware. They’ve looked at different solutions to the problems but haven’t decided on the best possible solution. Do I do it myself? Do I write to a company? Do I apply directly there? Do I go on to one of the job sites, or do I go to a recruiter? They have become more you-aware, so they’re aware that, “Oh, hang on a minute here, there’s a recruitment company that is a specialist in engineering that maybe I could work with them or, oh, hang on a minute here, I’ve seen this recruitment company on LinkedIn a lot. They say they can help me build the talent pipeline, our talent pipeline; maybe we should contact them. That’s when they become deal ready Now, the thing about this is it can take quite a significant amount of time for this to happen. I’ll give you an example. I have the desire to buy a lodge in Scotland. It’s been one of my bucket list goals for some time. Haven’t quite got around to it. It’s not going to happen in the next 12 or 18 months. However, I have started, lovely Facebook that it is; I’ve started surfing and looking online, and of course, I’m being retargeted now by Facebook and all these different adverts. I’m looking at where there are different types of lodges in other places with additional facilities. I am now looking for solutions, but I am not ready to buy yet. I’ve downloaded a couple of brochures and had a look. I’m not ready to go and look at this yet. However, I’m on several email lists and am being emailed because those individual companies are nurturing me now. After all, I expressed a want, and now I’m on their email list, and they’re keeping in touch with me. There’s one particular one that’s pretty good, and I like them. They’re around Loch Lomond, and I’m looking at that. They’re building a connection with me now. People don’t tend to buy lodges overnight; It’s not a rash decision. They may be fully aware that I could be on their email list for two years before I buy something. However, they are nurturing me with pictures and invitations to go and look around one of their sites to have a low-cost weekend maybe there. They are starting to nurture me because they understand that I am going through different parts of the buyer cycle. This is a high-value purchase and something that I am not going to jump into straight away. Now, when you look at people and recruitment in general, that is a high-value purchase. Let’s use an example of engineering again: the engineering role in question is £/$ 50k. Let’s say the fee for this is 20%. You will get a 10K placement fee when you place that role, which is pretty significant. However, that candidate isn’t somebody you’re just going to pull out of thin air. It’s probably going to be somebody that you have come across that’s been on your database for a while that you are starting to nurture rather than you just going to ring somebody up out the blue that they may have uploaded their CV, but they’ve never heard from you. Using Nurture Will Increase Your Client and Candidate Conversions Using nurture will increase your conversion. When you think about how the market is at the moment, do you think if candidates or clients have not heard anything from you, they’re likely to come and work with you to find them a role, a position, rather than somebody that’s been nurturing them, has been sending them great content, giving them ideas, helping them map their career out? Who do you think they will work with as time moves on? It’s human nature. It’s one of Cialdini’s principles of influence; called reciprocity. You’ve been helping them, and now you are going to be the first person that they contact when it comes to looking for that next role. It’s the same with everybody; for many recruiters, one reason they get so stressed out is they rely on spot business. They count on picking up the phone and calling the people ready to move now; only. Those who are ready to buy now are a very small percentage of the overall population that could buy. They don’t spend the time nurturing their candidates and clients because then if they did, trust me, life becomes so much easier because things are popping up in a good way. People are contacting, picking up the phone and speaking to you. People open those emails that you’re sending because what you’ve done is you’ve built some great rapport with them. You’ve built some skin in the game with them because you are helping them all the time. Trust me; people want to be nurtured in today’s environment rather than just having somebody pick up the phone they have never really heard of that sends them a connection on LinkedIn straight away, so, “Well, I’ve got a job. Do you want to have a conversation with me?” That can work for some people, but not everyone, particularly those passive candidates and those you now want to be able to place; That’s the benefit of nurture. Thanks, Denise How We Can Help You Set Up Nurture Campaigns For our clients, we provide and write campaigns for them around nurture. They find this a complete revelation for them when they start working with us as members of Superfast Circle and how marketing can work when it comes to nurturing people all along the buyer’s cycle; if you want to find out more, drop us an email or book a quick call here. The post Recruitment Marketing 101: The Need To Nurture Candidates and Clients appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today I want to talk about where you start if you haven’t done much marketing. I know the market has changed significantly in the past couple of years. Many recruiters have had their best year ever as they came out of COVID, yet things are starting to shift now. Lead generation is on many people’s agendas as a key action item. Interestingly, last week’s podcast went out to our subscribers– If you’re not subscribed, download one of our reports, and you’ll be able to get on our subscriber list. I suggested that I might do a webinar on lead generation, and obviously, lead generation is different in our sector because we’re talking about candidates and we’re talking about clients. We’re also talking about talent for those who want to grow your team. I was taken aback by how many responses I got, so that will happen. It’s probably going to be next month when that happens to get it all set up and everything else, so we’ve got that coming for you. Our theme over the next few weeks is looking at some of the real pain points that you are going through at the moment and how we can help you from a marketing perspective. Start With These 3 Key Areas of Focus I want to give you three key focus areas to start your marketing today. Always remember that marketing and sales are the growth engine of any business, and that’s where your focus should be. Marketing is about creating demand, and that’s demand for people at all parts of the buyer’s cycle. Then once you’ve created that demand, you have a better chance of converting your contacts into clients who work with you and candidates you place. The Gold Around Your Feet Let’s start with the first area. I put this as number one because this is an area where you will get results incredibly fast, and that is the gold around your feet. Sometimes it’s referred to as low-hanging fruit. These are people, candidates, and clients, both past and present, that you’ve reached out to work in your organization. These are people that you are already in connection with. Fact: A lot can happen in six months for many of us, and where an individual was in the past might not be where they are now, and this is a great strategy to use to re-engage with people. You can build a campaign around it and reach back out to them. Remember last week’s podcast– If this is the first podcast you’ve listened to, go back to last week’s podcast, where I talk about working with those connected individuals. If you have a database, you can filter people with whom you have not had a conversation within the past six months, and please, don’t let your crazy primitive brain jump in and say, “Oh no, they won’t be interested.” You do not know whether they wouldn’t be interested. This is the first area I would look at, a list of clients and a list of candidates, and I would get in contact with them. Now, whether you use an automated email campaign, something we do with our Superfast Circle clients, or you, depending on how many you’ve got, you start to do a ring round, or you go onto LinkedIn and reach out to them. Whatever it is, do that and start conversing with these individuals. That will throw up many people that you can begin to talk to who are probably interested in what you have now. Be that a candidate or be that a client. I remember a few years ago, we were working with a particular client, we were looking at this strategy with him, and he pulled up a list of whom he thought his team had been in contact with He got, I think, a couple of hundred people, and he said, “Next time we meet, I’ll tell you how this goes.” Anyway, he’d started to go through the process with his team, and when we next had a conversation with him, he was very miffed; He used a different word, but we’ll say he was very annoyed. Why? Because he had found out several candidates had gone and worked with another recruitment company to get their next role, they hadn’t returned to this particular company’s brand. They’d gone elsewhere because his team hadn’t had regular contact with them. Remember that doing this is a first start when you haven’t done a lot of marketing, but it’s something really to dial into your marketing campaigns. You should be doing it consistently because with the market the way it is, people are crazily being made redundant, and there might be some amazing candidates now on the market. Clients are also in a situation where they might lose somebody because somebody has made them a better offer. Then suddenly, they need that role backfilling, so remember that is a great way to start, and this should be a campaign that you always consistently run. Remember, the gold around your feet will make a massive difference. Identify Who You Want To Work With The second thing is, who are you working with currently? Have you identified the ideal candidate and client you want to work with? This is foundational work regarding marketing and something to spend time on to get it right while leveraging the low-hanging fruit and the gold around your feet. At the end of last year, we had several conversations with companies who said, “We want to be working with companies on bigger roles because we should be doing that. We’ve got so much experience.” If that’s the case, you might need to shift your focus on what companies you’re working with, so make that identification. I’m sure that at the end of last year, you reviewed where you’re spending your time, what companies you’re working with, and which candidates work best with you. Use that information as you build campaigns around who you want to work with as companies, candidates, and clients. Once you’ve got that sense of who you’re working with, it’s easier to focus on where to direct your energy. For instance, many of you may have Sales Navigator or Recruiter; from here, you can pull a list of those companies and individuals. Let’s say you now want to work with companies with over 50 employees in a certain geography. You can go into Sales Navigator and pull a list of those people, some of whom you might already be connected to, and then reach out to them. Getting Out On Social Now, with that new knowledge, number three is about getting out on social. Social media is a gem, as it is one of the easiest ways to consistently get in front of your market to demonstrate who you are, how you can help people, and your professionalism and expertise as a recruiter. Depending on which sector you’re in, LinkedIn might be the platform for you; for others, it might be LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook, but think about your social channels and start posting consistently on social. One client, when he first started working with us, when we talked about the gold around your feet, he noticed that he got a lot of business back from his past clients because suddenly they said, “Oh, I’ve seen you again. I wondered what had happened to you. I’ve not seen you for ages,” because he was posting on social. So, for easy wins, start doing that now. If you want an experience of the style of content to post on LinkedIn, follow us on LinkedIn It’s Deniseoyston and Sharon Newey. If you’re a recruitment business owner or marketer, come and connect with us, and I will accept your connection request and then ring the bell on our profiles. You will then be notified when we post so you can experience what to post. Because you’ll see that once you’re out on social media, you can brand yourself and your organization and share great content demonstrating your expertise. For many of you I know have thousands of followers. If you get back in front of those followers, they will appreciate you and see you, which will make a difference. Those are three easy things you can be doing when you’ve not done much marketing, Yes, there are lots of other things you can do. I’m going to talk about email in the future, and we’ve got a webinar on that website that you can go and sign up for if you look at the downloads bar at the top. Here is a link that will help. There you have three very straightforward ideas that work and will work for you and your organization. This is Denise saying bye for now, and I’ll see you next week. Thanks Denise. P.S. We share multiple ways to market your recruitment company, starting from scratch by helping you build your 90-day plan and providing you with all the content resources you need. Book a quick call with one of us here to find out more. The post When You Haven’t Done Much Marketing Where Do You Start appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

What are we all expecting to happen to our business in 2023? I know everyone’s talking about the R-word, and maybe you are going into this year with some uncertainty with everything else that’s happening. That is why I wanted to kick off this year’s podcast with one of the key factors and focus that we all have when it comes to our business, generating leads. Now, it’s very trendy at the moment, as I mentioned in the intro, for marketers to confuse people! Demand Versus Lead Generation As marketers, we like our jargon words, and some of you, you will have seen the conversation about demand generation versus lead generation and how we always have to start with demand generation first, and then we move into lead generation. Do you know what? Certain members of my profession like to confuse people I want to let you into a secret; It’s all fundamentally the same. The premise of marketing is to generate demand for our service; that is its role. To create demand for our recruiting service, we start with creating awareness among people that have a recruiting or career problem and don’t know who we are and how we can help them. We then build on this as they enter our marketing funnel; you can find out more about marketing funnels for recruiters here in a previous post I wrote and recorded. Topline: We are taking someone from unaware to aware consideration and then decision to work with us. Please do not get yourself confused about, oh, well, is it demand generation? Is it lead generation? At the end of the day, you want people engaging with your business, leads you can talk to, and then you can convert. I was talking to somebody about recording this podcast the other day actually and what I was going to do, and they suggested that you might want to do that as a webinar, Denise. This is one of our clients. The Recruitment Lead Generation Triad I want to give you some fundamentals of how lead generation works in today’s market; so you can kick off your activities in the right way this year. I want to share with you the recruitment lead generation triad, which works especially well in today’s market. Now, some of you listen to this when you’re at the gym when you are walking the dog, or your drive to work; please do not write if you are in a car, go back to this and listen to it later! Grab an A4 sheet of paper and draw a triangle. At the top of the triangle, where the pointy bit is, I want you to put; content marketing machine. Then on the left-hand side, at the bottom, I want you to put current connections. Then on the right-hand side, I want you to put cold outreach. I am going to talk about each of these elements. Connections, Cold Outreach and Your Content Machine Now, when it comes to lead generation, these are the three areas of focus that you need to consider this year because being a visible brand in the market is becoming critical, and that is where your content machine comes in. I’m going to talk about that in a second. No matter who you are or where you are, I am sure you have some connections. We were talking to one of our new clients this morning on one of our Superfast Circle calls, and he was talking about the fact that he’s actually got a CRM database with 40,000 plus candidates. This is a clean database he can leverage, which currently he isn’t! I suspect you have a database of connections, both candidates and clients; you aren’t leveraging. Then the other thing that a lot of people I know are not as keen on doing, however, if you want to grow and scale your business, is cold outreach. This is where the cold outreach, the current connections, and the content machine all work together because as you focus on each of these areas, I’m going to explain a little bit more about each one in turn, that makes a massive difference to you. Your Content Machine is a Huge Convincer Let’s start with the top of the triangle, with your content machine and getting attention in your market. I was chatting with a client of ours the other day, and I was explaining the fact that if people can’t see you, you cannot sell to them. You have to be visible in front of your clients and in front of your candidates consistently. Over Christmas, I sent a series of videos out on social media. One of them was Sharon. I made her go outside and record this video the week when it was something like -9 in the UK! She was sharing our marketing audit checklist. She told people, “Look if you want a copy of this, drop a note in the comment box. Somebody did that, who’d been watching our videos. I sent him the checklist, and he became a client less than ten days later. To be transparent, a conversion doesn’t always happen as fast as this, though you might be surprised how fast content can work for you. Now, if we hadn’t taken that time to share that content on LinkedIn, on our social channels, in our emails, that person, that individual, that company would not be working with us. That is the beauty of having a brand that is out online because what it will do is help you with your cold outreach, and it also helps you with those people that are already in your sphere of influence. They’re already on your database, and they’re already a connection on LinkedIn by creating content that is going out there that makes a massive difference to them because, suddenly, you are on their radar again. With our Superfast Circle clients, one of the first wins they get is because they are posting on social media in the way we suggest, and then their past candidates and clients get in contact with them again. They say, “Oh, I see you’re on social media. I’ve got a role. I’ve got this, or can you help me with this job.” All of those different things around content will help you. Now your content machine is very easy to set up. This is something that we help people in Superfast Circle implement. This is about the emails that you send. This is about what you post on social media. It might be about videos that you create. It might be about added resources and reports that you provide. If people aren’t seeing you around, people don’t know who you are, that cold call you make, that cold outreach doesn’t have the same impact. Fact: That you aren’t around, and people aren’t seeing you, your database will have forgotten about you if you are not using content to leverage your relationships with them, so that is number one, you must commit to building a content machine for your recruitment business. Your Current Connections Now, the next thing is using the connections that you already have. These may be connections in your database. I suggest that your CRM is always the best place to start because people there are more connected to you. Then, of course, you’ve got your LinkedIn connections, and then, you’ve got people that may be on different social platforms that you’re connected to, on Instagram or on messenger or whatever that might be. Mic drop moment It is easier to sell to someone who already knows you. The marketing jargon for this is low-hanging fruit or gold around your feet. These people are probably currently on your database and who you are not communicating with consistently. This is where you are really losing out because if you’ve got a database of people, then you can nurture those people; you can start to pull them through the funnel from being originally aware of you to be on your database to thinking, “Hang on a minute here, maybe we should be working with people.” Of course, these current connections are probably people that you have placed, people that you currently work with, who are also a great vehicle to get referrals from. The final part of the triad is cold outreach. Cold Outreach Now, when you are getting referrals from people or talking about you to others about the great experience they’ve had with you, and you’ve got your content machine, cold outreach will impact your business. I know lots of us don’t like doing it; However, this strategy works. Sara Blakely is the CEO of Spanx. In 2012 she became the world’s youngest female self-made billionaire. In a New Your Times article, she shared that one of her biggest clients was Nordstrom, and she got Nordstrom through a cold call that she herself made. Cold outreach works as recruiters, you know this, and though we all want more inbound leads mastering cold outreach will elevate your reach and the success you rightly deserve. The good news is there are many ways to use a cold outreach strategy when your content machine supports you. The first strategy is cold emailing; we share more on this topic in a post I wrote on how to use cold emailing to generate recruitment leads here. You can send out a cold email; you can still do that in the UK because if you send it to a business-to-business email, particularly for clients, that will work for you. You can do cold outreach on LinkedIn. There are so many different ways that you can do that. You can do that through direct messaging and paid traffic which is a whole strategy in itself. Do you know what? You can still do cold calling. Surprisingly, people will still answer their telephone when you ring them, and they will also answer text. There are so many ways you can do cold outreach that works. Is it harder? Yes, it is. You need to be consistent and give it longer, but honestly, I don’t know where we would be without doing cold outreach. Several things for you to consider here. I think almost certainly I’m going to do a webinar on this. Keep tuned because I will let you know when it’s available. Go back to the triad we shared earlier and review which of the three points you have in place. You’ve got connections at the bottom left-hand side, right-hand side, cold outreach, and at the top, your content machine. Start to work consistently on each of those elements; your lead generation and conversion will change completely this year. Thanks Denise How We Can Help Your Lead Generation This Year With our members of Superfast Circle, we give them a relevant lead generation strategy for their sector, including all the content and campaigns to use in each part of the triad. Book a call with us here if you want to find out how this will work for you. The post How To Generate Leads For Your Recruitment Business This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Before we start, there are a couple of things that will be useful for this whole process.   [First, remember this is a direct transcription for your benefit, so excuse any rogue typos.]  I did mention them last week, but I’m going to mention them again, just in case you haven’t grabbed them. If you’ve not downloaded the latest Recruitment Marketing Checklist, then do that because as you are moving forward towards the end of the year, I’m sure many of you are thinking about your strategy for 2023 already.   You do need to know where you are. If you haven’t got a copy of the checklist, or if you’ve downloaded it before, go back and print it off again and fill out the 30 questions. At least you have a sporting chance of knowing where you are versus where you want to be.  That’s number one. Number two – social media. We’re going to be talking about content in a second, but social media is pivotal for your brand awareness, particularly at this point in time, because of what’s happened over the past couple of years. You can download another of our reports. It’s going to help you, and they’re all complimentary. Just go along to www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/smm. If you’ve not downloaded the audit checklist, that’s, again, www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/mcl.    The Many Benefits of Content Marketing   Let’s talk about content marketing and its many benefits for you as a recruitment and staffing company. Today, I’ve highlighted 10 specific ways that utilizing content marketing will help you and your recruitment brand. Let’s start with number one.   1. Content Marketing Improves Brand Awareness   Number one is that content marketing is the most cost-effective way to improve your brand awareness. Now, content comes in many forms. It can be distributed in different ways, which we’re going to come on to. As a first premise, always remember that in today’s marketplace, one of the fantastic benefits of using content is that as an SME business or as a micro-business, you can compete in ways that don’t cost you an awful lot of money. You can get your brand out and in front of candidates and clients – your ideal candidates, your ideal clients – in a very easy way.  Now, you can outsource the writing of content. We have provided writing services in the past, and we provide them for our Superfast Circle members. Just imagine that this is something that anyone can teach themselves to do. A lot of people say, “Oh, I can’t write”. You might be surprised how good you could be at writing if you follow a specific process. We train people to write content in such a way that you could position yourself in front of your market and in a way that makes a huge impact on you and your brand.    2. Content Marketing Gives You Greater Exposure   The second thing about content marketing is that it gives you more ways for people to find you.    There are multiple ways that you can use content for people to find you.   One is through Social Media, and the other is by optimising content for the search engines.   So, social media – LinkedIn and, depending on what sectors you’re in, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. You can post updates and information about developing a career and recruiting. You can write up to 1300 characters on LinkedIn and even more on Facebook and Instagram. Here is an example from a recent LinkedIn post of mine. Another way is to optimize your website for the search engines, so you appear for the people searching for you. If you are writing a regular piece of content on your website, each time you post, that is another page on your website. Another page where people can find you and a signal to Google you are an authority in the sector.   A couple of years ago, we had an event in the Lake District for our Superfast Circle members. One of the members was lamenting that his website didn’t appear as he wanted it to on Google.   When was the last time you Googled your website? Just look at how many links appear for your website? Are there multiple links? Are you struggling to find it? One of the ways to change that is to have additional pages on your website, so additional content. This particular client of ours at the time hadn’t got any blog content at all. He had what I would class as a very ‘thin website’. It just had a few basic pages, and he had his jobs page.  Google wasn’t seeing him as an authority brand in his particular sector, and that was quite easy to rectify. He started to produce more content, and lo and behold, his website appeared. If you have more content on your website, it will be much easier for people to search and find you.   I don’t know about you, but if I go and Google a supplier by name of any description and I can’t find them on the first page, or I can’t find multiple links for them, I can’t find a Google places a piece of content around them, I’m always a bit sceptical – are they the real deal? That is one thing about content; it will increase traffic to your authority website and will help in your positioning.    3. Content Comes in Many Forms   Content can be created in multiple ways. It can be reused, and it’s really easy to do. Some of the technology around recording, videoing, and writing has become available in the last few years, making marketing easier. The next podcast that I will be recording is about my lessons from recording over 300 podcasts over the last eight years and how easy it’s become relative to when I first started recording The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast.  Think about all the multimedia you can now use, from podcasting to video to live streaming.  The good news is there are so many ways that you can use content. It doesn’t have to be in the written word. You could record something and have it transcribed. There are multiple ways to use content that will also impact how people consume you and your brand. Some people prefer to listen. Listener numbers on all the podcasting platforms are increasing exponentially now. You’ve got all these different ways that you can use content to your advantage.    4. Content Creates Connection   Creating content using many different modalities creates a connection with you. Content allows you to connect, and as you connect with people, they get to know you, and people, as we all know, want to work with people they know, like, and trust before they hand over money. People can get a sense of you, who you are and your personality because we all have so much choice in today’s market.   Some people probably won’t work with Sharon and I. We might not be their cup of tea. There are other people where I’m certain we are their cup of tea. They get to know that through the content we write, through the videos we create, and through the podcasts we record. That is available to you. It’s an easy way for you to start attracting your tribe through the things that you do and say.    5. Content Creates Omnipresence   One of the advantages of utilising content marketing for you and your brand is that it creates omnipresence. The famous marketeer, Jay Abraham, came up with the original quote around omnipresence related to marketing.     His thoughts are that we can be everywhere because we now have access to multimedia as an SME business. Content that you create can be shared across multiple channels. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, you need to put something different on Twitter. You need to put something different on YouTube, something different on Facebook”. To be honest, you don’t need to do that. You can share your content across multiple channels.   I think one of the things about this — and remember, email as well, we’re not even touching email a lot in this particular podcast, but of course, email is your content for making a connection with people. Just think about it, over the last couple of years, social media has gone through the roof with the number of people present on different channels because people were craving connection. I think there’s now something like 3.4 billion members on Facebook. Something like 2.6 billion people on YouTube.    Even LinkedIn is now up to just shy of 800 million members. You can see the difference that would make – if you are on all of these channels – some of your clients will be on these channels too. You can see how being present in front of people and the opportunity that could bring you; the way you do that is fundamentally through utilising content.    6. Content Builds Authority For Your Brand   Number six links to what we were just talking about when it comes to omnipresence. That is around building your authority brand for your market. You don’t need to be the authority on recruitment, but you need to be an authority in recruitment in your specific sector. Of course, that’s easier to do because your tribe is much smaller, but you can do that by using all these multiple channels. If you’ve ever had that experience where you watch an advert on the TV, and then you see it again, and then suddenly you’re opening a magazine, and that advert is there again. Or you go and look up their website, and suddenly you get re-targeted, and that person appears to be everywhere.   Our primitive brains then think, oh, well, if that person’s in all these different places, then maybe they’re okay. You can link to how our human psyche works when you start to build your authority. Of course, you can do this with the content that you create. You could write a blog post that then gets made into multiple images that you share. It’s recorded as a podcast; it’s recorded as a video. There are so many things you could do that help build your authority and opportunity in the market.    7. Content Plays Into The Buyers’ Cycle   Coming on to number seven now, we have talked so many times about the buyers’ cycle, about how people move from the awareness that they have a problem, through to wanting that problem solved, to identifying a supplier recruiting partner they can work with.   One of the things that content can do for you ahead of time is answer the questions in your clients’ and your candidates’ minds. I am certain most, if not all, of you will have a client and candidate pathway mapped out. Then, when they start to work with you, what’s the journey they take? There are lots of questions going on in people’s minds.   Now, imagine you are building your authority. One of the ways you build your authority is by answering all those questions going on in people’s minds. You know what it’s like; you have something pop up. The first thing you do, you jump onto Google, and you Google it, or because you are connected to somebody on LinkedIn, you just happen to see that piece of content. Our brains can do really good things for us; it searches out where all these things are, which helps. You can answer questions ahead of time for your people through the content that you create.    8. Content Warms Up Your Contacts   Number eight is it warms people up to working with you. We’ve touched on this briefly a little bit earlier on in this podcast. People get to know you as an individual, and then, if you are the type of person they resonate with, your content is warming them up even more as they’re moving down the buyers’ cycle to start working with you. There are lots of different ways that you can do that in the content that you write.    9. Content Can Be Used To Answer Objections   The next thing is the elephant in the room – people have objections. People have objections to working with you. It’s not the right time; it’s too time-intensive, you charge too much as a recruitment company, anyone can do it now, all these things that go on. You can create content that answers people’s objections. Imagine somebody is in your funnel. Maybe they’re on your email list; they’re a candidate considering whether they work with your recruiting company or not; you can answer a lot of their objections even before you get on the phone and speak to them.  It’s probably more likely that people, once they’ve read some of the content you’re sharing, will then take a call from you or maybe sit down and have a chat about their future career. All that can happen because you’re answering their objections.    10. Case Studies Can Be Used As Content   The final one I want to talk about that people don’t always consider is content can be used in the form of a case study, or it can be used in the form of a testimonial. We share testimonials as memes (visual graphics) on LinkedIn, Facebook, and in all these places that we hang out.  We also have written testimonials all over our website. Would that make a difference because people search for things like that? Think about your content there. It is a great convincer as people are moving down the buyers’ cycle and consider working with you because people don’t want to make a mistake. If they can go and read one of your client case studies or candidate case studies or testimonials, that will make a difference for them.  So there you have just 10 of the many benefits of using content marketing for you and your recruitment organisation. Get to work on these and get some of them moving before the end of the year; you will be amazed at the difference it will make with your connection and the rapport with candidates and clients and how many you can convert.    How We Can Help  We have many clients on track for their best year ever because they implement what we teach and utilize the content and campaigns we give them. If you want a quick chat to see if we can work for you, book your call and demonstration here.  Thanks,  Denise  The post The 10 Logical Benefits of Content Marketing For Your Recruitment and Staffing Company appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today’s podcast gives you a sneak peek of one of the elements of Superfast Circle and the private podcast we provide. This particular recording is transcribed below for you, and the topic is increasing conversions. Hi there, everyone; this is Denise, with another marketing quick hit as we cycle through November. Over the next few weeks, I want to share one or two conversations we had at the event around messaging. Many of you are thinking about what will happen next year; how do we convince more candidates and clients to buy from us? I want to share some of the key reasons why people buy and align this with some important communication points to get across. When purchasing a service from a B2B supplier, think about what is important for people as they’re making that buying decision and what are some of the buttons that need to be ticked or pressed for them to say yes. The first couple of things I want to share with you are around one, having a unique strategy, and the second around structure. If you think about this as strategy and structure, and then over the coming couple of weeks remaining in November, I’m going to share three other important elements to pull in. I wish I could say I’ve developed this myself, though I’ve adapted it for the recruitment space. Some of you will have heard of a guy, I’m sure, called Brendon Burchard; he’s a coach trainer. He talks about why people buy, what he calls the atmosphere, and the energy around people buying that you need to ensure you are communicating.   Your Unique Strategy Let’s look at your unique strategy. Some of you probably think, “Yes, but we’re not that unique, Denise.” As you will remember from the conversations we had at the event, you most certainly are unique, particularly when you talk about how you deliver a service and how you have got the experience over many, many years about the way that you work with candidates and the way that you work with clients. You need to list why you are different, which you all are. Some of you have worked in corporate settings before, you’ve worked for Hays, Michael Page, whatever, and you have a level of experience that others haven’t. Some of you have been an MD and worked in that particular sector yourself, so you have that element you can add to your strategy. Hence, people know that you understand more about the recruitment space in your specific sector. The particular strategy that you have may involve video interviewing. Yes, some other people do that, but they might not do it like you do. There might be a particular process around that, that you have honed, that you might have your 10, 15, 20 stage process that you do. Please don’t assume that everyone does it the same as you. We know that we have spoken to many recruitment companies, staffing organisations, and executive search over the years, and everyone does it a bit differently. Some people focus on one element; other people focus on another. Depending on your ideal buying persona, your avatar, and different elements that might be important for them, you will find this out as you’re talking to them. Think about your unique strategy. Of course, one of the reasons I’m sharing this on the podcast is to come onto the calls and have a conversation with Sharon and I because some of you have been with us a long time, we know you and your business, and we can shine a light on you that maybe you’re not shining on yourself. Who hasn’t had that situation where you think you’re not particularly good at something, and one of your friends will turn around and say, “Don’t be ridiculous. You’re amazing at that”? It’s because sometimes we don’t always hold the mirror up to ourselves to see how good we are at different things and what does make us unique.   Your Structure The second thing I want to talk about here is structure. People love structure. They want to know how they will be handheld through the process. Depending on the size of the company they’re working with, some individuals may not know or understand how the whole talent process works. Yes, you would be surprised that isn’t always the case. When I was recruiting back in the day, I thought I knew everything. When I worked with a few experienced farmer recruiters, I realised I knew “&~! all! It’s ensuring that you explain the structure to them and make them feel taken care of. Sometimes this is unconscious; they don’t always communicate with you that this is what they need. If you explain to me, “Okay, what’s going to happen first is this, then this is going to happen, then I provide this, then I do X.” Remember, we’ve talked about this in the past, particularly around candidates that you have a wealth of content that we give you from SFR that you can use throughout the candidate and client journey. As a member of the circle, what about the fact that, well, as we go through this process, we give you this, we provide this for you in your first 30 days, to how to excel, we provide you with a whole interviewing cheat sheet, we provide you with this? We have so much material that you could use in this situation. Think about the structure. People do love to be led. I remember reading something of Seth Godin’s a couple of weekends ago when he was talking about the key thing missing for many people: the need to be led. Even though they don’t ask for it, they want to know the structure. We’re in uncertain times when we’re in uncertain times, people need direction, and they need to know, what are we doing now? What do we do next? How’s that going to help me? Over this week, those are two things to ponder and think about how can we as a team communicate this? Look at some of our social media and copy, and you will recognise the process. We’ll send various images out, and you’ll notice on an image that it might be someone with their head in their hands or somebody sitting at a desk. There’s one we have with a marketer seated at a desk saying, “I just don’t know where to start.” Then we talk about structure and how we give people structure, and you’ll see how we link the two. If you imagine, what are some things you could start thinking about as you go through this process? We talked today about unique strategy, and then obviously, we’re going to talk about structure. Then over the next couple of weeks, I’m going to share the next three critical things. Listen in next Monday for the next two ideas.   Thanks Denise P.S. All the training and coaching that takes plus is distributed via a private podcast feed. Join us before the end of 2023; your price will be locked in forever. To find out more, book a call with one of us here. The post Convincers For Client and Candidate Conversion appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

The recruitment market has experienced a crazy few years. Now more than ever, organisations appreciate the value that an experienced recruitment company can bring to their business when recruiting the best talent to move forward. As the recruitment market becomes more competitive and client acquisition is back on your radar, you will likely be asked to provide a proposal to identify that you are the recruiter of choice they ‘should ‘be working with. So, if proposal writing is new to you, here are a few suggestions on where to start. Writing a winning proposal can be the difference between gaining a new client and a recruitment project and losing out to the competition. It will help your prospective client make a more informed decision about the service level you can provide.   It All Starts With Research and Planning Before you start writing your proposal, there are a few things to consider, which will involve research and market intelligence. Researching your client is vital. You need to understand both their business and growth goals. Plus, critically, what is happening in their current market. Putting the time and effort into writing a client-winning proposal is fine as long as it will bear fruit for you in the long, medium and short term What specific roles do they want to fill, and what is happening in the market or business that has created this opportunity? Which recruitment companies do they currently work with or have previously engaged with to deliver placements? Will the project be exclusive to you and the client, or will multiple recruiters be a part of the project? Is this proposal one where you have options of different fee structures for levels of service, or is this an Asda Walmart experience where it is all about the volume of roles you will get at a lower fee? Consider what questions they might ask, such as; your company’s experience working on similar projects, your recruiting process, and the team members who may work on the project. Ensure you are fully prepared on this one. When you think ahead like this by answering these questions in the body of your proposal, you demonstrate that you understand your prospective client’s needs and challenges and demonstrate your attention to detail. [ Important: Unless this is potentially a massive opportunity for you, consider the impact of working with multiple recruitment companies on a project; our experience is it rarely ends well.]   Creating Your Proposal 5 Critical Areas As you put your finger on your keyboard, remember to be concise and to the point when writing your proposal. Don’t use jargon unless it is a well-recognised sector speak that everyone in the process will be familiar with. Keep everything on point and avoid going off on a tangent, as it can confuse anyone reading the document. Focus on the client and how what you are recommending in the proposal will help them. Diagrams and flow diagrams will communicate your process and up-level your document and the impact of your pitch more than you appreciate. Timelines Are Key When it comes to recruitment, timelines are vital. Picture the scene; you are recruiting for a new sales force build for a product launch that will add significant revenue to your client’s bottom line. The salespeople they want will also need to be trained on the new product as well as being the best available! So, timelines like; first and second interviews, assessment centres, notice periods and training will all be critical to schedules and deadlines. Your timeline doesn’t have to be precise, as in down to the day; an overall guideline is essential to clients and reassures them that you know what you are doing and how the process works.   Focus on The Benefits You may want to go in-depth about your process; however, the top line is what they are looking for with an understanding of workflows. Remember, the last thing you want is to give away your trade secrets. Remember to highlight their pain points so that your proposal is the obvious solution.   Include Social Proof A prospective client often wants to know what it’s like to work with a provider they haven’t partnered with before. Most of them will carry out some due diligence checks like the background research you will have undertaken for your proposal. Providing several case studies will demonstrate how your recruitment company has assisted other companies in similar situations. Therefore helping to form a relationship of trust and respect for your company.   Tone of Voice Using an active voice and simple wording makes it easier to read and is the preferred choice when writing any business proposal. Here is a classic example of how this works. Passive: The candidates will be contacted in the first instance by our senior consultant. Active: Our senior consultants will contact the candidates in the first instance. People often use technical language to sound impressive. Unfortunately, it has the opposite effect, resulting in a less engaged reader as it’s more challenging to understand. Keeping your wording simple, avoiding jargon, and making it relatable to your audience means your proposal will have more impact.   Tell A Story One of the reasons many proposals get overlooked or rejected is because they don’t stand out from the crowd. Sharing examples and stories of previous projects can help. In today’s changing business, world story is both King and Queen! Here is an example I am sure you can relate to. Let’s say you had the task of finding senior executives for several C-suite positions. In the project’s early stages, the recruiting deadline was shortened, and you had to identify ideal candidates quickly. By using your in-depth industry knowledge and network in conjunction with your extensive market mapping, you were able to promote the opportunity to targeted candidates. Sharing examples always helps the sale.   Next Steps? Remember to focus your client on the next steps. Some proposals end without an ending. There is nothing for the client to do, nothing to sign, and no call to action. Proposals that don’t ask the client to do anything after they have finished reading often get put to one side and forgotten about. Stating what you want your potential client to do next or even requesting a signature at the end of the proposal to be sent back to you will keep the process moving forward. In summary, being able to write a winning proposal is your opportunity to demonstrate why your recruitment company is different and is the ideal partner who can meet their needs. While creating this type of proposal will take time, when done well, it can be one of the keys accelerating your business success.   Want Help Marketing Your Recruitment Company? We decided to re-write and re-record this post as it’s a question we have had more than once from our Superfast Circle clients. If you want to win more business and stand out from the recruiting crowd, our ongoing support through SFC might be exactly what you need. If you want to lock in the current fee forever, book a demo with us before Dec 14th and say yes and you are good to go. To find out more, call us on ++44(0)1524 920 700 The post Writing Winning Proposals appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Video has emerged as one of the most significant marketing tools in the world in recent years. Around 78% of companies say video marketing helped them to increase sales. What’s more, around 60% of content marketers said they planned to increase their video budget following fantastic ROI results. Increasingly, companies are using video for a range of different marketing goals; including. Generate new leads Increase understanding of their product or service Nurture and engage customers Elevating brand presence Building rapport with clients and candidates Videos can be used on virtually every marketing channel, whether you’re promoting your brand on social media, email, or via a website. Unfortunately, there are still countless companies and business leaders who fear getting involved with video. Why Your Company Needs Video Marketing Video is quickly evolving from a nice-to-have marketing option for business leaders to a mandatory requirement. Around 96% of people now say they use video to learn about products and services. Not to mention, the number of video users is growing all the time. There are about 1.9 billion monthly users accessing YouTube alone. Overcoming your fear of video means you can leverage a host of benefits when it comes to nurturing, engaging, and converting customers. At the same time, it ensures you continue to compete alongside other businesses in your industry. Leveraging video marketing will: Enhance your existing marketing strategies: Video can perfectly complement and enhance your other marketing strategies. You can transform how-to blogs into guide videos, or use video as a way to engage more followers on social media. Adding video an email can even increase CTR by 200-300%. Improve visibility: If you take the time to create and optimize your videos for search engines, you can use them to strengthen your organic traffic, and generate more brand awareness. All you need to do is create a description for your email that’s SEO optimized, and select the right thumbnails and visuals. Enhance trust: Videos offer a behind-the-scenes view of your business to clients and candidates. This makes you more trustworthy, human, and transparent in the eyes of your consumers. Employee interviews and behind-the-scenes footage can even make it easier for people to understand how your business operates. Boost conversion rates: Around 50% of customers look for product-related videos before making a purchase. Another 4 out of 5 customers also say demonstrations, showcasing your products and services, help them to make purchasing decisions. Using videos, you’re more likely to convince your audience to act. Improve brand reputation: Videos offer companies an excellent opportunity to showcase what makes them unique. You can highlight their personality, values, and mission in a series of videos, which help candidates and clients to decide whether you’re the right solution for their specific needs. Common Video Marketing Fears (and How to Overcome Them) As beneficial as video marketing can be, it also comes with a number of challenges for business leaders to overcome. Although 71% of B2B companies now use video marketing, there’s still a significant percentage struggling to break into the video market. Here are some of the common fears preventing brands from using video marketing, and how you can overcome them for your business. 1. Fears of Being Visible on Camera Not everyone feels confident in front of a camera. However, in today’s rapidly-evolving video landscape, you don’t have to be a supermodel or actor to stand out. There are countless people around the world producing videos every day. No matter what you look or sound like, if you’re delivering quality content, your viewers won’t care. If you’re particularly concerned about being on camera, you could even consider using animations and graphics in your videos, instead of human faces. However, keep in mind that real people generally have a better impact on clients and candidates, because they’re easier to relate to. 2. Budget Constraints One of the biggest fears some companies have about getting started with video marketing, is it’s going to cost them too much. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. Today, companies can create high-quality videos using nothing but their smartphone and some basic online editing software. There’s no need for any professional lights, sound, or camera equipment. Some videos are even expected to be less “professional” in quality than others. For instance, clients expect to see more raw footage on social media. It’s also worth remembering that the ROI on video is significant. No matter what you spend, around 89% of companies say video gives them an excellent return on their investment. 3. Fears about Content Production For some companies, it can be difficult to figure out what they should talk about in their video marketing campaigns. Nobody wants to be stood in front of a camera with nothing to say. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to overcome this issue, with planning. Sit down with your team and set goals for the videos you want to create. If you want to educate your clients about your services, you might provide a behind-the-scenes video that walks them through what you do. Alternatively, you could provide insights into a recent case study, with quotes from your customers to generate trust. It’s also worth asking your team members for their ideas on the kind of relevant content you may be able to produce. Don’t Let Video Marketing Fears Hold You Back As one of the most intimate and engaging forms of content marketing available, video is a fantastic way to engage clients, and candidates. However, it can also be a worrisome concept for some businesses to approach. Whether you’re afraid of being on camera, concerned about content production, or nervous about your budget, it’s time to overcome your fears. As demand for video content continues to rise, and statistics show the value this phenomenal strategy can bring, no company can afford to miss out. Start experimenting with video today to discover for yourself why this medium is so essential.   Thanks Denise. P.S. As part of your Superfast Circle membership we even provide video scripts you can use as part of your marketing. To find out more book a call with us here. The post How To Get Rid Of Your Fear Of Video Marketing appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Today we are talking about social proof and testimonials, specifically, getting candidates to say yes when you ask for testimonials or recommendations.  Anyway, I’m going to get into that in a second.   If you have not downloaded our marketing checklist, please do that, as planning is always critical at this time of year.  Go along to superfastrecruitment.co.uk/mcl, and you will be able to download this checklist from there.  So, let’s talk about testimonials and how to get more of them. We have another deep dive blog on testimonials you can also listen to here.  I wanted to dive deeper into persuading your candidates to give you testimonials because this has come up a few times with our Superfast Circle clients who are mapping out their marketing plans.  They have realized how powerful social proof is, and yet they know they haven’t been collecting testimonials.    We Live in a Review Society  I want to say one quick thing: we live in a review society. Only the other day, I bought Christmas presents for the family, and my habits confirmed how important a solid review is.  It’s fascinating; I automatically go and check the review, “Oh, that’s got five stars. Oh, that’s only 4.2, and I don’t think I bother with that one. Oh, that’s only got four or five reviews.” I do that consciously and unconsciously.   I’m a marketeer, and I understand how this all works.  Think about the value of someone else saying how good your recruiting service is, not just you.  With this podcast episode, we’re talking about candidates and the value of having multiple candidate testimonials on your website and social media channels, shouting out the value of working with you as a recruiter rather than somebody else.    Creating Your Testimonial Getting System  Now, the question is, how do we do this?  The first thing is to develop a system focused on getting testimonials. There is a precursor to your system, and that is having a goal.   Now, you are a good recruiter; I’m certain of that.   You probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast if you weren’t. Therefore, in reality, every single placement that you make should give you a testimonial.  Make that your goal; let’s pluck a figure out of the air because we have recruiters at all levels listening to this.  Say you make ten placements a month. It’s easy to do the math. We’ve got zeros and ones and figures   Let’s say you place ten people a month; therefore, there should be no reason you cannot get ten short testimonials from people you placed, which you can then use in your marketing, with their permission.  This is a realistic goal that you then build a system around.  What about giving your consultants an incentive or a target for every candidate they place getting a testimonial?  If they hit the jackpot or do this, I know many of you guys do the spin the wheel; then there’s an incentive for them, a prize for Jessica or Michael?  It’s amazing what people will do to achieve things like that. It’s such an easy win. Now, it’s an easy win because you’re going to build a system around it. Here are some of the things that we always suggest to our clients to do.    What To Include in Your System  The first thing when you are talking to a candidate is to set up right from the beginning that you will ask for a testimonial;  “Hi, Amanda; really pleased that you’ve registered with us. I do know that we have several vacancies that are ideal for you because you are qualified and motivated”.  Then what I would also say is, look, we work incredibly closely with our candidates. It’s key for us to deliver excellent service.  What we always ask is, when we place you, would you be willing to give us a testimonial?   You’ll get a yes or no or whatever.   I’ll make sure that I mention this again; when you’ve been placed, I’ll send you an email and follow up with a quick call.  You have created that first positive interaction with them. You framed the service that you are going to deliver.  The second thing to do now is diarising the process. Put it in your diary, whatever that might be. You know when the interviews are taking place and when the offer will be made; Put it in your CRM to ensure you follow through.  Much of this process can be automated via email.  Our Superfast Circle members have a full suite of emails that they use for testimonials that I have pre-written for them that they can use. If you want to know more about that, drop me an email. You can, of course, write your own campaign and when you do, make sure you give candidates specific questions to answer that showcase the service you deliver.  What we always suggest to people is one of two things, is that you give them some questions to answer because Andrea said, “Oh, it was really, really fantastic. Mark was a lovely consultant, and I’m really pleased I’ve got a job.”   Yes, that’s an okay testimonial, though not ideal.   What you want someone to talk about is that Mark was efficient. He kept me informed all the time, and he gave me improvements I could make. Everything was done professionally, and I felt like I mattered, I felt supported, and he helped me get a great job.  That’s a more powerful testimonial.  Think about why candidates don’t work with you and why candidates aren’t happy with other recruitment companies in the service they get. Think about how I can build this into the testimonials that go out on social media and our website.   These testimonials promote you and your brand because you demonstrate that you are different from other recruiters.  What I’ve suggested to you is absolutely fine moving forward.   A question for you?    Testimonials From Past Candidates  What about all those past candidates whom you haven’t asked for testimonials?  What can you do there?   You can handle this multiple ways with no need to overcomplicate things.  Send them a focused email campaign asking for a testimonial. Let them know you are checking in with them, and you could send them a great report or piece of content to support their career.  Some of our clients mention to candidates that for every testimonial that we get, we’re going to put the names in a hat, and we are going to pull out those names, and whoever wins will donate to their favourite charity, or we’ll send some vouchers, or whatever that might be.   The charity option seems to work incredibly well.   You could do something like that with people you have, but I think the main thing about testimonials is asking for them.   People who have had a good experience working with you will say yes to your request.   Then, of course, when they do, you can use these testimonials as part of your marketing.  Taught about this before when you’re promoting your brand on social media. There’s nothing better than something I call the horse’s mouth strategy.  This is where you have a candidate or client sharing their experience of how good you are.  You have someone who has worked with you talking about working with you rather than saying we treat candidates well!  Much better to get that testimonial out on social media from Andrea saying I was treated well.   Several ideas for you here about getting testimonials from candidates. One of the easiest things is to make sure you are asking consistently and frame it right at the beginning of your interaction and relationship with them.    Thanks   Denise    How Can We Help You Market Better Than Ever in 2023?  The answer is in multiple ways.   We will be your virtual marketing directors, and we come with a knowledge and understanding of the market at a deep level. We have delivered services for recruitment companies across the globe for over 15 years.   We will consult with you and together create a plan, so you stand out in the market and get the roles you truly deserve. As our client, we also provide the marketing collateral you need. Interested? Then call us at ++(0)1524 920700 or drop an email here.  The post Getting More Candidates To Say Yes To Giving You Testimonials appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Let’s talk about marketing mistakes recruitment companies make, especially micro and smaller SMEs in the sector. I’ve got 10 of them today. These are the mistakes that come up repeatedly with people when we first have a discussion about improving their marketing. From not having an action plan to ‘trying’ to copy a corporate they know. The good news is they are easy to change. Marketing and The Size of Your Business  One of the things about marketing is that it depends on your organisation’s size and what you do. We deal with micro-businesses, those under ten employees, and smaller SMEs.   It’s a very different marketing process compared to being with the likes of Hays, Michael Page, and Adecco. These huge corporate organisations have a full marketing department and marketing team. We’re not talking about how marketing works there; we’re talking about how you, as a small business, can stand out in an incredibly competitive market.   Remember, marketing is about creating demand. It’s about getting out in front of people so people know who you are, how you can help them, and how you can solve their problems, and then they can start to work with you.  It’s about how you create that consistent demand for yourself and your recruitment brand. Let’s start with some of the most obvious mistakes that people make.     1. Your Goals Don’t Align With Your Marketing Strategy  Number one is not aligning your goals with your marketing strategies. You could even say the other way around, not deciding on the marketing strategies that will deliver your goals. Because often, we’ll have a conversation with someone they have a huge goal that they haven’t necessarily thought about how they might resource it.  Therefore, they’ve got all these different ideas: “Oh, we could do this, and then we could do this, and then we could do that.”   Then they don’t do anything.   Here is an example; Let’s say that you want to start a new desk in a sub-vertical of a particular sector you are working in.   You see the opportunity that is there.  You know that there’s an opportunity there for you. Therefore, you need to think about the following questions.  What’s my marketing plan?   How am I going to communicate my value to the market?   What’s my value proposition here?   How am I going to get client leads and relevant roles to place?  Then how will I find and attract the candidates?  This is the planning piece that people forget about. They decide what their goal is but don’t factor in the detail of how to craft their message for the right candidates and clients and get their message out into the market.  For example.  What cold outreach are you going to do?   What warm follow-up?   Have you got a database?   We encourage you to consider all these things because it’s fundamental to have goals and actions that will deliver them for you.   When you look at the marketing checklist, one thing we discuss is to have a specific goal. Think about the marketing strategies I will probably need to consider when it comes to delivering the goal I have now.   Look on the Superfast Recruitment blog if you want an idea of marketing strategies you can use that deliver results in the recruitment sector.    2. Not Doing Research Before They Press Go  Mistake number two is not doing research and analysis before you press go. This is the foundational work around messaging and avatar.  Very few people like doing it. We’re just going through our foundational work. Again, we do it yearly, and we normally do it around this time as we prepare for our Superfast Circle event. We continually ask ourselves what challenges our particular clients are having now or will have next year.  It is the same for every business owner because you need to consider defining your avatar. Many people we work with tend to be established and experienced in their sector and historically have not marketed themselves.  The challenge is they are now pigeonholed as a recruiter that can only deliver certain types of roles, which isn’t true.  Consequently, they aren’t getting the bigger roles they want.  That is where doing your research and defining, this is the market we want to work with, this is what we’re going to do,” is so important.   Because so often see companies throw up job ads and blog posts and send random emails. This is known as spray and pray marketing.  In other words, they do not think enough about the clients and candidates they want to attract.     3. No Focus on Brand Building  Now number three is too little focus on building your brand. Branding has become more critical in the last few years because, during Covid, the power of a brand accelerated exponentially.  People talk about where the internet was pre-COVID and where it is now; it’s grown five or six years before what was expected.   This impacts your brand because, as a population, we spend more time online and, consequently, are even more discerning about whom we want to work with.  Let me give you an example of how human beings work. You go on holiday, and you want a ‘nice’ meal, and you’re walking past a restaurant, and you look at the menu, the lighting, whatever it might be, and you think, “Oh, I’m not too sure about that place. It looks a bit worn out and dirty, not my place.”   You may smile at that, but that’s exactly what we do, and we do that online now for everything.  When looking at people online, we go, “Oh, their website looks a bit dated,” or “Oh, their social media doesn’t look very clear. That colour doesn’t quite match.”   All of these things didn’t matter many years ago. We were fascinated by the internet, and candidates wanted a job, and that was it.  Whereas now, people are looking at you and your brand. They make that unconscious connection that your brand indicates what type of service they will get from you.   Brand building is vital. I think particularly if you are an organisation that wants higher fees and better clients.  You need to elevate your brand in a written and visual format and in the content you share.  Sometimes you go on a website, there’s been no new blog content, or it’s repurposed blog content from somewhere else, and it’s not formatted very well.   It’s all about you and the team rather than solving a problem for your candidate and client.  We talked a little bit about that in number two about your research. Think about your brand and the messages you communicate, and is that either attracting or repelling the candidates and clients you now want?    4. Ad Hoc or No Planning  The fourth mistake is that people don’t plan at a detailed level, if at all.  What I mean by this is that people aren’t thinking about their short, medium, and their long-term goals. Now, marketing can work fast when you leverage your low-hanging fruit.  These quick wins are often from people who are ready to buy now. We talked about the buying cycle a few weeks ago. It’s important to have a short, medium, and long-term marketing strategy that you are using that will deliver for you time and time again.    Something that I notice is that many recruitment companies are doing incredibly well. Yes, there are candidate short markets, but they’re doing well, taking their foot off the gas regarding marketing.  A poor move for your future growth.  Let me explain using a sales analogy here, as I suspect many people reading or listening to this post have worked in sales at some point.  Pausing marketing is just like not filling your pipeline. From a sales perspective, we all know what happens when we’ve had a really good month.   We say, Oh, I’ll take it a little bit easier after last month, and then six weeks down the road, we wonder why we haven’t booked any sales calls.  When it comes to marketing, it’s the same. If you are not consistently marketing, people will forget about you. It’s a bit like that empty pipeline that we all hate having. That’s the same when it comes to marketing.  Even though you are in yippy, dippy do-good times at the moment, remember that potentially we’re entering a mini-recession; The Bank of England likes to call that which always sounds better. People will be reconsidering their suppliers and reviewing their careers, so now is a time to market to those people.   That leads me to number five, which is consistent implementation.    5. Lack of Consistent Implementation  I love working with recruitment companies because they are action-takers. Unfortunately, they get bored very quickly, and their consistency of implementation stops.  Someone will get excited, you’ll see a flood of posts on social media, and then literally, you won’t see anything. The process hasn’t been systematized, and they are short of content or don’t know what to post.  This is an Achilles’ heel for people. Consistency is vital if you want to influence long-term because people are looking for that long-term play. Consistency is one of the keys to influencing and, ultimately, conversion.  There’s no excuse these days, as there are many tools and companies to help you. Tools like MeetEdgar, Paiger, and Canva and programmes like Superfast Circle provide the content resources you need.  These things can help you build your brand and implement your marketing.    6. Copying the Corporates  Now, number six is a mistake, copying the corporates. You could think that would surely be a good idea, Denise. Yes and no. The challenge is that someone will watch something on TV and think, “Oh, Indeed is advertising or Mark and Spencer are doing this, or booking.com are doing whatever.”  The challenge here is that that organisation has a huge marketing budget and team, which you don’t. You can’t afford to spend six figures on an influencer strategy or testing a new campaign. Marketing for micro businesses is different. You want guaranteed strategies that have demonstrated they work.   It would help if you had direct outreach alongside all the digital channels and the automation you want to use. Yes, of course, it’s fantastic because automation and tools of that type are accessible. They’re not outrageously expensive anymore for smaller companies to use. However, you will need direct outreach because you haven’t got the brand presence of Hays; you haven’t got the brand presence of Michael Paige.  You are ACME recruitment in Rochdale, and you need to do things slightly differently. It would help if you had different strategies that the corporates don’t have to use and don’t have to implement because they don’t need to because they’re a household name, but you aren’t. That’s why you need to consider all the different elements in your marketing mix, which we’ll get onto in a second.    7. Outsourcing and Abdicating  Now, the next thing I want to discuss is outsourcing and abdication. Some companies give everything to a marketing company and expect them to mind-read what they do.  Trust me; this is a disaster waiting to happen.  I’ve had to go back to them and tease everything out of them because you have all the absolute knowledge about you and your brand. Because of how the market is moving, it’s important to build that internal capability, which I’ll come onto. Outsourcing absolutely everything, people think it’s an easy win, and in fact, it isn’t.  Yes, there are some things that you might want to outsource if you’ve got a technical person that can do multiple campaigns for you, or you’ve got someone that’s doing your paid advertising or something like that.   However, the strategy has to come from you. You need to learn and understand how marketing can work for your organization because just abdicating everything, my friend, I have seen some absolute disasters.  I’ve seen it put people off marketing completely. It’s because they didn’t take responsibility and accountability for their brand and actually learn enough to give people direction.  They could have saved themselves a lot of money.   A please from me; don’t outsource absolutely everything without knowing and understanding what you are doing. Build that internal capability.    8. Not Enough Fishing Lines  Now the next thing I want to talk about is multiple fishing lines. People do not use enough ideas and strategies. Specifically, something I notice is people forget about the fact that you need to have candidate marketing and you need to have client marketing. For those of you building a team, you need to have a talent marketing pipeline because we’ve all experienced what’s been going on in the last two years; there’s been a more intense candidate shortage.  Some of that is fuelled by the fact that many people have just said, ‘Oh, well, I do client marketing. Don’t do any candidate marketing because all the candidates come to me, and now, they’re not.’   People are wondering why, “Oh, I don’t seem to have any connections with candidates, and now the job boards are charging me so much; what can I do?   This uncomfortably is where ignoring parts of the process in your business around attraction has created huge problems for you.  This is where you need to start considering what candidate attraction and marketing strategies I have or need.  Because candidates just aren’t sitting there waiting for your call anymore. You have to go out there and influence them about why it’s you and your brand they want to be working with, not Hays, Adecco, and not all the big boys.   No offence to any Hays listeners here. Some of the clients we work with are ex-Hays and ex-Michael Page, but what I’m saying here to make people aware is your marketing needs to encompass everything you are doing in the business, not just when you need it.   It needs to be long-term.  Plan out multiple marketing strategies to build your authority and brand presence so that you are attracting the candidates and clients you now want to work with.  Here is the metaphor I use, and it relates to fishing.  If you are a fisherman and you would want to catch more or different fish, you have to use different lines and bait; and more of them.  It’s the same when it comes to lead generation and business.  If you only stick to one or two strategies, you are curtailing your opportunities. In our Superfast circle, we give our members multiple strategies and the collateral that goes with them. If you want to know more, book a call with one of us here.    9. Not Building Internal Capability  This mistake I have touched on before connects with a couple of other things I’ve discussed: not building internal capability.  Many micro-businesspeople think I can’t afford to get a marketer or I want to outsource everything.  Both are incorrect ideas that will not serve your longer-term growth.  Something for you to consider.  We have several clients that work with us; they’ve got four or five consultants and a full-time marketer, and they are smashing it. One client we spoke to last week has had his best month ever in business.  They are doing so well because they’ve got a marketeer working for them that can help their implementation and build that internal capability. Now what’s interesting is all of those business owners started with us and brought marketing support.  They saw the value of marketing and what it could deliver for them.  Some of these people are part-time and full-time, and what people seem to forget is that there’s all this thought that I need to get another consultant, another consultant, another consultant. I understand you need more salespeople, but you also need brand awareness if you want to give your BD team a sporting chance to make sales  Learning marketing and building that internal capability will make a massive difference for you in the future because you will be astounded at the difference that will make for you.  It’s a mistake to think that marketing costs the business. Marketing is an investment for the company, and people around marketing are most definitely that.     10. Not Getting Support From A Marketing Mentor  Now the final thing I want to talk to you about is not going out and getting advice about marketing from someone that might have a few ideas on how you could support yourself.   Yes, this is an outrageous plug for us, but it is something that we see a lot. This is because people start marketing without knowing what they’re doing.   When our clients work with us, they are honest and admit; they don’t know what they don’t know!  They want some clarity; they want some direction, so they move in the right direction. We give them that they know that if they’re heading off, they’re action takers, they’re going in the right direction, and they are clear on what they should be doing. They know they’re going to get results. I think it’s a thing to remember that marketing is a discipline.   You imagine you’ve got your sales consultants; I’m sure many of you have sought outside advice.  You might have even hired a trainer and brought that trainer into the organisation to teach your recruiters how to recruit, sell, influence, and resource.   All of these things are similar in marketing.   Creating your marketing capability in your company is something you can get advice on; you can get a marketing mentor. We do that with our people; we are their virtual marketing directors.  It is something that a lot of people don’t think about. They see something on the TV or another recruitment company doing something in a different sector, and they think it will work for them without getting some advice.   Many of you here know about Superfast circle, but a pre-step to that is going and downloading all our reports and watching our on-demand training, which you will find on our downloads page here.  A second thing you can do is go and join our Facebook group.  We have a Facebook group called Recruitment Marketing Mastery.   We’re sharing content in there all the time. We’re sharing resources. You can ask any question at all, and we will come in and answer it.   That could be your first stage of getting advice about what you can do.   We’ve had clients that have come to us who had a website designed. They’ve come back and said, I wish I’d spoken to you earlier because I probably would have saved myself a few grand here because I had things done that I didn’t need to do and I should have had other things done that I did need to do and now I haven’t.  There are so many things that you can get help and support with and coaching around when it comes to marketing.  Get some help and advice on marketing your company because the market is changing, and we are experts who can help you.  What Next?  Think about what you are doing, think about what you want to implement, and then you can take action.   We work with recruitment and search firms worldwide and would love to help you.  Book a call in our diary here if you want to talk with us. Or email us here.  Thanks, Denise The post 10 Marketing Mistakes Recruitment Business Owners Make appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

What could marketing help to achieve for your recruitment company in a matter of months? More than you might imagine. In today’s podcast, we are sharing a conversation with Natalie, the MD of BBU recruit. In a few short months, Natalie and her part-time marketer were able to achieve more than either of them expected. You can listen to their story on this week’s podcast. Background Business Backup is a privately owned small recruitment firm based in Maidenhead in Berkshire. Supplying all levels of predominantly commercial office staff across the Thames Valley, the South of England and the North West. The company has been in operation for over 30 years, and Natalie Degiorgio has worked at the company for over 28 years and is now the sole director. During Covid, BBU diversified, turning a negative situation into something positive, supplying medical staff to the TV and film industry. What Were You Looking to Achieve When You Considered Marketing For BBU? Before I took the business over, I had a managing director, and the marketing style didn’t reflect the level of the brand that I wanted. For example, we had a website that I didn’t feel was my personality and what I wanted to portray. Last year, I decided that we were going to uplevel our website. It took me a while to get the design I wanted because, at the time, I didn’t appreciate what was possible and what we could achieve, and now I have a website that I’m proud of because it gives people a flavour of exactly what we do. It gives people a sense of our longevity, experience, and success within the recruitment industry. Before that, we had zero social media presence. It was another task on top of a very busy day, yet something I wanted to get started on. Marketing was relatively new to me; the challenge is you don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve spoken to various marketing companies in the past, and it felt like they were all ‘song and dance’, not practical. They didn’t understand the uniqueness of the recruitment industry and the need to market to candidates and clients. I met a lot of companies and wasted a lot of time. Eventually, I started planning my website in June last year, and we finally launched in March this year. I also felt I needed to do something with social media to align with my website to attract more clients and candidates. What Was The Key Marketing Problem You Were Looking To Solve? We weren’t getting outreach to clients quick enough. I agree there is a place for telephone sales, and we needed more than this option alone. Because we’re a small business, the challenge is having the manpower to spread the word and contact candidates and clients consistently My ultimate aim was to get the word out there faster regarding email campaigns. We’ve tried running them ourselves in the past, and they weren’t particularly successful. It takes an awful lot of time to try and think, okay, well, what are we going to write about, and what’s the right thing to say? If you’re not experienced in that area, which I’m not, it isn’t easy. As a business owner, you always have to try and be an expert in all these fields, and we can’t be. That’s why I felt it was time to engage in a marketing strategy properly. How Did You Come Across Superfast Recruitment? I used to get emails from you, and like many people, you read some, and you don’t read others. In the end, what made me reach out to you was I received a brochure from you, and I thought, I remember seeing these guys from my emails. I read your brochure and decided to reach out to you. Sharon: Yes, it was. I remember you saying to me at the time, does this work? And yes, direct mail does as part of an overall strategy. What Eventually Made You Make The Decision To Invest in Superfast Circle? Because there was so much pre-done for us, it took a lot of the work away from me, and I felt several things from my first conversations with you. I felt that you understood what my challenges were as a small business. That was the first thing, and I thought you would be there to support us because you understood my challenges. Plus, the fact that you wrote all the email campaigns was invaluable. You were instrumental in helping me with my website on marketing aspects which I would never have known. Website developers would have never known because we weren’t using you guys at the time. The social media aspects as well. I was quite excited because it was towards the end of December. I think it was the last day actually; the 31st of December, I think it was. I just thought, do you know what, to hell with it, let’s dive straight in, which I don’t normally do. I’ve never really invested time and money into marketing; Business Backup has never properly invested. I felt that my website and my marketing had to go hand in hand; it was really important to me to get new clients on board, especially with the pandemic, though, when we were going through. I decided to go for the whole package because I wanted complete support. I wanted access to everything because I wasn’t sure what I was getting into. I was excited to get into it because I knew I needed to get the Business Backup word out there and get it out more efficiently and quickly. Sharon: It’s interesting because I remember you using that phrase; I don’t know what it is, I don’t know. Since you shared that phrase, I’ve heard it several times from people in a similar situation. In a way, it’s not surprising to listen to you now say, “Well, I wasn’t 100% sure what I was letting myself in for.” Because sometimes, until you step in and start getting your hands dirty, you don’t know, do you? Particularly when you don’t know what you don’t know about marketing, that’s great. You launched your website in March, and the website you were then able to launch had some additional functionality to it so that, actually, the money that you were investing in that website was going to deliver more for you from a marketing point of view as well. That was great. You’re only six months into your marketing journey, having never done much before. In addition to the website, what have you now got in place? How’s that working for you? What Marketing Do You Have in Place, And What Is Working For You? Oh, gosh, right. We’ve got all of the social media shares that you provide us with. We’ve put all of that in place now. How we are advertising positions on social media is completely different now. Our adverts are more creative. Looking at the information you provide us it’s made us think we need to be more creative and eye-catching. They’re more colourful and more in keeping with our company logo. We’re getting them out in all different places. There are so many things that I have never heard of that we are using now; scheduling tools, sales tools, technical things and systems that I needed to put in place. It’s changed so much in that way. Over these last six months, it has been a huge, huge learning curve. When I first started, I felt a little bit overwhelmed with everything because I just felt like, “Oh my goodness, I don’t know anything here.” It was a little bit daunting, to begin with, and a little overwhelming. I’ve got a member of staff who works with me, Laura. She’s taken over the marketing side. She’s never done marketing before, but I felt she would find it quite interesting. Between us both, we’re learning all the time. Since joining SFC, we’re so much more up-to-date. When I look out in the market, we stand out as a company that knows what they are doing. With your support; I feel we look far more professional. We look like we’re on it and know where we want to go. In turn, that’s starting to attract more clients, which is great. Sharon: It’s what it’s all about. Recruitment business owners will tell us that they feel like they are the best-kept secret and people know us locally, but beyond that, we are the best-kept secret, and yet we are so good at what we do. I can see now that you’re sharing and telling people what you do. You are a high-quality business that has been around for over 30 years. The recruitment market is changing, and perhaps they haven’t had to do much marketing in the past, but it is different now and is more competitive. How Was It Tapping Into The Support and Resources As a Member of Superfast Circle? It’s been totally invaluable for us. For example, with the content, we don’t have to think about what content we’re going to send because of everything we get; reports, blogs, social media and all the email campaigns. You are handheld throughout the whole process. All of the tutorials and training, all of the modules, I mean, I haven’t finished all of the modules yet. Because when I finish a module, I think, “Right, okay, we now need to put X, Y and Z in place.” I feel that the support that the weekly calls I think are invaluable. Laura always comes, “I can’t always attend the weekly calls, but in the beginning, I did.” We always used to come away from the calls, and Laura still does, having learned something new, which is fantastic. Sharon: And probably a to-do list as well, I imagine! A massive to-do list. Yes. I mean this in a very positive way. I feel like it’s never-ending in a good way. It just feels like the list keeps growing and growing. I’m quite an impatient person. I have to keep saying, “Okay, we’re one step at a time.” I don’t know if you recall when I first joined. I was like, “I’m really overwhelmed with all of this. What do I do first? Just tell me where I need to go first so I can focus on those areas.” The beauty of you guys is you respond really quickly. I think your Facebook group is invaluable to hear what you and Denise have to say when we have questions. The network you have built with other business owners is really good because we’re all in the same position. It’s good to hear other people’s challenges and what they’re coming across and what’s worked for them and what hasn’t worked for them. I think I would never have had that whole network of support if I hadn’t joined Superfast Circle. Sharon: That’s brilliant. That’s fabulous to hear. Let’s say with the resources and support. I appreciated it when I reached out to you to have this conversation. I did say that I recognize it’s still quite early days. You’ve touched on the fact that you’re starting to see that you’re attracting new clients. Could you expand on what difference it is in what you have been able to put in place so far? Because in six months, you guys have done a huge amount, and you are a small team, it is you and Laura. Laura’s got other elements to her role, and you’re spinning all the plates that an MD spins. What Difference Has Joining Superfast Circle Made To You and The Business? In terms of the difference, it’s freed up a lot of time. Although we’re really busy, the difference is that we’ve got everything there; we just have to put it in place. We don’t have to think about what we’re sending. Once you’ve put something like, for example, your email campaigns, it all worked for itself once I got my head around what I was doing. It just automatically happens. We didn’t send it out to many people for the first email campaign we did. We got three of our lapsed clients back within the first two weeks, which was an incredible result for us. You were instrumental in directing us to go for the low-hanging fruit first, and it worked. Now we’re doing a cold email campaign, and whereas we used to do it before, I think the way the emails, the way you guys write your emails, people are actually replying. Whereas before, people didn’t reply. Access to your content has really changed things for us because it’s about knowing what will capture people’s attention. Yes, you’re not going to win everyone, but to get three clients back, the results speak for themselves, really. Sharon: For me, hearing you say there’s that reassurance as an MD making an investment and a commitment. It’s not just financial because it’s your time, Laura’s time. Knowing that having done it, that reassurance, “If we take action, this works.” You’re not going to get everybody; everybody’s not ready to buy straight away. We might want everybody to be ready to buy right now when we reach out, but that’s not the reality. We know that people are at different points of the buying cycle, and if you’re persistent and consistent, then as marketing builds momentum, clients land at different times, don’t they? I remember you being nervous; we’ll be honest, probably. You’d have that small amount of experience with an email marketing campaign before, hadn’t you, that hadn’t delivered for you. I remember that touch of nervousness. That’s great to hear your comments about the difference in the copy, which I think is what it’s all about. What Do You And The The Team Notice Since You Have Uplevelled Your Marketing? We do a monthly report analysis on how many people are going to our pages and social media, and our following has started to grow. That might not be a quick win because it is about chipping away. Our following on our social media has started to grow, and that’s on all platforms now, and that’s due to the content you guys have been supplying us with to schedule to share out. I’ve had comments from many people, including our candidates and clients, about how good our social media is because they see us more regularly. We’re still building, and now when a potential client or a candidate decides to look at our social media links, they will see a constant flow; it no longer stop and start. When I looked at various competitors, I noticed that their social media fluctuated quite a lot. It wasn’t constant. That appealed to me when I decided to join you guys because I knew that you would give us consistent content. I think that consistency is vital because whilst everybody might not read everything you say, it’s that visibility of seeing you. It was like when I received your brochure; I thought I’d seen them elsewhere. It’s remembering that particular logo or that caption or something. What Has Exceeded Your Expectations As A Member of Superfast Circle? Loads of things! The learning modules, I think, are just second to none. Laura, she’s really absorbed with it all. All of the learning modules, I think, are fabulous. They’re written in a way that I’m able to understand. It’s not in a marketeer’s language; it’s a language that I can understand, the reports that you provide us with that we get branded up. I think they are so well written, which is just a lot of kudos for us when we use them. Because we’re talking about relevant, up-to-date market issues, we’re talking about relevant things. The blogs, I think, are really good, that’s helped us with our website because otherwise, I’d have to write the blogs or employ somebody to write them. It’s like, “What the hell am I going to write about?” I think those are really good. I think the weekly calls, the fact that we can sit on a weekly call with you guys, and the general support the Facebook group gives is fantastic. When I decided to go with you guys, I thought, “Let’s just get the whole package, let’s just dive right in headfirst and see what happens.” To me now, I wouldn’t look back. You guys are our marketing company, the extension of our business. Yes, Laura does it all, but she wouldn’t be able to do it, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without the guidance of your expertise and Denise’s expertise. The good thing is that whenever we do go on a call, sometimes I think, “Gosh, I’m going to ask a really silly question,” but actually, it never feels like a silly question because I think that a lot of other people are thinking and have experienced the same sort of questions. We’re all small companies that are leaning on each other and are relying on your expertise. I think that whilst I haven’t finished all the modules yet, we, Business Backup and Laura and I, have gone on a real huge journey, and when we finish a module, it’s like, gosh, let’s go on to the next one I really like the private podcasts you get as a member of SFC. When I’m out walking my dog, I listen to the private podcasts and make notes while walking on my phone. It’s all been invaluable, Sharon; it really has. There’s not one thing I think if only they did this or if only they did, if only we could have that. You guys are always on hand to help. What Would You Say About Joining Superfast Circle? I would say dive straight in. I’m so pleased I’ve come across Superfast. Dive straight in because everything is done for you. You do have to think; of course, you do. You do have to take action, but everything is there for you. I think the content, support, and bounce ideas off you guys are also invaluable. We were talking about colour palettes only a few days ago, and I would never have thought to have spoken about colour palettes before. I was talking to somebody the other day who I think has reached out to you. She’s got her own business as well. I believe that what we have learned and gained, and by getting the full package, has exceeded what I thought we as a company could do. You are in my budget for next year. You’re in my budget for this year. For me now, it’s just a given that I have to have that marketing. When times are tough, people often think marketing is the thing to cut out. What I’ve learned is that marketing is the thing that constantly has to stay, and it’s a constant thing that you have to do. It is well worth the investment. It’s been fantastic. There’s lots more to come. I’m sure it will be another eye-opener in the next modules I’m watching. Every module is an eye-opener for us, which is fantastic. It’s that consistency for me as well. I feel secure and comfortable knowing that my marketing is being looked after. You’re specialists in what you do, which is important because you understand the recruitment industry so well. What Next? Are you ready to move forward, like, Natalie, with your marketing?  You will be fully supported by two virtual marketing directors who have been helping people like you for over fifteen years. Plus, we provide all the training and direction you need AND the vital content resources to stand out to the candidates you want to attract and the clients you want to work with. Either call us direct on +44(0)1524 920700 or book into our diary here. Thanks Denise The post How To Get Marketing Results In Less Than 90 Days Natalie’s Story appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

One of the ups and downs of sales and marketing is that, unfortunately, our customers, as a recruiter, your clients and candidates, may decide not to purchase your services immediately.   The harsh reality is; that they will purchase on their time scale. Unfortunately not yours or mine.  Let’s talk about customer buying cycles and people’s thoughts when purchasing. It is the same process; whether that’s a product that they’re buying or whether that’s a service that they’re buying, it’s the same.  It’s the same in any industry, whether you’re selling a fridge, you’re selling a relationship, or you are selling your amazing candidates to clients.  It happens in different ways and in different time frames for different people. This is known as the buyer’s cycle. A great way to remember it; I always call it ‘the acid test because this takes us through all the different elements.  The first one I will cover is awareness, the second is contemplation or consideration, the third is intent, and the fourth is the decision.  When it comes to purchasing decisions, you only probably need to look at your behaviour around buying something for the home, your kids, or your significant other. You tend to go through a cycle.   Generally, you don’t turn up to the store and say, “Right, this is what I am going to buy. I’m just going to buy this now “; Some individuals might do that and, likely, are further down the buyer’s cycle.  Now some people break this down into three sections; others break it down into four.    Awareness  First, we become aware and then we may consider that we want to buy that thing or decide – Do we actually want to move company? Do we need to recruit somebody now or later? Then we go through this intention while considering it in much more depth. Then we have a real buyer’s intent, and we finally make that decision. – That is a traditional buying process. So how does it relate to you and your marketing?   Many people ask us how content marketing works; will it bring leads straight away?  It can sometimes take longer because it depends on what stage people are at when it comes to the buyer’s cycle. Often people will become aware of you through social media, and then they go to your website, read a full blog post like this, and sign up for your emails.  In a recent blog post, we talked about LinkedIn articles and newsletters. Share content on LinkedIn, and people will become more aware of you. That’s the great power of social media; it can create that awareness about you.  It could be because a candidate you’ve placed, their best buddy, is also looking to move, and they recommend you as the recruiter of choice. It could be that within an organisation, one part of the company has used your specific recruitment company and now they’ve recommended you to another part of the organisation. So that’s where the awareness starts. You get onto people’s radar, and they may or may not want to use your services immediately, but at least you are there.    Contemplation / Consideration  The next part that happens is – I call it contemplation; some people call it consideration. This is where people start the evaluation process and are starting to look around a lot more. They may come and have a look at your website. They’re going to read your content. They’re going to start judging whether you are the type of person they could work with, whether you understand them.  Remember, people will look at your content before they decide to pick up the phone. This is where they’re considering:  Are they really as good as they say they are?   Do they get me?   Do they understand what is important to me and my career/company?  You must ensure that you have all your ducks in a row. When I say that, I’m talking about how you are profiling yourself as an authority in your recruitment sector. Do you have a website where you are actively sharing content? Do you have resources available? Are you actively posting on LinkedIn, adding value and branding yourself as a recruiter of choice?   This is where people are making decisions about that next stage.    Intent  Are they going to pick the phone up?  Maybe they’ve been receiving the emails you’ve been sending out to them for a while, and now they’ve got to know you, they’re starting to trust you a little bit more, and now they want to do something about their recruitment or career.  An example from our industry;  We often, with our emails, have people respond to us and say, “I have been receiving your emails for a while; I now know that I need to do something about marketing. It’s the middle of the year, and we want to press the button on this. Can we have a conversation?”    Decision  Then, of course, people move into that decision mode, and if you’ve got all the other things right along the way and your offer is crafted in such a way that it appeals to people and they get that you can add the value that they need, then they are more likely to say yes.  If you follow this process all the way through by creating awareness and being present online, people can see you.  If your website is set up and the branding portrays exactly what you can do for people ethically and congruently? If so, you will have warmed those people up to you and your brand.  Now some people may take days to go through this process, some take weeks, and some take years, and one of the benefits of online marketing is that you can automate this. You can get your blog posts created for you; we provide this as part of your Superfast Circle membership. If you want to find out more, book a demo here.  That is the buyer’s cycle in a nutshell. Knowing this process will take your marketing planning to a whole new level.    How We Can Help    We have many clients who are on for their best year already because they implement what we teach and utilise the content and campaigns we provide.    Book your call and demonstration here if you want a quick chat to see how Superfast Circle can work for you.     Thanks,     Denise     P.S. If you want to join Superfast Circle and want to learn more, call us on +44(0)1524 920 700  The post Factoring In The Buyer’s Cycle To Your Recruitment Marketing Plan appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.