Here is a list, in one place, of the blog posts that I’ve written for Recruitment Juice. I write one a month for them, so I’ll keep updating it.
I love their online training style and have been an advocate of their work from the beginning – they’ve won the RI Supplier of the Year Award for training, twice in a row. It’s also been lovely watching the rising career of Tom Bennett – IMDB over the years too. Great actor and comedian, playing Wayne Kerr.
Angela Cripps, MD
I’ve just finished another series of 13 posts last week, so thought I’d give myself a week off and give you the links to all 3 series from last year.
Whether you’re a new recruitment consultant and wondering what this role is all about – Series 1 (13 posts), or a manager recruiting new staff or an experienced consultant that wants to benchmark themselves – Series 2 (12 posts) or an in-house or external recruiter who wants the definitive ‘Recruitment Process’ – Series 3 (12 posts).
Step one – Taking a qualified position
Step two – Making a recruitment plan
Step three – Sourcing potential candidates
Step four – Qualifying the candidates
Step five – Interviewing the candidate
Step six – Presenting the candidate to the line manager
Step seven – Candidate preparation and briefing
Step eight – Line manager interview
Step nine – The candidate debrief
Step eleven – Resignation briefing and management
Step twelve – The post placement and onboarding plan
Angela Cripps, Connemara UK, 07789 966209
P.S. If anyone knows how to get rid of the paragraph spacing (3rd series of posts above), then please email me angela@connemarauk.com… always looking to learn!
Really interesting article on the ‘Candidate Experience’, which is becoming more and more prominent this year. Recruiters take heed…
And I want you to show me……
Sadly for me, this was not the summer of love when it came to my dear old friend and acquaintance – the HR Recruitment world. Now I know this will come as a shock to some of you reading who I had the pleasure of meeting. You’ll recall how we laughed and giggled our way through stories of people we both knew, I drank my strong black coffee respectfully even if it tasted like liquidized tar and you thrust your business card at me like the Marlboro man hands out cigarettes. Sometimes you invited me to meet your colleagues who, on arriving, looked about 11 years old and then proceeded to ask me the same questions but in the theme of an interim. Like a recruitment ‘whose line is it anyway’ gameshow..
We went about the formulaic HR recruitment dance in one of…
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This is the 10th post in a series of 13 of “So you’ve become a recruitment consultant…” and considering one of my initial blog posts about LinkedIn before I started this series (link below) had the most hits up until 2 weeks ago, it made sense to have this topic in the series.
I am amazed at the amount of resourcers and recruitment consultants that are not taking advantage of sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Bing etc. As a recruiter, as well as being a fountain of knowledge on candidates, clients, competitors, industry sectors, specialisms, jobs and companies alike it is also fantastic for generating leads of companies recruiting for specific positions in your chosen location. It’s like all of your research is being handed to you on a plate – or at the click of a button! And this is all free. If you want to upgrade, then there’s even more available to you, but I’ve managed so far without having to pay a penny to LinkedIn.
Tip 1 – Utilise what’s available
Spend some time on these sites and plan it into your working day to spend at least 15 minutes reviewing information and making key comments and sharing useful information as well as profiling yourself in a positive light. This is a major part of your job, so if you’re not doing this everyday, then you’re missing out.
Tip 2 – Focus on positive PR
When adding information to these sites, make sure that what you are sharing is going to be of interest to your connections – make the conversation interesting to them. You can join groups relevant to your sector, but I see so many recruiters just posting job after job onto these groups. That’s not what they’re there for. The groups are for interesting discussions and to share information. Keep the jobs to the job area and make a positive impact on these groups and forums, instead of annoying them!
This is The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3 and is a great representation of how social media should be used in conversation.
The second major point here is to cultivate recommendations. It doesn’t matter if you’ve only been in recruitment for 3 months, if you already have 10 people saying how good you were. I’ve currently got 33 recommendations and these range over 4 years. My tip would be to make sure you always have one that is from the past 3 months. Also, of course, you can get previous customers to write some comments about your service or even easier is when they endorse you. I’m in two minds about LI endorsements. Some mean a lot to me, but when someone I’ve never worked with clicks that button I think “What’s the point?” In the end, if your profile of skills is full, then it can only be a good thing.
Tip 3 – Have a strategy
95% of businesses see the benefit of Social Media tools, but only 13% actually have a actual strategy on how it should be used. So don’t wait for your company to make the decision for you. Decide for yourself how you want to use it and set yourself some goals – even if it’s a simple and targeting 10 new connections / followers per week. I did this when I started promoting Connemara UK. 100 connections on LI each week for 4 weeks. Here is the post that I wrote after week 3 Utilising LinkedIn in your Sales Strategy
I took a holiday last week and my usual number of weekly views of 125 went down to 39, but the times that my name came up in a search actually hit it’s all time high of 232 for the week. I’d put the work into my strategy beforehand, so I was still getting the opportunity of having my name in front of potential customers, even though I was lying on a beach.
Tip 4 – Ask your customers
Firstly, ask your candidates what sites, forums, blogs, media tools that they use or visit. If your candidates are going there, then it’s likely that other suitable candidates will be there too! Then ask them what they are most interested in seeing or reading when they do visit. It’s a simple question that informs you of the type of information that you should be sharing. This works just as well with your clients of course.
Tip 5 – Protect your connections
Ok, so on Twitter the whole world can see who’s following you, but on LinkedIn it’s not necessary to make it easy for your competitors. Change your personal settings so that only you can see the people you are linked to.
It seems that it’s not only me that’s getting more ‘sucked-in’ to the social media world. First Direct commissioned as UK based survey to see the extent of our passion in this. They came up with 12 distinct personalities
First Direct reached these conclusions by conducting an “in-depth, month long experiment, where people were focused to change their social media habits, and on an associated nationwide survey, examining people’s social media attitudes and behaviours.” I wonder what one you are?
Next week we’ll look at performance reviews and how you can strategise your desk based on your findings.
Angela Cripps, Connemara UK
I’ve been to quite a few seminars, conferences, events that have had social media and specifically LinkedIn as a topic. I had a really interesting conversation with a LinkedIn trainer and attended a Recruitment Society Event in London where it was the main topic. So, that’s what’s prompted this post.
I’ve been utilising it for 8+ years now, but until a few years ago I’d never had to use it for sales. So my policy was that I had always only connected with people that I knew and had actually worked with / trained. This made for a very robust network and when people came to me to introduce them to my connections, or even my connections, connections. It worked… for me.
That all changed when I got back into a sales role for APSCo, helping them to increase their membership in the Midlands. I changed my policy and started accepting invites from people that I didn’t know.
In February 2013 I launched my own business that I’ve had for 13 years, Connemara UK Ltd. I’d never used the name and although I already had quite a robust network (just under the 1,000 connections or so) I decided to set myself a target of an extra 100 connections for 4 weeks. I had work booked up until after Easter, so I thought I’d see what LI could do for me… without doing any sales calls. I made sure my profile was up to date and I had recommendations and endorsements for the work that I wanted to focus on. I’ve written 20+ different induction and engagement programmes for companies, I had lots of written recommendations, but only a couple of endorsements… so I asked for more.
On Wednesday of week 4 of my experiment, I was only 1 person off of my 400 hundred target. Amazing, especially as I hadn’t had to search for any connections… it’s all organic from the work I’d been doing in the first 3 weeks.
So how easy is it for anyone to increase their network like this, what was my strategy and what results did it bring?
Top 10 tips
1. Basic and logical, but not actually something that I’d done in the past, so I wonder how many others haven’t really utilised LI. I did an advanced search on MD (Title) Recruitment (Key word) 50 mile radius of my home town. With 2,236 results, it was certainly a great place to start, with nearly half either only 1 connection away or in a group that I belong to.
2. I went to the groups that I belong to and connected with these people. Just one of these groups had 125,000 members and I’m still only connected to 374 from all of my groups, so I’ve got a long way to go, because I’ve only just touched the tip of the iceberg with 1 group out of 39!!
3. I follow the group rules! I hear annoyance from so many people, including myself, whereby recruiters just fill up the discussion timeline with job postings… it’s not what we want to see or have multiple emails about.
4. I manage a group (The Recruitment Society) that is lucky enough to have about 20 people a day joining it. So set up your own group, get people interested and make sure that when you accept them, send them an additional welcome note through a connection request.
5. Send the invites in the evening, with a personalised note starting with “Good evening”. It shows that you’re willing to go the extra mile and put the work in to build your network, but also (and more importantly) it doesn’t get in the way of your sales time – although I’m doing sales calls to Singapore at the moment, so that is middle of the night stuff!!
6. Write or re-post interesting articles and discussions. Put your views and feelings on there. In other words, give a bit of yourself.
7. Comment on other people’s articles. 1 client approached me as they looked at my LI profile after I’d made a comment – what an easy way to get in front of your clients.
8. Make sure you’ve got recommendations and endorsements for the work that you want to do.
9. Be polite. Be courteous. Basic, but also missing in a lot of requests that I get. That also relates to your photo. I actually find some photos offensive! Sometimes it’s just the look on someone’s face that makes me think less favourably of them – maybe it’s because I’m a ‘visual’ type personality.
10. Above all don’t lie! Not a great way to start the relationship. I’m amazed at how many friends I’ve actually got. My initial reaction when I get a request that says someone is my friend is to want to shout at the laptop “NO, you’re not. I’ve never met you in my life!!” Delete follows very quickly. LI sent a request for me recently without me being able to add a personal note – I immediately wrote to the person’s email and apologised.
What’s been the impact?
Well the visibility of my profile has certainly changed. I was already in the top 1% of profiles viewed in 2012 (or so LinkedIn told me), but the graph speaks for itself. 30 – 40 views was quite normal per week for me… not now.
Also, you can see the increase of appearances in searches where I started to ‘sell again’, but even with Christmas and New Year, the 3 months to Mid March has increased by 50%.
So apart from profile, what are the actual business results?
In the first 3 weeks I had 7 companies approach me to utilise my services. 2 of these were companies that were linked to recruitment, that would like me to promote their business and take a % (which I don’t do) and the other 5 wanted Connemara UK to help them with projects, that they just happened to be organising this month. So my sales calls to the Directors have actually been 30 minutes+ each time and with clients already wanting my services – how easy is that? I’ve not had one “No” from these clients.
So in summary, I can understand why everyone raves about LinkedIn for the recruitment industry. What a sales tool… it does all of the leg work for you and you can do it every moment you have some spare time.
Update: July 2016
I wrote this blog 3 years ago and am glad to say that I have still not had to do any ‘cold calling’ as such and all of my work in the last 3 years can be attributed to LinkedIn in some way, shape or form.
This year I focussed on utilising LinkedIn to create international work for me. I used the same hints and tips that I’ve shared here and in numbers terms, I’ve connected with nearly 400 international recruitment directors, and set up 25 meetings in 5 different counties this summer, with 12 proposals for work. It doesn’t matter where you’re based, this works anywhere in the world.
My connections keep growing and my recommendations and endorsements still come in every week. I think one of the biggest impacts was writing a blog of useful information each week and sharing it with my LinkedIn groups. It was always targetted to be informative and I never sold myself or my company.
I’m getting closer to 5,500 connections now and have to say no, more than I say yes, to people wanting to connect with me. I still stick to just relevant connections.
Angela Cripps, MD http://www.connemarauk.com
Connemara UK 