Four engagement strategies every agency should be adopting

Over the past 18 months, we have gone from a stable market, to zero market, to one of the busiest markets that most Agency Recruiters have encountered! With focus shifting to candidate delivery and what appears to be shaping up as one of the most candidate short markets in recent history, we have finished this financial year in a very different place from where we started it. If this 180 turn has you in a spin, then this article is for you.

Here are our top Engagement Strategies for the Financial Year ahead.

engagement-strategies

1. Brand Building

Most recruiters and agencies we speak to know the value of building a strong personal brand. This term gets thrown around quite a lot and often we see consultants and agencies dipping their toes in rather than having a thorough strategy around this. For us, both at Hume Scope & Spencer Lane, our success has come from building a strong social brand.

Often what we find the struggles are;

I don’t know what to write content on
I don’t really know what the benefits of this are?
I don’t have time to do this

The three above challenges or perceived challenges as we like to say are all easily countered. I don’t know what to write about – every single recruiter has a depth of knowledge in their market as they are on the coal face of it having conversations and real-time data around what their clients and candidates are struggling with. This is the start of all great content ideas. Write to the struggles or challenges facing your target market.

Don’t underestimate the power of content! What we can do in an hour via social content can take months to do in a traditional outreach sense.

Imagine getting 6000 views on your content? It can be done quite easily and in a short amount of time.

engagement-strategies

2. Automation

Removing time-consuming tasks! We’ve built our businesses around automation! Within 2 Years, we have built our database of up to 7000k live contacts & candidates that are coded. Amazing right? What this allows us to do is to target our content and comms to the right people at the right time. And we do this all through marketing campaigns and automation tools. We’ve all heard recruitment is a marketing game, and it is. Getting on top of the latest automation tools can be tricky, however, when done right, you can sit and forget. Ie set up your campaigns, automated follow-ups, track engagement, and reach out to those that are engaged rather than to a huge variety of people. Aside from this, you should be constantly looking at ways to build on one of your most valued assets. – Your database. We utilise automation tools to continuously build on our database with over 1k contacts and candidates added every month.

Imagine how much more valuable your database would be if this was happening across your business with all consultants? You could add 20k contacts and candidates to your database every month (depending on staff numbers of course). But there is so much value in this!!!

engagement-strategies

3. Database Coding

Your database is King. Fact. How you clean, code and store data is what will set you apart from every other Recruiter in your sector. Most Agencies overcomplicate the Candidate Coding process, leading to plenty of room for human error and a lack of trust in the information stored in your CRM by your team. Our advice is to simplify your coding. What will allow you to find candidates easily, maintain the integrity of your data AND encourage Consultants to complete them? 2-3 key criteria should be enough to do it, and the benefits of being able to easily search Candidates and personalise EDM’s are ten fold.

There are also some great pieces of software that will allow you to clean and validate all your existing data, meaning you can start the new year with a thorough spring clean.

engagement-strategies

4. Use of Video

If you are struggling to get engagement with your Candidate outreach strategy, you need to ask yourself if you are doing anything different?

InMails are brilliant tools, but for a Candidate in demand now, they are a daily occurrence. Utilising video allows you to humanise your outreach strategy. It creates a point of difference, shows authenticity and makes it very hard for a Candidate to ignore.

Video has its uses across LinkedIn as a whole, in developing content and in engaging with an audience. There are some fantastic tools you can use that will revolutionise the way you attract passive candidates to your roles and ultimately your brand.