Speaker 1: Hey, folks, back from Talent Connect 2017. It was an awesome conference. I had the chance to sit down with some incredibly talented TA professionals, one of whom is Ed Nathanson. Now, Ed is the founder and CEO of a company called Red Pill Talent, and what he does extremely well is optimize sharing content socially as a recruiter. Listen to his advice and up your game. ♪♪

Speaker 2: The world of content, that's your world. Yeah. Lots of noise. Everyone's trying to figure out what to do with content. Let's start with, like, your main foundational piece of advice to get us recruiters' heads in the right place in this game.

Speaker 3: Yeah, so I love the theme of the conference, you know, instincts and insight, but we don't do that ourselves, and even we've been kind of egged on to use those things for these past three days. Yeah. But when we look at content, you know, we wonder why, you know, I always kind of say we, as recruiters, are kind of effing up LinkedIn a little bit, and we wonder why the perception of us, you know, really kind of goes the way it does. Whether you look at the most popular posts on social media, and I reference those, you know, to what works on LinkedIn, to what's worked personally for me, for my clients, it's one of two things. It's humor or heart. Heart means emotion. That's how I just an easier way to talk about it, but emotion. It could be sadness. It could be happiness. It could be inspiration. It could be outrage. All of those things are what get people to respond, but I would argue your recruiter brand, who you are online, is the biggest differentiator to recruiter success. What social allows us to do, whether it's LinkedIn or other platforms, is allow us to break down the I don't know you, and the most better recruiters are the ones who are using the platform to share, to provide advice, to engage, to sometimes make people laugh, to make people cry, whatever those things are, advice, whatever those things are, but if they're humor or heart, what it does is it gives people an insight into who you are. We've known each other for a while, but if you look at me, I probably wear my dorkishness all over me, and I can tell you that, and I can tell you that that helps me when I reach out to people, because the immediate thing is, I've never met them in real life, but they feel like they kind of know me a little bit, and in recruiting, whether you like it or not, no matter, you chose this world, right? It didn't choose you, right? You chose this. In this world, if you are not engaging on social and are purely a job poster, you will not have a job for long. You could be the best sourcer with the most coolest Boolean strings in the world. If you can't engage and get people to respond to you, you're doomed.

Speaker 2: Yep, yep. Conversations, if you will, like commenting on other people's posts, engaging in a dialogue on a feed somewhere, advice, thoughts, do's, don'ts.

Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm of the belief that do not be argumentative. Understand your brand is every touch point that you do. Even a like is speaking to, because people will see it, right? Is to what you believe, right? And what you ascribe to. And so if you think about that and the nature of that, it's really kind of taking all of that and kind of using that. This is my brand. This is my stake in the ground. This is who I am. And don't be, you know, there's no good to go to politics. That's one thing. You can talk about religion, but outside of the obvious things, it's really kind of taking everything in, understanding here's my stake in the ground. Some people aren't going to like it. Like sometimes I'll share things that I completely disagree with, right? But I say why I disagree with, right? Or if I like it, I'm saying, why did I like it? What resonated with me, right? And so doing that, you're adding to the conversation. As far as where do you go to get the content? I'm of the belief, the best stuff comes from right up here and not, you don't have to be creative, but you have to have an opinion. So I don't know if you've seen this on the feeds the way I have, but I'm connected to some people who are just talking about issues they see in recruiting. And there are a couple of paragraph type updates. Yeah. They always get a lot of traffic.

Speaker 2: They get a ton of engagement. Questions, point of view. Questions, point of views. All of those things. Yeah, that's great advice.

Speaker 3: And they are not people who are saying and coming up with a really funny quote or like emotional story about,

Speaker 2: but they're talking about things they know. Yeah. I would say my observation is that is probably one of the easiest and most underutilized way to one, build your own brand, get some feedback and hey, maybe get some advice if you ask a question. Absolutely. That's a great thing. So that's a great tip. Photos and video, any tips or advice there?

Speaker 3: Yeah. So again, I'm gonna go back to humor or heart, right? If it's a photo and it should be something that should be either light and airy and fun or something that has a message to it, some sort of emotion tied to it. If you take a chance and do things that are a little different, that might be going on the humor. And again, it might not be funny to everybody. Be a little vulnerable. That's Brené Brown saying. Exactly, that's Brené Brown saying. Be vulnerable. It doesn't have to be perfect. Right. Or emotion. We did a video with Cisco where we had different people saying, I'm a mom, I'm a dad, I'm a beer lover, I'm a cook. That was it. And then it said, I'm a developer, I'm a salesperson. And that was it. The message being, I am not my job. I am a person, but I do my job here and I like it and they let me be that. That has performed exceptionally well. Wow, just that simple. Just that simple. Love it. People saying who they are and what their job is. That simple.

Speaker 2: The other one is in terms of longer form content. So advice there. I mean, I think that is very daunting for people. Even those that want to say something, like how long, what should I say? Is it gonna be?

Speaker 3: There's a great example. So I work with a company in Massachusetts that does individual cancer care. And the leader of recruiting, the U at that company, was really kind of struggling with the concept of what we're talking about. He doesn't really emote. Great guy, but he doesn't really emote very often. He didn't feel comfortable with doing something like this. I started asking him, why are you here? Why are you working here? And he said, oh, my dad was diagnosed with cancer when I was interviewing here and the whole thought of just doing something and helping him, and I was like, there you go. So, and then what I ended up finding out, in Massachusetts, he commutes four hours a day to get there. So I said, there's your story. Guy cares about what he's doing? Right. And so he wrote a story called Why I Commute Four Hours a Day. And the engagement on it was off the charts. They're not a big company. They're not a well-known company. I'd say maybe the little niche they operate in, but the engagement it got and the responses it got. And he will tell you to this day, he published it two years ago. And to this day, candidates will reference it to him. And when you do something like that and you encourage it and from leaders like you in organizations and you make it important, it starts to become important to the team, especially if you tie metrics to it.

Speaker 2: Do you think there should be a different metric or some other expectation in terms of performance of a recruiter on these topics? So if I'm recruiting my, you know, you know the traditional metrics I'm going to be held to account on, but should there be one about like your voice, your presence, your brands, your talent brand index of yourself?

Speaker 3: Absolutely. So I actually recommend that to every company I engage with is you need to start measuring your team on social pitch.

Speaker 2: Do you think it's, I mean, would you put it in the category of, hey, you're great at telling your company's story. You can close, you can source, and you need to have this skill. Like, would you put it on the same level of like the core competencies for a recruit to get a job on this team? There's no question.

Speaker 3: There's no question.

Speaker 2: This has been a treasure trove of nuggets. So thanks, bud. It's great seeing you. My pleasure, likewise. Cheers. Cheers.