Today’s guest blogger is StemX CEO Dominic Chapman. StemX is a video interviewing platform to make recruiting more efficient, user-friendly and far more convenient, allowing employers to be able to choose from a larger pool of candidates in much less time.
I’ve recently been doing a lot of research on marketing and how recruiters can turn themselves into a personal brand to enable them to be seen by more people, improve trust and ultimately grow their business. I am still finding that a lot of recruiters still take the old school approach to recruitment by picking up the phone and utilising their network. This still works great, but these things aren’t going to disappear.
There is another way; sharing personal brand through social media. The knowledge that you have gained over the years as a recruiter, is invaluable. Being open and sharing that knowledge with the world will change the way that new clients find you forever. It all sounds like scary stuff but the more you break it down, the easier it gets. So, I’m going to do a little step by step process on how to build a personal brand and bring in more clients.
Step 1. Find your Mission and your Niche
Your mission and niche will make it 100 times clearer on what content you need to be producing. For example, my mission statement is ‘On a mission to empower small businesses through technology’ and my niche is to help and support small businesses and start-ups.
The reason for this for me? This mission statement aligns with both my business (StemX) and it allows me to cover a wide enough topic that I won’t run out of content, but narrow enough that the right audience is going to see it. Once you have this, you are one step closer.
Step 2. Align your Personal Brand across all Social Media Platforms
Get a great picture of yourself or find one that you previously have. The iPhone Portrait mode looks fantastic and means you don’t need to go to a professional. Align all the social media platforms with the same image and bio to get some consistency.
Step 3. Start Creating
This is by far the toughest part, you may fear you are putting out the wrong thing or worry what people might say, but you’ve got to get past this! There is a technique called ‘Pillar Content’, I’m going to attach a presentation with the thesis but explain it briefly here. EVERYTHING you do each day can be turned into content. https://www.slideshare.net/vaynerchuk/the-garyvee-content-model-107343659
A phone call with a client advising them how to write a job spec? Turn it into a blog post and newsletter. Speaking at a conference? Turn that into a video, podcast, image posts, blog AND a newsletter. I’ve added a simple link to all the different platforms you can utilise from the video, text and audio content you are creating. Distribute to all of them, because you never know where they are watching or listening.
Link here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lzshe9ul7eg5fbo/Different%20platforms%20to%20distrubute%20content.docx?dl=0
Step 4. Be Patient, Consistent and Listen
Be consistent. Post consistently and evenly across the platforms that you decide to engage with. Whether it is daily, weekly or monthly, you need to be creating plenty of content and getting your team and friends involved to like, repost and share your content!
Listen. Get feedback from your audience and listen carefully. This doesn’t necessarily have to be actual comments, but look at the engagement you are getting. If one piece of content gets huge engagement, do similar content again and if that happens again, you know you’ve hit a sweet spot to double down on.
Finally, be patient. This isn’t going to happen overnight. Just because you post 3 times a week doesn’t mean that it isn’t going to work, give it at least 3 months before changing your strategy and thinking about other platforms. You really do have to be patient.
Extra tip: The steps ahead and the links attached hopefully should get you going to at least produce more content then you probably are now, but there’s one more thing to boost your personal brand.
Engage. Engage with other influencers and leverage other audiences, this can be through meeting up with them or just simply resharing and commenting on their posts. Trust me, it works!
The result of all this? You’ll start to get noticed. You will become the ‘go to’ person for your niche and I can guarantee you will see an increase on your bottom line.