Hays Post an svejsan. Engaging on social media is difficult when you are in the recruitment industry. Only candidates are interested in hearing from people who have the right job for them. How can you ensure that your potential clients and professionals are interested in what you have to say over time?
Catherine Gutsell, Hays Post is a global recruitment agency that was recently recognized as the most socially engaged on LinkedIn. Listen to the interview on SoundCloud, iTunes, or continue reading for a summary.
Hays is a global leader in professional recruitment. Hays Post employs over 9,000 people and has 252 offices across 33 countries. We operate in 20 industries. We work in the public and private sectors and place people in temporary, contract, and permanent jobs. We placed approximately 67,000 people in permanent jobs last year, and about 220,000 into temporary assignments.
Hays Post has been my employer for the past four years. I currently lead the Group social and content teams. They also work alongside our global PR, Brand, and Data Marketing teams.
Like all brands, we have seen how customers communicate has changed Hays Post. Social media is now a strategic priority for all regions and countries. Although our social media presence has been large and has traditionally been focused on LinkedIn, we are now seeing incredible growth across all our social channels. This large reach allows us to expand our talent pool, which makes it easier and faster for us find the right candidates to work with our clients.
My role is to develop and implement our global social and contents strategy. This is in the interest of attracting candidates and clients to Hays and making Hays Post a top choice for anyone searching for a new job or building a team.
A large part of my job is content-related. I am involved in every step of the process, from creation to promotion to repurposing and measurement. Over the years, my obsession has been creating high-quality content that helps our audience solve a problem or tackle a challenge. We use social media every day to offer our audience something of value. We make sure that every piece of content works as hard as possible. For example, after publishing a blog post, we will repurpose it onto Slideshare into visual social graphics, and into a LinkedIn Publisher Blog – this ensures that our content has the maximum reach.
Social media marketing follows a “Hum, Sing and Shout” content marketing strategy. Hum is our daily content that we share every day, while Sing and Shout are our larger content assets like salary guides.
What are your Hays Post business’s overall objectives and Challenges?
To build long-lasting relationships and be viewed as their trusted advisor throughout their career. This is where the challenge lies. In some cases, candidates can become clients. We need to consider this. Social media can be used to foster talent pools.
To increase the productivity of our consultants – so that they can get the best candidates for clients faster than anyone else. Candidates and clients interact with us in many ways. We use different channels to communicate with them. It is part of our philosophy recognize and respond quickly to these trends. Social media, particularly LinkedIn, has been one of these trends. We encourage and empower our consultants to share the jobs and content they are recruiting with their networks every single day. We are reaching a wider audience by encouraging employees to share Hays Post content on their LinkedIn networks. This was a challenge because social media activity isn’t always in the forefront of our recruitment consultants.
Maintaining our leadership position in mature markets like Australia and the UK, while increasing our exposure to markets less mature. Content marketing is challenging because of language issues. We must find the right balance between globally and regionally relevant content.