Ketan Gajjar: Hi there, Namaste, how are you? This is Ketan Gajjar, your host from the very Apnu Ahmedabad in India. James, hi, welcome to the Recruitment Curry podcast.
James Whitelock: It’s an absolute pleasure to be here. I’ve been I’ve been following, you’ve got, you’ve had a couple of episodes out so far. I’ve I’ve been following him and I was very keen to come on board and and be a guest and you kindly agreed.
Yeah, it’s an absolute pleasure to be here.
Ketan Gajjar: Likewise. Thank you for being on the podcast. So James for our listeners, a brief introduction, is going to be really helpful.
James Whitelock: My name is James Whitelock and I’m the managing director of thinking circles recruitment marketing.
And we do pretty much what we said on the cover. So we help small to medium recruitment agencies and some suppliers into the recruitment space with marketing. So we handle the from very top level advisory consultancy. Through to strategic positioning all the way around to delivery and that might include, social media management, video creation and all the kind of cool stuff that goes on that at that level.
We basically come in and act as your marketing team. And we help you get. Bring on new candidates, find new clients, new staff is very big in a minute That’s one of their kind of areas. So that employer is a brand new piece. We do a lot of that in a minute yeah, and we you know, we work with some custom great businesses some great clients and Yeah, we just try and make sure that these businesses get their vision out online So they can they can grow and thrive
Ketan Gajjar: Great.
So James, specifically on the, employer branding piece and then, candidate attraction piece, how can digital marketing actually, enable small and medium sized, recruiting agencies to achieve both these objectives?
James Whitelock: So it’s interesting because you can come at them from the same perspective, right?
So a lot of businesses might think these are two different strategic positions, but if you’re a small business what you want to do is just treat it as one basic kind of talent attraction is talent attraction, whether you’re bringing people into your own business through an employer branding position, or you’re going to bring on trying to find new candidates.
And so the first thing you want to do. Is understand what you want to get from what you’re doing. Okay. So why are you doing it in the first place? And it’s easy enough to say we want new candidates. That’s never as easy as it sounds.
The other position is is, do you know who you want to who you’re trying to talk to? Do you know your audience? There’s a kind of a fallacy within a lot of recruitment agencies that they know who they’re trying to talk to. Yeah. And sometimes they don’t, sometimes it’s a bit more kind of a, it’s a bit more subtle than that.
And we have this conversation with a lot of a lot of agencies who are in that position. It was like, you speak to these people on a day to day basis, do you know, what else do you know about them? How have you come up? How have you stumbled across them?
They stumbled across you. That’s not what you want to do. You want to be much more. A good kind of digital strategy when it comes to employer branding and talent attraction, it meets the goals that you set yourself, and those are different for different businesses, depending on what type of agency you are, if you need volume, kind of candidates, then you have to take a volume approach to your marketing.
If you want, if you’re being very targeted, then you have to change the, or expectations and go for Kind of quality over quantity all slightly and slightly different techniques you might use to go and go about that. But that’s really the kind of first thing is just have a think about it, right?
Don’t do it because your competitors are doing it. Don’t do it because, there’s someone in the, in, in the office that is good on Twitter, or Instagram or something. Have a good think about, what you’re going to try and get from it. And what and what your expectations should be around that as well.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So it’s basically, identifying the objective of going down this route and then, do, as you mentioned, you don’t know your target audience or KYC, know your customers, beat the candidates or the clients, and then, further drilling down into. Specifics of you know the sector, is it volume based or is it you know, pretty niche and then you know it’s pretty limited So how yeah, sorry, go ahead, please.
James Whitelock: So so yeah, you hit it on the nail very [00:04:00] succinctly. And it’s not a thing that a lot enough businesses do, a lot of businesses jump into marketing without kind of giving enough thought and it’s Sometimes it’s an easy thing. We’ll just put, we’ll put some kind of we’ll put some posts out onto social onto LinkedIn.
And you might have one or two bits of success with them, but that’s not a marketing strategy, right? That’s not that’s just putting some stuff out onto LinkedIn. It’s not the same as understanding what you want to gain from it. And. There’s a whole, one of the things we always try and help our clients with is that kind of strategic positioning is right.
What’s the flow of this as well, right? So you’ve got some, you’re up to putting stuff out onto LinkedIn. What do you want them to do once they’ve if they click on that link what’s the next stage? Where, what’s that journey look like? And if you’ve only, if you’ve only ever got as far as sticking like a post out onto LinkedIn, Haven’t thought around what happens next.
Yeah, no, probably you’re probably going to have the opinion. It’s not really working for us. Or we’ll go back to what we were doing before. We’re putting lots of jobs out there onto social media instead. We’ll just go back to that because that seemed to do something.
No, that’s not the kind of what people are really after these days. They [00:05:00] want much more kind of added value and they want you to have a kind of a voice within the market. And that’s the thing that kind of really builds your brand and draws people into what we call inbound marketing.
And so there’s when we talk to a lot of our clients We always say to them that you know It’s going to take a good month or so when you’re to figure this stuff out, right? You can’t just jump in it. We need to do a bit of research We need to do ask these questions.
We need to and it can be quite intensive So if there are businesses doing it themselves, again, they have to be prepared to put the time in as well. And this is why businesses like mine, a business like yours exist because the, they just sometimes don’t have the time and resources to do this kinds of stuff.
So they have to they, they outsource it. And also that’s why we’re experts, but no problem. They can do this stuff in, in, so what we do isn’t, Dark isn’t. There’s no dark art, but it does take time. It does take time. That’s the thing. And I know before we started recording this is one of the things we wanted to touch on around how long this kind of stuff takes.
Yeah. If you are, we always suggest, four to five weeks to build yourself that marketing [00:06:00] strategy. Just take your time, understand who you’d wanna talk to and do that.
Ketan Gajjar: Interesting, you, we discussed, you spoke about the timeline. And then if there’s an agency, who’s starting from the scratch, and, LinkedIn essentially is the pillar for most of the, recruiting industry, actually, because the candidates exist on their majority of the clients, Also exist on the, on, on the platform.
What approach would you ideally recommend, when people are posting regularly and you mentioned about, people taking action. I go and post something on LinkedIn today. I have to know that. Okay, fine. What do I want James? To do about that post, if i’m posting it do I want james to like it or click on the link go to the website What kind of approach would you recommend the agencies to start with? You know when they don’t have anything or negligible, online presence
James Whitelock: Sure. Now, depending on the size of the business what I would suggest if you’re a really small, if you’re a startup and there’s maybe two or three of you a couple of billers, basically I [00:07:00] might be inclined in this day and age to go down a kind of a personal branding route is to make sure that each person within your team has got their own kind of personal brand and it’s their own voice that’s going out.
I think with social media and LinkedIn in general, that’s actually a faster route. Okay. So you give these people a little bit of freedom to talk around what they talk, what they want to talk around in the market. One thing you want to always pretty much avoid is just putting Spamming these social media channels with jobs.
Okay. I know it’s the bit of content that agencies have the most of, but that probably isn’t the best way to start. If you want, if they want to a methodology, then think, a kind of a four in one kind of ratio. So four bits of kind of, or three bits of these four bits of decent content with one, one job.
And that’s how you because you can get away without feeling too sales focused and less transactional, which is what we want to try and get away from in within the recruitment space. And so I would empower your kind of your team members. And they’re probably, if you’re [00:08:00] that small business, you probably they’ve probably got half decent brands and they were probably got quite big networks.
So just play to that. When you get a little bit bigger, that’s when you want to start thinking around to the kind of corporate branding and branding the businesses itself. Those personal brands become so strong for these individual kind of recruiters that you don’t want to necessarily stifle that too much.
So personal branding is definitely the way to go. And that kind of whole thinking of that sequencing of what you want people to do. And that kind of the nurture trail. That kind of usually means you wanted to click on something on LinkedIn and probably go back to the website. That’s the hub.
That’s where you can then, and technically that’s where you’re going to capture some of the details. You’re going to get an identifier, an email address and name, and that’s your routine. So that’s where you want to try and that’s your calls to actions to get to that place.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. So basically, you want to increase the number of visitors on your website.
Either subscribe to a newsletter or fill the form, give me their information. So that you can pick up on that and then, follow through. When it comes to personal branding, and that’s the talk of the town right [00:09:00] now, across, globally, everybody wants to, put stuff on LinkedIn, give their thoughts.
What route again? Is it, graphics? Is it videos? Is it just, writing something on your status and, putting out, putting it out there for people to respond? What really works well James, from your perspective?
James Whitelock: From a personal branding perspective you obviously need people to see you.
So videos worked really well, basically in those kind of in those situations. So I would start with video. If you’re not that confident on video, which some people just aren’t you could go down the audio route, like we’re doing today, like a podcast, basically, you can go down that route.
Or if you’re a, if you’re a decent copywriter, then the next stage would be then to be writing something. But I was always, whenever you’re putting something out onto social and you’re, and if you are just going down the copywriting, you’re just writing posts, always try and include some kind of graphics, some kind of imagery with it, because that’s always going to catch people’s attention.
Now, there are all kinds of little tricks you can do on LinkedIn to to try and give your post better dwell time on through the LinkedIn algorithm, having kind of carousels of images and [00:10:00] all that kind of stuff. So people hang there and sit in it for a long time.
So those are tricks, but. It’s almost play to your strengths. Personal branding is a bit like a muscle. The more you work it, the better you get it. And so over time, you’ll get more used to being on camera, you’ll get more used to just sitting and sitting in your, office or wherever it is, and recording something a piece straight to camera.
There’s that fear initially of you’re going to trip over your words and all that kind of stuff. But No one cares about that. Just go for it. I do it all the time and I’ve I do this kind of business. So that’s where you would start. I would start with the kind of visual, because if it’s personal, they want to see you, they want to hear you.
They want to know what you look like, want to know what you feel like. So that’s the way.
Ketan Gajjar: And I, I, for one, can confess that I have this, I’m very conscious, when it comes to video recordings I still do it once, one video every couple of weeks.
And the podcast is one of the roots, really helps to get the word out. And, I’m really comfortable with this one. And when it comes to, copywriting as well. Personal branding itself, like you mentioned, it’s a muscle that you must develop and the entire [00:11:00] social media or digital media marketing is a different level of learning and development that, that one needs to go through.
And which is why, agencies like yourself, exist in the market to SMEs to, get the word out, help them, develop their brand. So what are some of the lessons that, that you would share, with the SMEs the ones who really want to, aspire and grow their brand, going forward.
Yeah.
James Whitelock: So there’s a couple of things that you can do is Do one thing and do it. Okay, so pick your strategy pick it and that could be A single platform that could be a single type of content as a good example. Thinking circles my business the only content that we really put out is the podcast, But we put a lot of time a lot of effort into making sure it sounds great It is as good as we can make it And that’s pretty much it All we do, that’s our channel.
That’s how people know who we are, how we talk to people and how we get across what we want to talk about and our position and authority within the market. So that is again, the kind of place that I would start off is do one thing and do it well. Now, obviously from a [00:12:00] recruiter’s perspective, it’s good that, and immediately you think let’s do LinkedIn.
No, everyone’s doing LinkedIn. So maybe look at, if you’re depending on which market you’re in, There’s a lot of stuff out there. You could pick tick tock and try and do your kind of your short form videos on tick tock. We’ve got clients that are doing it and and doing it well.
So if you are small and you’re growing resource light, time light, then pick one pick one, one thing and do it really well and get known for doing that thing really well. So that’s the kind of first tip I think.
Ketan Gajjar: Spot on. And when you’re small and when you’re starting something entirely new, especially when it comes to marketing.
It does eat up a lot of your time. And I can tell that because when we started, we started just with LinkedIn and then, followed with Facebook and not Twitter Twitter is a different animal altogether. So there I still use my personal brand, and then, talk through because you want your personality to come out, on Twitter and, have chat with people and stuff, but LinkedIn, yes, overpopulated TikTok videos, Insta Reels is something that I’ve seen, a lot of agencies now [00:13:00] and then recruiters, putting stuff out there and and one thing again, I’ve learned from, like yourself many other people as well, that it’s consistency, isn’t it?
That you must, The frequency must be regular. It’s not one post in a month. That’s going to help you. Is it?
James Whitelock: Yeah, you’re right. So that’s a good, that would be almost the, you stole my second point there it’s is to be consistent is and But that becomes easier if you’re doing the one thing right when you’re worrying about what your strategies across all of these platforms, whether you’re doing it in your writing, if you wanted to write ebooks or in the right kind of do just stick to that one thing and do it well and do it consistently.
And what does consistent look like? That’s the next question is what is consistent? Maybe. If you take me and the thinking circles brand, we literally we’re posting probably three or four times a day, right? Because we’ve just got so much content. We just don’t have, we have to do that, but that doesn’t mean that we get any more success out of it unless beyond if we were posting maybe once a day, so I think once a day are on your chosen channel.
As, and if that is the only channel you’re doing, that’s, you probably gotta stick to [00:14:00] that, right? It’s gotta be a, then it comes down to when you post. And so you’ve gotta the, second point was just to Sean, get some rudimentary understanding of how the analytics work on that platform that you’re doing is to so easy.
It’s easier on link. It’s fairly easy on LinkedIn, it’s fairly easy on the other ones. Understand what how you would measure that as well.
Ketan Gajjar: And on the analytics part as well. It’s an interesting point there because people post whenever they have the content, which is ready to go on.
And I’m certain that there are not many people who would be aware that okay, fine. The role that the time plays in in, in, in getting the, attraction or, getting more likes or comments for a certain post. So from the digital marketing agency perspective, from your business perspective, What kind of output or reports would you generate for your clients?
Let’s say, you’re posting five posts across, various platforms. And then with that intelligence, how do the clients react? What is the next step after [00:15:00] that?
James Whitelock: That’s an interesting point and I can be a bit of a contentious point, right? It’s those kinds of analytics and stats that you’re going to get from this, the social media channels are a good place to start, but they might be what we would describe as vanity metrics.
Vanity metrics means, they’re just you look, you’re doing well because you’ve got, I don’t know, a hundred likes on this. You’ve got this, how many views on that? But it’s, but. It doesn’t really do much. Okay. It gives you an idea of there’s a bit of popularity on that post You know what we would rather look at would be what we might class as engagement And so that’s when you start looking at comments responses to comments and shares a little bit shares Not so much because that’s that actually doesn’t work as well as it should do on linkedin But the kind of comment trial trail is much better.
That’s more your engagement when you get really serious into from recruitment marketing. You really want to understand of what’s going into the database and understand the kind of the, and understand what we might call the potential value. So this is where we always trying to get our clients to is understand [00:16:00] the potential value.
So from the marketing activity that we have been doing for them. We have managed to put a potential value into the database of X amount. Okay? So that means we’ve, they’ve gone through the entire, A candidate for instance, has gone through all the kind of online process and gone through to application and then been put in a database.
IE they’ve been screened and they’re worthy of being in a database in the first place. They, that business knows that okay a candidate in this space is worth to us X amount, right? So that kind of fee. Hence a potential value and you can do the same with on the client side So that’s how we really always want to get to that’s what we want to measure Eventually is that because it’s much more tangible, right?
So it is saying we’ve put five new candidates into the database, this week They’re all they can all be placed at some point if not over the next kind of Few next month or so, but they all have this potential value Hence why we’ve put 20 grand into the database or something like that,
Ketan Gajjar: right?
So it’s the engagement rate And then the conversion, from there on that is [00:17:00] what we should be looked upon rather than The vanity metrics that like you mentioned, 100 likes, 50 shares We
James Whitelock: all want that and It’s not like you should ignore them because it is a good indicator, but it’s not the end goal, right?
That’s not you know, that’s not the success of a marketing campaigns.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure and What are some basic tools that you would recommend? Let’s say, there’s a new startup agency coming out They don’t have of course, everybody who’s either bootstrapping or taking some funding externally They’re always going to be conscious of spending So what are some of the tools that the users can use actually know to start that?
Okay fine I want to start with basic branding exercise personal end, employer, whichever way
James Whitelock: So you can come at it from two two angles, if you’re gonna if you’re determined to do it yourself Then there’s all kinds of tools. Obviously my my suggestion would be to outsource everything that you don’t want to do yourself, right?
That you’re not an expert [00:18:00] in. And I always use the example of, most people don’t do their own accounts. So you get yourself an accountant. You felt me out because you’re not an accountant. A lot of the people we deal with, and, you know, again, a key to winning businesses, they’re not marketeers.
So why would they even attempt to do some of this kind of stuff themselves? In your case, there’s part of that, there’s part of the recruitment process. It’s time consuming. They don’t need to do. So let’s move out and leave the recruiters and leave the people running that business, doing the bits that they really want to do.
And they really enjoy and then free up the time due to do with that. consistently instead of instead of doing the stuff they don’t want to do. However, if you’re not, if you are really bootstrapped and you are going to attempt to do all this stuff yourself, then there’s things like, okay, get yourself Canva because, you can do designs in Canva almost instantaneously.
You can turn them around and you can add new videos and all that kind of stuff. That is probably to make yourself look good. It’s just about design. Canva is probably the place you want to start in that sense, right?
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. Sure. And then it’s nice and easy, [00:19:00] isn’t it? It doesn’t cost much, you know It doesn’t cost much time as well from training perspective.
You can just get on with it. It’s not going to be as Amazing and professional as you would make as an expert it’s going to help you,
James Whitelock: I’m gonna let you in a secret. Yes, and we use canva. Okay, we do we have canva We also have like adobe, things but we use canva as well And I mean there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.
There are good designers that there’s this stuff ready to go You know what? From a turning stuff around very quickly is great for that kind of stuff. So
Ketan Gajjar: it absolutely is absolutely. And then, what is one last, really marketing wisdom that you’d share? With people who want to outsource their marketing.
James Whitelock: In, in the recruitment space. Now you’ve got a bit of choice around kind of recruitment marketeers. And we all work a little, all act a little differently. So talk to all of us and find out exactly what you’re going to get from us. Some of us we position ourselves slightly different to some of the other guys out there and we have good relations with all the other businesses out there, but they all offer slightly something or slightly something different.
Okay, [00:20:00] whether it is just short term projects based or a single project or kind of ongoing kind of retained work might be more focused on personal branding, might be more focused on a complete inbound marketing strategy. So shop around and have a think about. One, how much you are willing, actually willing to spend.
So that’s always a good thing to understand is what can you actually afford? Because you tend to find the more you spend, the more you’re going to get. And yeah, there’s all kinds of so those are the things I would think if you’re going to start talking to out of a thing about outsourcing, your marketing is just look at the market, there’s, there’s a handful of us out there now that can all could potentially help.
And understand what the project you is, because the worst thing you can do when you come to come to us is we have to go a lot of backwards and forwards and tease it out of you, which we do. And we’re happy to, think of the end goal is always helps. And we can say, Look, yeah, we can do that for you.
But there are definitely times when we’ve gone to clients that we don’t think we can help you with that. That’s not what we do. We’re very specialist in what in kind of the way we work. So those are the kind of things when you’re [00:21:00] talking to recruitment marketeers about an outsourcing, have a bit of a plan.
Ketan Gajjar: Sure. And then we will of course, share James’s details, with the link and LinkedIn profile and website link as well in our caption. If there’s any audience who are interested in reaching out I’m sure, James will be more than happy to have a chat.
James Whitelock: I’m always happy to chat to anybody. Yeah.
Ketan Gajjar: Good stuff. And before we part, James, do you love curry? And if you do what’s your favorite curry?
James Whitelock: I do love curry. I quite like it hot. So I’m not like, like fiercely hot kind of curry, so I might go up to a Joe Frazee kind of level, but something, fairly well, but I also do I really like paneer as well.
So anything with kind of paneer in it I’m a massive fan of, yeah.
Ketan Gajjar: Wow. So hopefully when I’m in London next year, we can catch up for a curry. I’ll take you to a good Indian.
James Whitelock: You do that. I look forward to the best
Ketan Gajjar: Indian restaurant in London.
James Whitelock: Great.
Ketan Gajjar: All right, James, it was really a pleasure having you on the podcast The Recruitment Curry.
I’m [00:22:00] sure, the listeners will get really a lot of value out of this and we catch up soon on some of the topics on digital marketing. Thank you very
James Whitelock: much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
Ketan Gajjar: Thanks James.
Hi there.
