Humans are very much creatures of habit. We tend to get our food from the same places. Technology has figured this out and now many of us put in the same grocery order to pick up every single week. We tend to get our news from the same sources each day.
The problem is, we are different creatures of habit! My grocery order might be completely different from yours, and maybe from a different store. You might get your news from CNN and I get mine from Reuters. But we both get it online each morning. You might spend your time on social on LinkedIn and I spend mine on Twitter.
Most of us struggle to go outside of our habits.
This is a major problem for recruiters!
I tend to post stuff on basically three channels. This blog, which goes out everywhere. Directly on LinkedIn. Twitter updates. A little on Instagram. When I meet people who follow me they usually come from one of these three places, and I’m always amazed that many times they don’t cross over. Someone will say they found me on LinkedIn, but they never knew I had a site or was on Twitter. Someone followed me on Twitter for years, and just recently after many years sent me an invite to connect on LinkedIn.
I think we tend to believe everyone is everywhere. But they’re not. Everyone is everywhere, but they are all not in the same places!
Great recruiters are multi-channel recruiters. Average recruiters are a few channel recruiters. Crappy recruiters are one-channel recruiters.
I constantly have people, not in the industry who follow me ask me how can I be everywhere all the time. It must take so much time! I’m not really everywhere, I’m just where they are, so to them, it looks like I’m everywhere. Plus, automation helps a lot!
What is multi-channel recruiting?
If you spend the majority of your time on LinkedIn recruiting, you will find people and you will find some level of success. That’s one channel, but it’s a big channel for the industry.
If you add in other channels depending on your market and industry, you will get even better. Maybe you are active on Twitter, Facebook, local groups, created a voice on TikTok, etc. You will be more successful than just one channel.
Now, build some personal pipelines from your ATS database and nurture those, add in a blog and a newsletter, build an additional audience, become a regular at your local university sharing content around job search, etc. Adding these channels will elevate you even more.
Having a great ad strategy and understanding where your audience lives and plays online is another key channel. I like using programmatic partners to help with this, but many will use Indeed, ZipRecruiter, etc. More channels!
My channels to becoming a successful recruiter might be vastly different than your channels, but finding multiple channels is key!
More channels are needed because we have no idea what percent of our target market is going to be in each channel. Let’s say we choose a channel, we like that channel, it’s comfortable to us, but only 10% of our candidate market is in that channel? You will most likely fail. When I see recruiters fail, it’s usually they are only spending time in one or two channels.
Also, maybe you are in two channels and the vast majority of candidates are in those two channels, but so are all the other recruiters going after that same talent. But, 5% of candidates are over in that third channel and no one is over there! That could be your winning channel!
I don’t need to be in every channel, but I need to be in enough where I’ll give myself the best chance to find the talent I need. Many times we give up on a channel too fast and never go back. We constantly have new recruiters come into our environment and they’ll find some candidate out of the blue, using a channel recruiters gave up on and haven’t been to in months! It’s those slap to the forehead moments! “Damn it! I used to get so many great hires from there and just forgot to go back…”
So, as your out there fishing today, think to yourself what channels are you not using that you should start using, and what channels are you using too much?