Content Development & Talent Acquisition

Content development does not take the place of telephone engagement in the search business, it enhances it. 

Historically, search has been a 1:1 relationship. I call it the old school analog search business. One call, one conversation and perhaps one point of influence. Hang up, do it again. 20 or 30 times per day. When you develop your search practice using content development, you reach thousands of individuals on behalf of your clients. You are also able to inform 24/7 at scale. When you create valuable and meaningful content you form new relationships every day. Your clients benefit and so do the individuals that you place. As someone who has been one of the top headhunters in the medtech world for years, I know the old way and I know the new way. There is no comparison.

Content development turns cold calls into warm calls and warm calls into hot calls. Emails and phone messages get returned more confidently. When an organization puts out content using articles, video, podcasts, and short form postings, it provides the opportunity for you to share your expertise in the market from a talent acquisition perspective. Content development:

• Creates a familiarity with people you have not yet met.
• Demonstrates your firm’s competency in the market.
• Shares your thoughts on the market from a talent acquisition perspective.
• Provides evidence that you are qualified to be the messenger for a company or even more importantly represent individuals and their careers in the market.
• You are committed to your career and your business. Personal and financial reinvestment into your business that benefits everyone that works with you.

Content development does not take the place of telephone engagement in the search business, it enhances it. 

Your clients and individuals in the marketplace should be very interested if you are developing content for the market you do business in. It speeds up the hiring process for your clients and provides insight as to your expertise.

It is pretty simple, you are either committed to transitioning to a content-driven talent acquisition process or you are just riding out your last few years in the search business making calls from a dog-eared database. For those that want to do recruiting the old way, no worries. You could also still recruit by mailing in resumes, but you don’t. You faxed and then emailed and now even use text. You could also recruit by not using LinkedIn, but you do. It is all the progressive use of technology.

Pre-Engagement Opportunities

Content development allows the market to have a familiarity with your work so when your company reaches out to them they know what you stand for and how experienced you are in the market you recruit in.

Digital storytelling on behalf of a client is incredibly powerful. Content development on behalf of a client company builds market awareness and develops a hiring narrative that allows for quicker engagement on behalf of the client with the market talent.

Post Interview Opportunities

With all of the work and money that goes into sourcing individuals for positions within a company, it is fascinating how most organizations still do not have a tool to stay engaged with the individuals after they go through process and for one reason or another did not get hired, but were still very talented individuals.

A sales organization would never attend an industry trade show without a follow up plan in place to contact all of the "leads" they captured at the show. Yet there are very few companies that have a mechanism in place that allows them to stay engaged with individuals who have interviewed at their companies.

Having content in the form of a newsletter or even better, a function specific newsletter to stay in touch with sales types or marketing types or specific software types would be ideal. It is the 21st century people, create a “warm bench” of talent. Using technology available today, products like (Adam Gordon Candidate ID) dramatically reduces friction on the back end when you having to do a similar search in the future.

The Ask

Here is the caveat though. You have to be committed to developing content. It is intellectually challenging. It is time consuming. It is expensive. It requires an additional talent skillset in your search firm. It requires as much of a commitment as running a full-time search practice on your desk.

There are some search firms that have already pre-judged the use of social platforms without ever having deployed on them. In the very few cases that perhaps they had deployed content, they did it a few times and decided it did not work. In fact, their content may have even been terrible or they did not commit enough time to it.

Search firms that are romantically tied to what got them here are getting crushed by competitors who are using content in their search practices. For the search firms that do not understand the power of social tools for their clients and their businesses, and want to make the transition, I am happy to take your call and share what I have learned over thousands of hours invested in the process over the last few years.

I am 3 decades deep into this business and I love it now more than ever. It is just a matter of time before the market leaders will be incorporating the use of content into their business practices. You might as well be in on the land-grab earlier rather than later. It will raise the bar for everyone. The entire world deserves a better hiring experience.