How do you use content to attract passive talent?

I recently spoke at the Bloomberg Thought Leader Series run by specialist HR recruitment Elliott Scott about attracting passive talent and it was a fascinating event. Here is what I presented about how you can attract passive talent on LinkedIn.

The conclusions I took from the event included:

• Empower and inspire your current workforce to attract talent. You can do this in many different ways ranging from encouraging them to brand their LinkedIn profiles to enabling them to want to talk about how great working at the company is

• Create a team bonding and pride in the company by encouraging everyone to have the same LinkedIn personal headline and background picture
• Your LinkedIn company page is your gateway to success, don’t let your HR team take it over. Would you let them take-over your company website? No. So why let them take-over your LinkedIn company page? Get HR, Corporate Communications and Marketing to all work together but ultimately it's a marketing vehicle, content focused and that's a marketing role not an HR role. 

• Don’t just blast jobs and more jobs on your company page use the page to engage with relevant and contextual content. Have a look at L’Oreal, Hays, ANZ, Standard Chartered, Black Marketing, Collective Works pages as to how to do this.

• Your CEO is the leader of your team, use him or lose the battle for talent. Encourage him to blog and not just once or twice in a blue moon but consistently every week or at least every month. Engage and empower through the CEO’s profile with content to inspire current and future talent to want to work for him.

• LinkedIn is the world’s largest publishing platform. Use it or your competitors will. Encourage your employees to publish their own blogs not just about the company but business life, innovation ideas, things that they have noticed in a business context. The more active your employees the more likely they are to catch the attention of passive talent who may be looking for that spark to change from passive to active.

• Remember the scientific rule of content sharing on social media, 1-9-90. 1% of people create, 9% share/like/comment and 90% do nothing but view. Don’t be a follower be a leader.
• Universum produced some interesting stats for Singapore’s talent. They are more interested in work life balance, want to feel like they are serving a greater good, wish to be a leader or manager of people, to have an intellectually challenging role, to have an international career, friendly work environment.

• Marina Bay Sands (MBS) is a great example of how you create, develop and manage a LinkedIn company page with engaging content. When Gordon Ramsay’s new restaurant, Bread Street Kitchen opened at MBS they use various social media tactics to engage the audience and whet the appetite.

• The first thing they did was create an intern competition with local chefs and used social media to amplify, helped by Ramsay himself and his millions of followers on all his networks. Then they used it to launch the restaurant and used the Ramsay content as part of that as he was a willing participant in doing so. They started B2B for talent before they went B2C for the restaurant itself.

• The amount of engaging content they produce is fantastic and they really do use their celebrity chefs and everyone working there to the max. Plus they use job fairs and everything is promoted through social media and LinkedIn. Check out some of their posts above where they address fundamental talent issues in Singapore of people wanting to move often, moving for different roles, promotion and more $.
• As a result of this, I believe, they have increased their Ideal Employer raning branding appeal from being 19th to 8th according to Universum. That’s pretty amazing for a casino. They are above Apple, facebook, Goldman Sachs, DBS, OCBC in Singapore - quite staggering considering the global appeal of these brands.

• Other great LinkedIn company pages that really use engaging and compelling content to touch and inspire followers, employees and enable them to amplify it above the ones previously mentioned include Dell, IBM, Coca Cola.

• Message proactively - of course you can do all of this to lay the ground work but you still need to proactively reach out on LinkedIn using the LinkedIn data, slice and dice it and find the people you want. I have used key word searches to find my COO, marketing executives, content editors and interns. It works even without placing adverts although I do that too and amplify them through organic sharing and employee advocacy. 

In summary:

a) Build:

• Company page
• Employees connections
• Followers 95% more likely to respond to message
• Twice as likely to recommend company
• 60% share company content
• Employees need to build network, share content with them and in groups

b) Engage:

• Imagine you are a magazine publisher - you are on LinkedIn
• Your followers are your readers
• Create and curate engaging and compelling content that your employees and followers can share with their network and in group

c) Recruit

• Socially sell before you actually sell through content
• Engaging followers and their connections with job opportunities is 10x easier and more effective than cold selling job opportunities

and one more thing......

Is talent really passive?

According to a LinkedIn survey 80% of talent are passive or are they?

• 15% are tip-toers - thinking about it
• 44% are explorers - tempted by the right opportunity
• In the US Approachable to Super Passive talent is 2:1
• In Asia Pacific it’s 6:1

Socially sell

1. Everyone loves to hear of opportunities - even if they have started a new role
2. Listen to them on LinkedIn
3. Keep in touch socially - be ready when they are ready to move