Recruiting Future with Matt Alder - What's Next For Talent Acquisition, HR & Hiring?

Ep 7: What is Content Marketing and Why is it Important?

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Mervyn Dinnen Content Marketing Expert for HR and RecruitingThe importance of content marketing has risen significantly in the last two years, however it is still under used in the Recruiting and HR space. In this interview Matt and Mervyn discuss just what content marketing is and how it can be used for recruiting, employer branding and customer engagement. Mervyn shares what is working and gives us his 7 tips for producing great content. They also discuss the current state of Social Recruiting as well as Poldark and Kittens…… Subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes

Duration:: 16m
Broadcast on:: 01 Apr 2015
Audio Format:: other

In this episode Matt Alder talks to Mervyn Dinnen Content Marketing Expert for HR and Recruiting

The importance of content marketing has risen significantly in the last two years, however it is still under used in the Recruiting and HR space. In this interview Matt and Mervyn discuss just what content marketing is and how it can be used for recruiting, employer branding and customer engagement. Mervyn shares what is working and gives us his 7 tips for producing great content. They also discuss the current state of Social Recruiting as well as Poldark and Kittens……

Subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes

There's been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material progress in your lifetime and mind, at all the ages of history. Hi everyone and welcome to episode 7 of the Recruiting Future Podcast. One of the things that's really fascinated me in the last two years has been the rise of content marketing. There's something that I feel we don't use enough of in recruitment and I think that might be because many employers and indeed recruitment agencies don't necessarily understand the benefits it can bring to them. Today's interview guest is Mervyn Dennen, who is an expert on content marketing for recruitment. He talks us through some of his experiences and also gives us his seven top tips for producing outstanding content. Hi everyone and welcome to another Recruiting Future Podcast interview. I'm very excited to be talking to my very good friend Mervyn Dennen today. Hi Merv, how are you? I'm well, thank you Matt. Good stuff. For those of you who may not have heard of you before, if there's actually anyone out there who hasn't, could you just sort of introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do? Okay, my name is Mervyn Dennen and I help recruiters and HR teams with content marketing and social engagement. My background is a recruiter and an early adopter of social recruiting. I was an social media manager for a digital recruitment brand and over the last year, 18 months, I've been a blogger, report writer, content creator for HR technology and recruitment agencies and also helping train HR teams in how to better use social media to attract talent. Cool, thank you. I think people who will have come across you will have come across you because of your prestigious amount of great content that you produce. Can I want to talk about content marketing in this particular interview? Could you give us your definition of content marketing? What is content marketing and how is it sort of relevant to recruitment? I think, I mean, there are many different definitions. So if I think about it from a recruitment viewpoint, I think it is using content and by that, I mean it can be written content. So it can be a blog, it can be a white paper, it can be a report, it can be something on your website, interviewing clients or thought leaders in your space. It can be verbal, it can be a video, it can be a video interview, something like we are doing here, it can be a podcast, it can be a webinar. It's content you create that helps to, as opposed to sell, it's not about the promotion, not about how widely you share it. It's about building a body of knowledge so that people know who you are, what you stand for, if you are an organization looking to recruit, you can use it to establish employer brand, to talk about the kind of place where you are to work, you can use it to establish some kind of leadership in terms of your marketplace, what it is you do, or generally entertain an amuse. I mean, I wouldn't do too many funny cat memes but sometimes they can work. Everyone loves a kitten, after all. So I think that's really interesting, but I think it's going to be a very new area to lots of people in the industry, whether they're an employer or an agency or indeed a supplier. I mean, does it actually work? What kind of feedback and results are you getting or your clients getting from taking this kind of approach? Well, I suppose there are two angles that they would look at. One would be the interaction primarily through social channels or what they're tracking through Google Analytics, maybe in terms of visits to their website, and that is kind of how widely it's shared, how often people comment on it, interact with it, and the way in which they consume it. So is it something where they are maybe looking at that business to be some formal thought leadership or some kind of beacon of best practice in the industry? Is it kind of insightful, something different, or if it's something that maybe you're teaching them? I'm writing with a search company at the moment, a search business, I'm writing some stuff for them in which we're trying to establish a kind of dialogue going with senior HR people and HR directors. So we're writing very much about what's on the HRD agenda, so it's not the more transactional side, but it's very much about how business is evolving and what HR needs to do. I'm currently writing a series of reports for a business who've been doing research into what global businesses do in certain areas of recruitment and talent, and they've got some data, and I'm writing fairly long reports, and a good example of this is that it starts with a blog, and if you like the blog, there is a shortened version of the white paper that you can download, and obviously if you like more and want to know a bit more behind it, then there is obviously a download you can pay for to give you more insight. So that is a way that you're able to use content marketing on three levels to try and get people tied in with your brand, and maybe looking at you to be the kind of people who can educate them in what they need to know. Cool. Cool. And you talked about lots of sort of different formats of content there. Are there, is there anything that you feel is working better than anything else? Is it photo? Is it video? Is it text? The audience, what's the thinking behind the formats that you use? I think that it depends on the message, and it depends on the kind of people that you are looking to reach with the marketing. So I think for a lot of businesses in this space, an element of it needs to be written, and I think plenty of businesses now understand the need to keep a regular blog going so that they can showcase the kind of things they do, the kind of things they think of their perspective on the market for recruiters. Maybe they're educating job seekers, maybe they're educating clients in how better to recruit. If it's an in-house recruitment team, then it's their way of maybe showing people what a good place they said they are to work. I think that the, with images, if it's purely image, and obviously there are some fairly good examples using Facebook, but if there's too much image of what a great place we are to work, it maybe sells a culture that isn't supported. So I think it needs to be a balance. I think there's a lot more now I'm seeing done, particularly around the technology companies of doing a kind of thought leadership panels. I've sat on a couple myself recently where a business gets three or four people together to talk around a topic, and then they will maybe be talking for an hour or so, and that might be edited down to two or three shorter videos. And that, I find, is a very useful way. People like video. They can consume them in different ways. They can consume them when they're on the go. When they're second screening, when they're commuting, and I think people like, rather than just reading all the time, to actually listen to some people, kind of maybe expand on their views and opinions. So I think video is underused. And I think the kind of thing you and I are doing here on a podcast, I think that's very underused. Yeah, I would agree with that. I love podcasts, which is part of the reason that I started this one, and I'm surprised that more people aren't using them. I found that looking at the stats of when people listen to this particular show, it's very much while they're commuting, sometimes in the evenings, on Sunday evenings, on their way to work, it seems to be a really good medium for reaching people at different times of day. Well, if anybody listens to this on a Sunday evening, I'm sorry, I'm no match for Paul Dark. I'd rather date with this now, I'm sorry about that. That's all right. It was all in the 70s as well, I'm sure it'll be on again. So obviously, the driver behind content marketing is the move towards social media, towards networking and all those kind of things. Traditionally, if there is such a thing as a tradition in the last four or five years, social recruiting seems to be about just sharing job postings and things like that. I mean, how are you seeing it change with content and how do you think it should sort of change further social recruiting? Well, I think that one of the things there are kind of sort leaders within the recruitment space who will kind of say that we're getting very good at attracting people that we don't want to hire, and we're not getting that good at attracting the people. We do want to hire. And so a lot of the kind of sharing of job postings and maybe sharing of fairly at a nine content attracts a lot of people, but it might not be the people we really want to reach who will engage with what we do. So I think that businesses are trying to use it a bit more, but I think there is a tendency to create a piece of content and then kind of share the hell out of it if I can use that expression across every medium, every platform, every 15 minutes and get everybody in the office to share it at 10 minutes intervals or something. So I think you need a balance. I think you need to use it to spark conversation. I mean, the content needs to communicate, inform, educate and inspire and to do that, you need a range. So I think the idea, I mean, I would say that people who are using it most effectively have a range of written, verbal, visual, graphic, infographic content that they share at different times. I mean, ultimately, social recruiting is knowing what you have to offer, knowing the role you have or the culture, the brand that you're trying to attract people into. And I don't mean, I'm not being glued when I say it's about having the right conversations with the right people at the right time. And content is the way you kind of reel them in. And there are seven, I have seven, the components of good content, which I can explain in a minute. But I think that too many, if you look at the research that's done around people using social channels for recruitment, too many of them are still using it to share jobs, to search for candidates, to look for referrals, "Here's a great job, do you know anybody?" And not enough of them are still using it to actually have a conversation and just get people talking around a topic. Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. In fact, my final question to you was going to be, you know, can you share us some sort of top tips for people getting started? But now you've mentioned your sort of seven key principles of great content. Then I'm afraid you have to share them with us. Oh, right. I will do it. I will do it. In no particular order. First thing I would say if I go one step back, one of the American authors, speakers, and thought leaders around content marketing who you will know of, is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk. And he will always often say that every business is now a media business. Absolutely. And the only way to compete is to become an authority on the content you've got and to have people who can tell your story. And I think, I mean, for me, number one is to keep it simple. People like messages that are clear, that they're easy to understand. They don't necessarily like overcomplicated. I know that if you're trying to engage maybe a senior audience or maybe directors, you think that you've got to have something that looks like some kind of piece of university research or something. But those guys will read Forbes at the weekend and share kind of, you know, 14 things, successful people do in the morning or something like that, because they find it amusing. So I think don't assume that your audience, don't don't prejudge what your audience will look for in content. Okay. And the second would be clear, clarity is important, you know, no buzz words, make it plain, make it clear that what your message is, don't talk in jargon. I think you need to show passion as number three. So you need people who can create the content, tell your story if you like, who mean it? You know, talk it like you mean it, believe it, be passionate, and it's quite infectious. Leading off and that you need focus. So one of the key things I will explain to companies when I meet them for the first time is, do you know what the problems are or the situations that the people are trying to reach are in? Do you know what's on their mind? Do you know what's affecting them at the moment? Because the content you need to create should be focused around what those people want to read and know about. I think humour is important. It doesn't have to be full of jokes and funny cat memes or pictures of puppies or anything, but you need to somehow show that you enjoyed it. Knowing jokes, no current fads, you know, I mean, no kind of five jobs for Zane, what's his name from one direction to do when he leaves or that kind of thing sounds funny, but in a week's time when 5,000 businesses have done a riff on it, there's nothing to make you stand out. So nothing about Paul Darklin? No, no, nothing about Paul Darklin. Sorry, I was just writing a Sunday evening and what he was doing while I was on. Honesty is important, so because it's content and we've got you're creating it, it's easy for people to make their business or their offering sound a lot grander and a lot more far reaching than it is, particularly if they're trying to sell and cover every base. So I would say that if you're trying to create content that addresses a client or a potential client or a potential candidate's issues, don't offer a solution that you don't deliver. So it's got to be something that you know you're on top of because otherwise it's not authentic. When people start to interact with you, they'll realise that you can't actually, you're not actually talking it as if you mean it. And I think the thing is action. The last thing is then there needs to be some form of a call to action. To inspire somebody, whether it's to make a comment, whether it's to share it, to recommend it, to pick up the phone or sorry, it's a bit on fashion, to message you in some way. And I think that people sometimes forget that and it's easy to create a blog, a video which is really interesting to watch at the end of it, you know, the person consuming it might say, well, so what, you know, I mean, it's great, but then I'll move on to see the next video now. So you want people to actually want to contact you off the back of it. OK, fantastic. I think there are some absolutely fantastic tips there that people will find very, very useful. So thank you very much for talking to me. And thank you for speaking to me too. That was Mervyn Dinan. Thanks very much for listening to the podcast. As ever, you can subscribe on iTunes and on Stitcher. For more information and previous episodes, please go to www.rfpodcast.com. There's no podcast next week, but I'll be back in two weeks time with another episode. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC]