Welcome to another episode of Recruiting Conversations! I’m Richard Milligan, and today we’ll explore why your personal brand is crucial in the digital age of recruiting. We’ll dive into how a strong digital presence impacts every stage of the recruiting process, from attracting talent to retaining employees long-term.
Episode Breakdown
00:00 - 00:30 - Richard introduces the episode by emphasizing the role of digital platforms in modern recruiting success.
00:31 - 01:30 - He shares a story about a recruiting leader who brought on 45 experienced salespeople in 30 days, underscoring the importance of personal branding for success.
01:31 - 02:30 - Richard discusses the common misconception that personal branding is only useful when things aren’t going well. He explains why it's critical at all times.
02:31 - 03:30 - Personal branding isn’t just about attracting talent. Richard explains how it fills gaps when you’re not in day-to-day communication with recruits, particularly during critical transition periods.
03:31 - 04:30 - Richard shares data: 25-30% of people who accept job offers don’t show up for their first day due to counteroffers and other last-minute factors. A strong personal brand can help mitigate this.
04:31 - 05:30 - The Four C’s of personal branding: Connection, Content, Communication, and Conversion, and how they are the foundation for a successful digital presence.
05:31 - 06:30 - Richard shares an effective tactic: adding a "PS" line with a LinkedIn link in text reminders for meetings. This boosts show rates by 18% when recruits see the leader’s active and engaging LinkedIn profile.
06:31 - 07:30 - The importance of representing yourself as an attractive leader online, ensuring that your LinkedIn profile and social media presence align with the expectations of top recruits.
07:31 - 08:30 - Why your personal brand impacts whether recruits show up on day one and how it also plays a significant role in retention once they join your team.
08:31 - 09:30 - Richard shares a statistic that 29% of new hires leave within the first 90 days. A strong digital presence helps you stay connected, visible, and relevant, reducing attrition.
09:31 - 10:00 - Conclusion: A strong personal brand isn't just a bonus—it’s a critical component of modern recruiting. Stay visible, stay relevant, and use digital platforms to your advantage.
Key Takeaways
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Personal Brand Matters: Your digital presence fills the gaps when you’re not in direct communication with recruits, influencing whether they show up, accept offers, and stay long-term.
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Boost Meeting Show Rates: Including a "PS" with a LinkedIn link in meeting reminders can significantly improve attendance.
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Retention is Digital Too: A strong personal brand keeps you relevant and helps retain employees, even after they’ve joined your team.
Your personal brand is a critical tool in today’s recruiting landscape. By focusing on digital platforms and maintaining a visible, attractive presence, you can improve your recruiting results and retention rates.
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So the big question is this, how do recruiting leaders like us who have 12 to 15 other job responsibilities win at this game of recruiting? How do we build a system that allows us to recruit effectively in a minimal amount of time while motivating recruits towards meaningful change? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Richard Milligan and welcome to Recruiting Conversations. Hi everybody, it's Richard Milligan and welcome back to another Recruiting Conversations. And I am here today to share a recent conversation to have with the coaching client and it goes around this idea that your personal brand matters. Digital plays a massive role in recruiting success today. And so the competition I'm having with someone today, this individual is having a ton of recruiting success in fact, over the course of the last just over 30 days, they're bringing on a 45 plus experienced salespeople in the market at the rim. And for those of you that like me for the first 10 years of your career, we're doing good to hire three or four people a year, it seems like that is impossible. But if you don't know my full story, I went from being that person that hired three or four people a year to being someone that over the course of a handful of years hired more than 300 people that were experienced salespeople. And so it is possible. Now, there's some things here that matter, right? Like I have to understand who I am as a leader and be able to articulate what I call an attractive leader framework. You have to have systems and structure around what you're doing on the recruiting side. And you've got to have a strong personal brand because that matters to everything. And so in our conversation with his leader, conversation was, yeah, I'm not going to focus on my personal brand right now because everything's going, well, it's just not that important. And I as his coach said, whoa, okay, because it's not just about attracting talent. I can get really excited as a recruiting coach around a leader who's going hardcore at their personal brand and humanizing themselves on these social platforms. But one of the things that holds up in the data is that there are a lot of other reasons as it relates to recruiting why your personal brand matters. So in my journey of coaching people, I have found that somewhere around 25 to 30% of people that accept offers, whether they accept them in writing and sign the offer, or whether they accept them verbally, about 25 to 30% actually don't show up the first day of work, okay? So we think about this, like you can't, if you're recruiting a successful salesperson in your market, you can't control certain things that happen when they go to exit. Even if they wait till last minute to say, hey, boss, I'm resigning today effective immediately, you will still get the data supports this, you will still have to deal with the fact that about a third of those people receive a counter offer from the current employer. That's just a known fact, right? If you recruited any level, you realize this, person's supposed to join the team, they go under resign, suddenly everything gets better, all the problems have been resolved, and they're not willing to walk out the door. So when you think about someone said yes, and someone signed the offer letter, and someone's got a start date where they're joining your team, that sure feels like it's real, but what happens is that there is this wind of time where you're not in day-to-day conversations with the recruit, and they're not on your team yet, so you don't have things like loyalty and value that you get to bring to them on an ongoing basis, and there's just enough of a distance there that a lot of those people actually fall out. So I saw a survey around this, and the survey asked American workers if they had ever backed out of a job they accepted, and 28% of workers said that they had, and 66% of managers said that they had actually had that exact same thing happen to them. If you're going to be successful, you're going to have a personal brand, and guess what? It's going to be a conduit in some of these places where you aren't available. I've had leaders tell me over and over again, person wasn't joining the team after they said they were joining the team, saw something that I posted on social, called me and said, I saw what you posted the day, and I'm going to sign the offer I'm moving towards you, where they had been ghosted for when is the time. I've heard that so many times. What your personal brand is consistent visibility. Now, when we say personal brand, we follow our four C's, and that means that you're growing your connections, so connections matter. You're creating daily content on the platform, so content matters. You are communicating with your audience, so you're engaging with the people that are your audience consistently on a daily basis, and you actually have a conversion strategy, because conversion matters, if you can't make conversions on these platforms, why the heck are we even using these platforms, which is why we're writing a book, How to Dominate Digital Recruiting, because you can, and most people don't think they can, because they don't utilize these platforms the way that they need to utilize them. There's several places where your personal brand feels gaps, feels voids that you can't actually feel, and one of those is where we would start is whether someone sees you in order to self-solicit you. In some industries, we're seeing the higher echelon of salespeople, up to 75% of them are self-soliciting. They're literally reaching out to the leader. How do you reach out to a leader and engage them in a conversation around, I'd love to talk to you about your company, your team, and you, when you don't even see them in social. You can't, right? The first place you start is you can't be solicited by a highly successful person in your city, in your geography, unless you're active in the digital world. The other thing that we've seen is this happens over and over again. It's very normal that when an appointment gets set up, an initial conversation with the recruit gets set up, especially where you're dealing with successful salespeople, that they regularly know, show that phone call. It's just normal today, about half of them, in fact. What we've seen is that if you run a sequence and you remind them of this three times, that you can improve it, but there's this little PS line on a message when you text it. It says, "PS, Richard's active on social media, and here's a link to his LinkedIn page." When they see that and check that out, because they will, they're going to Google you, by the way, anyways. What's going to show up is one of the top three searches, LinkedIn has the best search engine optimization in the world. When they click on that link and they come across your profile, or God forbid that it's not your profile, somebody else's profile, but if it is your profile and they click across to your homepage and they see you're about me and your experiences and your profile picture and your secondary photo and all these things that matter, right? If you don't represent yourself as an attractive leader, they will no show the meeting. True story. We have found that just simply adding a PS line to a text message, "PS," where the recruiter sets a meeting, "PS," Richard's also active on LinkedIn. Here's his LinkedIn link, check him out here, 18 out of 100 people will show up for the meeting simply because Richard is representing an attractive leader on that LinkedIn profile and his content, okay? Where they show up to the meeting, it matters. It matters whether they accept your offer, okay? We've talked a little bit about that in the conversation I had recently with a recruiting leader and then it matters like we talk about accepting the offer, that's different than when they show up on day one, okay? And so whether they show up on day one, your personal brand matters. And then guess what? Let me go even further because this is all over data, whether you retain them, okay? The retention of them matters around this and especially if you're an executive leader, okay? As an executive leader, there's less of you to go around, right? You've got multiple layers of leaders around you, you've got multiple teams around you. There's just not enough of you to always be available but here's a place as a CEO, as a C-suite, as an executive leader and especially at a market level where you will actually influence the retention data as it relates to your company or as it relates to your team. You will be more likely to retain people when you have a strong personal brand, okay? And so in this conversation with this leader, I was like, "Whoa, I don't know, this matters to a lot more." You got 45 people coming, expect to have a third of those people fall out. A third of those people fall out before they join, guess what? I saw some recent employment data for an industry, 29% of new hires left within the first 90 days, okay? You start to take a round number like 50 and you divide it into 60% and now it's like you're doing a lot of work and you should have a strong personal brand because you will say something, you will reference something, you will document something that you're doing and all of those things will show up in your social, give you visibility, they make you relevant, it actually insulates you in these areas, okay? So that's what I had for you today. Hope you're doing well. This is an interesting season to be a recruiting leader, man let's be all in. I'm all in with you and so until I talk to you again on another recruiting conversations, have a great week everybody. Want more recruiting conversations? You can register for my weekly email at 4crecruiting.com. If you need help creating your own unique recruiting system, you can book a time with me at bookrichardnow.com. (gentle music)
