25
Social Recruiting
Social media is an amazing tool, but it’s really the face-to-face interaction that makes a long-term impact. —Felicia Day, actress The influence of social media on recruiting is inescapable. Millions of people are linked together on social media sites—constantly checking and updating their status. As a recruiting tool, social media has moved from cutting edge to ubiquitous and inextricably woven into the fabric of military recruiting. The social channel is a key component of a balanced prospecting methodology. There has never been a time in history when so much information about so many prospects was so easy to access. Not just contact information, but context. Through the window of social media, you can:
Along with the increased awareness of the power of the social channel, there is a disturbing trend of recruiters using social media as a substitute and excuse for avoiding telephone and face-to-face prospecting. It’s easier to hide out on Facebook or Instagram all day than to interrupt strangers and engage in human-to-human conversations. Social media is an important piece of the prospecting puzzle, but it is not a panacea. Contact and conversion rates from phone, face-to-face, and text message prospecting dwarf conversion rates on social media. The social channel enhances, elevates, and sometimes accelerates your prospecting efforts. It certainly moves you into your prospect’s familiarity bubble. But it is not a replacement for focused and deliberate outbound prospecting efforts. From time to time, though, a recruiter will challenge me on this premise. It happens in most FMR training classes. As we start talking about the power, efficiency, and effectiveness of telephone prospecting, I’ll notice a recruiter who sinks lower and lower in his seat and avoids eye contact. I call them out: “Sargent Echols, it looks to me like you aren’t buying this?” The response is always the same. “I know you say the phone works, and maybe it does for other people, but I get far better results on social media (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter). Besides, no one answers the phone anymore.” He’ll usually go on with a long-winded justification for why spending all day online is far more effective that talking to actual prospects. Sometimes he’ll throw out the words “old school” just for good measure. I never fail to notice the incredulous looks on the faces of his leaders who are sitting behind him. They know the truth, and so do I. This recruiter rarely, if ever, makes mission. If you think social media is magic fairy dust that will allow you to avoid the hard work of prospecting, you are in for a rude awakening. Social recruiting will not solve your pipeline woes and provide an endless stream of qualified prospects with little effort. It takes far more than a Facebook connection and hope to move today’s talented young Americans to take action. Let’s get this straight from the get-go. People don’t want to be pitched or “sold” on social media. They prefer to connect, interact, and learn. For this reason, the social channel is better suited to building familiarity, nurturing a lead, research, nuanced inbound prospecting, and trigger-event awareness. This is why effective social recruiting is a long, hard slog. It takes daily, ongoing, consistent effort. It requires you to think, manage your message, and be present. If you are truly activating social media as a part of your balanced prospecting arsenal, you know that the commitment to consistency can be exhausting. With the exception of the social in-box, which can be a supplement and alternative to the traditional e-mail in-box, social recruiting is about nuance, tact, and patience. Social recruiting is a collective term that encompasses a variety of activities—all designed to enrich the recruiting process and fill the pipe with more qualified and motivated prospects. These activities include:
It’s critical that you integrate social media in your balanced prospecting arsenal and work to become a master at leveraging the social channel. Because the social media landscape is changing and continues to change so rapidly, I am going to avoid diving into the specific features/tactics of the major social media sites and tools. Frankly, because the social media sites are so feature rich, it would require several more books to give you everything you’d ever need to know, and by the time those books were published, they’d all be out of date. The social media landscape is complex. The task of mastering and getting engaged on social media is daunting and frankly overwhelming—so much so that most organizations have an entire team of people assigned to manage their social media presence. That’s how much effort it takes. As an individual recruiter, there’s no way you can maintain a consistent cadence on every social channel and still have time to manage the recruiting process. Should you try to keep up a presence on all of these channels, you’ll find that it is exhausting. What’s more, the fickle nature of teenagers means that social media channels are in and out of favor like the wind. It’s a moving target. I’ve found that I can effectively manage three channels at a time, and I’m much better when I’m only working two. Beyond that it gets tedious, and my efforts are diluted. Take a step back and answer these two questions:
The ROI on your social recruiting efforts will increase significantly if you are playing in the same sandbox as your prospects (students, grads, and prior service). It’s also important to engage in channels you’re comfortable with and enjoy. For example, I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I love it. My audience spans almost all of the major channels, but Twitter is by far my favorite, and it shows in my follower base (follow me @salesgravy). Do you hear that giant sucking sound? That is social media stealing Golden Hour time from recruiters across all branches of the military. Hours upon hours of prime recruiting time wasted with heads stuck in laptops, tablets, and smartphones—“social recruiting.” The social channel is mesmerizing and addictive. It is designed to be that way, to hook you so you keep coming back for more. That’s why those likes, shares, hearts, notices, and little numbers on the social apps on your phone exist. They trigger your curiosity, need for significance, and competitiveness. Social media is a big money-making machine that devours your data, time, and attention, and sells it to advertisers. To do that, it needs you to be hooked. When you spend your entire day on social media, don’t think for a minute that it is any different from parking yourself in front of a TV screen. Of course, the difference between television and the social channel is that you can actually accomplish something on social media when you gain the discipline to focus your time on creating specific outcomes that help you identify prospects and move them into the recruiting pipeline and applicant funnel. You must learn to use social media the right way, so it is a good use of time. Efficient and effective is the name of the game. Your time investment in the social channel must be focused on increasing the size and viability of your recruiting pipeline and moving applicants into the funnel. Otherwise you’re just wasting time. Table 25.1 shows Social Recruiting Objectives and the Five Cs of Social Recruiting Table 25.1 The Five Objectives of Social Recruiting and The Five Cs of Social Recruiting Here are two questions you must constantly be asking yourself as you engage in social recruiting:
If the answer to either of these questions is “no” or “I’m not sure,” it’s time to make an adjustment in your strategy. The primary objective of social recruiting is building familiarity and trust. You want to be seen, heard, and perceived as a credible resource for potential applicants. At a basic level, prospects will look you up online to get the gist of who you are and what you are all about before meeting with you. What they find will cause them to make instant judgments about you. Those judgments will impact your ability to influence and persuade them to engage. Your professional presence online should position you as the one person who is most capable of helping prospects gain valuable insight into a career in the military. Like most people, you make quick judgments or build quick impressions about others when you are introduced for the first time. That is just how we operate as human beings. With so much incoming data attacking our nervous system, our brains have evolved to quickly grab available information about others (how they look, talk, act) and compile that information into a snapshot of that person. Those first impressions—regardless of how valid they are—influence our feelings toward the other person. True, in the physical world you sometimes get a second chance to make a good first impression. In the virtual world, however, you have zero chance of changing first impressions that are made about you online. When prospects view the “online you” and don’t like what they see, they just move on. The most common mistakes recruiters make that damage their personal brand online are:
Your social media profiles are a direct reflection of your personal brand. These profiles are the tip of the social recruiting spear. Until your prospect (and their parents) meet you, who you are online is who you are. This is why it is critical that you invest time in developing and perfecting your social profiles. Today, not tomorrow, take action to ensure that your online image casts you in the best light. Here are some of the basics:
Headshot—According to PhotoFeeler.com, a website that helps people choose the right photo for online profiles, “Profile photos are so essential to modern communication that a good one’s become a basic necessity. And that couldn’t be truer than for those of us whose professional lives are tied to social media profiles.” Ensure that you have a professional headshot, in uniform, on all your social profiles. Professional means you leave your cat, dog, kids, vacation, college buddies, cool sunglasses, and bottle of beer out of the picture. Make sure the picture is taken in good light at a flattering angle and has a neutral background. Lose the cheesy poses—like with your arms crossed, hand on your chin, or cocking your eyeglasses. You don’t want to come off looking like a schmuck. Instead, smile and put a pleasant look on your face. In a study1 based on over 60,000 ratings, Photo Feeler found that a genuine smile has a significant impact on other people’s perceptions of your competence, likability, and influence based on your profile picture. Cover image—Inbound marketing juggernaut HubSpot.com advises that “having a social media profile without a cover photo is like having a brick-and-mortar business without a store sign.” Most social media sites allow you to upload a cover image (sometimes called a hero image) to your profile. This is, most often, a background placed on the header. It is a free way to let an image tell your story. Summary/bio/about you—Personal branding expert William Arruda says that “an effective [social media] summary makes people want to know more about you and ultimately connect with you one-on-one.” This is also true of the “about you” and bio sections on each of your social media profiles. You can go long form on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube and get creative with short and sweet descriptions on Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. Writing a perfect summary that connects with prospects, parents, educators, administrators, and community partners requires thoughtfulness. It’s your story. It should be well written, truthful, and compelling enough that after reading it people want to engage with you and meet you. Write in the first person and make it conversational. Your bio should explain who you are, what you are all about (values), your accomplishments, career milestones, and why you love being a part of the military. Contact information—You are in recruiting. Your job is to engage qualified prospects and move them into the recruiting funnel. The very best thing that can happen is a prospect who calls and interrupts you. If you make it hard for them, they won’t. If you don’t provide contact information, they can’t. So make it easy. Put your contact information, including recruiting phone and e-mail, on your social media profiles as appropriate and in compliance with regulations. The social channel is the most efficient and effective way to build familiarity. To build familiarity, you must be present and consistently engaging with prospects online. The more prospects see you, the more they like you and become comfortable with you. Engaging means liking, sharing, and appropriately commenting on your prospect’s posts as well as content they are commenting on and sharing. You also need to post content that is of interest to them and congratulate them on achievements. Be aware that you are always onstage. Everything, from your profile picture to the things you post, like, share, and comment on, are being watched by prospects and their circle of influence, so it’s critical that you manage your message. We live in a hypersensitive world. People are easily offended by the smallest things. The wrong words, wrong like, or wrong comment can damage your reputation and personal brand; in extreme cases they can go viral and derail your career. Familiarity is a two-edged sword. When impressions of you are positive, familiarity can cut through friction and help you initiate recruiting conversations with prospects. But when prospects have a negative impression of you, they will erect walls to keep you out. This is simple. Think before you post. If you think what you are posting could be controversial in any way, shape, or form, sit on it for 24 hours before pushing the post button. The very best outcome of the investment you make in social media is to entice prospects to contact you. An inbound lead is much easier to qualify and convert into an interview than an outbound prospecting call. Inbound prospects are also excellent resources for referrals. Familiarity plays a key but passive role in inbound prospecting. When you are well known to prospects, they will often contact you when trigger events cause them to begin thinking about career choices. Sharing and publishing relevant content that is intriguing to prospects and helps them solve problems, answering questions in groups, and posting thoughtful comments can also open the door to prospects contacting you for more information or to ask you questions—especially when these posts demonstrate empathy and position you as a trustworthy resource. It’s also a good idea to consistently post content on careers in the military, military success stories, links to information about military career choices, general updates on community and school events, and other content that pulls people in and positions you as an expert. Windows of Enlistment Opportunity (WEO)s are disruptions in the status quo that compel prospects to seek out life or career changes. For some prospects, windows of enlistment opportunity are predictable because they are driven by the Annual Recruiting Cycle. With other grads and prior service, WEOs are less predictable and can be random. These WEOs are triggered by changes in their financial situation, employment, marital or relationship status, and other life-altering events. Most social networks allow you to follow people without being directly connected to them. The major social networks also provide updates on the people you are following. It is important to consistently monitor your news stream and discussions in the groups where your prospects hang out. When you notice a change, that’s usually a good time to contact your prospect. Social media is a smorgasbord of data. You can gather an impressive amount of information about prospects that you can use for initial qualifying, developing prospecting messages, and pre-interview planning. All of the major social media channels offer powerful search capabilities that give you access to detailed information about prospects. For social research shortcuts, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Sam Richter’s book, Take the Cold Out of Cold Calling. Sam’s book is the bible on using online and social resources to gather information. Social media in-boxes may be leveraged to engage prospects directly to ask for interviews or qualifying information. When sending social in-box messages, for best results, follow the Four-Step E-Mail Prospecting Framework from the previous chapter. Mastering the five Cs of social recruiting is the key to turning intention into action and results. For centuries, highly successful people have understood the power of connections and how to leverage these connections to accomplish their goals. Connections get you in front of the right prospects, which helps you make mission faster. Everything on social media begins with a connection. When you meet prospects by phone and in person, you’ve opened the door to familiarity. At the moment after they’ve just met you, you have the highest probability that they will accept your social connection request. By sending them the connection request just after they’ve met you, they see your name again, anchoring familiarity. On most social platforms, once a person connects with you, you gain the ability to see their connections, which helps you gain deeper insight into their core motivations, values, and peers. There are three ways to create connections: Creating and publishing original content that is relevant to the issues and problems your prospects are facing is the most powerful way to build trust and credibility with your prospect base. Content will typically be in the form of:
Publishing relevant content draws prospects to you and entices them to engage with you or share your message with others. When people who were previously unknown to you like or share your content, it reveals new prospects. You also gain insight into trigger events and buying windows. When people like, comment on, or share your information, you learn about the problems they are facing, their emotions, urgency, and interest in the military. Creating high-quality original content is powerful, but it is also very, very difficult. It requires a significant investment of time and intellectual resources. You also need to ensure that anything you post that is original is in compliance with regulations. I highly recommend investing the time to create and publish original content because the benefits to your reputation and career are massive. But if developing original content is not your thing, it is easier to leverage content through curation. Intuitively, we know that recruiters who connect, educate, offer insight, and solve problems are far more successful than those whose primary recruiting strategy is to slap shot features and benefits. In the social channel, the primary way you provide value for prospects is through content that educates, builds credibility, anchors familiarity, and positions you as a trustworthy expert. The right content shared at the right time with the right prospects can create important connections and convert passive online relationships into real-time conversations. The challenge is that the social channel is a voracious and insatiable beast that devours content. It must be fed daily for you and your message to remain relevant and present. Even if you had the time to create loads of original content, it would never be enough to keep up. So the solution is curation. A simple analogy for curation is the act of clipping articles from magazines and newspapers and sending them to someone. Except on social media, you are doing this digitally and amplifying the impact by going from a one-to-one analog footprint to a one-to-many digital distribution. Instead of publishing your own original content, you leverage the content that is being created and published by others. Essentially you become a maven who aggregates the most relevant content for your audience and shares it through your various social media newsfeeds. Sharing can either be a direct link that you post or a share from a source you follow. The beautiful thing about sharing content is that even though you didn’t produce it, some of the credit for the content rubs off on you. To become a successful curator, you need to be aware of what is happening in your branch of the military and the military in general. Have your eyes and ears open, pay attention to what is going on around you, and consume both military and general career planning information. The branches of the military produce a massive amount of positive content that may be leveraged on your social channels. Tools including Google Alerts, Pocket, or Feedly make it easy to stay informed and gather insightful content to share. When you curate with intent, you begin linking together relevant content based on an overall strategy, rather than just randomly and disparately sharing. You take time to read and understand what you are sharing, which allows you to add comments and insightful takeaways to the shared content, which further burnishes your expert status. Let’s get real. You want the time and effort you invest in social recruiting to produce real, tangible results. You want more qualified applicants in your funnel. Otherwise, what’s the point? When leveraged effectively, the social channel can and should generate inbound leads. Social recruiting, leveraged effectively, is like building your own inbound marketing machine. This is where intent and strategy with content creation and curation come into play. You must actively plan for and work to generate leads and engagement that open recruiting conversations. Social recruiting is a grind. It takes work. It is not easy, simple, or automatic. Getting value from and adding value to the social channel requires a consistent, focused, and disciplined approach. Consistency is crucial. Social recruiting doesn’t work if you show up some of the time. You dilute your efforts if you are random and hit-or-miss. Time blocking is the key to being efficient. You must block 30 minutes to an hour each day (preferably before or after the Golden Hours) to engage in planned, intentional social recruiting activities. Have the discipline to limit your activity to the block of time you have set aside for social media and no more. You may feel that you are not accomplishing much in short daily social recruiting blocks, but the cumulative impact of daily activity is enormous over time. Here’s the problem you face: In the ocean of content flooding the social channel, it’s getting more and more difficult to stand out and get noticed (which is why the social channels are making so much money selling sponsored posts). If you are starting from the ground up with no followers or a small audience on established social platforms like Facebook, it can take from six months to two years to create enough gravity to pull prospects in to you. This does not mean that a targeted and narrowly focused social recruiting strategy can’t be effective. It just means that it will require more and more effort to get a reasonable return on your investment. This is why a combination of social and outbound prospecting strategies is so powerful. Outbound prospecting and inbound social recruiting go together like mashed potatoes and gravy. Social recruiting builds familiarity, is awesome for research and WEO awareness, and will generate inbound leads. It is, however, a long-term, passive strategy that requires patience and nuance and is unlikely to produce immediate results or to ever scale to a size that generates enough inbound leads to allow you to consistently make mission. Outbound prospecting, on the other hand, is an active approach to filling the pipe by engaging prospects in person, by phone, by e-mail, through social in-boxes, or by text. It is the art of interrupting your prospect’s day, opening a conversation, setting an appointment, or gathering information. Combined with social prospecting, outbound activity becomes enormously powerful. The combined benefits include:
Once again, it comes back to balance—balancing your prospecting channels, methodologies, and techniques to be efficient and effective with your scarcest resource: time. This past summer while riding a bus in Kyoto, Japan, with my son, we struck up a conversation with a young Japanese businessman. Conversation might be an exaggeration. Since we don’t speak Japanese and he didn’t speak English, communication was a struggle. The one thing we found in common was music. We all took turns naming our favorite bands. Thumbs up, thumbs down. We laughed and sneered, sang snippets of songs, and enjoyed the moment—a brief connection on a hot crowded bus. As the bus approached the next stop, the young businessman prepared to get off. The bus slowed and the doors opened. As we bowed to say goodbye, he reached into this backpack and pulled out a small, wrapped box, motioning for me to take it. At first, I politely refused, but he was emphatic that I take the gift, so I smiled, bowed, and took the box from his hand as he slipped out of the open door. Thirty minutes later my son and I made it back to the small apartment we were renting. I peeled the green wrapping paper from the box, curious to see what was inside. When I opened the lid, it wasn’t what I was expecting. Inside were five slices of raw fish wrapped in leaves. I stared into the box in disbelief and then after a moment, reached in and pulled out a leaf-wrapped piece of fish. My son turned up his nose as I popped it into my mouth. “Daddy, you can’t eat that!” he pleaded. “That’s raw fish out of some random guy’s backpack from a bus. You don’t know what you’re putting in your mouth.” “But he gave it to me as a gift,” I shot back. “I can’t waste it. That wouldn’t be right. It was probably his dinner!” Even though my son’s argument was rational, I felt a deep emotional obligation to reciprocate the stranger’s gift by eating the fish. But my compelling feeling of obligation was far from over. The moment the young man stepped off the bus I felt a twinge of guilt. He hadn’t given me time to find something in my bag to give him—to repay the favor. It bothered me all afternoon. As we walked through the Gion district in Kyoto, I found myself looking for him, my reciprocal gift at the ready. Two months later, the guilt was still there. This is the power of obligation. Robert B. Cialdini, author of The Psychology of Persuasion, says, “One of the most potent of the weapons of influence around us is the rule for reciprocation. The rule says that we should try to repay, in kind, what another person has provided us.” In layman’s terms, the law of reciprocity simply explains that when someone gives you something, you feel an obligation to give value back. But as Cialdini explains, the rule or law of reciprocity goes much deeper than this. Effectively it is the glue that holds society together. This feeling of obligation, the need to reciprocate, is baked deep into our psychology. When you follow, like, comment, and share the posts of other people, it makes them feel important. In the age of social media those likes, shares, comments, and follows are like currency. They are gifts. The need for significance—to feel important—is a powerful human driver. This need is so insatiable that when you make a person feel significant, you give them the greatest gift you can give another human being. This gift is one of the cornerstones of influence. By making a person feel important, you create a subconscious feeling of obligation to reciprocate. That desire to reciprocate will cause the other person to be more likely to share your posts—which amplifies your message. It also increases the probability that prospects will seek you out at school and community events, ask you for more information, take your call, respond to direct messages, e-mail, and text, or engage directly in conversations about a career in the military.
Social Recruiting Is Not a Panacea
The Social Recruiting Challenge
Social Recruiting Is About Nuance
Choosing the Right Social Channels
Five Objectives of Social Recruiting
Five Objectives of Social Recruiting (Outcomes)
The Five Cs of the Social Recruiting Process (Effective)
Personal Branding
Connecting
Marketing, Education, and Insights
Content Creation
WEO Awareness
Content Curation
Research and Information Gathering
Conversion
Outbound Prospecting via Direct Engagement
Consistency
Personal Branding
Building Familiarity
Marketing Through Insight and Education
WEO Awareness
Research and Information Gathering
Outbound Prospecting
The Five Cs of Social Recruiting
Connecting
Content Creation
Content Curation
Conversion
Consistency
Social Recruiting + Outbound Prospecting = A Powerful Combination
Creating Obligation and Leveraging the Law of Reciprocity with Social Media