On September 5th, 2018 I received an email announcing the release of “Staffing Speaks Out”, a conversation series with staffing & recruiting industry leaders by Bullhorn. The email quotes their intro video (seen below) and claims to be a place for learning, growth, and inspiration. All provided by industry professionals, experts, influencers, and… you guessed it, Bullhorn customers.
Needless to say I was intrigued. I followed the link in the email and was pleasantly surprised to find a number of high value video interviews and articles covering marketing in the staffing industry.
Topic: Marketing For Staffing Firms
One video in particular struck me as being highly valuable to a lot of agencies. The interview features Sr Director of Marketing Lauren Schuman of the NYC based staffing firm, Pyramid Consulting Group. Several of the topics covered in the interview relate to how Pyramid tackles obstacles in marketing to clients and candidates in the staffing field. The importance of mobile optimization for your website and the increased use of mobile devices by job seekers is emphasized. Shorter, more concise job descriptions are also recommended by Lauren. Her firm puts much of their attention to forward thinking technology and has been moving away from outdated practices such as cold calling in favor of sms notifications and text messaging.
“Just know your audience. I think cold calling is kind of an outdated practice, as well. I think that, again, there are some industries where it still works, but for us, our people aren’t responding to that. They’re not listening to voicemails. They’re not picking up the phone for a number that they don’t know.” – Lauren Schuman
Video content is also discussed as being a strategy Pyramid uses to reach potential candidates & clients. While search engines like Google still show a lot of love for long form text content, video can have a meaningful impact on the SEO of your website by improving user experience metrics. It has an even greater impact on users who are more likely to consume video content than text content.
Bullhorn is known for producing great content like this and for providing a robust marketplace for service providers such as those mentioned in the video. TextUs and Cube19 are both mentioned in the interview with Lauren Schuman. TextUs is a text messaging platform that integrates with Bullhorn and Cube19 provides analytics dashboards to better understand how your marketing efforts are working.
So Much Potential
There are a number of topics I’d love to see them cover, however I have some concerns that they may only be tapping Bullhorn customers for these video interviews. While I’m a huge fan of Bullhorn, there are industry experts outside of the pool of Bullhorn users that may have valuable insight into marketing, design, operations, sales, business development, and branding for staffing & recruiting firms. I see so much potential in the first few videos and articles that they’ve published under this brand that I worry it will be used to plug their marketplace too much and not give enough emphasis on tools and marketing platforms outside of the Bullhorn marketplace. These concerns may be premature but with such a strong start to the Staffing Speaks Out series, I’m optimistic that they’ll continue to churn out great content in the future. I’ve already learned quite a bit from the Staffing Speaks Out series, I hope you have too.
Topic Wishlist
My topics wishlist includes: ad targeting strategies for passive vs active candidates, content marketing strategies for the staffing industry, and how to best utilize sourcing tools such as Indeed and LinkedIn. Also, I’d love to see interviews with Joe Green (CMO of Medical Solutions), Sara Menke (SEO of Premier Talent Partners), or Amber Ireland (VP of Marketing at PPR Talent Management Group). I think their interviews would be insightful due to their different perspectives, industries, and experience with marketing at different levels of their organizations.
For more information about Staffing Speaks Out check out their blog or search for the hashtag #StaffingSpeaksOut on Twitter.