30th April, 2024 - Webinar replay

10 practical ways your marketing can support your recruitment with Antony George Recruitment

Lewis 

Okay, perfect, right. I’m just making sure the recording is on because I did one recently, Phil, and I hadn’t put the recording on and it was very annoying because everyone wanted the recording and they couldn’t have it. Even a couple of people today I’ve emailed it last minute to say “Please make sure it’s recorded, because I do want to watch it.” So, I’m really looking forward to this session today and we have people coming in now, which is wonderful. So this session today, will be hosted like many others. We have the chat function running, so if you can hear us, just say “Yes” or “Hello” or “Hi”. That would be absolutely fantastic to make sure you can hear us successfully, we will have the question and answers open as well. So if you do have any questions or comments, please feel free to ask them and use the wealth of the knowledge that we’ve got with our wonderful partner, Phil. Hi there, Michelle, wonderful. Lovely to see you. I’ll quickly share my screen first of all, and we’ll get things underway for you all. Okay. Today we’re joined by the wonderful Phil Bray, but I’d like to start off with a little bit for those of you who don’t know us. We are Anthony George Recruitment. We’re the UK’s first financial planning subscription-based recruitment agency. Effectively, we fix all the costs of recruitment for our clients and spread that cost of recruitment over 12 months and we operate only in the financial planning space. Some additional services that we provide that not a lot of people are aware of are business consultancy, we are very big on retention and culture and understanding that as a cultural piece, as well as our WhatsApp communities. We’re now sitting at, surprisingly, we can’t believe it, nearly 1300 members across all of our communities. So we’re really proud to see that growing and developing, and lots of people getting value from it. One of the main things we do quite often is run these sessions. We run these every single month, and it’s supported by our wonderful partners. These are just some of our partners that we work very closely with, it’s all done on a non-profit basis so they’re not paid partners. We’ve joined up with them because they’re adding some fantastic value to the industry. Today, we’re joined by one of our wonderful partners, Phil. For those of you who don’t know Phil, he’s the founder and director of The Yardstick Agency, now the highest-rated agency specialising in financial services. Phil has worked in financial services for over 20 years, he started at GAN as a financial adviser, before moving into marketing. He started as Head of Marketing at a financial planning practice and a network before setting up The Yardstick Agency back in 2017. Yardstick has a team of around 48 staff, that may have grown slightly, we can find that out from Phil, they provide marketing strategies, websites, branding, digital, and design services, including blogs, newsletters, social media services and inbound marketing to clients. So, Phil, thank you so much for joining us today, we really appreciate it

Phil Bray 

Thanks for having me on Lewis. It’s great to be here. Right, I’m going to try and share my screen. This is the hardest bit of presentation. Let me do this, then that.

Lewis 

You’re a professional Phil. There you go.

Phil Bray 

Can you see a PowerPoint?

Lewis 

I can see the PowerPoint.

Phil Bray 

Can you still see the PowerPoint?

Lewis 

I can still see the PowerPoint, wonderful.

Phil Bray 

Fantastic. What can go wrong? So, what are we going to be talking about today? Typical ways that marketing can support your recruitment. Oftentimes when firms come to us, they think the only way we can potentially help firms from a marketing perspective is with the generation of new leads and new clients. That, clearly, for most firms, is incredibly important, but marketing can also help and support your recruitment efforts and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. It can also help, as I was telling a planning firm yesterday, with your acquisition efforts, because much of what potential team members, vendors or acquirers are interested in are the same things that potential clients are interested in. But today, we’re going to focus on the practical ways marketing can help support your recruitment. Who knows Lewis? We might do another webinar in the future about how marketing can support your acquisition strategy.

Lewis 

Absolutely.

Phil Bray 

Please do ask questions in the Q&A or the chat, which Lewis will keep an eye on. Otherwise, you’re only going to have me talking at you for the next 45 minutes, and nobody wants that. Do give me feedback. I know there are firms on this call who have got multiple advisers in their teams and multiple support staff so, if you see something I’m talking about today that you’ve had a different experience of, or you disagree with, then please do share your experiences and that will help improve this presentation for everybody. So do ask questions, give feedback and share your experiences. Let’s start by identifying the problem. Talking to advice firms, and I speak to advice firms as I’m sure you do Lewis, every day of the week, sometimes on a Saturday as well, but every day of the working week, there is a supply and demand problem. For many roles, there is more demand than supply. We also have a situation where candidates are potentially more discerning than ever before about where they work, the benefits they’ll get, the culture and values of the place they will work at, but also the value that the business is adding to their clients. We obviously had the change in work environment this time four years ago, it was as sunny as it is today, but we’d all locked down hadn’t we? Whilst many people have returned to work, that was a catalyst for the great resignation and people to change their desires in work, how they want to work, etc. Just look at Yardstick, on a Friday, I’m in the office right now and on a Friday, I am the only one in the office. Pre-covid, the office was full and people were going to the pub on a Friday. It’s full today because the girls are off out for somebody’s hen do later on. So it’s pretty full today, but things have changed. Then we’ve got the amount of noise that’s out there for both employers and employees. And in my experience, employers, business owners, take a very reactive approach to recruitment. I know in the past, we’ve been guilty at that with Yardstick, somebody joins, it’s working out, they leave, “Oh, we need to hire.” My view now is that firms should be constantly hiring, even if they don’t have roles, because it’s better to have a surplus of supply rather than no supply when you need it. Lewis, would you echo that? Is there anything you would change on that?

Lewis 

Yeah absolutely. I think the clients that we work with quite closely at the moment, we meet them every two weeks, so we really understand the challenges of what’s going on, but we also have conversations about what’s coming in the future. So, a lot of our clients will want us to continue to keep an ear to the ground, continue to prospect potential individuals, because particularly advisers have got to be in contact with them consistently because it’s sometimes the timing of when the time is just right. It’s the same with really experienced paraplanners and suddenly when an opportunity does arise, they want to be able to take them on immediately. When you find a really good candidate, I’m sure everyone will probably agree whether you need them or not, if they’re a very, very good candidate, you will take them on board. So, for a lot of clients, they want us to continuously work on them, because they are an actively growing business, and they’re happy to take the initial hit with their salary for, say, three months until they’re really needed because the skill set is there, and like you said, the supply and demand. So, I have to agree with that.

Phil Bray

Cool. If that’s the problem, what are the solutions? For me, the solution is to develop – and I’m very conscious that I’m presenting this to Lewis, somebody who knows far more about recruitment than I do – but for me, the way to deal with this is to develop a strategy. Allocate time and resources and work on your recruitment using some of these tips that come from a marketing background, even when you don’t have vacancies. So rather than ABC Always Be Closing, ABR, Always Be Recruiting, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. So if that’s setting the scene of the problem, these are 10 tips that we’ve seen work at Yardstick, we’ve seen work at other firms, and we’ve helped work with other firms that probably come under the heading of marketing, but at the end of the day to a prospect you are selling your business to them aren’t you? You are selling your financial planning services, your paraplanning services, your admin services, whatever they are. Here, you are selling a role, a business, a lifestyle, to potential candidates. So, it’s still a marketing challenge and I think it needs to be reframed in that way. Let’s dive into the top tips. This, for me, is number one: We need to write great job adverts. A job description is not the same as a job advert. Your job advert should be passionate and full of energy. It needs to sell the role and sell the business to the potential candidate, or potential candidates – plural. You’ve got to sell it. You’ve got to impress them. You’ve got to attract them. You’ve got to excite them. Your culture needs to shine through because that’s probably the first interaction they’re going to have with your business. They’re going to have interactions often before the interview, or even before submitting an application. They’ll look on your website, they might look at your online reviews, they might spend a little bit of time on Glassdoor looking at reviews of your business and what it’s like to work for you. But, your job advert is probably the first time that they interact with your business, and therefore it’s so important to get it right. What we don’t want is a dry, dull, technical job description. We want something that’s vibrant, passionate, and full of energy. I also think we need to demonstrate to candidates what it’s like working in the business. We talk about showing rather than telling. When it comes to social proof and clients, showing the value of working with your business rather than telling them the value. And here, rather than telling candidates about your culture as a business, we need to show them the culture of the business. How do you do that? We do it through testimonials from existing team members, and staff survey results. I don’t know how many of the businesses on here run staff surveys, but at Yardstick for example, when we’re doing our job adverts, we quote our employer net promoter score. That’s quoted in there and I think we might even quote previous years. Also think about things like staff videos. Get members of your staff to record a video about what it’s like working here, and pop it into the job advert. This is two ways, it’s not about us doing people a favour coming to work for us, it’s a two-way approach. It’s not a parent/child, it’s a parent/parent approach. And in the job advert, we need to give candidates what they want to see. Some research from Haynes shows, 80% want a detailed job description, two thirds want to know the role requirements, and not far off, 6 of 10 want to know what they’re going to get paid and what other benefits they are going to get. What’s your view on that, Lewis about whether you put salary and package into the job advert?

Lewis 

Clients that say they’re not happy to promote or share the salary bandings tend to find that probably 50% of people if not more, are less likely to come back to us. It’s quite surprising so something I always say is “Be very open with your salary bandings.” Because people will move between £3000 and £5000 salary uplift. So if you’ve put the salary for a paraplanner as “up to £50k” for example, you’re only really going to attract candidates earning up to between £40k and £45k so add an extra 5k on to that. That doesn’t mean you’re willing to go to that level, but it does mean you’re going to attract that next level of candidate that you might potentially want and then you never know, you might have a little bit of flex in your salary if they’re an absolutely outstanding candidate. But really think about that three to five salary banding. And just to add on to your point there about the videos Phil, I absolutely could not agree more. If you can get your staff to do that, absolutely do. When we’ve said this before to some clients, they maybe don’t like doing that, but if not, you get on a video. You tell them why they should be working with you. We do a lot of landing pages with videos interviewing our clients to tell prospects what it’s like to work there. What do the day-to-day duties look like? It brings you to life. So, look at videos as really powerful tools. What you said there Phil is bang on, for sure.

Phil Bray 

I’ll show you in a bit on another slide and I’d be interested to know why some of your employers don’t like doing videos. The next thing I would say about the job advert is to include the following – this is a marketing exercise, the clue is in the word advert – an accurate job title, and you can see the other things on there, key skills and attributes, a description of the business. Don’t leave your candidate in any doubt about what you do, who you do it for, and the benefits of the work that you deliver to clients. What the role involves, the location – I think that’s incredibly important, and whether you’re hybrid working I know to our candidates at Yardstick that is a very important thing, as is the benefit package. Then really specifically what you want them to do when they apply. So here at Yardstick, we ask for two or three things, a covering letter, CV, and portfolio of the work if appropriate. Not for all our roles, but when a portfolio of work is appropriate. I can’t imagine that when you’re applying for financial adviser job or paraplanner job a portfolio of work necessarily applies, but the first two might. How often do we get those three things? About 1% of the time. It’s a tiny proportion of the time but those candidates absolutely shine through if we get those two or three things depending on the job role, we know we’re on to a winner. It’s almost a guaranteed interview when we get them. When it comes to actually writing it… and here at Yardstick, our content team writes quite a lot of job adverts these days on behalf of some of our larger clients, and that’s because the larger clients have tuned in to the fact that this is a marketing challenge. I suggest writing it in the first person, be clear, and include subheadings because one of the key problems you often see with a job advert is it’s just a block of text, a massive block of text. Most people are reading it online, and perhaps on a mobile device so, if you insert subheadings into the job advert that explain the key points about the role, not questions that you then answer in the body text but key points about the role, if somebody skims that job advert, they will read and see the subheadings, so, they’ll get the key messages. Subheadings are incredibly important in any form of writing, blogs, guides, award entries, etc. so use them to your advantage here. Use short sentences, short paragraphs, and bullet points to make it easy for people to read. Job number one, get your advert right. Make sure you’re selling the role. Make sure it’s exciting and it’s vibrant. Lewis, would you add anything?

Lewis 

That’s me being an amateur and talking while muted. No, I have to agree with those points. Not too wordy, I think we have a tendency of adding too much in there. When we send it over to clients, we then have to take the information and kind of decode it a little bit. We do send a sort template to our clients, and once we get that back, we decode it a little bit and then break it into bite-sized chunks. So that when we do our marketing and our engagement, we can send it to candidates in a drip format to really get them to buy into the job and what it’s got to offer.

Phil Bray 

Number two, get your website right. Some people may speculatively look for a role at a certain business. High-profile financial services businesses that are known to do good work often get people looking for a role, going onto their website and seeing if they’ve got any vacancies open. I know one firm that we work with, multi-award winning for multiple years, based in in Yorkshire, and to get their last few candidates, they haven’t, unfortunately Lewis, used a recruitment consultant, they haven’t even needed to go to LinkedIn, because they’ve had people going to their website.

Lewis 

Brilliant.

Phil Bray 

And their website does a few things. The first thing it does is display all roles that are open in that business. So one page with two or three roles that are open in that business. They don’t try to explain on that page what the role is about, they don’t have the job advert on that page. The advert is contained on a sub-page or a child page. So it might go, home page, job roles, and then the individual job adverts. If they don’t have any job roles open at that point, we encourage them to put up a message, something along the lines of, “We’re always looking for good people. We always want good people to come and join us.” And that encourages people to send in speculative CVs. I would also add that page to the main navigation. To make it easy to find, there are obvious places to put it. Link to it from your team page. If you imagine you’ve got a team page with maybe nine images on it, put a 10th on there with “Is this you? Would you come and join our team?” and then link that through to the careers page. There are all sorts of things you should be doing on your website, but you do need to get it right to encourage speculative CVs coming in, but also to make sure that people get the information that they need. Again, you could put videos on there as well, and we’ll talk about that in more detail.

Lewis 

To add on that one, Phil, I always say, put yourself in the candidate’s experience. So, if it is hard work on your website to send their CV or fill in an application page, you’re less likely to get them to apply directly. So, make it as simple as you can to increase your chances. That’s a little top tip that we always say as well.

Phil Bray 

I agree with that. Number three, we need to impress potential candidates with what I would call client-driven social proof. That’s because potential candidates to work for your business want to know you are doing good for your clients. They want to know that they’ll be working for a financial planning firm, financial advice firm, or any type of business that is doing good work and adding value to its customers and clients. So, candidates, I believe, will check you out online before applying to understand whether they want to work for you, to help with their application you would hope and prepare for an interview. One of the best applications we ever had was from Abi Robinson, who Lewis knows now. Abi joined us two and a half years ago. It’s fair to say, Abi’s CV wasn’t necessarily perfect for the role she applied for, but she put a portfolio of her work together, she put her CV in and a covering letter with it. She put her portfolio and CV in Yardstick’s brand colours, so it stuck out. We interviewed her, turned out be perfect and she’s been with us for two and a half years. There are all sorts of reasons why someone might check you out online before getting in touch. In that case, it was Abi trying to find out what our brand colours are but other candidates might do it because they want to understand whether they want to work with you, to help with their application or to prepare for an interview. The same things that impress potential clients of your business will impress potential employees. That might be online reviews on Google and VouchedFor, it might be client survey results, and it might be videos. The flip side of that is social proof from your team that impresses potential candidates. I think there’s a few things you can do here. The first is, I would encourage everybody here to consider using Glassdoor. Lewis, we did a bit of a poll, didn’t we? When people signed up for this webinar about Glassdoor.

Lewis 

Yes. I think every single person, bar two people, are not using Glassdoor. And I think two people aren’t even aware of what Glassdoor is. So yes, this is quite an important one because when we speak to candidates they are very much aware of Glassdoor, and they are checking it. If someone’s not on there, they look at other means to check out a company. So it is definitely something you should be aware of, that employer brand piece.

Phil Bray 

Let’s have a bit of audience participation and see who’s listening and who’s awake.

Lewis 

Here we go.

Phil Bray 

So, if you don’t use Glassdoor, and you’re on the webinar, can you just put a note in the chat to explain why you don’t use Glassdoor? What are the barriers to using it? What are you concerned about? What are you anxious about with Glassdoor? And while you’re doing that, I’ll explain a little bit about what Glassdoor is. So essentially, similar to how people use Tripadvisor for restaurants, VouchedFor for financial advisers and financial planners, Glassdoor allows your current and former employees to go and rate their experience of working with you. They rate you out of five stars, there are some subheadings and they can put the pros and cons of working with you. Normally, when we explain Glassdoor to people, especially employers and business owners, they fold their arms, get a bit grumpy, and just express a lot of negativity about using it, because they immediately jump to the worst case scenario of disgruntled employees, current or former going on and getting a bit ranty explaining why they hate their job, they hate their boss, etc. The problem is, current or former employees can do that already. They can go and leave a review on Glassdoor, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Lewis 

Yeah.

 

Phil Bray 

So, my view is we need to turn this into a positive. Get on the front foot, get ahead of the game, build your own profile on Glassdoor and then curate your reviews. Ask current and former employees to leave a review. Clearly, if you’ve got someone you know is disgruntled, you are not going to go and solicit a review from them, but go to current and former employees, those you’re confident would say positive things about you. It doesn’t need to be entirely positive, you want it to be authentic, but go and ask them to leave reviews because I guarantee you, if you don’t, the first review you get will be a negative one, and then you’ll be scrambling around trying to put positivity on top of a negative review. It happened at Yardstick. We had someone do it four years ago, and that’s what alerted us to the benefits of Glassdoor. So what have people said Lewis?

Lewis 

We’ve got one here. “Don’t have time have time to do it.” We’ve got “Ex-employees and not current ones, leaving reviews.” “Wasn’t aware of the benefits it would provide” top three there.

Phil Bray 

So I think in terms of time, Aspen, I know how busy you are, but what I’d saying terms of time is just think about the benefits of doing it. Because a couple of hours to set up a Glassdoor profile and then a five-minute conversation with five employees asking them to do it is going to save you a lot of time A) if you ever get a negative review and B) it is going to filter candidates, which makes recruitment easier. Scott, “Ex-employees, not current ones, leaving reviews.” I’m not sure what you mean by that.

Lewis 

So his previous employees are leaving reviews, but not his current ones. So maybe he’s getting more negative ones, potentially. Maybe an indication to that?

Phil Bray 

Yeah, perhaps Scott would like to clarify that. One of the things we do at Yardstick is, we have a rota and we go out to members of staff probably once a year and say, “Would you leave a review?” at that point, we don’t do anything to curate what they say, we don’t write it for them, we just go and give them a nudge. It’s really useful the feedback that we get. It’s something that provides huge benefits. We’ve got 44 reviews on Glassdoor now, the platform itself is not great, but it provides huge benefits. Lewis, do you think most candidates will go and look a company up on Glassdoor?

Lewis 

I wouldn’t say most, but I’d say it does become part of it. I think because the nature of our business, a lot of the businesses that we work with are slightly smaller firms so maybe they’re not big enough to have Glassdoor profiles, but certainly the ones that are actively growing, maybe going on an acquisition train at the moment and currently acquiring businesses and they’re starting to build, we suddenly see that it becomes more important. And looking at some of the people that are in here today, they’re at that size where it should be important. When we are speaking to candidates, if they do have a positive Glassdoor profile, we always put that at the forefront, particularly in our email engagement for our clients. We show them “This is a positive. This is what you know people are saying working there.” which is a benefit.

Phil Bray 

And once you’ve got the reviews on Glassdoor, it’s a bit like your Google and VouchedFor reviews, you don’t just leave them on the platform, you move them into your marketing.

Lewis 

Absolutely, on your website, everything like that. Absolutely.

Phil Bray 

Yeah. Your website, job advert, and all sorts of places. Another type of team-driven social proof is a team-member survey. We do one a year at Yardstick, which goes down well and it’s really useful. We get an employer NPS from it. So, a team member survey, and then publishing the results shows you’re an open, transparent employer who wants to understand how their staff feel about the role and working for the for the business. And again, there are videos. Moving on to tip five, in terms of videos I think they’re fabulous social proof. We’ve all got a studio in our pocket now with our iPhones, you could edit it yourself or come to your friendly specialist marketing agency to edit it. Some examples of questions: “What’s the best thing about working at The Yardstick Agency?” Or “What’s the best thing about working at Smith and Wardle?” Or, “Would you recommend working at E Paraplanning?” “How would you describe the culture that Anthony George?” Those sorts of questions with 20-second answers, short, sharp answers, and then use those videos throughout your marketing. There are so many places you can use them, on the careers page, on your website, on the job advert pages. You know, rather than the heading, “What’s it like to work at wherever?” you can say “Don’t take our word for it, watch this video, and Lewis will tell you what it’s like to work with us.” use it in your social posts as well. We know how much video engages people; more than the use of static images on social media, especially on LinkedIn, which is probably the primary channel for recruitment marketing in this space. So, huge benefits to videos, and the barrier to producing videos is so low. There are people on this call who could go and stick a mobile phone in front of their staff this afternoon, give them one of the questions to answer, edit it overnight by putting it on PeoplePerHour, Fiverr or somewhere like that and you could have a video on your website tomorrow. The barrier to doing it is so low but the benefits are so high. One of the key benefits that’s not on the slides is that you’ll stand out. There are very, few firms doing this. I think there are very few firms getting their team members on video to promote working for the business. Is that fair Lewis that not many people are doing it?

Lewis 

Very few. And even when I broker the conversation to say I want to create a landing page and when we speak to candidates I want a video or an interview to show them, they’re like, “What? What do you want me to do?” So they’re quite hesitant, but the ones that do massively stand out, and then the feedback that we get from candidates is “Wow, thank you. I have no questions. When can I come to interview?” Because they’ve articulated why they’re recruiting, the vision of the business, what their journey looks like, all the key questions of what candidates want answered by a business. Sometimes we can sing about it and talk about to our hearts content, but if you say it yourself, it’s like hearing it directly from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. It creates so much more conviction for sure.

Phil Bray 

Conviction and connection as well. Number six, I spoke about that firm earlier client of ours, who is very high profile in the profession, and that profile means that when somebody is looking at a move, whether it’s an administrator, a paraplanner or an adviser, they will go and look at high profile firms websites. The think “I would like to work for that firm. Let’s go and see if they’ve got any vacancies open. I’d like to go and look at that firm as well.” So your profile in the profession, I believe, is absolutely linked to your ability to find, attract and retain good quality staff. So what can you do there? Things like awards. Awards are incredibly important, and I’ll come to one that’s specific in a minute but awards are incredibly important, and I’m convinced there is a link for my firm in Yorkshire, and the numerous awards they’ve won and the recruitment opportunities that it presents and the press coverage. The personal finance press and the trade press. It’s easier to get in the trade press than the personal finance press, but it’s becoming easier with services like Newspage from Dominic Hiatt’s team to get in the personal finance press. Speaking at events. Lewis, we were at an event last week, and there were advisers on panels speaking, there were advisers doing individual speaking slots to 5000 – 7500 people. That raises their profile in the profession. Finding ways of supporting the advice and planning community, chairing your local PFS, getting involved there and then building that reputation for giving back if you increase your profile in the profession, you will attract, like a magnet, potential recruits. Lewis, is there anything that you’d like to add to that?

Lewis 

Yeah, I would definitely add on that. I spoke at Professional Adviser 360 (PA 360) all about retaining good staff members, and sitting on the panel with me were two wonderful businesses, one based up in Scotland, and the head of people from Saltus. Two fantastic businesses that I was on panel with and it was absolutely great to be working alongside them. And it gives their businesses that credibility piece. You don’t pay to be on the panel. So to go on and give your advice to potentially a room full of 50, 60, or 100 people and talking about why your business is different, you’re raising your whole business profile immediately. That’s your social proof, you can get videos of it, and capture all that information that you can put out consistently for six-plus months, effectively, on your content.

Phil Bray 

Huge benefits of doing it. One award that I would encourage you to consider if you are a certain size as a business and that is, The Best Financial Advisor Firm to Work For award, linked to the Professional Adviser Awards. It’s for anybody that’s in a B2B business, Michelle, that probably includes you in that category and I believe there’s a partner award for Best Financial Services Firm to Work For. It’s a list rather than an outright winner. So there are maybe 15 or 20, firms who have got this. Maybe it’s an accreditation rather than an award, that’s maybe a better way of putting it. In terms of your marketing, it’s incredibly powerful to say “We were one of the best advice firms or one of the best financial services place to work last year.” There you go Michelle. For the adviser award, I think the minimum is 15 employees. So there’s plenty of people on this call who have got that number of employees. It’s an employer questionnaire to start with, and then an employee survey. So it’s a survey of your staff, which might make some people a little bit nervous, but there’re two benefits of this. The first, if you pay the fee – because there is a fee for getting the data, it’s free to enter but if you want the data, there’s a fee. – I think it was reasonably good, it wasn’t massive, then you’re killing two birds with one stone. You’re getting that feedback from your team, but you’re also, if the feedback is good enough, included on the list of firms who win the award or get the accreditation. So I would say, look it up. I was at the Professional Adviser Awards, when was it? March or April. Halfway through all the firms that were included in the list got up on the stage, had a lovely photo taken, and then it’s an opportunity to promote it. This webinar is about marketing, and if you win the award, you’ve then got to PR the success. So, promote it, keep promoting it week after week, month after month, throughout your marketing. I’m not saying any of the things in here are a golden bullet, but it builds up a picture and that is one thing I would absolutely encourage anybody on this call to go and look at when those awards open, which will be Christmas time, or January next year.

Tip number eight, LinkedIn. Now Lewis, you might say differently, but I think LinkedIn is incredibly important from a recruitment perspective. What would I be doing here? I’d be writing regular posts on LinkedIn promoting vacancies. There is a stat that only one in five of your connections see each of your LinkedIn posts. It doesn’t quite work this way, but the logic is, if you extrapolate that, you need to post the same thing five times for everybody to see it. Like I say, it doesn’t quite work that way, but it gets the message across. It’s not good enough to post just once, you’ve got to post multiple times about it. The natural feeling among many people when they’re posting recruitment job adverts, is to do it from a corporate account, but I would do it from both personal and corporate accounts. We all know, because we’re probably all on LinkedIn, that we’re more likely to engage with a personal account than we are a corporate account. So yeah, keep your corporate account ticking over, but do more of this on your personal account. Stick some social proof in the comments as well. So you might put your job advert up, but then in the comments say “Click this video to go and see what it’s like to work with us.” “Go and read our Glassdoor reviews.” “Here are our client survey results.” Build that social proof up, not in the main post, but in the comments below it. It’s always valuable to go back to a post on LinkedIn 20 minutes to half an hour after you posted it and just stick a little PS on there. For some reason, that always increases engagement. Then, also to increase engagement, go and get your team to comment on the post and like it or engage with it, because that will feed LinkedIn’s algorithm, but do not click the share button. LinkedIn’s own algorithm hates the LinkedIn’s own share button. I don’t know why, it just does.

Lewis 

Crazy, isn’t it? You’ve got to really be on top of the changing of the algorithms all of the time. That is like a full-time job in itself.

Phil Bray 

Yes it is and you can get distracted by the LinkedIn algorithm and try and game the algorithm but that actually distracts you from doing what you should be doing, which is posting regularly and adding value. But if there are some quick wins, then I would embrace them and that is one of them. So, post natively on LinkedIn your job vacancies. Post them regularly and get your team to go and support those posts. Then also on LinkedIn, consider, this is not for everybody, but consider whole outreach. So turn on the ” I am hiring” badge, then use the search facility on LinkedIn to identify potential candidates, view their profile to demonstrate you are interested in them and understand whether they’re the right fit and then get in touch. Send them a message, send them a connection request with a covering 300 characters or go and get a premium account and use some in-mails, but start that cold outreach. If you do it in the right way, you won’t get pushed back, you won’t get negativity. You might get ignored, which is fine, but you won’t get pushed back, you won’t get negativity. And then if someone’s not interested, it’s not right for them, the time’s not right or whatever, ask them if they know anybody else. Ask them if they know somebody else who they could introduce you to. Like I said, it’s not for everybody, but it can work. And then the last thing, from a marketing perspective, number 10, one of the things that has worked really well at Yardstick is asking our team to introduce us to candidates and incentivise them. We pay £1000 to our staff for successful hire. Successful hire is defined as somebody who passes their probationary period, we’re not going to pay the money until the person’s passed their probationary period, because that’s how we define a successful hire and it works incredibly well for us. It’s the same thing as a warm referral into a financial planning business. A warm referral into a financial planning business will always convert better than a cold lead from somewhere else. The same is true here. So those are my top 10 tips for helping use marketing to improve your recruitment. Lewis, back to you.

Lewis 

Love that, absolutely brilliant. And Phil’s come back with a comment saying “We really valued the best adviser feedback, both to help improve our offering to staff, but also recruitment. All recruits mention it. We do it every other year due to time commitments.” Absolutely right. When you get that award and are shortlisted, it’s a big moment and the feedback you get is so, so good. So it’s absolutely brilliant, Phil, that you’re doing that and you’ve seen the value in it. And if any of you haven’t, make sure you research it and see when you can get involved because it’s definitely worthwhile, for sure. Definitely.

Phil Bray 

I’d add Glassdoor to the things that you review. It’s really interesting that a very small proportion of people on here are using Glassdoor. For me, it’s an absolute revelation. It’s helped us improve the business, yeah, and it’s helped us recruit the right candidates.

Lewis 

Absolutely. Has anyone got any questions either for myself on the recruitment side or for Phil on the marketing side? We’ve got a combination of us both here, use our knowledge because we add so much value to our clients who are struggling to recruit, but also don’t want to do it themselves. If we go back to what Phil was saying about the direct outreach, that works really well. So, what we do for some of our firms when we’re looking for quite difficult roles to fill, our relationship with our clients we work directly with them. Every two weeks have a meeting where we identify who we like and who would be applicable for their role. We’ve got a short list of candidates that we’ve tried to contact, and they’ve not come back to us for any reason, we send them directly to our client. We get them signed up on LinkedIn, give them a message to send, and we get a better hit rate by going direct and then at that point, we then take over again, and we do the video interviewing and everything. But, it’s using the power of your position within your business to get it right. If you’ve got a member of your team that can do that work for you, it’s all about getting that individual to join your business. It’s thinking outside the box all of the time. So yeah, really good on the outreach piece, some people are quite nervous about it, but don’t be.

Phil Bray 

Nothing bad will come of it.

Lewis 

Absolutely. Well, Phil, if there are no other questions, I’d like to thank you very much for your time. We’ll get the slides off of Phil, we’ll also get the recording, so if you want to re-watch it again you can, and if you have any questions at all for either of us, you want to help your marketing or your recruitment, you know where we are. Thank you so much for joining us and Phil, thank you again for another wonderful webinar. Thank you so much.

Phil Bray 

Thank you for having me, Lewis! Cheers everybody, bye bye.

Lewis 

Brilliant, thank you. Bye bye now.

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