14th September, 2022 - Webinar replay

8 NEW simple ways marketing can fast track your recruitment and save agency fees

Phil Bray 0:00
Welcome to this morning’s webinar: Eight new simple ways marketing can fast track your recruitment and save agency fees. So there’s three of us on today. In time honoured tradition, I’m going to hand over to Dan and Dan’s going to just explain what we’re going to do today.

Dan Campbell 0:19
Brilliant. Thanks, Phil. So as Phil rightly says, I’m Dan. So I’m the Head of Branding and Design here at Yardstick. And once or twice a month, I get to play the part of Phil’s extremely unglamorous assistant, which means that I’ll be doing two things. The first is making sure that everything’s running smoothly, and keep us on track and on time. So if our sound cuts out, let us know in the chat. Speaking of which, Zoom has changed a few of the default webinar settings. And thank you, Carrie, for answering one of the questions I was about to ask in that sometimes it doesn’t work. So now we know it is working, we can ask any questions, any comments, anything that Phil says, or Abi says, either through the chat box at the bottom or through the Q&A box, so I’ll be monitoring both. And as we go through at natural breaks, I’ll be asking any questions you might have. And I know that we’ve got quite a lot to fit in today’s session. But if there are any stragglers at the end, we’ll make sure that all of your questions do get answered. So get stuck in! These always work with plenty of input, and you’re a famously engaged bunch so don’t be shy. And we also have Abi Robinson with us. Phil says there’s three of us today not two. So she’s usually behind the scenes compiling their follow up email to this. But she will be co-presenting today as there’s plenty of social media tips within the presentation. And who better to include than the person that takes care of our social media, frankly, so we’re in good hands. So without further ado, over to Abi and Phil.

Phil Bray 1:53
Abi is going to talk about Instagram later on, because I can write my knowledge of Instagram on the back of a really small postage stamp. So Abi’s going to be doing that later. So let’s have a look. What are we going to be talking about today? So the first thing we’re gonna be talking about is we’re gonna dive straight into marketing tactics that will help you recruit the right people. And we did a similar webinar to this, I think it was back in May, and we will put the recording of that webinar into the follow up email. Because I think they should work well together, there’s probably two companion pieces, that webinar we did in May, and today’s webinar. But then we’re going to have another look at LinkedIn about and looking at how LinkedIn can help you find the right candidates. We’re going to dive into Instagram and look at that as well. Few changes to make to your website, stay on for that, because there’s a few things in there that we’ve not previously mentioned. And then three ways we can be using video to impress potential recruits into your business. And as Dan says, please do question, comment and challenge and absolutely if there’s something that’s worked for you, really keen that we share that information with other people that are on the call. So if there’s something that works for you do put it in the chat, do put questions in the chat and a Q&A. And I want to make sure that nobody leaves today without their questions answered. And I’m going to start, talking of questions, with two questions. So if everybody that’s tuned in today, just put a little note in the chat, because I want to understand more about the audience. So two questions. First question, how many people do you currently employ? Just put a number in the chat if you would. And then how many people are you looking to hire in the next 12 months? And again, if you could put a note in the chat there as well. So two numbers, how many people do you currently employ? How many people are you looking to hire in the next 12 months? And we’ll come back to that question after the next slide from the answers after next slide. So why are we talking about recruitment today? Well, when I talk to advisors and planners, and business owners, there seems to be a supply and demand problem. There is more demand out there for advisors, planners, admin staff, than there is supply. And that creates a problem, that makes it harder for firms to recruit. So that’s really why we’re here today. There’s a few other things added in as well. We’ve got more discerning candidates than ever before. And there is quite a significant choice for them, that supply and demand imbalance means that planners, advisors, and admin staff have got more choices than they ever had before. And of course, over the past two or three years, we’ve seen a significant change to our working environment. So for example, Yardstick yesterday, we interviewed a candidate whose current employer will not allow flexible hybrid or home working. And you know what? That’s led him to think, that actually, he needs a change of scene, a change of organisation, change of employer. And that’s why he’s looking to move and potentially come to us. So that change in work environment has led to people appraising where they physically work from. And if the current employer won’t allow flexible or hybrid working, that can lead to a change. Now, of course, we’ve got this phase of the great resignation, we’ve come out of a period of uncertainty with COVID, I think it’s probably fair to say we’re heading into another period of uncertainty with the cost of living crisis and the recession potentially. But there is a lot of movement in the job market, hence, the term the great resignation. And then a couple of other problems we have: it’s very noisy out there. If any employer has put a job advert up on LinkedIn, or Indeed, just a number of CVs that get thrown at you – Abi’s smiling – the number of CVs that you get thrown at you is significant. And we’ve got some ideas in a bit about how you can narrow those choices down. And then finally, on the problem front, we do tend to find, and I think we’re (at Yardstick) probably guilty of this as well, less so this year, but we have been guilty of it, of a reactive approach. Like you need to find somebody, and let’s go out and try and find them, rather than being always switched on when it comes to marketing. So from our perspective, we believe that in the same way you have a marketing strategy to attract new clients, we should be having a marketing strategy to attract new recruits as well, rather than just being reactive. So there are some of the problems that we perceive right now, if there are other problems that you think you’re having that we can try and solve today, do put those in the chat. But Dan, what numbers have we come up with?

Dan Campbell 7:03
Right, so we’ve got a real diverse spread, which is good. So we’ve got a fair few that have got teams of between one and five team members, we’ve got some that are in the teams and sort of the mid 20s. And we’ve also got a few that are 50 people strong. And of the people that are hiring, it tends to be between one and four people that they’re looking to add.

Phil Bray 7:30
Okay, so like you say, a really diverse spread, that’s incredibly useful. And if there are other challenges or problems that you’re having on the recruitment front that we’ve not put in there, that are not covered by those six, do put something in the chat. And we can open that up to the wider audience and try and come up with some good ideas ourselves. So eight new ways. We did, can’t remember what the number was, but there were lots of top tips in the last webinar. So these are eight new ones. The first one, now this won’t apply to everybody. But the first one is to enter the Professional Advisor’s Best Financial Advisors to Work For Award. It’s a bit of a mouthful, that. And this is an award that normally open their awards later on in the year, so maybe November, December time. This is one that comes before that. And it’s not an award that you win. In previous years, it’s been a list of the best advisors to work for. And you’re either on the list or you’re not. But at the award ceremony, back in March in London, all the firms that were on the list are up on the stage, they all got a nice little trophy, they all got a nice little badge that they can use on their websites. So it’s a list rather than an outright winner. You’ve got to have a minimum of 15 employees to enter. So that might, unfortunately, discount some people on this call. And the entry process is a combination of questions that the employer will answer, and then employees survey as well. And this is the thing that makes it really different. Because the decision about whether you make it onto the list is, I think significantly based on what your employees say about you. So it’s for me, a very authentic award to potentially be included on the list. If you have 15 employees, you’ve got to get 80% to respond from memory. And you can buy the survey results as well. I think for smaller firms is about £550. So you’re killing a couple of birds with one stone here. There’s an award that you can enter that is really quite attractive if you get on the shortlist because it will play well and appeal to potential recruits because you’re one of the top firms to work for. But also it plays well with clients. Because if I’m a client of a financial planning firm, where the staff are happy, what does that mean? Well, that means that from an ethical perspective, that’s quite nice. But also happy staff means probably the staff stay there, there’s less staff turnover. And therefore, I’m getting a more consistent relationship with the people that I work with within the firm. So the deadline for entry is the 30th of September. And Abi, if we can just put a link into the follow up that would be great. Because I do think this is worthwhile for firms that have a large enough workforce to be able to enter. And it’s the usual drill, you enter, you qualify and then you promote. There’s no point going to enter, if you’re not going to promote the winning entry at the end. But as I say, 15 employees, combination of your entry and employee surveys, and the deadline is the 30th of September. So if you want to learn more about that, click the link in the follow up email. So number two, Facebook Pixel Advertising. So if anybody’s on Facebook, we all know those adverts that follow us around. You’ve been on a website, a garden centre website or a furniture shop website. And you’ve been looking at products on their websites. And then you head onto Facebook a few days later, and you see their adverts. And you could do the same thing with your recruitment advertising. So on your website, we believe you should have individual job advert pages for all the jobs you have vacant in your business. So if you were looking to recruit, an advisor and a power planner, you’d have one job page for an advisor, you’d have one job page for a power planner. Now one of the things you could do is pick potential candidates and looking at those pages to understand more about the job role, understand more about the package the firm and decide whether they want to apply. So you could put a Facebook Pixel on those pages, design an advert that’s relevant to each of those job pages. So the advisor one would refer to an advisor in the advert, paraplanner one would refer to a paraplanner and so on. And that means that if people who have been on those pages, then spend some time on Facebook, they will see those adverts, and it will remind them that they’ve looked at their job pages, and actually, that there’s an opportunity there that they could apply for. So it’s keeping where they use Facebook, it’s keeping the job front and centre of mind and encouraging them to go back to the page in the future. So we could use Facebook Pixel Advertising, as I say, to remind people about open jobs. Number three, and we’ve used this relatively recently. So one of the things we’ll talk about in a bit is direct approaches on LinkedIn, doing a search on LinkedIn to find paraplanners in your area because you want to recruit a paraplanner, and then reaching out directly to them, either via InMails, if you’ve got a premium listing, or by just sending a connection request. And you’re reaching out to find out we’ve got this job vacancy open is now the time for a change? Potentially. And is this worth having a conversation? Now some of those people will come back, small number of those people will come back saying yes, now is the time, let’s have a chat. Bunch will ignore you, fair enough. And a bunch will come back and say thanks for the approach, but actually it’s not the right time now. In which case, follow that up, normally just say thank you, but follow it up with “Thank you, but do you know somebody else who might be a good fit for this role? Is there anybody you can introduce me to?” And then you could also, as the slide says, if you offer an internal recruitment incentive, you could consider extending that to the person who just turned you down but might know some other people. You probably don’t have to but you could consider doing it. But you’re just trying to keep that chain going. And paraplanners will know other paraplanners and advisors will know other advisors. So rather than just it being a dead end, just ask them. Is there anybody else you can introduce me to who would be a good fit? So you’re trying to turn that dead end into something that’s more of an opportunity. And we’ve used that recently, and it’s worked really well for us. Number four, we’ll talk about it more in a bit and we mentioned it last time. But there’s a little badge on LinkedIn, I think it’s purple, Abi might know different, but I think it’s purple. And you can turn it on, it’s just a little badge, it’s a little kind of slash under your picture that says we’re hiring, and you can turn it on and turn it off. And that allows people who are looking for jobs to understand which business owners have job vacancies open. And you could just put that hiring badge on and leave it at that. But the other thing you could do is you could put the hiring badge on and then, rather than just having an image of yourself, you could change that and have a video. So that video, combined with the hiring badge, just explains to people what roles you’ve got open right now, where they can go to find a bit more information. And then a little bit of why should you come and work for us, these are the reasons people work for us. You’ve only got 30 seconds on the video but I do think it’s a nice touch. And you can only record the video on a mobile device, you can’t do it on a laptop, you can only do it on a mobile device. So it’s really easy to do, it’s really easy to record and upload. And personally, one things we’re going to try and do is toggle the hiring badge on and off, suggest you do as well, and then change the video. So every time we toggle it on and off, change the video. We’re now recruiting for paraplanners, we’re now recruiting for an advisor. And again, it’s just something different to make you stand out in a market that’s very noisy, and very competitive. So give that a go. Dan, I’ve just seen something come in the chat. Is there anything we need to deal with?

Dan Campbell 17:20
Really good question coming from Carrie, who asks: Is there a way to avoid being bombarded with recruitment agency offers or connections when posting a job on LinkedIn?

Phil Bray 17:31
There is, I’ve not found it yet. So at the bottom of our job advert, we put a little note that says “Respectfully, no agencies”, it doesn’t work. agencies don’t look at it. I guess we could move it to the top. But again, I suspect agencies won’t look at it. And I also think that, I mean, I’m not here to bash recruitment agencies, they’ve got a part to play. But obviously, we don’t want to pay money out if we can avoid it and I’m sure you don’t either. So I’ve just taken the view, Carrie, of clicking delete, delete, delete, when I get the emails in, and I’ve gone a bit further and just blocking their email addresses. And I’m hoping over time, that might do something. But I’m afraid now, I don’t know what the answer to that is. Other than those few things, which you could you could try. Sorry Carrie. Anything that’s followed up there?

Dan Campbell 18:31
No, no, that’s it.

Phil Bray 18:36
Right, number five. Develop a great exit process. So there’s a lot of focus when you bring people into a business about how you onboard them into your business. You see on LinkedIn, quite often pictures of swag that they have given to new candidates when they’ve joined. So there’s a lot of focus on the onboarding process. And I think there needs to be as much focus in the offboarding process as well, which is a horrible phrase but I couldn’t think of another one, offboarding when people leave. And for me, there’s significant benefits of making sure your offboarding process is as good as the onboarding process. And if we can get it to be a positive process that could lead to an employee returning in the future. It will certainly lead to them being an advocate for your business out in the wider world. And the advice community, the planning community. Whilst there’s 25-30,000 advisors and planners in the UK, plus another few 1000 paraplanners and admin staff. Whilst there’s a lot of people, it feels like a small community, and often the case that Dan and Abi have said this before, that it’s amazing how many people know each other. So it feels like a really small community. And therefore you want advocates for your business, and anybody who leaves your business, you want to really make sure that they are an advocate for your business. So if a potential candidate approaches them says what was it like to work for Yardstick? What was it like to work for Dan or work for Abi? Then the answer was really positive. And I think the heart of getting there is to make sure the offboarding process is as good as the onboarding process. And of course, if the offboarding process is good, it can lead to positive online reviews. Glassdoor is probably the leading review site for employees to review their employer, and it will rank in your Google listings. So if there is a review on there for you, for your business, and you cannot take your review down when it’s on there. And someone can put a review on Glassdoor without your permission. And the offboarding process is more likely to lead to positive reviews, and less likely to lead to a negative review. So number five, really focus on your offboarding process. Dan, is there a question?

Dan Campbell 21:24
So we’ve got a question in from Lena who asks: Is there a way to advertise for just local candidates on LinkedIn?

Phil Bray 21:33
Abi, you can put in job adverts up here. I don’t think that is a way of advertising for local candidates. But you can use the filtering questions that will be the obvious answer, I think there.

Abi Robinson 21:46
It does say when you go to post a job, and you’ve got job title, company, workplace type, job location, and then employment type, if you put in a specific job location, LinkedIn does say that it will be shown to job seekers searching for on-site jobs in that location. So there is some kind of algorithmic filtering system, if you give a location. If you want to get more technical, you can sign up for Recruiter, which is one of their premium platforms through LinkedIn Talent Solutions. So it should help just by posting a free job and put in a location. But yeah, look into LinkedIn Recruiter, if that’s something you want to take to a higher level.

Phil Bray 22:27
Yeah, that’s good advice. And I would use those filtering questions as well. So its filtering questions are typically, how many years experience? Do you have that sort of stuff? So you can have a filtering question. Do you live within X miles, 10 miles of NG1? Or whatever your numbers are and whatever the postcodes are. And then people would answer yes or no. And if they answer no, you can immediately discount them. So it’s a quicker way of filtering them. So I don’t think there’s a way of stopping someone applying for a role if they’re not in the local area, but you can make your life easier when it comes to filtering them out. And, serendipitous moment, number six, use filtering questions on the job board. It’s almost like we put that together, isn’t it? So I think the filtering questions on Indeed and LinkedIn, we found them incredibly useful. And as you get just the sheer number of applicants coming in, it can be a bit of a problem, to find that really good quality needle in the haystack. And the filtering questions, there’s all sorts of questions you can add on. Certainly on LinkedIn and Indeed, there’s some preset questions, you can put your own questions in there as well. Clearly, you might need to make sure that any questions you ask, comply with your HR and legal obligations, there’s certain things you can’t ask. But we’ve found those really, really useful. So we’ve been advertising for a Designer and Developer role. Recently, that was the most we’ve had on Indeed and LinkedIn. And I’ve been using those four filtering questions, which is just about people’s experience of using certain pieces of software, certain pieces of kit. And if they haven’t answered the question, I’ve just not looked at the CV. If they’ve answered all four questions, yes, I’ve then 100% looked at the CV. And that has really helped narrow down the amount of time it’s taken to review CVs. And we’ve seen an uptick in the quality of candidates recently, since we’ve been using the filtering questions for both the Designer and Developer role and Copywriter roles. It’s helped massively. And so for me, that’s the biggest takeaway today when it comes to how you filter out the noise and reduce the number of CVs that you’re being asked to look at to a more manageable level. Number seven, previous candidates. So we talk a lot at Yardstick about the fact we need to nurture prospects, potential clients. Most financial advisors convert maybe one in four, the other 75% there’s a lot of value in, there’s a lot of people who could become clients. And therefore, for me, it’s really important that we keep previous CVs because the same thing applies, there will be people who apply for jobs with you if the timing isn’t right, the fit might not have been right, they might not have quite had enough experience, come back in a year or twos time, that sort of thing. So I’d recommend keeping all good CVs, save them in folders by job role, like advisor, powerplanner, admin, etc. And then when a role opens up, that’s your first port of call, go back and have a look at those CVs. Make sure you have a system for keeping notes to remind yourself, because we all go to sleep and you might have forgotten what a candidate was like a year or two ago. So keep good notes. And then when a similar role opens up, revisit them, go and reach out to them directly on LinkedIn. Explain what happened last time, remind them about what happened last time, just say “Is now the time for another chat?” And that could save you a whole lot of pain and a whole lot of time. If you keep the CVs and go and re-look at them. Dan, is that a question? No it’s just a thank you isn’t it?

Dan Campbell 26:30
Yeah, we’ll take compliments and thanks, as well as questions. So yeah, send them all in!

Phil Bray 26:38
So number eight, embrace Instagram. I believe it’s called “The Gram” now, isn’t it? So embrace Instagram. And as I said earlier, my knowledge of Instagram can be written on the back of a really, really small postage stamp. So I’m going to hand over the rest of this section. And I’m going to come back and talk about LinkedIn and videos, to Abi, who’s going to talk about Instagram. You are gonna have to use your best Chris Witty impression Abi, and tell me when to move to the next slide.

Abi Robinson 27:08
I was gonna say, you’re gonna be the glamorous assistant now. So yes, if there’s anybody in the audience who’s glazed over and is wondering if there’s time to go make a cup of tea there is, but bear with me, because I think Instagram can be really useful. Whether you have loads of knowledge, very little knowledge, hopefully, you’ll see that it can be a very powerful tool. And the reason why I’ve crossed out that first question is because it’s almost irrelevant whether Instagram is right for you. It’s whether your ideal candidates are using Instagram. And I think the move to TikTok by a lot of younger people has opened the floor for older users to find a space on Instagram, which can make it even more valuable. It’s the third most used platform in the UK at the moment. So Facebook’s still top of the charts with about 56 million users coming in, with LinkedIn about 33 million. And then it’s Instagram with 34 million, way above Twitter, which is on about 18.4. So just goes to show it has got a lot of influence in the social media market. Perhaps unsurprisingly, is predominantly used by the younger generation. So 31.5%, as it says there, is 25 to 34 year olds, followed by the 18 to 24 year olds, it’s about 30%. But there are still some slightly older people on there. So the 35 to 44 year old age bracket is still 16.1% of the Instagram market, which is a wider spread than I anticipated. And I think if you’re hiring for paraplanner roles or administrative assistant roles or any kind of position that could be taken on board by somebody in that age bracket, then Instagram could be a place to recruit. Just a few more stats just to show the value of it. Instagram say that 90% of the people who use it follow a business account, which is obviously massive, and 79% of people applying for jobs at the moment are using social media as part of their job search. One in 10 find a job through social media as a result. And another survey found that, for recruiters, about 71% found that using social media was effective in decreasing the time to fill for non managerial salaried positions, which is likely to be who you’re trying to recruit for, I suspect. So I think all of those things, plus the variety of content types and the content streams that are available on LinkedIn, do make it a powerful place for us to be. May I?

Phil Bray 29:46
Yeah, absolutely.

Abi Robinson 29:48
Thank you. So I’m not going to spend too much time on this. It’s mainly for when you get the follow up email afterwards. There’s a couple of links in here if you did want to go and set up an account then this explains how to do it. But I did think it was worth mentioning a couple of bits. So when you do sign up, have a think about what email address you’re going to use. For our profile, it’s mine. But if there’s numerous people across the business who want to help manage your Instagram account, then just think about whether it needs to be a shared email address instead. And when it comes to the full name, you can use the business name and you can for the username, but just be a bit intelligent about it. So anybody who’s got a Google My Business Profile should have been receiving the monthly roundups of who’s looked at your profile, who’s been clicking on to your website, etc. But what I found that that email provides as well is a list of the top three words or phrases that people are searching for when they’re looking for your business online. And for us, just Yardstick and just Yardstick Agency, we’re getting way more hits than The Yardstick Agency. So scrapped the “The”, I know people are searching for Yardstick Agency on Google. So from an SEO perspective, let’s get our Instagram profile up on Google as a result of what I know people are searching for. So use what’s available to you and just be a bit intelligent when you’re thinking about setting up your account. Add in a bio and add in your website is self explanatory and switching to a business account, there’s a link there to a video that will show you how to do that is, again, really powerful when it comes to showcasing yourself both to clients and to candidates because as I’ve indicated there, you can set a business category that just showcases the services that you offer it also provide greater insights, better analytics and you can include contact details that you can’t on a personal account. So for example, your address, you’re probably not going to be putting that on your personal Instagram account. So if I do convince you, then that’s how to do it. Next slide, please.

Phil Bray 31:51
Yes, Chris.

Abi Robinson 31:55
So when I said, and this is where you need to bear with me, but I am going to run through it quickly. And anybody who knows Instagram, sorry for teaching you how to suck eggs. But unlike LinkedIn, where I say you’ve just got your feed that you would scroll through content. On Instagram, there’s two hubs of content, and you need to consider them both equally. One of which is the feed, which is where we’re all used to seeing social media content. And the other is your stories. And the difference being that your feed is your more curated strategic posts that hang around forever, the predominant place where you’re going to build your brand, whereas stories are more ephemeral. Unless you save them to a highlight on your page, they will disappear after 24 hours. So it’s a lot better for spontaneous, off the cuff, unofficial bits and pieces and for engaging with your audience on a more personal level, which when it comes to recruitment, I think we can all agree that’s a massive win in terms of building those relationships with potential candidates. Live videos are, as the name would suggest, a live broadcast real time video that you do as part of an Instagram story. And the benefit of those is that they get pushed right to the top of all of your follower’s stories, and they often get a notification to say “The Yardstick Agency have gone live”, which is something that again, you don’t get with other platforms. So that can be something to utilise as well. There is a lot more about each of these types in the notes section of the presentation. So when you get a copy of the slides, there’s more in there to save me having to go over it now. But in terms of the content types, on LinkedIn, you can post a photo, a video, a PDF, a poll. Instagram has the same kind of variety of options, you can post a single photo or a single video, which is quite self explanatory. Or the most popular type of content on Instagram is a carousel, which is up to 10 photos or videos contained within one post. And then reels, which are of TikTok generation, that’s what we have them to thank for, are short form vertical videos up to 60 seconds now editable in app, can be set to the music, and are really good for piecing together bits and pieces of photo and video content. Imagine somebody is renovating a house, a reel is the perfect way to show that because you can take two second videos throughout the entire renovation process and then at the end, bring them all together into a reel which will show over time the before, during and after. So it can work the same way in the business with some examples that I’ll give later on. But that just gives you an idea of the different types. And ideally, they should all feature as part of your strategy. But I would recommend starting small and building on that. So we know carousel posts do well and they take less effort. So let’s start there, look at the analytics, use the data to see what’s worked and what hasn’t, and then build upon it. So next slide please, we’ll actually get into the meat of it in terms of what a winning strategy looks like. Now everybody here is primarily thinking about recruitment at the moment. But if you set up your Instagram account and dive straight into “look, we’ve got this amazing paraplanner vacancy”, nobody’s gonna care, because they don’t know who you are, they don’t know what your brand looks like, they don’t know what the team looks like. You have to have both a business strategy and a recruitment strategy. And you have to build your brand before you can start encouraging people to join the business. So determine your goals, which might look like “I want to grow by this many followers” or “I want to achieve this much engagement” or “I want to hire this many candidates by nine months time” or whatever it might be. Who are your target audience? Speak to people across your team who are in roles similar to the ones you’re going to want to recruit into. What do they enjoy doing? How old are they? Find out things that can help you target people on Instagram. Look at your competition. If your peers are on Instagram, what are they doing? What works? What doesn’t work? If they’re not, you could have identified a great niche in the market. And then from there, you can develop your content plan, which is the next slide in terms of building the first strategy, which is your business strategy. So first thing you need to do is choose your posting schedule. So we’ve talked about the two different streams, your feed and your stories. I would recommend cycling through them over a two week basis. So maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday of the first week is a feed post, Tuesday, Thursday as a story, reverse it the following week, look at the data, find out what people have been engaging with. Ideally, you would post every weekday but again, this is all aspirational, you’ve got to start with whatever time and energy you’ve got and build up from there. Or you can outsource, had to get that in somewhere. Decide what you’re going to post. So again, in the notes section of this slide, there’s loads of content ideas, I’m not going to go through them all now, but just to give you an idea of some of the things that I think would work really well on Instagram, and it’s something that I want to do with our team is a day in the life. So if you’re hiring for a paraplanner, getting a paraplanner in your team to do short video clips of this is what a day in the life looks like for them, is going to work down the line when you’ve got candidates looking at your profile who want to know, really what does that job entail? We’ve all read job adverts that sounds so similar and they’re so dry, and you actually maybe get into the job and it doesn’t look anything like you thought it might. So this is a way of humanising that job advert. User generated content, just helps your clients achieve their dream time and then I want a round the world cruise, can they send you some photos of that? Can you show the things that you’ve been offering, which is going to help both a client and a candidate perspective. A Q&A, that’s good to do as a live video, Q&A about your business, about the team, about the role. When we get to thinking about recruitment, there’s loads and loads of options. And as I say, there’s more in the notes section. But the main thing is you have to be consistent, and you have to be patient, as any of my social media clients will know it isn’t an overnight process. And it’s a lot about human psychology, it’s a lot about playing the long game, and you aren’t going to see results overnight. So consistency, patience and willing to analyse the data is absolutely key. You could spend all day on Google trying to hack the algorithm and work out what’s best for you. But until you actually try it with your audience, you’re not going to know. So trial and error really is the best strategy. So once you built your brand, finally, we can think about recruitment. What does your recruitment strategy look like? Well, if the business strategy is done well, hence why I’ve spent quite a bit of time talking about it, the recruitment strategy will be so much easier. Because building the brand is the hard part. Once you’ve shown off you and the team and the business in the best light possible, that should do a lot of the work for you in terms of bringing in the right candidates. Don’t start building your brand at this point, just pull out some of the posts you have been doing and add in recruitment. And a lot of the ideas are going to be much the same in terms of content, and again, there’s some ideas in the notes. So get your Founder or Director to do a video talking about the role in more detail. Ask for somebody who’s already in that role to do a Q&A. This is all sounding very familiar. Have a video of somebody in the feed talking about how good that role is. It’s all the same things. You’re not reinventing the wheel, it’s just tweaking it so that you are trying to start bringing in candidates as opposed to clients. Where I’ve said consider outreach, we’ve talked about outreach a little bit already. It is harder to do on Instagram than LinkedIn, because LinkedIn is geared up for professional networking. Whereas Instagram, a lot of people don’t just use it professionally so it’s going to be harder from somebody’s profile, perhaps to see if they’re the ideal candidate for you. But it’s not impossible. And certainly if there’s recommendations within the team, you could outreach directly to people on Instagram and see if they’re interested. And like Phil said, you’re gonna get some people who aren’t, some people who might be, some people who won’t be at all, but it is still worth having that conversation. And a tip for that if you’re gonna do it, is outreach to people just after you posted a story because it will push to the top of their feed if they then follow you back. So there’s all these little tips and tricks that I don’t think people give Instagram credit for that you don’t get necessarily on other platforms. And make sure your direct messages are monitored in case people are sending in questions. Instagram is a lot more back and forth in that respect than LinkedIn is. And then the last slide is just a quick sum up of all of the things Instagram can help you with. So making sure you add your candidates on there before you put in all this hard work is really key, it isn’t going to work for everybody. As much as I’ve said, I think it can work for a lot of people. But if they are, get your account set up, it can be a very powerful tool, because this variety of content streams and types make it a really exciting platform. And it isn’t all pictures of what people have had for lunch like it was eight years ago, there are really interesting things that you can be doing on their business wise. The winning strategy needs to combine both business and recruitment and you need to brand build before you can think about inviting candidates to apply. And like with any social media work, you need to be patient and consistent. And if you haven’t got the time, then you can consider outsourcing somebody like us.

Phil Bray 41:06
Thank you Abi. That day in the life video is a fantastic idea, which we will come back to in a minute. I’m really keen that advisers and planners, where the target audience hangs out on Instagram, use it and embrace it. So early in the new year, maybe later on this year, if there was demand for it, we would absolutely be happy to run webinars on explaining more about Instagram, and spending a full hour diving into that sort of stuff in a bit more detail. So if you think that will be useful, just put a note in the chat and just say yes, because that will help us understand whether there’s demand for it, whether there’s a call for that sort of webinar to explain more about Instagram. So back into a world that I understand: LinkedIn. So really key that today is as practical as possible and giving you little hints and tips, little things that you can do that will have a material difference to your marketing. And we’re going to focus on LinkedIn, then we’ll do website, then we’ll do a video. So number seven, ways to use LinkedIn. Use paid for job adverts, and they work really well. Yes, you can use the free version but if you put a bit of budget behind it, and I do mean a bit, £5-10 a day, for a relatively short period of time, you will get more candidates. We’ve found that actually, the best quality of candidates and the significant volume of candidates comes in the first few days after you’ve posted a job, and it tends to tail off after that. So one of things we’ve started doing is putting job adverts up on LinkedIn and then taking them down after seven to 10 days. You might come back and repost them a few days later, but just keep refreshing the posts. And the other thing on LinkedIn, which we found to our cost in the past, you can’t schedule a closed date, you can on Indeed but you can’t schedule a closed date on LinkedIn. So if you don’t close it, they’re gonna keep billing you. So just make sure that you have a note somewhere else that you can close the job advert. And, of course, it doesn’t just have to be paid for ads on LinkedIn. There’s the more organic side of things where you will be posting your current jobs from your corporate account and from your personal account. And also potentially sending direct messages to connections. So one of the things that you can do, and should be doing, is future proofing your outreach by building connections with potential future candidates. So if you’re a business owner, and you know over the next couple of years, that you’re going to be wanting to recruit, for example, paraplanners then now’s the time to start sending connection requests to paraplanners. You’re not sending a request by saying “Are you thinking of moving jobs? We’ve got this vacancy open”, you’re just, as one professional to another, trying to connect with paraplanners. Key benefit to that when the time is right for you to recruit for that paraplanner position, you’ve got a bunch of paraplanners on LinkedIn that you are already connected to, and therefore you can put a message into their inbox. They’re more likely to see the posts that you put up organically about the role. And you’ve already got that little audience of paraplanners. And if you can bear with little audience of paraplanners, little audience of administrators, little audience of advisers and planners depending on what your recruitment needs are, you’re future proofing things, you’re giving yourself people that you can reach out to through direct messages and are going to see your organic posts. And it’s a relatively simple job, not saying a business owner should be doing that, I’m probably saying somebody should be doing it on behalf of a business owner. Get yourself LinkedIn Premium, it’s £30-40 a month, do a search for paraplanners in a certain area and start sending messages out, and you can broadly send 200 unsolicited connection requests a week. That’s number two. Number three, as I said, send direct messages to connections. And that might be the first message, “We’re recruiting for this position, is now the time for a new challenge?” If it’s not, “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt today”. If it is, “Let’s have a chat”. And of course, if they reply, like we said earlier, and they say “Actually, no, now’s not the time”, then follow up with a “Thanks, do you know anybody who might be? Do you have anybody in your network who we should be talking to?” So future proofing your future outreach, and then sending direct messages, they work hand in hand. And then obviously, like regular posts, promoting your vacancies, push them from your corporate account, push them from your personal account. And personally, I would be adding if you can social proof in the comments or social proof in the post. So you might want an employee net promoter score, you might have calculated that your staff turnover is incredibly low. You might have a video, Abi’s day in the life video, I think it’s a great idea, you could put that in there as well. There’s all sorts of things you can do, just to show that you are a great place to work. And then get your team and other people within your business to support the post by adding comments, “It’s a great place to work”, “I’m really looking forward to seeing who applies for this”. Whatever it is, but adding comments, we all know from previous webinars, that comments are the oxygen that give posts life. The more comments a post gets, the more people who will see it. It’s just a fact of LinkedIn’s algorithm. So get your team to support by adding comments, liking, but don’t get them to share by clicking the Share button, get them to write their own post and link back. And of course, if you’re putting a link to a job page on your website, make sure that link goes in the comments as well. Number six, turn on the “I’m Hiring” badge, really important. We talked about the benefits of that, maybe changing the video as well. And then use the search facility to identify potential candidates. And this goes back to what we said earlier about the direct outreach. So if you’ve got LinkedIn Premium, it’s a bit easier to do the search and you get the ability to do more searches. So use a search facility to identify, I don’t know, paraplanners in Nottingham. That will bring you a list of paraplanners up, you can then filter that by first level connection, so you’re already connected to them, second and third. You can then visit their profile, to start understanding whether they’re the right type of candidate for you. And of course, if you visit their profile, they’ll get a notification to say you’ve visited their profile. So it demonstrates that you’re interested in them, and then get in touch. Now, if you already connected to them, you can clearly send a longer message with a link back to the job advert. If you’re not already connected to them, you can send them a connection request, got example of that in a minute, you can send a connection request with a covering message, you’re limited to 300 characters. Or if you’ve got a Premium account, you can use InMails. And I think the Premium account gets you 30 InMails a month. I think they’re carried over from one month to the next as well. And if someone replies, you get the credit added back. So the search facility is incredibly useful. And all you’re doing is doing what recruiters do, and then charge you for, frankly, by using that search facility. Might be a bit unfair on recruiters, you know what I mean? So, do your search, demonstrate interest by looking at their profile and understanding if they’re right fit, and then reach out to them. Three ways of reaching out to them, if you’re already connected, you can send a long message, if you’re not already connected, send them a connection request. If you’ve got the ability to send InMails, you can send them that InMail. And what we’ve put together here, and you’ll see it on the follow up, is just a quick message. I believe it fits the 300 character limit, depending on how long their name is or how long your name is, it fits the 300 character limit. So use something like that. And then of course, if they reply with “Thanks, but no thanks”, send a message to ask, “Who else do you know that might be right fit?”. Right, websites, how do we do this? People will be looking at your website, might be because they’re just looking to see if you’ve got any vacancies right now, they might have clicked a specific link to a specific job from Instagram, LinkedIn, anywhere else that you advertising. So our view is that you have a careers page and on that page, you can put some social proof like we’ve talked about already, and you have a little bucket for each of the jobs, you’ve got open. So you might have an advisor bucket, a paraplanner bucket and an admin bucket. Then when someone clicks one of those buckets, they go through to a page where you’ve got your full job advert. And the last webinar we did on recruitment, the first part of that webinar talked about how to write a job advert, go back and have a look at that if you want some help there. Make the page easy to find, put it in that top navigation, put a link to it from the team page as well. So make it really easy for candidates to find that page, if they’re just looking at your website. And as research shows, 88% of candidates search for jobs by a mobile device. Thinking about it, it probably makes sense. So therefore, you need to make sure that your website as a whole, but also the careers page in particular and the job advert in particular, are easy to read on mobile devices because that’s what most people are looking at. When it comes to adviser planner, websites, about two thirds of traffic is on desktop devices, PCs, laptops, etc. and only about 25% is on mobile devices. When it comes to recruits, it’s significantly more that’s on mobile devices, so the pages have got to get look good on a mobile. And then in terms of social proof, and you would put the social proof on your parent careers page, the one that sits at the top of the hierarchy and the individual adverts. And what would you put on there? You might put your employee survey results. If you do an employee survey, you might put those results on there. And of course, that survey could be as a result of something you do yourself, or could be as a result of the Professional Advisor Awards. If you’ve won any awards as a business, put those on, might not be specifically about being a firm to work for, but still put those on. Team member videos, I think Abi came up with some great ideas there. On the individual pages for advisor, paraplanner, admin staff, you can have a day in the life of an administrator. A Day in the Life of a paraplanner, I think that works brilliantly. You can put your Glassdoor reviews on there, you can embed those in there. And of course, you can then put the usual client and advisor driven social proof. And we all want to think that we’re working for companies that are doing good, so having a client video on there shows the value that you deliver to clients, and everyone wants to work for businesses that’s delivering for their clients, why wouldn’t we? So showing that you do those things, again, really powerful. So think about the social proof, not only what you put on your website but more generally, on those careers pages, on those job adverts. Then we’re going to finish off with videos. Three ways to use videos. So for me, team member videos, what’s the best thing about working here? So what’s the best thing about working with The Yardstick Agency? Really quick cuts, maybe if you have six people, 10 seconds, you’ve got a minute video explaining about the best things about working there. Would you recommend working? And why? How would you describe the culture? There’s some examples here on that Henwood Court website. And I love the idea of a day in the life. That day in the life video might be a little bit longer. I suspect whilst those videos that we’ve got on the screen, 60 seconds would probably be enough. I suspect the day in the life video could be a little bit longer, because you can get away with a bit more detail. And then where do you put that video? So you could introduce, as Abi said earlier, you could get the founder the business, maybe the line manager, the person they’ll be working for to record a video and place it at the top of the advert that you’ve got on your website. I think that can be really powerful, so someone sees who they’re going to be working for. So the next graphic designer that comes into Dan’s team sees Dan speaking to them, explaining about the role at the top of the advert, but it starts to create that immediate connection. So that’s something that we’re certainly going to look at, and I think other people should do as well. And then, as we’ve said, a few times already, change that LinkedIn image to a video. So that not only do people see the hiring badge, but they see what you are hiring for and then you can keep doing that every time you’ve got a different position. So a few different ways to use video to impress other people. And of course, let’s think about how we can help each other. As we just finish off, really interested to see whether there are any more questions, really happy to answer those questions. We’re going to send this follow up out later on today, because I’m aware that we’ve gone through a lot today. And there’s a lot of hopefully, really useful little hints and tips. When you add them together, it will make a material difference to your recruitment. So really happy to hang around and answer any other questions that you’ve got right now. But also interested to hear what’s working for you? What’s working right now? Think about the last person you recruited, how did they find you? Was it a LinkedIn advert? Was it an Instagram post, etc? What’s not working? What are you struggling with, and what would you like to try out of today’s webinar that you haven’t tried already? So just put some notes in the chat, if you would, otherwise, it’s going to be quite a silent end this webinar. So don’t leave me hanging, put a few notes in the chat just about the things that are working for you right now. Like I say, think about that last recruit, what’s not and what else you would like to try. And again, really happy to answer any other questions that you’ve got. Otherwise, Dan, what was the response to the Instagram question that I asked?

Dan Campbell 57:16
It was a resounding “Yes, please”. So people really want some Instagram tips, hints, webinars. So I think whatever we can muster, people want to see. So I feel that Abi’s going to be quite popular on these webinars.

Phil Bray 57:34
I can vouch for that, because I’ll learn something as well.

Dan Campbell 57:37
Absolutely. And then going forward, so Carrie mentioned: Candidates seem to hold the cards in terms of working from home/remote working, because they can get it elsewhere. So that’s sort of a main comment that they’ve got.

Phil Bray 57:51
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I don’t know how everybody else felt, but at the start of the pandemic, I assumed you’d all be heading back to the office. Dan remembers probably quite well, me standing up on the 17th of March 2020, saying, “Cheers, everybody, we’ll see you in a couple of months”. It didn’t work out like that really did it? And as the year went on, we realised that actually flexible working was really quite useful. And therefore we’ve given people hybrid working so they can work where they where they choose, providing it’s appropriate for the task that they’re doing. But what it has done for us is it’s widened the talent pool by which we can recruit. It’s significantly widened the number of potential candidates we can have. I completely accept that it’s different for some financial advisors and financial buying businesses and there are significant issues around data protection, but it does widen that ball. Carrie, what are you doing? We have suggested they can after probation? That makes sense. But it does, in my experience, increase the size of the candidates. Right, those were the bells for 11 o’clock. There we go in the background. If nobody else has got any questions? Oh, we’ve got something just come in now.

Dan Campbell 59:17
Yeah, let’s finish off with Lynette’s comment there. “So our approach to culture is providing a hit with candidates. This seems to be a high priority with people with flexible working. We struggled to find experienced individuals but are attracting new talent and our website helps with this. And we’ll look into the Professional Advisor’s Best Financial Advisor to Work For awards to help that.”

Phil Bray 59:40
Thanks, Lynette. I’m bound to agree with you on your website seeing as we developed it, but the culture of your business, I know it’s absolutely amazing. And I think it’s one of the biggest things that probably attracts people to you and allows you to retain some really, really talented people. Right, hope that’s been useful. Watch the feedback, watch the replay because I’m aware there’s a lot of stuff in there. And we’ll be back next month. Cheers everybody. Bye bye.

Dan Campbell 1:00:12
Take care guys, bye.