Statistically, less than 10% of recruiters write a blog. Less than 5% wrote more than 100 blog posts. That is one in twenty! There is a number of interesting theories why recruiters are rarely bloggers. My own opinion is that by nature of the recruitment as a business it is really about communication and social interaction. I mean recruiters are natural networkers. This is a core skill a recruiter is effectively selling in conjunction with the sales skills. Guess what, bloggers are more often than not, not so good networkers. To write a blog post you need to sit and think and write. Not really a social activity, is it? To write 100 blog posts, quite a lot of this sitting and thinking and typing is involved. And quite often a blogger needs to write a lot to perfect his technique, understand his skills and his audience before the blog gets any decent traction. And then, and only then it all changes, from the solitude to online social networking on steroids! A good niche blogger is more known and has a far greater influence than the editor of the industry magazine. It is to do with the payroll, with the freedom, with the social aspect of the blog as a publication.
The best recruitment bloggers I have seen have turned their career path completely. They blog. They teach. They train. They do not recruit any more. My best guess is that they have been in the wrong job in the first place.
I have spent my past 5 years preaching blogging to recruiters. I can tell you one thing: It was a tough 5 years! From the largest recruitment agencies to the start-ups I always had the same issue. They will be very excited about starting blogging after the training. But most of the recruiters will just get to that stage, being excited about it. But never post a single blog post. Well, one can only bring the horse to the water.
A few clients in the last 5 years have made some extraordinary successes. The one just got published yesterday: A blog post is worth €20,000 by the great Peter Cosgrove. Reading it, just makes me feel good since my last 5 years didn’t go to waste. It’s really fulfilling to see your clients doing things you thought them, and doing them right.
12 replies on “Why Recruiters don’t like blogging?”
Hi Ivan,
I can totally relate to everything you mentioned. I’ve been “thinking” about writing a blog for the last 5 years. I did write one, but it stayed in draft mode. What advice could you give me to write post my first blog?… I totally want to do this.
Cheers,
future blogger Orlando
The reason so many recruiters don’t blog? A lot of them are semi-literate. Oh they talk a good game, I’ll give them that, but put them in front of a PC and they can’t string together a coherent sentence. Trust me on this on, I’ve met and received communications from hundreds throughout my illustrious career in HR. A mish-mash of barrow boys who weren’t good enough for the City!
@E J Pugh – well as in any profession there is those that are more and there that are less ‘professional’. The recruitment is no difference. The fact that there is no formal education to become a recruiter, anyone can become one without much training. Not surprisingly, you might get the ones who lack on some skills to do their job. They simply never got a chance to learn those.
PS. English is not my native language. My grammar and spelling is what many people laugh about. And they have all the right to do it! What I did find more often than not is that people who notice the poor grammar is the ones that do not get the meaning. Or I write about something where they recognise themselves (like your example of lack of certain skills). And trough hurts.
@Orlando – I have been training the recruiters how to blog for many years now. Some clients that become friends as well gave me a nickname ‘Ivangelist’. I guess it’s because they realised the big hurdle I have put in front of myself. My success rate in training a good blogger is actually low. I have to admit that. I guess it’s simply because I train people who while training realise that it’s not really that easy and that it does require a lot of effort. Especially to start blogging. Some trainees just find out that that blogging thing is just not for them (An easy way out? – yes for quite some of them).
I guess my best advice is to pick up a topic you want to write that you will be comfortable to write about for a long time. Pick something you know about, and you think people might be interested in. Here is the example. I run job boards for 10 years. I always had to build tremendous traffic on those web sites – since it is in essence the traffic / job seekers / applications / CVs one is selling when running a job board. I realised I know quite a lot about what is nowadays called SEO. Simply since I have been doing that search engine optimisation for many, many years. I started a blog called http://www.SEOConsultant.ie. I wrote there everything I knew about SEO. A year later I got a first phone call – a company who asked me if I can do that SEO thingy for themselves. Today that SEO consultant is a standalone and very profitable business. Last year I was approached from the first potential buyers as well.
So what to blog about? Something that you know well about and try to think what of your knowledge might be beneficial to others.
Let me know if this helps?
Here is an example of a London recruiter who won 5 clients and increased site traffic by 20% 6 weeks after training their staff in content driven marketing aka blogging! http://bit.ly/Ayciym
Thanks Colm!
Well 20% increase in traffic in 6 weeks just after starting blogging means that they didn’t have much ‘organic’ traffic on the site in the first place. And that is quite common in the recruitment world. Recruiters invest in the new web sites, but fail to realise that this was only the initial investment for the ‘platform’, and that the real work only begins there.
But a good start! 20% traffic increase, by 20%,… nice steps in the right direction…
Interesting was to note that they got 5 new clients and made 3 placements in the same 6 weeks – directly as the outcome of a blog!
Hi Ivan. I enjoyed your post – thanks. What makes you say that they didn’t have much organic traffic in the first place? Could it not be that their blog content was well planned for their audience, and well tagged?
@Tim: Thanks for your comment! Where do I say that?
Hi, where did you get those stats? I think it’s probably because recruiters deal with enough paperwork, and just don’t have time to dedicate to a blog. This will probably change though, as the larger companies institute a social media plan. – Charles
@Charles – I have analysed the LinkedIn Recruitment network members in Ireland. They I looked at all the twitter accounts of all the Irish Recruiters: http://www.irishrecruiter.ie/. From the LinkedIn Profiles and Twitter Bios I collected all the blogs I could find. The result is less than 10% recruiters have an active blog.
Hi
Great blog as usual Ivan.
Many of my clients are blogging – we have trained them to do it and helped them with their social media strategy.
I think that blogging is assumed to be complicated – it’s not, it just takes a little time and a decent enough platform to post the content. Things are a lot easier than they used to be, and recruiters are a lot more switched on about social networking. They just need a little support to help them make a start.
What has also helped is a drive towards recruiters having more sector specialisms which gives consultants something to actually talk about – as opposed to a lot of the more traditional recruitment agency models where recruiters were generalists.
(When you sell you company, Ivan, can you save a little space for me on your private island? ;-)
Hi Lisa,
My blog posts aren’t half as good as your cookies!
You are right. The specialist recruiters are in most cases much better bloggers. The ‘generalist’ recruiters usually write articles like – ‘How to write a CV’, and ‘What to wear for the interview’. That is all cool, but there is tons of those already.
An industry specialist recruiter has a unique knowledge. Like what skills are getting harder and harder to find – hence the salaries or rates for such skills is going to increase. Actually if one has been recruiting for a long time in a certain niche, you can most likely get a gig as an advisor for Minister of Education and Economy as well. Both of them have a lot to learn from you.
Blogging about such topics – where a recruiter has a lot to say, and very few people have the knowledge about it and the data to back it up – makes the blog popular, and quoted and linked to.
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