I believe that content is the most important thing you can do for your community aside from understanding and researching in order to build those resources (content) that help advance the community you are building, growing, supporting or trying to reach. Like most things in my professional career, I fell into human resources as well as the world of blogging and content. I did, however recognize a good thing.

The History of Blogging4Jobs

In 2007, I started Blogging4Jobs as a way to build a relationship with job seekers. I was an HR Director who was actively working to build a candidate pipeline for my company. Our quarterly headcount numbers shifted sometimes dramatically and I would be expected to hire hundreds of new employees in just a couple of weeks with a very small team. The blog was a way to help share resources with the job seeker audience while also building a bench of job seekers to fill my openings.

In 2009, my blog made national media headlines. I’ve been featured in most major media as a result of the content, resource and information we shared. I decided my blog should become my full time job and I set out as a small business owner who was going to make a living with my blogging.

While I achieved my goal of being a pro-blogger, Blogging4Jobs changed. I pivoted the community to serve who I felt was an underserved community which was the HR and recruiting industries. And I started experimenting with the types of content and resources that would most benefit those communities. I now own multiple websites and at present we have 5 that publish content on the regular. Some people collect shoes. I collect blogs. My recent purchase was www.workplacewines.com.

Types of Content Marketing in Recruiting and Job Seeker Industries

There are as many ice cream flavors are they are types of content. The types of are limitless which can make focusing your content and engagement types extremely overwhelming.

 

 

Pictured above are my current favorite content flavors. The key to content isn’t originality its quality as well as creating content that suits the community, but most importantly focusing your efforts using five areas to really drive engagement, build relationships and help provide resources to your community.

• Research. This starts with understanding your audience or in the case of job boards, audiences. More on that in the paragraph and corresponding graphic below.
• Measure. Job boards must go beyond click per candidate, web traffic and other paid promotion methods. As a recruiter, I’m interested in source of hire, engagements per hire or applicant, turnover by source and the type of resources my candidates are visiting on my career site or community.

• Resource Focused. Content is a balance between education and entertainment. The content should be specific in that it attracts your targeted audience and fulfills a resource need. One of our most popular podcasts (Episode 28 FMLA, Workers’ Compensation & Disability Update): with over 1,500 direct downloads covers the important employment law topic of FMLA, ADA and Workers’ Compensation. It was created after hosting a webinar on the same topic with over 70+ attendee questions our speakers couldn’t answer during the recording.

• Get Weird. As I mentioned web visitors want to be educated as well as entertained and sometimes the best way to gain the attention of an audience is through non-traditional methods. Maybe it’s a mash up of job seeker memes. For me, it was a themed week on our blog. We focused on a single topic for an entire week and invited guest contributors. We had 36 blogs in total publish in 7 days on the topic of #BigDataHR as well as a corresponding Twitter chat and webinar. Our efforts resulted in over 50 million Twitter impressions. #BigDataHR was the trending topic in the HR and recruiting industry for two straight weeks.

• Recreate. My business is a small shop. Usually I a blog post gains traction, and I work with my freelancer team to expand our content channels. We “recreate” our efforts by expanding a blog to a webinar to an ebook to a podcast. This offers us a wider reach to our intended audience, continues to engage the community at large and makes the best use of our time. As I mentioned, we are an extremely small team.

The Real Challenge: A Dual Sided Industry

Job boards and aggregators are facing a unique challenge in the HR and recruiting industry. They are dual facing meaning they have to engage, build relationships and provide resources for two separate communities. Those two communities are the job seeker and the recruiter. Great content can serve both but in most cases they way in which you engage these two related communities is completely unique.

 

Recognizing the dual sided marketing and community challenge in key for the job board industry. Talent acquisition and recruiting teams are becoming more aggressive in their efforts to build talent communities, establish employment brands and using social networks as well as online communities to source for candidates internally. Recently, I wrote about how Oracle is using Google Forms to recruit sales professionals. These new breed marketers are extremely disruptive. Job board owners and operators should take note as they begin building, enhancing or growing how they engage their own communities.

You can learn more about my content and community philosophy by  viewing my presentation from the JobG8 North American Summit I’m giving today (Tuesday). For my regular blog readers, I’d be interested in knowing what types of content you most enjoy and how job boards can better serve the recruiter as well as job seeker communities.