In this episode Matt Alder talks to Mervyn Dinnen Content Marketing Expert for HR and Recruiting
The importance of content marketing has grown significantly in the last two years, however it is still under used in the Recruiting and HR space. In this interview Matt and Mervyn discuss just what content marketing is and how it can be used for recruiting, employer branding and customer engagement. Mervyn shares what is working and gives us his 7 tips for producing great content. They also discuss the current state of Social Recruiting as well as Poldark and Kittens……
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:16]:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to episode seven of the Recruiting Future podcast. One of the things that’s really fascinated me in the last two years has been the rise of content marketing. It’s something that I feel we don’t use enough of in recruitment, and I think that might be because many employers and indeed recruitment agencies don’t necessarily understand the benefits it can bring to them. Today’s interview guest is Mervyn Dynan, who is an expert on content marketing for recruitment. He talks us through some of his experiences and also gives us his seven top tips for producing outstanding content.
Matt Alder [00:00:54]:
Hi, everyone, and welcome to another Recruiting Future podcast interview. I’m very excited to be talking to my very good friend Mervyn Dinnen today. Hi, Merv, how are you?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:06]:
I’m well, thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:01:07]:
Good stuff. For those of you who may not have heard of you before, if there’s actually anyone out there who hasn’t, could you just sort of introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:01:17]:
Okay. My name is Mervyn Dinnen and I help recruiters and HR teams with content marketing and social engagement. My background is a recruiter and an early adoptor of social recruiting. I was then social media manager for a digital recruitment brand. And over the last year, 18 months, I’ve been a blogger, report writer, content creator for HR technology and recruitment technology companies and for recruitment agencies, and also helping train HR teams in how to better use social media to attract talent.
Matt Alder [00:01:51]:
Cool. Thank you. I think people, people who will have come across you, will have come across you because of your, you know, the prestigious amount of great content that you produce. Kind of want to sort of talk about content marketing. In this particular interview, could you, you know, give us your definition of content marketing? What is content marketing and how is it sort of relevant to recruitment?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:02:16]:
I think, I mean that there are many different definitions. So if I think about it from a recruitment viewpoint, I think it is. It is using content. And by that I. It can be written content. So it can be a blog, it can be a white paper, it can be a report, it can be something on your website interviewing clients or thought leaders in your space. It can be verbal, it can be a video, it can be a video interview, something like we’re doing here. It can be a podcast, it could be a webinar. It’s content you create that helps to as opposed to sell. It’s not about the promotion not about how widely you share it. It’s about building a body of knowledge so that people know who you are, what you stand for. If you’re an organization looking to recruit, you can use it to establish employer, brand, to talk about the kind of place where you are to work. You can use it to establish some kind of thought leadership in terms of your marketplace, what it is you do, or generally entertain and amuse. I mean, I wouldn’t do too many funny cat memes, but sometime they can work.
Matt Alder [00:03:25]:
Everyone loves a kitten after all. So I think that’s really interesting. But I think it’s going to be a very new area to lots of people in the industry, whether they’re an employer or an agency or indeed a supplier. I mean, does it actually work? What kind of feedback and results are you getting? Are your clients getting from taking this kind of approach?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:03:55]:
Well, I suppose there are two angles that they would look at. One would be the interaction primarily through social channels, or what they’re tracking through Google Analytics, maybe in terms of visits to their website. And that is kind of how widely it’s shared, how often people comment on it, interact with it, and the way in which they consume it. So is it something where they are maybe looking at that business to be some form of thought leadership or some kind of beacon of best practice in the industry? Is it kind of insightful, something different? If it’s something that maybe you’re teaching them. I’m writing with a search company at the moment, a search business. I’m writing some stuff for them in which we’re trying to establish a kind of dialogue going with senior HR people and HR directors. So we’re writing very much about what’s on the HRD agenda. So it’s not the more transactional side, but it’s very much about how business is evolving and what HR needs to do. I’m currently writing a series of reports for a business who’ve been doing research into what global businesses do in certain areas of recruitment and talent. And they’ve got some data and I’m writing kind of, you know, fairly long reports. And a good example of this is that that it starts with a blog. And if you like the blog, there is a shortened version of the white paper that you can download. And obviously if you like more and want to know a bit more behind it, then there is obviously a download you can pay for to give you more insight. So that is a way that you are able to use content marketing on three levels to try and get people tied in with your brand and maybe looking at you to be the kind of people who can educate them in what they need to know.
Matt Alder [00:05:56]:
Cool. And you talked about lots of different formats of content there. Is there anything that you feel is working better than anything else? Is it photo, is it video, is it text? Does it depend on the audience? What’s the thinking behind the formats that you use?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:06:19]:
I think that it depends on the message and it depends on the kind of people that you are looking to, to reach with the marketing. So I think for a lot of businesses in this space, an element of it needs to be written. And I think plenty of businesses now understand the need to keep a regular blog going so that they can showcase the kind of things they do, the kind of things they think give their perspective on the market. For recruiters, maybe they’re educating job seekers, maybe they’re educating clients in how better to recruit. If it’s an in house recruitment team, then it’s their way of maybe showing people what a good place I said they are to work. I think that with images, if it’s purely image, and obviously there are some fairly good examples using Facebook, but if there’s too much image of what a great place we are to work, it maybe sells a culture that isn’t supported. So I think it needs to be a balance. I think there’s a lot more now I’m seeing done, particularly around the technology companies of doing kind of thought leadership panels. I’ve sat on a couple myself recently where a business gets three or four people together to talk around a topic and then they will maybe be talking for an hour or so and that might be edited down to two or three shorter videos. And that I find is a very useful way. People like video. They can consume them in different ways. They can consume them when they’re on the go, when they’re second screening, when they’re commuting. And I think people like, rather than just reading all the time to actually listen to some people kind of maybe expand on their views and opinions. So I think, I think video is underused and I think the kind of thing you and I are doing here on a podcast, I think that’s very underused.
Matt Alder [00:08:10]:
Yeah, no, I would agree, I would agree with that. I mean, I love podcasts, which is part of the reason that I, that I started this one. And I, you know, I’m surprised that more people, more people aren’t using them. And I found that, you know, looking at the stats of when, when people listen to this particular show, it’s very Much while they’re commuting, you know, sometimes in the evenings on, you know, Sunday, Sunday evenings, on their way to work. You know, it seems to be a really good medium for reaching people, you know, at different times of day.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:08:45]:
Well, if anybody listens to this on a Sunday evening, I’m sorry, I’m no match for Poldark, although I’ve rather dated this now. I’m sorry about that.
Matt Alder [00:08:54]:
That’s all right. It was on. It was 70s as well. I’m sure it’ll be on. I’m sure it’ll be on again. So obviously the driver behind content marketing is the move towards social media, towards networking and all those kind of things. Traditionally, if there is such a thing as a tradition, in the last sort of four or five years, social recruiting seems to be about just sharing job postings and things like that. How are you seeing it change with content and how do you think it should sort of change? It should change further social recruiting?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:09:37]:
Well, I think that one of the things, there are kind of thought leaders within the recruitment space who will kind of say that we’re getting very good at attracting people that we don’t want to hire and we’re not getting that good at attracting the people we do want to hire. And so a lot of the kind of sharing of job postings and maybe sharing of fairly adenine content attracts a lot of people, but it might not be the people we really want to reach who will engage with what we do. So I think that businesses are trying to use it a bit more, but I think there is a tendency to create a piece of content and then kind of share the hell out of it. If I can use that expression across every medium, every platform, every 15 minutes and get everybody in the office to share it at 10 minute intervals or something. So I think you need a balance. I think you need to use it to spark conversation. I mean the content needs to communicate, inform, educate and inspire. And to do that you need a range. So I think the idea, I mean, I would say the people who are using it most effectively have a range of written, verbal, visual, graphic, infographic content that they share at different times. I mean, ultimately social recruiting is knowing what you have to offer, knowing the role you have or the culture, the brand you have that you’re trying to attract people into. And I don’t mean, I’m not being glib when I say it’s about having the right conversations with the right people at the right time. And content is the way you kind of reel them in and you know, there are seven. I have seven key components of good content, which I can explain in a minute. But I think that too many, if you look at the research that’s done around people using social channels for recruitment, too many of them still using it to share jobs, to search for candidates, to look for referrals. You know, here’s a great job. Do you know anybody? And not enough of them are still using it to actually have a conversation, just get people talking around a topic.
Matt Alder [00:11:49]:
Yeah, absolutely. That makes sense. In fact, my final question to you was going to be, you know, can you share us some sort of top tips for people getting started? But now you’ve mentioned your sort of seven key principles of great content, then I’m afraid you have to share them with us.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:12:06]:
Right? I will do. I will do. In no particular order. I mean, first thing I would say if I go one step back, one of the American authors, speakers and thought leaders around content marketing, who you will know of, is a guy called Gary Vaynerchuk, and he will always often say that every business is now a media business.
Matt Alder [00:12:26]:
Absolutely.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:12:27]:
And the only way to compete is to become an authority on the content you’ve got and to have people who can tell your story. And I think, I mean, for me, number one, is to keep it simple. People like messages that are clear, that are easy to understand. They don’t necessarily like over complicated. I know that if you’re trying to engage maybe a senior audience or maybe directors, you think that you’ve got to have something that looks like some kind of piece of university research or something, but you know, those guys will read Forbes at the weekend and share kind of, you know, 14 things successful people do in the morning or something like that, because they find it amusing. So I think, don’t assume that your audience don’t prejudge what your audience will look for in content. The second one, be clear. Clarity is important. No buzzwords, make it plain, make it clear that what your message is. Don’t talk in jargon. I think you need to show passion as number three. So you need people who can create the content, tell your story if you like, who mean it, talk it like you mean it, believe it, be passionate, and it’s quite infectious. Leading off of that, you need focus. So one of the key things I will explain to companies when I meet them for the first time is do you know what the problems are or the situations that the people you’re trying to reach are in? Do you know what’s on their mind? Do you know what’s affecting them at the moment because the content you need to create should be focused around what those people want to read and know about. I think humor is important. It doesn’t have to be full of jokes and funny cat memes or pictures of puppies or anything, but you need to somehow show that you enjoyed it. No in jokes, no current fads, you know, I mean, no kind of five jobs for Zane, what’s his name from One Direction to do when he leaves or that kind of thing sounds funny, but in a week’s time when 5,000 businesses have done riff on it, there’s nothing to make you stand out.
Matt Alder [00:14:35]:
So nothing about Poldark then?
Mervyn Dinnen [00:14:38]:
No, no, no, nothing about Poldark. Sorry, I was just running a Sunday evening and what people could be doing while I was on Honesty is important. So because it’s content and because you’re creating it, it’s easy for people to make their business or their offering sound a lot grander and a lot more far reaching than it is, particularly if they’re trying to sell and cover every base. So I would say that if you’re trying to create content that addresses a client or a potential client or a potential candidate’s issues, don’t offer a solution that you don’t deliver. So it’s got to be something that you know you’re on top of because otherwise it’s not authentic. When people start to interact with you, they’ll realize that you can’t actually, you’re not actually talking it as if you mean it. And I think the thing is action, the last thing is then there needs to be some form of a call to action to inspire somebody. Whether it’s to make a comment, whether it’s to share it, to recommend it, to pick up the phone, or, sorry, that’s a bit old fashioned to message you in some way. And I think that people sometimes forget that. And it’s easy to create a blog, a video which is really interesting to watch. At the end of it, the person consuming it might say, well, so what? Great, but then I’ll move on to see the next video now. So you want people to actually want to contact you off the back of it.
Matt Alder [00:15:59]:
Okay, fantastic. I think there are some absolutely fantastic tips there that people will find very, very useful. So thank you very much for talking to me.
Mervyn Dinnen [00:16:10]:
And thank you for speaking to me too.
Matt Alder [00:16:13]:
That was Mervyn Dinnen. Thanks very much for listening to the podcast. As ever, you can subscribe on itunes and on Stitcher. For more information and previous episodes, please go to www.rfpodcast.com.
Matt Alder [00:16:28]:
There’S no podcast next week, but I’ll.
Matt Alder [00:16:30]:
Be back in two weeks time. Another episode.
