How Recruiters Can Use Thought Leadership to Book More Business

By Rachael Bailey

You’re a Recruitment Consultant or Salesperson that wants to book more business and ultimately earn more. But how? This blog goes further than your typical sales training and techniques and outlines the importance of engaging with your LinkedIn audience and the importance of LinkedIn in B2B sales.

LinkedIn and B2B selling

When you send an email or leave a voicemail with prospective clients, if they’re interested, they’re likely to Google you to find out more information. What is the first result when they Google your name and business? Your LinkedIn profile! (try it).

A study has shown that over 70% of B2B buyers use social media as a decision-making tool. You could be a great Recruitment Consultant, but if your LinkedIn profile and activity doesn’t reflect this, it’s going to have a negative impact on your business development efforts. On the flip side, understanding your LinkedIn audience and effectively engaging with them is great for your personal brand.

Influencers aren’t just those selling products to their millions of fans on social media. You can influence your decision makers to work with you through your activity on LinkedIn and we’re going to show you how.

What is thought leadership in Recruitment?

A thought leader is an individual or business that prospects, clients and even competitors recognise as an authority in their chosen specialism, resulting in them being the go-to person for their expertise.

Let’s put it into recruitment context - a business has an ongoing issue with their time-to-hire and they need to hire new staff more efficiently. You know this is a common issue, so you write a blog on how businesses can dramatically improve their time to hire which provides great advice on the topic.

Whilst your competitors are only posting jobs on LinkedIn, you can be using thought leadership in recruitment to generate valuable inbound leads.

How do I use thought leadership to recruit on LinkedIn?

There’s a number of ways that LinkedIn helps recruiters, but thought leadership is one of the lesser known ones. Before you write anything, start with the basics. The fundamental to more effective selling on LinkedIn is to understand your audience - Which sectors are they in? What issues do they come up against? What do they like or dislike? Identifying these things will tell you which content you need to write or share that will add value.

When you have figured out who your audience are, start following some of the best news sources in your sectors - we’ve always got our eyes on The Manufacturer, The Engineer, Rail Technology Magazine and recruitment resources including Recruitment Grapevine. Who you follow will completely depend on your sectors but do your research!

Now you have your audience, and your news sources, start sharing content! Anything from the reliable publications you follow that you think would add value to your clients and candidates, share it on LinkedIn and perhaps write a short sentence of your thoughts on the content.

Writing content for LinkedIn

As a Recruiter, you don’t necessarily have to write anything from scratch to improve your B2B selling ability on LinkedIn, sharing content and engaging with others content is a great start and will make a difference.

However, if you’re a confident and fluent writer, creating original content is a guaranteed way to separate yourself from the competition and really appear as an authority in your sector. Once you’ve identified your audience and which content will get you spotted, take to LinkedIn publisher to create an article and share it with your potential candidates and clients - see an example of what this looks like here.

Starting with the basics and simply getting to know your social audience better and how to help them will make a real difference to your lead generation. Of course, it’s important to continue sourcing candidates, posting adverts and other business development techniques, but also putting the effort into thought leadership will ensure your prospects come to you ahead of the competition

Jobs in Recruitment


Looking for a new job in recruitment? Want to know more about the role of a Recruitment Consultant or a day in the life of a Recruiter?

We’re always on the lookout for ambitious recruiters to join our teams in Derby, Leicester, London and Leeds. We have an unrivalled training programme that will give you all of the tools you need to be successful, including social selling - not forgetting our generous basic salary and uncapped commission!

Contact our Talent Acquisition Manager, Rachael Bailey, below for an informal chat about a career with Ganymede.



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