Inbound Marketing and Recruiting Meet to Create a Hybrid: “Recruiting 2.0”

In the following guest post, Meg Toland of Hollister discusses what went into the launch of her company’s Inbound Marketing and services model and how it’s impacting her business in a big way. 

As the Marketing and Communications Director for full-service Boston-based staffing firm, Hollister, I discovered early on that a basic Facebook fan page, LinkedIn group, or Twitter handle would hardly be enough for us to reach our incredibly diverse online audience.  Here is what we did and some tips on how you can recreate our success.

Find the Common Denominator in Each Unique Market Sector

Before launching our inbound marketing and services model, Recruiting 2.0, we challenged ourselves to find the common denominator of each of our unique market sectors. What do a software engineer, HR generalist, marketing director, executive assistant, sales manager and controller all have in common? As unique as each role appears, the answer was very simple: all share the desire to interact with like-minded individuals, learn about industry trends and develop professionally.

Keep It Searchable

After agreeing on this, we ran a detailed study of our audience, performed an SEO analysis for all six of our division lines, and projected the success rate of targeting each individually. The results told us to go live and go live fast.

In designing our online communities on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, and launching three blogs and a YouTube page, I turned to a phrase that was embedded in me at a very young age- "keep it simple stupid" or in this case, "keep it searchable".

Today our online communities include: Boston Marketing Group, Boston Tech Hub, Boston Creative Group, Boston Accounting & Finance Professionals, Boston Administrative Professionals, Boston HR Leaders and Boston Jobs. We have strategically placed each community so that the right types of professionals can easily find them.

Share Useful Content with Your Communities

To add value, we regularly include a combination of industry news, local events and Boston Hot Jobs (brought to you by Hollister) to the discussion mix. Because we have a monthly audience of over 15,000 Massachusetts professionals, we work closely with our new media communications agency, 451 Marketing, to help us monitor each community and ensure that our audience stays engaged.

Recruiting 2.0 has done three crucial things for us: expanded our access to Massachusetts job-seekers, enhanced our customer interaction through real-time communication and strengthened our overall online brand presence. Before integrating social media into our marketing strategy, our website traffic averaged 2,500 hits per month. Since the launch, we have seen a steady monthly increase of measurable qualified traffic that has led to a record high monthly rate of 15,900 visitors; a figure that took just eight months to achieve. Today our top sources of referring traffic include Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the Boston Hiring Blog.

These traffic sources alone speak volumes about where today's job-seeker is migrating and also, where the recruiting game is headed. We are very excited to have wrapped our arms around the new media space early on in the game and to already be experiencing concrete results.

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