Content for Recruiting: A Breakdown for Startups
This type of content isn't about brand alignment, internal messaging, or looking fancy. In fact, it’s intentionally the opposite.
2-minute read
This is a breakdown of things to consider if you’re creating content for recruiting:
Internally:
Brand and design conversations will block you from making things. Avoid them at all costs. This can mean flying under the radar of the marketing team. Nobody cares about recruiting until content comes into play. Then suddenly, everyone has an opinion. And what should only take days or weeks to create for free or on the cheap, suddenly takes months with scoping and budget and meetings. Lots of meetings.
Strategically:
This type of content isn't about brand alignment, internal messaging, or looking fancy. In fact, it’s intentionally the opposite. It’s the ongoing creation and distribution of the most relevant and topical information.
I’m currently thinking about recruiting content in two buckets:
1. Thought leadership: This is the world through my eyes.
2. Marketing: This is a new world through your eyes.
This is how I see each playing out in marketing your teams, their cultures, and their work to talent.
1. The world through my eyes builds trust.
It shows smart people that you don’t just know your shit, but that you also have fresh ideas on how your industry, your profession, your little corner of the world can progress.
Smart people want to work with smart people. Therefore, it makes sense to have at least one public-facing thought-leader from each team at your company putting their ideas and opinions out into the wild.
2. A new world through your eyes provides hope for a different and better future.
This is documenting how your teams think about their work, how they approach challenges, how they overcome their differences, how they measure outcomes, how they sell, how they build, how they create, and how they contribute to your company’s mission.
Each approach attracts, just from different angles.
This is a do-both situation. And it’s done with the intention of enabling your recruiting team's ongoing sourcing motions.
Tactically:
This should be driven at the team level, not at the company level. That means recruiters, team leaders, and their ICs have autonomy and authority over the content: they create what they want—in whatever format makes sense for them and the markets they’re serving.
Engineering, product, design, sales, marketing. Each their own brand.
Use the available tools that are free and/or cheap. Most come with some level of distribution already built-in.
Social.
Team podcasts.
Team newsletters.
Team content pages. (Use Notion. Check out Super.)
*Very little budget (if any) is needed to spin these up.
Believe me, the idea of thought leadership makes me cringe just as much as you. Reframe this however you like. All I know is that it works.
It’s also worth mentioning that we’ve partnered with some fantastic marketing teams on recruiting content—mostly focused on engineering teams. Marketing is only a blocker when they don’t have the mindset described above.