The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast

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Oct 2026

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October 20, 202628 min

LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads for Recruiters: Which One, and When

LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads are the two paid channels a recruitment business owner is most likely to consider, and the most common mistake is treating them as interchangeable. They are not. They do two different jobs. LinkedIn Ads sells identity: it lets you put your message in front of a defined type of hiring decision-maker, chosen by job title, seniority, company, and sector, before they start looking for a recruiter. Google Ads sells intent: it puts you in front of someone at the moment they search for what you do. This post gives an honest take on both. It covers what each platform is genuinely good at, what they realistically cost, and the traps that drain a small budget on each. It is deliberately careful with the numbers. LinkedIn’s headline figures are ad reach and registered members, not active users, and Google publishes no comparable national user count at all, so any figure claiming one is invented. Reliable recruitment-specific cost data does not exist, so every benchmark here is directional and clearly flagged as such. Above all, it makes the case that paid ads are an amplifier, not a foundation. They reward a clear niche, known numbers and fast follow-up, and they punish the absence of those things expensively. For many small recruitment companies, the cheaper next win is reconnecting with existing relationships, and this post permits you to start there. If you do advertise, it shows how to test small, choose the right platform for the job, and measure what actually matters: placements and gross profit, not clicks and form fills. What You Will Learn in This Post The single idea that makes paid ads make sense: identity versus intent What LinkedIn Ads is genuinely good at, and the niches it suits best How to read LinkedIn’s audience numbers honestly, because ad reach is not active users What Google Search Ads is for, and the user-count myth to ignore The two mistakes that drain a small Google budget fastest Why neither platform rescues a weak offer, and the questions to ask first When the smarter money is on the people who already know you How to test paid ads without setting fire to your budget The only numbers worth measuring, and a simple way to work out what you can afford The one idea: identity versus intent If you remember one thing from this, make it this. LinkedIn Ads sells you identity. Google Ads sells you intent. LinkedIn knows who people are: their job title, their seniority, the company they work for, its size and its sector. So you can put your message in front of a specific type of person, the exact hiring manager you want, before they have gone looking for a recruiter. You are buying the right audience. Google knows what people want in the moment, because they have typed it into the search bar. Someone searching for a specialist recruiter in their sector is telling you what they need, right now. You are buying the right moment. Audience before they search, or the moment when they search. Spend on one expecting it to behave like the other, and you will conclude that paid ads do not work for recruitment. They do. You have to know which job you are trying to do. LinkedIn Ads: buying the right audience LinkedIn is built for business. Every profile is a career history attached to a company, which is why it is the one paid channel where you can build an audience out of professional detail. You can target directors and heads of talent at engineering companies of fifty to two hundred people in a chosen region, and LinkedIn will show your ad to those people. No other paid channel does that as cleanly, and that’s why you use it. The numbers LinkedIn’s own advertising tools reported around 1.2 billion registered members globally in early 2025. In the UK, LinkedIn’s ad reach was 48 million people in late 2025, about 69 per cent of the population, and it grew by 5 million in a single year. The important word is registered. These are member accounts, not active users, and the two are not the same. A widely cited third-party estimate puts active monthly LinkedIn use at around 350 million people worldwide. Still an enormous audience. Just not a billion people waiting to read your ad. When you plan a budget, plan against the realistic active audience that matches your target, not the headline account figure. What it does well Reaches decision makers before they are actively searching, which nothing else does as well Promotes genuinely useful assets: a sector salary guide, a talent map, a short market report or a webinar Captures leads with native Lead Gen Forms that pre-fill work email, job title and company; LinkedIn recommends keeping these to three or four fields Puts budget behind a credible founder post, not just a company advert, which carries more weight in a trust-led sector Follows up with warm audiences who watched a video, visited the site or opened a report Who it suits best Professional services, technology, finance, engineering, and senior or leadership roles. White-collar niches where profiles are detailed, and you can describe your ideal client by company, function, and seniority. If that is your market, LinkedIn is the stronger paid platform for reaching clients. The cost, honestly LinkedIn is expensive, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The best cross-industry benchmark for this year, from a study of business-to-business advertisers published in August 2026, put the average cost per click at around 9 US dollars and the average cost per lead at around 202 US dollars. A separate vendor analysis of more than 1,300 campaigns put LinkedIn cost per click in the 8 to 16 US dollar range across the US, Canada, UK and DACH markets. Read those as reference points only. They are global, cross-industry business-to-business figures in US dollars, not UK recruitment figures. Reliable recruitment-specific cost data doesn’t exist, so don’t convert these into a quote or forecast. Use them to set expectations, then build your own numbers from real campaigns. Google Ads: buying the right moment Google is a different animal. It is not one place, but a system that runs ads across search results, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, and a lot of partner inventory. For a time-poor recruitment owner, ignore most of that and focus on one thing: Search. The ads that appear on the results page when someone types a query. Google’s strength is intent. Someone searching for executive search for finance directors needs you today, and you are answering them rather than interrupting them. The reach is there. Google handled nearly 92 per cent of all UK searches across devices in August 2026. If your clients search for what you do, this is where they do it. The user-count myth You will often see a claim that Google has a certain number of users in your market, quoted as an advertising audience. Ignore it. Google does not publish a national user count for Google Ads the way LinkedIn publishes member figures, and the two cannot be compared like for like. The honest, defensible claim is about search share, which is very high, not about a made-up audience number. What it does well Captures companies actively searching for a specialist supplier Protects your own company name so a competitor cannot buy an ad against it Runs tightly focused niche campaigns, for example, a contract recruiter for a named skill in a named city Remarkets to people who have already visited your site The two traps that cost you money First, candidates and clients overlap. Candidates and clients search for many of the same words. Bid broadly on recruitment, and you will pay for clicks from job seekers looking for work when you want employers looking to hire. The skill on Google is discipline: separate client searches from candidate searches, and use negative keywords to tell Google the words you never want to appear for, such as jobs, salary, CV template and free. Send every click to a page about that exact service, not to your homepage. Second, premature automation. Google will steer you towards automated campaign types that spread your spend everywhere and let the system decide. They can work, but only once you are feeding Google accurate information about what a real result looks like. Google’s own guidance says its automated campaigns need enough budget to generate at least 50 conversions to learn properly, and a budget of at least ten times your target cost per result. For most small recruiters, early on, that is a lot of money spent teaching a machine. Start simple, stay in control, and hand over to automation only once you know what a good lead costs you. A note on AI and search Google said on its February 2026 earnings call that its AI answers at the top of search, AI Overviews and AI Mode, were driving more searching, including commercial searches, not less. Search is not going away. It is changing shape, so keep an eye on how it affects your query volumes and clicks over the coming year. What neither platform can do Neither LinkedIn Ads nor Google Ads will rescue a weak offer. Paid ads are an amplifier. If your proposition is sharp, your niche is clear, and you have proof, ads make more of that happen, faster. If your proposition is that you recruit across lots of sectors, your website looks tired, and there is no evidence you are any good, ads help you reach that conclusion quicker and more expensively. Before you spend a penny, answer three honest questions: Have you actually chosen a niche you can speak to with authority, rather than a bit of everything? Do you know what a placement is worth to you in gross profit, and therefore what you can afford to spend to win one? Can you follow up on a lead the same day, every time, because paid leads go cold fast? When to skip paid ads, for now For many small recruitment companies, the honest answer to those questions is not yet, and that is fine. If your database is full of past clients you haven’t spoken to in a year, if your referrals are underused, or if you are barely posting anything, paid ads aren’t your cheapest next win. Reconnecting with people who already know you is. Ads are for pouring fuel on something already alight, not for lighting the fire. If you switched both platforms off today and put that money and time into your existing relationships instead, that would often be the better commercial decision. How to test without wasting money If the foundations are there, test carefully. Keep it small and narrow: one niche, one country, one clear offer and one good landing page. Do not test five things at once, or you will learn nothing. Then pick the platform that matches the job. If you can name the exact companies and people you want and they are not searching yet, that is LinkedIn. If people are already searching for your kind of service, that is Google. You do not need both to start. You need the right one. The only numbers that matter A lead is not a result. A click is not a result. A form fill is not a result. The numbers that matter run further down the line: how many leads became a real conversation, how many conversations became a brief, how many briefs became a placement, and what that placement was worth. If you judge your ads on clicks and cost per lead, you are measuring the easy thing rather than the thing that pays the bills. Remember, in recruitment, the placement often closes months after the ad, so track all the way through before you switch a campaign off. A simple way to work out what you can afford: say a placement is worth 12,000 pounds in gross profit, you win one in five of your serious opportunities, and you are willing to spend 15 per cent of that profit to win the work. That points to roughly 360 pounds as the most you would pay for a qualified opportunity, and if around 40 per cent of raw leads become qualified, roughly 144 pounds as the most you would pay for a lead. Those figures are an illustration only, not a benchmark. Yours will be different. The point is that the maths starts from your profit, not from someone else’s number. Thanks Denise and Sharon The post LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads for Recruiters: Which One, and When appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

September 29, 202627 min

Meta Ads for Recruitment: What Facebook and Instagram Advertising Can and Can’t Do

This post looks at paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, run through Meta Ads, and where it fits for a small recruitment, search or staffing business. It’s the paid companion to our earlier episodes on organic Instagram and Facebook. The short version is this: Meta ads can be genuinely useful, but they’re rarely the right first move for winning cold clients. The reach is real. Meta’s planning tools suggest advertisers can potentially reach around 38.8 million people on Facebook and 35.5 million on Instagram in the UK alone, with similar coverage across the US and Australia. But reach is not the same as attention, and neither is the same as someone being in a hiring mood. Facebook and Instagram are places people go to switch off, which makes Meta a discovery channel rather than an intent channel. That single distinction shapes everything else. We cover the four jobs Meta does well for recruiters, candidate attraction, retargeting, waking up your database, and getting a useful resource into the right hands, alongside what good recruitment creative looks like and the honest answer to whether Meta can win you clients. It can contribute, mostly by warming people up rather than closing them, but a cold ‘book a call’ advert to strangers rarely works. We also cover the money and the measurement: budgets, how long to give a campaign, and why chasing the cheapest lead is a false economy. We’re clear throughout about what the data does and doesn’t show, including where reliable UK and Australian recruitment benchmarks simply don’t exist. And we give you permission to skip the channel entirely if it doesn’t suit your business. What You Will Learn in This Post What Meta ads is, and how the paid side differs from organic posting on Facebook and Instagram Why reach on these platforms is not the same as buying intent, and what that means for recruiters The four jobs Meta ads genuinely does well for a recruitment business What separates recruitment adverts that get noticed from ones that get scrolled past The honest answer on whether Meta can win you cold clients How much to budget, how long to wait, and why lead quality matters more than cost per lead Who should skip Meta ads altogether A recruitment owner said something to me recently that sums up how many people feel about Facebook advertising. He’d put a small daily budget behind a ‘We’re hiring’ post, waited a couple of weeks, and got very little back. His conclusion was simple. Meta ads don’t work for recruitment. I understand why he’d think that. But it isn’t quite right. What happened is that he asked the wrong channel to do the wrong job for the wrong audience, in the wrong way. Once you understand how paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram really works, that becomes a very fixable problem. This is the paid side of Meta. We covered organic Instagram and Facebook, the posting and the profiles, earlier in this series. Today is about paying for reach and where that money is best spent for a recruitment, search, or staffing business. What are Meta ads Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram. Meta ads is the system you use to pay for reach across both platforms from one place, through Ads Manager. You choose a goal, choose who you’d like to see your advert, supply the words and pictures, set a budget, and then Meta’s system decides who to show it to. That last part matters more than it used to. Meta’s delivery is now heavily AI-led, which means your detailed targeting choices act more as suggestions than strict rules. The platform tries to find whoever is most likely to give you the result you asked for. That has a big consequence, which we’ll come back to: the quality of the information you feed the system matters more than the cleverness of your targeting. The reach is real, and so is the catch Let’s start with the thing everyone leads with. Scale. In the UK, Meta’s own planning tools suggest an advertiser can potentially reach around 38.8 million people on Facebook and 35.5 million on Instagram. In the US, the figures are roughly 198 million and 182 million, and in Australia around 17.7 million and 15.2 million. These come from DataReportal’s Digital 2026 reports, drawing on Meta’s planning data from late 2025. Instagram’s reachable audience is also growing faster than Facebook’s. Now the catch, because it’s the whole game. These are estimated advertising audiences, not counts of real, active users. Meta itself is clear that the figure is not a proxy for how many people really use the app, and that it moves around for technical reasons that have nothing to do with more or fewer real people. So ‘can reach’ is not ‘is paying attention’, and it’s a long way from ‘is in a hiring mood’. It helps to think about how people use these apps. In the UK, Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found people spend, on average, around 43 minutes a day on Facebook and Messenger, and around 20 minutes a day on Instagram. That’s real time and real attention. But it’s leisure time. Family photos, Reels, hobby groups, holidays, football. For context, Meta’s family of apps reached an average of 3.60 billion daily active people in June 2026, and Instagram passed 2 billion daily users in mid-2026. Those are global, family-wide figures, not Facebook-and-Instagram-only numbers and not country-level advertising reach, so they’re best treated as background rather than something to plan around. Discovery, not intent This idea explains almost everything else. Facebook and Instagram are discovery channels. People are there to switch off, not to buy recruitment. Compare that with LinkedIn or search, where someone is much closer to a work frame of mind. It’s worth being precise about who is reachable, without falling into lazy generalisations. Facebook’s audience includes a large share of working-age adults aged 35 and over, among them managers and hiring decision-makers. In the US, Pew Research found adults aged 30 to 49 were the most likely age group to use Facebook. Instagram reaches a higher proportion of younger adults, with use strongest among those aged 18 to 29. The point is not that one platform is for older adults and the other for young people. The point is that being reachable is not the same as being ready to buy. A hiring manager can be sitting right there in the audience and still have no interest in a recruitment pitch while they’re scrolling in the evening. None of this makes Meta useless. It makes it a discovery channel, and that changes what you should ask it to do. How Meta Helps Recruiters Meta ads does four jobs genuinely well for a recruitment business. Candidate attraction. This is Meta at its strongest. Job seeking happens in the evenings and at weekends, outside professional networks. Facebook has huge reach among working-age adults, and Instagram and Reels let you show what a role or a workplace is really like. If you recruit in volume, or locally, or into roles where people decide on their phone, care, hospitality, logistics, construction, manufacturing, and early-career technology and digital, it can be a very cost-effective way to be seen by the right candidates. Retargeting. This is the one most recruiters underuse. Retargeting means showing adverts to people who’ve already interacted with you. They visited a job on your website, watched most of one of your videos, opened a form, or downloaded your salary guide. They already know you exist, and a well-timed reminder does far more than shouting at strangers. Waking up your database. You can take your own lists, your candidates, your past clients, the people who came to a webinar, and, where you have the right permissions, show them adverts directly through Custom Audiences. Most recruitment businesses are sitting on a database they barely speak to. One word of care: using your own data like this comes with real privacy obligations. You need a lawful basis and a clean process. Don’t skip that part. Getting a useful resource into the right hands. This is the one we’d most want you to take away. Not ‘book a call’, but a genuinely useful thing: a salary guide for your niche, a local hiring report, a short guide on why offers are being turned down, or a webinar on what’s changing in your sector. You advertise the resource, the people who want it give you their email to get it, and you’ve turned rented attention into an audience you own. Our Marketing Trends Report works the same way. What good recruitment creative looks like A generic vacancy graphic with a logo and a salary gets scrolled past. The adverts that stop people do one of four things: teach something useful, name a specific problem, show real proof with permission, or make the next step genuinely easy. So ‘the three salary trends affecting data engineers in Manchester this quarter’ works far better than ‘we are hiring’. And short, native vertical video matters more than it did. Meta’s current guidance points to 9:16 Reels, and a 20- to 40-second specialist insight recorded on your phone is often more persuasive than a polished, generic corporate film. Can Meta win you clients? The honest answer is that it rarely does on its own, and rarely from a cold start. But it can play a real part. It contributes to client work by warming people up, not closing them. Picture the sequence. A hiring manager sees your useful salary guide. Another week, they see a short video of you explaining something smart about their market. Weeks later, they get an email from you or a note on LinkedIn, and this time your name is familiar. You didn’t win that client on Facebook, but Facebook did some of the early groundwork. It goes wrong when a small business expects a cold advert to do the job of a proper conversation. ‘We recruit accountants, get in touch’ means nothing to someone who’s never heard of you and wasn’t thinking about hiring. ‘The three things pushing up finance salaries in your city this quarter’ might make that same person stop. One is a pitch; the other is useful, and useful travels much farther here. The strongest results come when Meta is one part of a joined-up approach: useful content, Meta distribution, retargeting, email nurture, and LinkedIn or direct outreach, with fast follow-up behind it all. The money and the measurement On budget, don’t dip a toe in with a fiver a day and expect to learn anything. Meta’s own guidance is that where you set a cost-per-result goal, your daily budget should be at least five times that goal. A five-pound target cost per result implies a daily budget of at least twenty-five pounds. A serious test needs enough spend to produce real evidence, not just a few clicks. Give a lead campaign enough time to run properly. Meta suggests aiming for 50 or more conversions a week, with performance often improving after the first two weeks and a sensible minimum run of around three weeks. For a niche recruiter with a smaller audience, that volume isn’t always achievable, so judge results over weeks, not days. On quality, this is the point that saves the most money. If you tell Meta to find you the cheapest possible leads, it becomes very good at finding people who fill in forms cheaply and are worth nothing to you. Meta’s own figures show that when you feed the system information about which leads turned out to be good ones, through the Conversions API for CRM, cost per quality lead fell by around 21 per cent on Instant Form campaigns and around 9.5 per cent on website-form campaigns, compared with optimising for volume. Feed it the outcomes that matter. A word on benchmarks, and what the data won’t tell you It’s worth being straight about this. Reliable, like-for-like 2025 to 2026 Meta cost benchmarks, broken out separately for the UK, the US and Australia and specifically for recruitment B2B client acquisition, do not exist in the public data. Anyone quoting you a precise ‘cost per recruitment client’ from Facebook is guessing. The most-cited dataset is WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2025 Facebook Ads benchmarks, which are US and cross-industry. Their broad ‘Career and Employment’ category showed an average click-through rate of 2.81 per cent, an average cost per click of 0.86 US dollars and an average cost per lead of 17.64 US dollars. Treat that as rough US context only. It is not a UK or Australian figure, it is not a recruitment B2B benchmark, and a cheap form-fill is not a placement. Two advertiser examples illustrate how the levers behave, though they are not results you should expect. A B2B company, BLISS, found a shorter Instagram lead form produced 2.5 times the conversion rate and a 40 per cent lower cost per lead than a longer one, although the longer form gave higher-quality leads. Another, Appsee, reported 3.4 times higher click-through and a 25 per cent lower cost per qualified lead from Instagram Stories. Mechanisms, not guarantees. Whatever you run, measure the right things. Not just reach and cost per lead, but qualified leads, booked meetings, job orders, placements, revenue and gross profit. That’s the difference between a campaign that looks busy and one that pays. A note on compliance Recruitment advertising isn’t just a marketing exercise. Employment adverts sit within Meta’s Special Ad Category, which limits some targeting options, and any use of client or candidate data in Custom Audiences needs a lawful basis under UK GDPR and the equivalent rules in the US and Australia. This post is marketing guidance, not legal advice, so take specialist advice for your own circumstances. When to leave it alone Some recruiters should skip Meta ads altogether, and that’s a perfectly good answer if you run a small, confidential senior-search business, where the roles are rare and discretion matters; public advertising on Facebook is usually the wrong tool. Your work happens through relationships and direct approaches, not lead forms. If you can’t yet say clearly who you help and what makes you different, sort that out first. An advert only amplifies your message; it can’t rescue a fuzzy one. And if you don’t have the capacity to follow up leads quickly, or a proper page to send people to, don’t start yet. There’s no prize for being on every channel. The prize is being good on the few that suit your business. What to do this week If you’re curious but cautious, don’t launch a cold campaign at strangers. Start where the warmth already is. First, take a resource you already have, or could make in an afternoon- a salary guide, a short market report, a hiring checklist for your niche- offer it, and let people swap their email for it. Second, if you’ve got a bit of website traffic or a following, set up a simple retargeting campaign so the people who already brushed past you keep seeing you. Both are low-risk; they build something that lasts, and they teach you how the platform behaves before you ever try anything colder. Remember the pattern: Meta rewards useful, and it rewards warm. Get that right, and it stops being a money pit and starts being a proper part of your marketing. Thanks Denise The post Meta Ads for Recruitment: What Facebook and Instagram Advertising Can and Can’t Do appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

September 15, 202634 min

Is YouTube Worth It for Your Recruitment Business?

I am going to do this one differently. Normally I lay out the case for a channel and then tell you who it suits. Today I am starting with the answer, because this is a question we get asked all the time and it deserves a straight response rather than a long build-up. The question is: is YouTube worth it for a recruitment or search business? My honest answer, for most of you reading this, is no. Not because the audience is not there. It is. YouTube has the biggest reach of any channel we have covered in this series, and it is not close. And not because the content would not work. It would. It is because of what YouTube asks of you. And it comes down to one thing that only you can answer. Are you comfortable on video? And will you still be comfortable on video in nine months, when the view counts are still small, and nobody has booked a call off the back of it? That is the real question. Everything else follows from it. So let me take you through what the data says, why I have landed where I have, and then the cases where I would change my mind. Because there are some, and you might be one of them. The Audience Is Enormous, and That Matters Let us start with size, because this is where YouTube is genuinely different from everything else we have looked at. In the UK, YouTube reaches 55.5 million people. That is 79.7% of the population. That comes from Google’s own advertising data, compiled by DataReportal in November last year. In Australia, 21 million people. That is 77.7% of the population. In the US, around 253 million. There is a better piece of data behind that American number, and it is the one I would hold on to. Pew Research, in November last year, found that 84% of US adults use YouTube. It has the highest reach of any platform Pew measures. And it is the only one where a majority of every single age group uses it. 95% of 18- to 29-year-olds. 92% of 30- to 49-year-olds. 85% of 50- to 64-year-olds. And 64% of those over 65. Ofcom put UK adult usage at 94%. Why does that matter to you? Because in every other channel in this series I have had to tell you that the people who hire you might not be there. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, all of them come with that caveat. YouTube does not. The hiring managers you want are on YouTube. So are the candidates. So is everybody. And they do not just drop in. UK adults spend around 51 minutes a day on YouTube. In the US it is about 35 minutes. One thing I want to be straight with you about before we go further. If you go looking for a global user figure for YouTube, you will find anything between 2.53 billion and 2.85 billion depending on who you read. Google does not publish an official number. So I am giving you the three country figures instead. Those are clean, and they are the ones that matter to you. So Why Am I Telling You Not to Bother? Fair question. If the audience is that big, why is this not a yes? Because reach isn’t the same as relevance, and YouTube isn’t built for what most of you need. YouTube is a search engine. Google owns it, and people use it the way they use Google. They type in a question, and they watch the answer. That is a real strength for a certain kind of content. Somebody typing in a question about a counteroffer, what a role pays, or whether they should be using a search consultant has a live problem. If your video is the answer, you have met them at exactly the right moment. But look at what that means for you. You are not going out to find people. You are waiting for people to come and find you. That is brand building, not lead generation. It is slow. The upside is that it compounds, and I do not want to undersell that. A video you post this month can still be bringing people to you in three years. A LinkedIn post is finished in about seventy-two hours. Nothing else you do has that shelf life. The downside is what you cannot do. YouTube gives you no way to put your content in front of hiring managers specifically. LinkedIn does. On LinkedIn, you can pick a job title, a company size, and a seniority level. On YouTube, you get broad interests and broad demographics, and that is about your lot. So you cannot go hunting for clients on YouTube. You can only build something and hope the right people search for it. The people who market for a living have already worked this out. Hootsuite’s 2026 figures show 85% of business-to-business marketers name LinkedIn as their highest return channel. Facebook is second at 28%. YouTube is third at 22%. Those add up to more than a hundred because people could pick more than one. A separate survey from September last year asked marketers generally how they rated YouTube’s return. 33% said it was strong. Facebook was at 54%, Instagram at 43%. So YouTube is not a bad channel. It is a middling channel for business-to-business, rated by people with far more time and budget than you have. What YouTube Asks of You Now, the cost- and I do not mean money. Uploading a video is easy. Anyone can do it. Building an audience is a different job entirely, and three things have changed in the last eighteen months that made it harder than it used to be. One. YouTube changed what it rewards. Watch time used to be the main ranking signal. It is not any more. It is now viewer satisfaction: whether people say they enjoyed it in the surveys YouTube runs, whether they come back and watch again, and whether they keep watching after yours. That was confirmed by Todd Beaupre, YouTube’s Senior Director of Growth and Discovery. The good news is that a strong three-minute video can now beat a padded ten-minute one. The bad news is you are being marked on something you cannot see in your own numbers. Two. Shorts and long videos are now two separate systems. They were split at the end of 2025, and completely different algorithms rank them. So if you planned to post a Short, get traction, and have that pull people toward your longer videos, that no longer happens. A Short doing well lifts nothing else. Two formats, two audiences, two jobs. Three. Shorts now get about an hour to prove themselves. You have a 30- to 60-minute test window after you post. In that hour, YouTube decides whether to push it further or let it go quiet. The retention bar is high: around 65% for anything under 30 seconds, around 50% for 30 to 60 seconds. Miss it, and the video is done. There is also a filter now that suppresses repeated formats and recycled hooks. So the make-one-thing-and-rework-it-fifteen-ways approach that works elsewhere works against you here. And as of May this year, AI disclosure rules became enforceable, with automatic detection flagging undisclosed AI-generated content and limiting how far it travels. Worth knowing if you are using AI tools to help produce video. Add all that up. To do YouTube properly, you need to film consistently, edit, write titles that work as search terms, design thumbnails people click on, read retention data, and keep going for months before any of it means anything. And then there is the time. This is the part every article you read about YouTube skips, so let me say it plainly. Filming takes time. Not the six minutes the video runs for. The setup, the retakes, the editing, the thumbnail, the title, the upload, and then going back in a fortnight to see how it did. You are running a small team. Most of you are still carrying a desk yourself. So where is that time coming from? Because it is not coming from nowhere. It is coming out of business development, delivery, or your evening. I could not find a reliable hours-per-week benchmark for this, and I am not going to invent one. Instead, I suggest you film one video properly, start to finish, and time yourself. Then multiply that by however many weeks you think you will keep it up. That number is the real cost of the channel, and it is usually what stops people, not the marketing. And before anybody asks, yes, AI avatar tools now can read your script with a face that is not yours. I would not recommend it. You are in a people business, selling trust, and the moment somebody realises they are watching a synthetic version of you, you have lost the very thing you were trying to build. There is also the point I just made about disclosure, so you could end up paying that price for a video that does not get seen anyway. Some of you can do all this. Most of you have a business to run. A Question to Consider So here is where it comes down to you, not the platform. Are you comfortable on camera? Not would you like to be. Not could you learn. Comfortable this month, filming yourself talking for six or seven minutes without four retakes and a knot in your stomach. Be honest with yourself on this one, because a lot of people answer it with the version of themselves they intend to become. If the answer is no, YouTube is the wrong place to start. You would be taking the format you find hardest and putting it on the platform that demands the most consistency. That combination is why so many recruitment channels have four videos on them from two years ago. If the answer is yes, I have different advice, and it might surprise you. Put the video on LinkedIn. If you are comfortable on camera, the video is the valuable thing. The platform is secondary. Your clients are on LinkedIn, and when somebody there reacts or comments, you know exactly who they are, and you can follow up the same day. On YouTube, you get a view count and no idea who was behind it. Then, if you want, put the same video on YouTube afterwards so it is searchable, and so you have got somewhere to point people. Use YouTube as your library. Not as your shop window. That is the position I would take with almost every member we work with, and it is what I would say to you if we were on a call. When I Would Change My Mind There is a version of this where I would tell you to go all in. Three conditions, and I would want all three, not two out of three. One. You are comfortable on video, and you will still be doing it in a year. Not a burst. A habit. YouTube rewards people who keep showing up, and it does little for people who don’t. Two. You work in a sector where people research slowly. Executive search. Technology. Professional services. Anywhere a hiring manager might spend weeks working out what they need before they speak to a single recruiter. That long consideration period is what YouTube’s search function does well. If you are in high-volume, fast-turnaround staffing, this is not your channel. Nobody is watching an eight-minute video before they apply for a shift. Three. You already have the content. Testimonials you could film. Market commentary you give away on every call anyway. The same six questions every candidate asks you. If you are starting from a blank page and a blank channel, that is two jobs, not one. All three true? Build it properly. Two out of three? Do the videos on LinkedIn and use YouTube as the archive. One out of three? Leave it alone and put the time into a channel that will pay you back sooner. If You Are Going to Do It, Do This If you ticked all three, here is the practical part. The formats that suit a recruitment or search business are the ones that answer questions people already type in: Candidate and client FAQs Role explainers and day in the life videos Market insight and salary commentary Short testimonial clips from happy clients A few things that make a real difference: Build playlists and series rather than posting one-offs. They keep people watching longer, and session length is now one of the strongest signals for long videos. Write your titles as search terms, not as clever headlines. This is a search engine. Think about what someone would type. For Shorts, 30 to 45 seconds is the sweet spot for clearing the retention bar. If your channel is under 50,000 subscribers, use your own voiceover rather than trending audio. Original audio gets a ranking benefit at that size. And the mistakes worth avoiding: Recycling the same hook and the same format over and over. That gets suppressed now. Posting a Short and walking away. Watch the first hour, because that is the window that decides its fate. Assuming a Short doing well will lift your longer videos. It will not. They were decoupled at the end of 2025. For measurement, YouTube Studio gives you everything you need for free. The numbers to watch are average view duration and retention percentage, click-through rate on your thumbnails, subscriber growth, and for Shorts, whether people swipe past in the first few seconds or stay. Note what is not on that list. Views. Views are the number everyone looks at and the one that tells you the least. What the Advertising Costs A quick word on paid, because people ask. YouTube advertising runs through Google Ads; it is auction-based, and there is no rate card. The short version: it is cheap to be seen. Skippable ads, the ones people can skip after five seconds, run at pennies per view. One 2026 analysis covering over a million dollars of ad spend put the average at just under 3 cents a view and 49 cents a click. Being seen has never been the hard part, though. Being remembered by the right person is. Two caveats before you plan a budget off any of that. Those are global and US-blended figures, because I couldn’t find separate UK, US, or Australian benchmarks. I also couldn’t verify a minimum spend for YouTube ads. One thing worth knowing if you do go paid. 59% of people now see YouTube ads on a television screen rather than a phone or a laptop, and that changes what a good video looks like. What I Could Not Find I want to be open about something, because this series is meant to be straight with you. I could not find a single verified recruitment case study for YouTube. Not one with numbers I would be willing to read out to you. Plenty of general video marketing data exists. Agency case studies don’t separate YouTube from everything else running at the same time. No recruitment-specific, independently checked evidence shows a recruitment or search business built its client base on YouTube. I am not going to invent one to make this post feel more complete. That absence is part of the answer. If YouTube were reliably working for businesses like yours, somebody would have published the numbers by now. Pulling It Together YouTube has the biggest and broadest audience of any channel in this series. Around eight in ten people in the UK and Australia. 84% of American adults, and the only platform where a majority of every age group is present. The people who hire you are on it. It works like a search engine, which means it compounds and keeps working long after you post. That is a genuine advantage nothing else gives you. But it gives you no way to target the people you want; it ranks third for business-to-business behind LinkedIn; and it asks for months of consistent filming and editing before it gives you anything back. That is hours a week out of a diary that is already full. So my answer to the question we get asked is this. For most micro and small recruitment and search businesses, YouTube isn’t worth building as a channel. If you are comfortable on camera, make the videos and put them on LinkedIn where your clients already are. Use YouTube as a library underneath, so the work stays findable. And if you are not comfortable on camera, please do not start here. Start where you can be consistent, because consistency beats the platform every time. I hope that has been useful. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Choosing the right two or three channels and leaving the rest alone is one of the most valuable decisions you will make this year, and it is one of the first things we work through with new members inside Superfast Circle. Our members get the content written for them, monthly coaching, and a clear plan for where their marketing effort goes so they are not spreading themselves across six platforms and getting nowhere on any of them. The post Is YouTube Worth It for Your Recruitment Business? appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

September 6, 202629 min

WhatsApp for Recruiters: Where It Wins You Clients and Candidates, and Where It Costs You Both

Ket Takeawys From This Podcast and Post WhatsApp is the highest open rate channel a recruitment or search business can use, but it deepens relationships you already have rather than starting new ones. What that means in practice: WhatsApp has more than three billion monthly users, with open rates of 95 to 98% against roughly 20 to 25% for email. It has no discovery algorithm and no professional targeting layer, so it cannot introduce you to anyone new. It works best with candidates and clients who have already given you their number, where it speeds up screening, scheduling, briefs and updates. Clients genuinely do come through it, but only where the relationship already exists. Used to approach people cold, it risks blocking, reporting and a breach of UK consent rules under PECR and GDPR. The deciding question is not candidates versus clients; it’s warm versus cold. Of all the channels in this series, WhatsApp is the one I get asked about in the most roundabout way. Business owners rarely ask me whether it works. They ask me what it’s for. That makes sense, because most of you are already using it. It’s on your phone. You message your team on it. You message your family on it. You’ve probably messaged a candidate on it, because it was quicker than email and they replied in four minutes rather than four days. So the question isn’t whether WhatsApp works. It clearly does something, or you wouldn’t keep reaching for it. The question is whether it belongs in your marketing plan, and if it does, what job it’s doing there. I’ll give you my answer up front. WhatsApp doesn’t start relationships. It deepens the ones you already have. Get it the wrong way round and use it to approach people who don’t know you, and it will do you real damage. How Big Is WhatsApp? WhatsApp has more than three billion people using it every month, a figure confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg on Meta’s earnings call in April 2025. Trackers in early 2026 put it between 3.14 and 3.3 billion. Somewhere between 2.3 and 2.6 billion people open it every day, around 83% of the monthly base, and it’s available in more than 180 countries. For context, Facebook sits at around 3.07 billion monthly users, so the two are neck and neck at the top of this series. In the UK, research cited by the communications regulator and published in December 2025 found around 90% of UK online adults used WhatsApp, roughly 44.2 million people. That’s the most authoritative UK figure available. The US and Australia are messier. US estimates run from 87 million to 124 million depending on which tracker you read. Australia sits somewhere between 9 million and 13 million. I’m giving you ranges rather than a tidy number because Meta doesn’t publish country by country data, and I’d rather tell you the truth than give you false precision. The number to hold on to is the UK one. Nine in ten UK adults online are on this app. Your candidates are there. So are your clients. What WhatsApp Is Not This is the part that changes how you think about it. Every other channel in this series has an algorithm. On Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube, you create something, the platform decides who sees it, and if it’s good enough it reaches people who have never heard of you. Reach is earned. WhatsApp doesn’t work that way. There’s no feed ranking your content and no discovery mechanism putting you in front of strangers. Your reach is limited to people who already have your number, or people who click an advert to start a chat. WhatsApp doesn’t build your audience. It communicates with the audience you already have. There are two partial exceptions. WhatsApp Channels, launched in 2023, is a one way broadcast feature that had reached 500 million monthly users by June 2024. And WhatsApp Status, viewed daily by around 500 million people, takes up roughly a third of the time people spend in the app. Both are useful. Neither will introduce you to a hiring manager who has never heard of you. The second structural point matters just as much. WhatsApp has no professional layer. There are no job titles, no company data and no seniority filters. Nothing tells you whether the person on the other end is an HR director or a school leaver. LinkedIn knows who people are professionally. WhatsApp knows a phone number. Where WhatsApp Is At Its Strongest If it won’t introduce you to anyone new, what will it do? It will make every conversation you’re already having faster, warmer and far more likely to be read than anything else you have. Look at the numbers. WhatsApp messages are opened at somewhere between 95 and 98%. Email sits at roughly 20 to 25%. Broadcast campaigns on WhatsApp are reported to convert at 15 to 25%. And 78% of job seekers now apply on a smartphone, so your candidates are already living in this format. Here’s where recruiters are genuinely getting value: Screening questions answered in minutes rather than over two days of phone tag Interview scheduling and confirmations, which cuts no shows Status updates during a process, so candidates aren’t left in silence QR codes that take someone straight into a chat to start an application Sourcing internationally, particularly in markets like India, Brazil and the Middle East where WhatsApp is the default messenger Keeping a warm client contact updated, once they’ve given you their number Every one of those is about speed and experience with someone who already knows who you are. And Yes, It Works With Clients Too It would be easy to read the last section and conclude WhatsApp is a candidate only channel. It isn’t. Once a hiring manager has given you their mobile number, WhatsApp becomes the fastest route to them you’ll ever have. Briefs come through as a voice note on the way to a meeting. Questions get answered in minutes. You stop being a supplier they email and start being the recruiter they message. We’ve won clients through WhatsApp ourselves, and so have members of ours. But in every case the relationship came first, and the number was given rather than found. That’s the distinction that matters here, and it isn’t candidates versus clients. It’s warm versus cold. The Line Between Warm and Cold This goes wrong at exactly one point, and that’s when you use WhatsApp to approach someone who hasn’t given you their number and doesn’t expect to hear from you. I know the temptation. You’ve got mobile numbers sitting in your CRM going back years. It feels like an easy win sitting there. Leave it alone, for three reasons. One: There’s No Cold Route In You need a number someone has given you, or you need them to click an advert. There’s no equivalent of a LinkedIn connection request here. And if you’ve bought a list of mobile numbers, you’ve got a bigger problem than channel choice. Two: The Consent Risk Is Real Unsolicited business messaging on WhatsApp can breach UK consent rules under PECR and GDPR. This isn’t a grey area you can talk your way out of, and the penalties attach to the business rather than the individual who sent the message. Three: It Breaks the Social Contract A hiring manager gave their number to their kids’ school, their plumber and their friends. A pitch from someone they don’t know arriving in that space doesn’t read as enterprising. It feels like an intrusion, and the two buttons available to them are block and report. Note what you lose. The same message on LinkedIn would have been unremarkable. Sent on WhatsApp to someone who never gave you the number, it costs you a contact permanently. There’s one more thing, and it isn’t comfortable. WhatsApp has become a common vector for recruitment scams. Fake recruiters, fake roles, fake interviews, all run through this app. Candidates are increasingly wary when a recruiter they don’t know appears in their messages. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it. It means you introduce yourself properly, identify your company immediately, and give people a way to verify you. What WhatsApp Costs Basic use is free. A WhatsApp Business profile costs nothing and takes minutes to set up. A photo, a business description, a greeting message and an away message, and you’re running. Costs appear when you want to send at volume or advertise. From the first of January 2026, Meta moved to charging per message rather than per conversation. UK rates published across 2026 sources range from just over a penny to about seven pence per marketing message, depending on category and source. Messages a customer starts remain free within a 24 hour window. To send in bulk or automate anything you need a Business Solution Provider. Platform subscriptions typically start between nine and fifty pounds per channel per month, plus VAT, on top of the per message cost. Click to WhatsApp adverts run through Meta Ads Manager on Facebook and Instagram, and open a chat rather than sending someone to a landing page. US benchmarks from 2026 put a good cost per click between ten and fifty cents, and a cost per lead who goes on to start a conversation at one to three dollars. No UK or Australian benchmarks exist in the sources reviewed, so if you test this you’ll be gathering your own numbers. How to Measure It Native analytics on the free Business app are basic: messages sent, delivered, read and received, visible in your settings. The Business Platform adds message level data, and third party platforms will layer on a proper funnel view for a subscription. For most recruitment business owners, four numbers tell you everything: Response rate. What proportion of people reply? Time to first response. How much faster is this than email? Message to booked conversation. How many turn into an interview or a call? For paid adverts, cost per conversation started and cost per qualified lead Best Practice, and the Mistakes to Avoid What works Set up a separate WhatsApp Business profile rather than running your desk from your personal number Brand it properly with a photo, company name and what you do, so anyone receiving a message sees straight away who you are Use it for screening, scheduling, updates and confirmations Use Status or a Channel for passive nurturing of your candidate pool rather than messaging people one by one Use simple automation for first response and interview slot booking What to avoid Cold business development messages to hiring managers who haven’t opted in Failing to identify yourself in the first line, which in the current climate makes you look like a scam Over messaging. The moment WhatsApp feels like a mailing list, you’ve destroyed the thing that made it work Treating it as a brand building channel. Nobody is discovering you here Is WhatsApp Right For Your Business? Four Questions If you answer yes to two or more, it’s worth setting up this month. One. Does your business handle high volume or time critical candidate communication, where being first to respond wins you the placement? Two. Do you source candidates internationally, particularly in markets where WhatsApp is the default way people communicate? Three. Is candidate experience somewhere you’re currently losing people, through slow responses, silence during a process or no shows at interview? Four. Do you have candidates or clients who have given you their mobile number and would expect to hear from you on it? If you answered no to all four, and particularly to the last one, the problem isn’t WhatsApp. It’s that you don’t yet have enough relationships to put on it. Build those first, on LinkedIn, on email and through your content. Then come back to this. Pulling This Together WhatsApp is one of the two largest platforms in this series and easily the most misunderstood. It won’t build your brand and it won’t put you in front of anyone who has never heard of you. Those jobs belong to other channels. What it will do is make every relationship you already have faster, warmer and more likely to turn into something. That includes candidates, and it includes hiring managers who have come to trust you enough to give you their number. So build the relationship first. Let people give you the number rather than digging it out. Then use this channel for what it’s genuinely brilliant at. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Knowing which channels to use is one thing. Having the content, the campaigns and the plan to run them consistently is another. That’s what we do inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done for you content every month, monthly coaching calls and a clear system that takes the guesswork out of what to post, where and when. If you want to find out more get in touch. The post WhatsApp for Recruiters: Where It Wins You Clients and Candidates, and Where It Costs You Both appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

August 24, 202628 min

What Recruiters Need to Know About TikTok This Year

TikTok reaches around 24.9 million adults in the UK, roughly 136 million in the US and 10.2 million in Australia. That’s somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the adult population in each of those markets. The audience sits mainly in early- to mid-career stages, and because the For You Page hands out reach based on interest rather than follower count, a brand-new account can get in front of thousands of people. For recruitment, search and staffing businesses, the honest answer is that TikTok is a candidate channel, not a client one. There’s no sourced example of a recruitment business winning new client work through TikTok, and no verified UK, US, or Australia return-on-investment benchmark for the sector. The people who sign off recruitment spend aren’t concentrated on the platform. So if you hire at volume for entry- to mid-level roles, it’s worth testing with a small, defined budget of around 300 to 500 pounds over a fortnight, measuring your own cost per lead rather than relying on anyone else’s numbers. If you’re targeting senior or executive people, put that time into LinkedIn, your email list, and direct outreach instead. This post covers the audience data, what the algorithm rewards in 2026, what a test costs in time and money, and four questions to help you decide either way. What You Will Learn in This Post Who’s really on TikTok in the UK, the US and Australia, and what those numbers mean for the roles you fill Why the change of ownership in January 2026 removes the one objection that stopped a lot of recruiters from looking at the platform at all What the algorithm rewards now, and why a brand new account with no followers can still get real reach Why TikTok can get you candidates but there’s no evidence it will get you clients The difference between attracting candidates and winning clients, and why mixing the two up costs you money What a proper test costs in time and money, and four questions that’ll tell you whether to run one at all I know what some of you are thinking. TikTok is for dancing. It’s not for a serious recruitment business. My clients aren’t on there. Some of you will be right about that. And I want to say up front, you have my permission to walk away from this one. Not every channel is for every company, and part of my job is helping you say no with confidence rather than adding another thing to a list you’re already struggling to get through. But it’s a fair question, so let’s answer it properly. Here’s where I’ve landed after going through the research. TikTok can get you candidates. I couldn’t find any evidence that it will get you clients. That’s the short version. The rest of this post is why, and what you should do about it. What Changed in 2026 Let me start with what’s shifted, because if you looked at TikTok a year or two ago and backed away, your reason might not apply anymore. TikTok is a short-form video app owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. It launched internationally in September 2017. In January 2026, its US operations were sold to a new, majority American-owned entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, led by Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. They hold 80.1 per cent between them, with ByteDance keeping 19.9 per cent. The deal closed on 22 and 23 January 2026. Why does that matter to you? Because for years, the objection I heard most about TikTok had nothing to do with the audience. It was the risk that the whole thing might disappear overnight in the US. Hard to build a plan on that. That question has now been answered. I’ll be straight with you, though. Some legal commentators, including at Harvard Law School, argue the data and influence questions haven’t been fully settled. So not every concern is gone. It’s that the one that made planning impossible has. If you parked TikTok because of that, it’s worth another look. Who’s Really on TikTok in Your Market These are TikTok’s own advertising reach estimates for adults, which are the most current, source-dated data available. UK: around 24.9 million adults, roughly 36 per cent of the population US: around 136 million adults, roughly 39 per cent. Estimates vary between sources from 136 million up to 153 million, so treat it as a range Australia: around 10.2 million adults, roughly 37.5 per cent So in all three of the markets most of you work in, somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the adult population is reachable on this platform. That isn’t a niche. Which is why it’s worth making a proper decision about, rather than dismissing it because of what you assume is on there. Now, the make-up of that audience is what matters for you. In the UK, TikTok’s adult audience is around 62 per cent female, which is a big difference from the global picture. The largest UK segments are 25 to 34, at around 29 per cent, and 35 to 44, at around 23 per cent. In Australia, the gender split is close to even, and the 25 to 34 group is the biggest single segment at around 48 per cent. Globally, around two thirds of adult users sit in the 18 to 34 bracket, with about 8 per cent aged 55 and over. What does that mean in practice? TikTok’s built-in audience sits mainly in early to mid-career stages. It’s not where you’ll find a concentration of senior hiring decision-makers, board-level people or business owners. They’re on LinkedIn, and we covered that channel in a previous episode. One more thing if you work in the Australian market. The under-16 social media ban came in during December 2025 and applies to TikTok, which has pushed the active base further towards adults. For reaching early career professionals in Australia, that makes it slightly more relevant, not less. How the Algorithm Works, and Why It Matters to a Small Business TikTok doesn’t work like LinkedIn or Facebook, and this is where people get caught out. On most platforms, your content goes to your followers first. If you’ve got fifty followers, you reach fifty people. TikTok hands out reach through the For You Page, which works on interest rather than your follower list. That means a brand-new account with nobody following it can get in front of thousands of people if the content works. Please sit with that for a second, because it’s rare. On almost every other platform, you have to build an audience before you get reach. Here you don’t. For a small recruitment or search business starting from nothing, that’s the strongest argument for testing this channel. In 2026, the algorithm has moved further towards rewarding completion rate, rewatches and total watch time. Not likes. Not follower count. Whether people watch your video to the end, and whether they go back and watch it again. TikTok tests each video on a small sample first, then decides whether to push it wider. There’s a second shift worth knowing about. People increasingly use TikTok as a search engine, typing questions into it the way they’d type them into Google. For a recruiter, that’s useful, because content answering real questions- what a role pays, what the interview process looks like, how to move into a sector- keeps working long after a trend has died. On frequency, general guidance is one to four organic posts a week, with newer accounts sometimes benefiting from a few more while they build momentum. On engagement, the estimates vary depending on who you read. One 2025 study puts TikTok at 4.86 per cent, another gives a median of 1.73 per cent, and a third gives 3.7 per cent. Different methodologies so that I wouldn’t build a business case on any single one. What they all agree on is that TikTok beats Instagram, Facebook and X on average engagement. Why TikTok Won’t Get You, Clients Now for the part I really want you to take away, and I’d rather you heard it from me than found out three months into a content plan. When I went through the research for this episode, I was looking for one specific thing. A recruitment or search business that had won client work through TikTok. A PSL, a retained brief, an exclusive assignment. Something that started because a hiring manager saw them on the platform. I couldn’t find one. Not in the UK, not in the US, not in Australia. There is documented recruitment activity on TikTok, and some of it has real numbers attached. But it’s all candidate attraction and employer branding, and none of it is UK-based, so I’m not going to wave it in front of you as though it tells you something reliable about your market. Does the absence prove it’s never happened? No. But it tells you something, and the audience data explains why. The people who sign off recruitment spend aren’t concentrated on this platform. There’s a second gap worth naming while we’re being honest. There’s no reliable UK, US or Australia benchmark for return on investment on TikTok advertising specific to our sector. So if you go in, go in as a test with a defined budget and measure it yourself. Attracting Candidates and Winning Clients Are Two Different Jobs This is the bit that sits underneath everything else, and it costs recruitment business owners real money. We talk about recruitment marketing as though it’s one thing. It isn’t. It’s two jobs. One is attracting candidates. Getting people to apply, building an employer brand, filling your talent pool. The other is winning clients. Getting in front of hiring companies, starting conversations with decision-makers, landing briefs and retainers. Different people. Different messages. Different channels. And a channel can be brilliant at one and useless at the other. Why does this matter so much? Because you can spend six months posting away, watching the views come in, feeling like your marketing is finally working, and then wonder why your client pipeline hasn’t moved an inch. It hasn’t moved because you were doing the other job. I see this a lot. Someone tells me marketing doesn’t work for them, and when we unpick it, the marketing was working. They were doing something other than what they needed. For winning company clients, the routes with proper evidence behind them are still LinkedIn, direct outreach, your email list and consistent content that builds your authority in your sector. What It Costs You, in Time and Money Time Posting on TikTok is technically easy. Record, add captions, publish. A smartphone and the built-in editor will do, and you don’t need to buy any tools to start. The harder part is the style. TikTok rewards content that feels natural, informal and gets to the point in the first two seconds. If you upload the polished corporate video you had made for your website, it’ll sink without a trace. That shift in thinking is the real investment, not the technology. I’ll be honest that there’s no verified benchmark for how many hours a non-marketer needs to put in before they see results. Working back from the one to four posts a week guidance, plan for a few hours a week for filming, editing, captions and looking at what worked. That’s my estimate, not a sourced figure, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. Money Organic is free. If you want to test paid, here’s what it looks like. Minimum campaign budget: 500 dollars lifetime, or 50 dollars a day at campaign level Minimum ad group budget: around 20 dollars a day in the US, 20 pounds a day in the UK, 30 Australian dollars a day in Australia Cost per thousand impressions: sources give ranges of 3.20 to 10 dollars, and 10 to 15 dollars for the US and UK specifically, so treat these as indicative Cost per click: typically 50 cents to 1.50 dollars A realistic first test: 300 to 500 over a fortnight, which is roughly what the algorithm needs to optimise For comparison, a February 2026 UK benchmark puts Google Ads at around 1.55 pounds a click and Facebook at around 78 pence. So TikTok clicks can be competitive, and sometimes cheaper, once you convert them. The number I’d hold onto is that first test figure. Three to five hundred over a fortnight is something most of the business owners we work with could stand to lose if it doesn’t come off. It isn’t a bet-the-house decision. What Good Looks Like on TikTok If you decide to test it, here’s what to do. Use TikTok’s in-app lead generation forms rather than pushing people off to your careers page. Every extra click loses you people Connect those leads to something fast for the follow-up. WhatsApp works well here. Speed protects the momentum you’ve paid for Build an account with a personality behind it, not a job board feed. Give people a reason to follow you before they need you Post consistently, one to four times a week, so the algorithm has enough to work with Answer the questions people in your sector are searching for. That content keeps earning long after a trend has passed And what to avoid. Treating it as a way to win clients. The audience data doesn’t support it Over-polishing, because production value works against you here Posting in bursts. Three videos one week, then nothing for a month, gives the algorithm nothing to go on What to Measure If you can’t measure it, you can’t decide whether to carry on with it. Reach and impressions Video views, and importantly average watch time and completion rate, because that’s what the algorithm rewards now Engagement, meaning likes, comments, shares and saves Follower growth, as a secondary number rather than a headline one Click-through rate to any landing page or lead form If you’re running paid, cost per lead, and then how many of those leads turn into placements TikTok gives you all of this through TikTok Studio for organic content and TikTok Ads Manager for paid. Both are free and fairly easy to read. The last one on that list is the one that matters to your business. Leads on their own don’t pay anybody’s wages. Questions to Help You Decide Grab a pen and paper for this one. I’d rather you wrote the answers down than did it in your head. Where does the talent you place sit? If you’re hiring at volume for entry- to mid-level roles, the platform’s audience lines up with the people you need. If you’re doing executive search or senior professional services appointments, it doesn’t. Is your main goal candidates or clients? If it’s candidates and employer brand, this channel is worth a look. If it’s winning new clients, put the effort into LinkedIn and your email list instead. Can you sustain one to four posts a week in an informal style? Be honest with yourself here. If the answer is no, and for a lot of small teams it is, then adding a channel you can’t keep going will make your marketing worse, not better. There’s Also Another Answer Some of you will want to be on there anyway, on the basis that the people in early career roles today are the hiring managers you’ll be selling to in ten years. That’s a fair argument, and I’m not going to talk you out of it. Just be clear with yourself about what you’re buying. That’s a long-term brand play, not lead generation. Give it a small budget you wouldn’t miss, judge it on whether people know who you are rather than on placements, and don’t let it eat the time that belongs to the channels bringing money in this quarter. What I wouldn’t do is run it as a brand play while privately hoping it produces clients. That way you’ve built the disappointment in from day one. Final Thoughts TikTok reaches between a third and two-fifths of the adult population across the UK, the US and Australia. Its audience sits mainly in early- to mid-career stages. It also gives small accounts a genuine shot at reach, which very few platforms do anymore. But candidates and clients are two different jobs, and this channel only does one. So if you place volume roles and you need applicants, test it properly, with a real budget and real measurement. And if you run a search business placing senior people, close this door and put the time into something that’ll pay you back. Saying no to the wrong channel is a marketing decision, and it’s a good one. Because the mistake I see most often isn’t picking the wrong channel. It’s picking too many. Doing all of them at half effort. Then deciding marketing doesn’t work. Marketing worked. It was just spread so thin that none of it got enough of you. Pick two or three. Do them properly. Be consistent. I hope that’s been useful. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Choosing the right two or three channels is one thing. Showing up on them consistently while you’re running a business is another. That’s what we help with inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done-for-you content every month, coaching calls and a clear marketing system, so being visible to the clients and candidates you want becomes straightforward rather than another thing on the list. If you’d like to talk it through, book a call with us here: www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call https://recmarketingandsales.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ep515.mp3 The post What Recruiters Need to Know About TikTok This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

August 11, 202623 min

Marketing Channels for Recruiters: What Recruiters Need to Know About LinkedIn This Year

LinkedIn is the one platform almost every recruiter already uses. That is a good instinct. The catch is that most recruitment and search business owners lean on it for one job, sourcing candidates, and leave the more valuable job, winning clients and building a brand, largely untouched. So let me give you an honest breakdown of what LinkedIn does well, what it does not, and how to make it work for both winning clients and finding candidates. LinkedIn Does Two Jobs, Using Two Different Parts of the Platform One idea runs through everything below. Instagram and Facebook, which we covered in the previous two episodes, are candidate attraction and employer brand channels. LinkedIn is different. Most recruiters already use it every day, and for the most part they use it as a sourcing tool, finding candidates by role, skill and sector. That is a fair way to see it, because it is a brilliant sourcing tool. But sourcing is only half of what LinkedIn can do for your business. The other half, and the one many recruiters underuse, is the client side. LinkedIn is also your strongest channel for winning clients and for building a personal brand that brings clients to you. It is where the people who hire you spend their working lives. So for most owners, the opportunity is not to source more; it is to start using the client, business development and personal branding half they have been leaving untouched. Two jobs, one platform, and they do not happen in the same place. The client and brand side lives in the feed, in what you post and how consistently you show up. The sourcing side lives in outbound search and messaging. Treat LinkedIn as one undifferentiated thing, and you dilute both. Understand the split, and you get far more from it. How Big It Is, and Who Is On There LinkedIn passed 1.3 billion members worldwide this year, with around 310 million active every month. More useful than the global figure is how far it reaches into the working population of the markets most of you serve. In the UK, LinkedIn reaches around 71% of the population. In the US, around 83%. In Australia, around 61%. Those are high figures, drawn from LinkedIn’s own advertising reach data, so they include some duplicate and inactive accounts. Treat them as a sign of very high penetration rather than a literal count of individuals. Either way, the conclusion is the same. Almost every hiring decision-maker you would want as a client is reachable here. LinkedIn reports more than 65 million decision-makers and 10 million people at C-level among its members. That is your ideal client list, gathered on a single channel. The Lurker Economy, and Why It Matters So Much Now the single most important thing to understand about LinkedIn. Only around one percent of active users post content. Everyone else reads. They scroll, they notice, they form a view, and they rarely like, comment or share. These are the lurkers, and they make up the vast majority of the platform. Think about who they are. Your clients. Hiring managers, business owners and department heads do not spend their working day reacting to posts. But they see them. And when a vacancy appears, they contact the recruiter who has been showing up in their feed. Brand Building and Client Acquisition Are the Same Activity This is why, on LinkedIn, building your brand and winning clients are not two separate tasks. They are the same task. Here is a real example from one of our members. She had been posting consistently on LinkedIn for some time. Nothing elaborate, just useful content in her specialist area, published week after week. Then a client she had not worked with in over a year came to her out of the blue with a senior technical role, a CTO position, and handed it to her exclusively. When she asked what had prompted the call, the answer was revealing. He told her he could not miss her, she was all over LinkedIn, and when the role came up hers was the first name that came to mind. He had never once liked or commented on a single thing she posted. That is the whole point. You are not posting to collect reactions. You are posting to stay in the mind of a buyer who will never engage in public, but who will call you the moment they have a need. Every useful post is a small deposit into that future phone call. Same anonymised member story as the script, the real Rachel / Ice Recruitment example. Say the word and I will name her, since it is already published with permission. What the 2026 Algorithm Now Rewards LinkedIn changed how its feed works this year, and the change favours exactly the kind of person reading this. The platform has moved towards relevance-based distribution. In plain terms, it now works to put each post in front of the people most likely to find it genuinely useful, weighing the author’s demonstrated expertise and topic consistency rather than raw reactions. It pushes down engagement bait, the “comment YES if you agree” style of post, along with generic content that reads as machine-made and posted without thought, and posts where the video has nothing to do with the words. What it rewards is teaching something useful, in a clear niche, from someone who obviously knows their field. Read that again. It describes you. You are a real expert in your sector, which means you do not need to chase viral reach. You need to be consistently useful to a specific group of people, which is what the platform now favours. On format, documents, carousels and native video currently outperform plain text and link posts, so if you are unsure what to create, start there. Using LinkedIn to Source Candidates So far we have talked about the feed, which is where clients and brand live. The other job, sourcing, happens through LinkedIn’s paid tools, and it is worth knowing LinkedIn splits the two jobs across two different products. Sales Navigator is the business development tool, built to find companies that are hiring and reach the decision-makers behind them, which is what most recruitment owners use it for. A Recruiter licence is the sourcing tool, and that is the one that matters here. A Recruiter licence, whether full Recruiter or the lighter Recruiter Lite, lets you search and reach candidates by job title, seniority, industry, skills and experience with a precision no other platform offers. You can organise candidates into talent pools and use InMail to reach passive people who are not in your network. And the outbound approach delivers. Industry data this year shows a candidate you source and approach directly is around five times more likely to be hired than one who applies to a job advert. It is little wonder many recruiters use LinkedIn every day for sourcing. Where LinkedIn Is Not the Answer An honest series means honest limits. LinkedIn is outstanding for sourcing professional, technical and executive candidates. For high-volume, hourly, trades it is a weaker candidate channel, and that is where Facebook and the other platforms we have covered earn their place. So match the channel to the roles you fill. If you place specialists and professionals, LinkedIn is close to essential on both sides. If you place high volumes of hourly workers, use LinkedIn for the client relationship and source your candidates where they gather. The Mistakes That Hold Recruiters Back A handful of habits hold recruiters back on LinkedIn. Posting only jobs, which turns your profile into a job board and builds no authority. Posting rarely and in bursts, when consistency is the entire game. Chasing engagement tricks that the algorithm now works against and that clients see straight through. Publishing generic, machine-made content with none of your own thinking in it. What aspect of LinkedIn is Right for Your Business? No channel suits everyone, so decide deliberately. Ask three questions. Is my priority winning clients or sourcing candidates? If clients, LinkedIn is close to essential whatever your sector. If candidates, what kind of roles do I fill: professional and technical, and LinkedIn is your best tool; high-volume and hourly, and you should source elsewhere while still using LinkedIn for clients. And can I commit to showing up consistently with useful, niche content rather than the occasional job advert? That consistency is what turns a dormant profile into a channel that brings in business. Answer those honestly and you will know how much of your time LinkedIn deserves. How We Can Help You This Year Knowing what to do is one thing. Doing it consistently, while running a business, is another. That is what we help with inside Superfast Circle. Members get a personalised marketing plan, done-for-you content and campaigns, monthly coaching and a clear system that makes showing up on LinkedIn and the other channels straightforward rather than one more job on the list. If you have been meaning to get LinkedIn working properly for your business, book a call and we will show you how it works. www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call Thanks Denise The post Marketing Channels for Recruiters: What Recruiters Need to Know About LinkedIn This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

August 4, 202623 min

What Recruiters Need to Know About Facebook This Year

Let me start with a question I get asked more than almost any other when it comes to marketing channels. Should I be using Facebook for my recruitment business? It usually comes with a follow-up. Is it not just for personal stuff now? Has everyone not moved on to LinkedIn or Instagram? Is it worth my time? Here is the honest answer. Facebook can be genuinely useful for recruitment, but only for a particular kind of hiring, and only if you use it in a particular way. A lot of the owners I work with get this wrong on both counts. Some write it off completely and miss a real opportunity. Others pour hours into it expecting it to bring them clients, then feel let down when it does not, because winning clients was never what Facebook was for. So let me clear it up. Here is what Facebook is good for, what it is not, and how to decide whether it deserves a place in your marketing for the rest of the year. Facebook is bigger than you think First, let us deal with the myth that everyone has left. Globally, Facebook has more than three billion people using it every month. It is still the biggest social network in the world. Closer to home, in the markets most of you work in: Around 56% of the UK population have a Facebook account, roughly 55 to 56 million people. In the US, around seven in ten adults use Facebook. In Australia, around 65% of the population are on it. In our markets, the audience is broadly stable rather than growing fast, but it is enormous, and it is not going anywhere. So no, Facebook is not dead. Not even close. But scale is not the same as relevance Here is the thing to hold onto. A huge audience only matters if the right people are on it and you can reach them. So the real question is not how big Facebook is. It is who is on there for you, and whether you can get in front of them. What Facebook is really for in recruitment When it comes to recruitment, Facebook has one clear job. Candidate attraction, and specifically for volume and local hiring. It is not a client channel, at least not organically. It is not where you win business development or reach senior hiring managers. And this is not just my opinion, it is built into how the platform works. On LinkedIn, people show up as professionals. They tell the platform their job title, their company, their seniority. That is why you can target a hiring manager or a head of talent so precisely. On Facebook, people are not there as professionals. They are there as people, catching up with friends, sitting in local groups, watching video. So the targeting recruiters rely on, by job title, by seniority, by company, either is not available or is not reliable. That single difference tells you almost everything. Facebook is brilliant at reaching a broad, local, personal-life audience. It is weak at reaching a specific professional one. One exception, and it is paid There is one important caveat. Everything above is about organic Facebook, the free posting side. Paid is a different lever. When you put budget behind Meta ads, you can build brand awareness with a far wider audience than your own followers, and that can include potential clients, not only candidates. It will not replace LinkedIn for winning business, but it can keep your name in front of the right people. There is a fair bit to running Meta ads well, and we will cover that properly in a dedicated episode later in this series. The reach problem nobody tells you about Now for the single most useful thing I can tell you about Facebook. If your Facebook strategy is a company Page that you post to now and again, I am sorry to say, almost nobody is seeing it. Organic reach on a Facebook Page, the number of your followers who see a post without you paying, has collapsed. The benchmarks now sit at around 2% of your followers per post. So a thousand followers might mean twenty people see a post. Ten years ago that figure was closer to 16%. It has fallen off a cliff, and it is not coming back, because Meta makes its money selling reach through ads. So where is the life on Facebook? Groups. Facebook Groups reach 15 to 40% of their members per post, five to fifteen times more than a Page. The algorithm favours Groups because people opt in and engage there. A niche local jobseeker group, or a sector-specific community, will do far more for you organically than your company Page ever will. That flips the usual advice on its head. The instinct is to build your Page and post your jobs. The reality is that your Page is the weakest tool Facebook gives you, and Groups are the strongest. If you take one thing from this, let it be that. Where it works, and where it does not Let us make it practical. Facebook works well when your hiring depends on candidate volume in a specific area. Retail, trades, hospitality, industrial, warehouse, driving, admin. Roles where you need a steady flow of local applicants, and where those candidates are living their everyday lives on the platform and in local groups. For that kind of hiring, Facebook’s local reach and low cost are hard to beat. Where does it fall down? Executive search. Specialist technology roles. Professional services placements. Anything where the candidates and clients are senior, specific and few. Those people are far easier to reach on LinkedIn or through niche channels, and Facebook’s lack of professional targeting works against you. So the question is not whether Facebook is good or bad. It is whether the hiring you do matches what Facebook is good at. For some of you that is a strong yes. For others it is a clear no. Both are fine, as long as you are honest about which one you are. A real example Here is what this looks like done well. A technical staffing company wanted more applications for the roles it was filling. Rather than relying on its Page, it ran a tightly targeted local campaign, focused on people of working age within about a fifty-mile radius, using job-related search terms, backed by consistent content. Over the year, job applications rose by 82%. They nearly doubled. Follower numbers climbed sharply, and website traffic rose too. Notice the pattern. Local. Targeted. Consistent. A little paid spend to earn reach, rather than hoping the Page would deliver it. That is the Facebook playbook for recruitment in a nutshell. If you use it, here is what works If you have decided the hiring you do fits, here is what works, based on the data rather than guesswork. Lead with Groups, not your Page. Get active in niche and local groups where your candidates already are, or build one if the right group does not exist. That is where your organic reach lives now. Use video, and caption it. Native and live video get the highest reach by a distance, and most people watch with the sound off on their phone. Captions are the difference between being watched and being scrolled past. Do not treat Facebook as free. Pair organic activity with a small, consistent paid budget. Even ten to twenty pounds or dollars a day, run properly and given time to settle, will do more than occasional bigger bursts. Go hyper-local for volume roles. Target by area and by interest, exactly as in the example above. And the mistakes to avoid: relying on your Page as your main channel, posting rarely and expecting reach, using Facebook to chase senior decision-makers it was never built to target, and running paid campaigns on too small a budget for the platform to learn anything. How to decide if Facebook is right for you Three questions to consider Does my hiring depend more on candidate volume in a specific area than on reaching senior client decision-makers? If yes, Facebook is worth a proper look. Do I have even a small budget, say ten to fifty a day, and a few hours a week for content and a group presence? If not, organic-only effort at today’s reach levels probably will not repay the time. Is my priority reaching hiring managers or senior clients in professional services or technology? If so, Facebook is a secondary channel at best, and LinkedIn is where your energy should go. Answer those honestly and you will know. That is the whole point of this series. Not to be on everything, but to choose the channels that fit how you win, and give those your full attention. How we can help you this year Working out which channels are right for your business, and then producing the content consistently, is exactly what we help recruitment and search companies with inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done-for-you content, monthly coaching and a clear plan, so marketing stops being the thing that slips when you get busy. If that is the kind of support you have been looking for, book a call and let us show you how it works. www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call Thanks Denise The post What Recruiters Need to Know About Facebook This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

July 28, 202624 min

Marketing Channels for Recruiters : What Recruiters Need to Know About Instagram This Year

This is the first in a new series where I take you through the main marketing channels one at a time, from Instagram and LinkedIn to YouTube, TikTok, email and paid ads, and give you the honest picture on each one. Here’s why I’m doing it. One of the questions we get asked more than almost any other is simple. Should I be on this platform? Is that one worth my time? Where do I put my effort? It’s a fair question, because there are more channels than ever, and none of us has the time to be on all of them. If you listened to the last podcast, we went through the marketing tasks worth doing over the summer- those slower weeks where you finally get a bit of headspace to work on the business instead of just in it. A lot of you will be doing exactly that right now, looking at the rest of the year and wondering where to focus. So it feels like the right moment to go through the channels properly, one by one. We’re starting with Instagram, because it’s the one recruiters are most unsure about. It feels very consumer, very lifestyle, and a lot of owners wonder whether it has any place at all in a serious, B2B business. Here’s the honest answer. And it starts with the data. The Numbers Might Surprise You In the UK, Instagram has around 37.7 million users, according to the most recent figures from NapoleonCat in March. In plain terms, that’s more than half the entire UK population. Not half of social media users, half of everyone, every age group. The US is much the same. The latest data from Pew Research shows about half of all American adults are on Instagram. And Australia is higher still, with almost seven in ten adults using it at the end of last year. So let’s put one myth to bed. Instagram is not a niche teenage app any more. It’s properly mainstream, across all three of the markets most of you work in. But here’s the part that matters most for us as recruiters. The age profile, and it’s worth looking at properly. In the US, eight in ten of the 18 to 29 age group are on it, dropping to fewer than one in five of the over-sixties. In the UK, the biggest single group is 25 to 34. Hold that thought, because it’s the key to everything that follows. Instagram Is a Candidate Channel, Not a Client One Here’s what that age profile is telling us. For most recruiters, Instagram is a place to attract candidates and build your brand, not a place to win new clients. Think about it. The people doing the hiring, the ones who sign off your fees, tend to be more senior, and they’re far more likely to be on LinkedIn. That’s where they go with their work hat on. The people scrolling Instagram are much more likely to be your candidates, and they’re sizing up what it’s like to work somewhere long before they ever apply. So if your goal is winning new clients, hand on heart, Instagram probably isn’t where I’d start. LinkedIn is still your channel for that, and we’ll cover it properly later in the series. But if you want to attract candidates and build a brand that makes people think they really know this market, I want to work with them, then Instagram can genuinely earn its place. I’d rather be straight with you about that than have you chase a channel because everyone says you should. Which Sectors It Suits A lot of it comes down to your sector. Instagram tends to work best where the work is visual and where the people you want to reach are already spending their time. Think hospitality, retail, the trades, creative and marketing recruitment, or early careers and graduate recruitment. Anywhere you can show people, places, a bit of culture and energy. It works less well for executive search, senior finance, legal, and high-level tech and engineering, where both the candidates and the clients tend to be more senior and established in their careers, and far more likely to be found on LinkedIn. So before you put a single hour in, ask yourself honestly whether your candidate pool is really the kind of audience that’s on Instagram. If it is, read on. If it isn’t, this might be one you note and move past, and that’s a perfectly good outcome. Half the value of this series is helping you rule channels out. What Works on Instagram Let’s say Instagram does fit your market. Here’s what works, and none of it needs you to be a professional content creator. Lead with video. Reels, the short ones, get far more reach than a plain photo post right now, and they don’t need to be polished. A quick chat to camera about a role, a bit of advice for candidates, a behind-the-scenes moment. That’s plenty. Use carousels for teaching. Swipe-along posts like five CV (resume) mistakes costing you interviews, or what it’s really like working with us. People save that kind of content, and saves are one of the strongest signals you can send Instagram that your content is worth showing to more people. Use Stories to stay front of mind. Polls, questions and quick updates keep you visible with the people already following you, with barely any effort. Use your DMs properly. So many good recruitment conversations start in the messages, so make it easy for people to reach you there and reply like a human, not a job board. The golden thread through all of it is to be real. Real people, real placements, real culture. On Instagram, authentic beats polished every time. Time, and the Reset Tax A quick word on time, because I know that’s what you’re really thinking. To make Instagram work, you’re looking at posting a few times a week and sticking at it for a couple of months before you see much back. It’s not instant. But then nothing good in marketing ever is. And this brings me to something I feel strongly about. Please don’t try to do all of this at once, across every platform. I see recruiters get excited, throw themselves at four channels for three weeks, run out of steam, and stop. Then they start again in a panic when the pipeline dries up. All that stopping and starting costs you. Every time you disappear for a while, you lose the momentum you’d built, the algorithm stops favouring you, and the warm audience you’d gathered goes cold again. I call it the reset tax, and it’s one of the most expensive mistakes in marketing. You’re far better off picking one or two channels that genuinely fit and showing up on them consistently than spreading yourself thin across the lot and burning out. That’s the whole point of this series. Choose well, then commit. Does It Work? Yes, when it fits. A recruitment agency in Germany ran a simple campaign on Instagram Stories and brought their cost per hire down from around four and a half thousand euros to about thirteen hundred. That’s a serious result, and it came from genuine, culture-led content rather than anything fancy. Real people, real workplace. How to Decide If It’s Right for You Four quick questions. Is my main goal candidates and brand, or clients? If it’s clients, start with LinkedIn. Is my candidate pool genuinely on Instagram? Visual, consumer-facing sectors, yes. Senior and niche, probably not. Have I got visual content, or can I create it? Culture, people, placements, advice. If there’s nothing to show and no time to make it, your effort is better spent elsewhere. Can I commit to being consistent for a couple of months? If not, don’t start, because a burst followed by silence is worse than not showing up at all. Answer yes to those and Instagram is worth a proper go. Answer no, and you’ve saved yourself a lot of wasted time, which is a win too. In Short Instagram is a mainstream channel now. It’s excellent for attracting candidates and building your brand in the right sectors, weaker for winning new clients, and the trick is being honest about whether your market is really there before you commit. Next in the series, we’re staying in the Meta family and turning to Facebook, Instagram’s older sibling with a very different crowd, and one a lot of recruiters write off too fast. How We Can Help You This Year Knowing what to do is one thing. Doing it consistently is another. If you’d like a hand putting your channel plan together and having the content resources ready so you can stay consistent without it swallowing your whole week, that’s exactly what we do inside Superfast Circle. Book a call and we’ll show you how it works: www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call Thanks Denise The post Marketing Channels for Recruiters : What Recruiters Need to Know About Instagram This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

July 14, 202623 min

Don’t Pay The Reset Tax With These 7 Marketing Tasks for Your Summer

Summary Most recruitment business owners stop marketing over the summer and restart in September. That restart carries a hidden cost: lower reach, a colder audience and a first month back spent recovering ground you already owned. Marketers and BD professionals call it the reset tax. This post sets out seven marketing tasks for the summer. They are not designed to fill your quiet weeks with busywork. They are designed to build a marketing system that keeps running when you are heads down billing, so your autumn pipeline is not left to chance. Key Takeaways The reset tax is the cost of stopping and restarting your marketing. Most owners pay it twice a year, over the summer and at Christmas. Review the first half and identify what compounded, rather than what gave you a one off hit. Work your database while clients and candidates have the headspace to think. Build your pipeline sixty days ahead. October fees are earned in July and August. Get twelve weeks of content written and scheduled before your busy quarter arrives. Fix the shop front. People check your website and LinkedIn profile long before they contact you. Be honest about whether you are doing no marketing, too little marketing, or the wrong marketing. The fix is different for each. Choose the system over the sprint. Small consistent levers beat bursts of effort every time. What happened to your marketing last August? Not what you meant to do. What actually got sent, posted, written and published. For a lot of recruitment business owners, the honest answer is not very much. Clients go quiet. Candidates are away. The inbox slows. And the marketing, which was already the first thing to get dropped when you were busy, gets dropped again. Then September arrives, everyone comes back, and you look at a thin pipeline and think, right, time to get back out there. So you start again. And starting again is the expensive bit. The Reset Tax Nobody Budgets For There is a cost to stopping and restarting your marketing, and it never appears on a spreadsheet. Marketers and BD professionals call it the reset tax. You stop posting for six weeks. Your reach drops, so when you return you are seen by fewer people than before you left. The warm audience you built has cooled. The people who were starting to recognise your name have forgotten it. You spend your first month back buying your way to where you already were. Most recruitment business owners pay this tax twice a year. Once over the summer. Once at Christmas. This is not an argument for working through August. It is an argument for using the summer differently. The quiet weeks are not the time to do more marketing. They are the time to build the thing that means your marketing does not stop when you do. Why a To Do List Is Not Enough A list of tasks reinforces the behaviour that keeps recruitment companies stuck. It suggests marketing is a pile of jobs you get to when there is a gap. After eighteen years working with recruitment and search business owners, I can tell you this is rarely a knowledge problem. You know you should be visible. You know you should be talking to your database. It is an implementation problem. The gap between knowing and doing is where growth disappears. So here are seven tasks, and every one of them is chosen because it closes that gap rather than adding to your September workload. 1.Review the First Half Honestly We are past the halfway point, so look back at January to June and work out what genuinely moved the needle. Use Stop, Start, Continue if it helps. What will you stop, what will you start, what is working that you should keep doing? Then add the question that matters most: what compounded? Some marketing gives you a hit and then nothing. A one off campaign. A burst of posts. Other marketing builds on itself: the content that keeps getting found, the relationships that keep returning, the list that grows whether you are watching it or not. Separate the two, then be ruthless about where your time goes in the second half. 2.Work Your Database While People Have Headspace There is gold at your feet. In your CRM are clients you have not spoken to in eighteen months, candidates you placed three years ago who are now hiring managers, and enquiries that never got a follow up. Summer is one of the few points in the year when those people have room to think. They are reflecting on the year. They are wondering whether they want another one like it. That is the moment to land in their inbox with something useful. A market update. A career conversation. A question about autumn hiring plans. The recruiters with the strongest Septembers are the ones who had those conversations in July. 3.Build Your Sixty Day Pipeline Now The work you do today does not pay you today. It pays you in around sixty days. The conversation you have this week becomes next month’s brief and the placement after that. The fees you bank in October were not earned in October. They were earned in July and August by someone who kept going. So a thin pipeline in September is not a September problem. It is a summer problem you are only finding out about late. Work backwards. Decide what you want to be billing in the final quarter, count back sixty days, and ask what has to be happening now for that to be true. 4.Get Ahead on Your Content This is the task that buys back your autumn. Reach the end of August with twelve weeks of content written and scheduled, and your busiest quarter no longer knocks your marketing over. It simply continues without you. Do not invent topics from scratch. Go and look at what has already worked. Your website analytics will show you which pages people read. LinkedIn will show you which posts landed. Your client calls will tell you which questions keep coming up. The market tells you what it wants. Your job is to listen, then say more about it. 5.Sort Out the Shop Front A beauty salon dresses the window before the season, not during it. Your website and LinkedIn profile are your shop front, and for most recruitment companies they are costing money. People check you out long before they contact you. Look at yours the way a stranger would. Does your website say who you help, or only what you do? Is there a case study or testimonial visible within ten seconds? Is there any reason for a visitor to give you their email address? Does your LinkedIn profile read like a CV, or like a page written for the people you want to attract? None of these are big jobs. All of them are the sort of thing that never gets done because it is not urgent. 6.Be Honest About What You Are Really Doing When I talk to recruitment business owners about their marketing, I hear three answers. The first, and it is more common than people admit, is that they are not doing any marketing at all. None. Too busy, or referrals have always been enough. It simply is not happening. The second is that they are doing some, but nowhere near enough of it, and never for long enough to work. A few posts. An email that went out once. It stops before it has a chance to build. The third is that they are busy doing the wrong things. Activity that feels like marketing and produces nothing. Posting jobs and calling it content. Setting up a channel their market never looks at. Before you add anything to your list, be honest about which of the three you are. The fix is different for each. If you are doing nothing, start, and start small enough that you will keep going. If you are doing too little, commit to something you can sustain when the busy weeks arrive. And if you are doing the wrong things, stop them. Stopping is allowed. Consistency in one or two things that work will always beat scattered effort across six that do not. 7. Choose the System First, Not the Sprint Every task above fails if you treat it as a burst of effort. Review the year, blast the database, write some content, tidy the website, feel productive, then run out of road in week three when a big brief lands. What works instead is small, consistent levers pulled repeatedly, whether you feel like it or not. It is deeply unglamorous and it is the whole game. The owners who grow are not the ones with the best ideas. They are the ones with something in place that keeps the marketing moving while they are heads down billing. That is a system. Building one is the best possible use of your summer. How We Can Help If you are reading this thinking, I know all of this and I still do not do it, that is the most normal thing in the world. It is the Implementation Gap, and it is not a character flaw. It is what we have spent this year designing for. Sharon and I have created The Catalyst System , and it sits at the heart of Superfast Circle. It is there for exactly the problem described in this post: marketing that runs as a system rather than something you get to when you remember. If you would like a look at how it works inside Superfast Circle, book a call and we will walk you through it. www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call Thanks Denise The post Don’t Pay The Reset Tax With These 7 Marketing Tasks for Your Summer appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .

June 8, 202631 min

Imposter Syndrome Is Keeping Your Recruitment Business Small

Key Takeaways From This Post In this episode of The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast, Sharon Newey explores why imposter syndrome disproportionately affects the most capable recruitment business owners, what it actually costs commercially, and three practical actions you can take this week to start showing up with the authority you have already earned. You are on a call with a client you have worked with for a while. Good relationship. The conversation is going well. And then, almost as an aside, they say: “We had a really useful piece come through this week from another agency. A benchmarking report on salaries in our sector. Really timely.” They are not threatening to leave. They are not complaining. It is a throwaway comment. But something shifts. Because you know that topic. You have lived it. You have had the exact same conversation about salary expectations with four clients this month. You know what is happening in that market, why it is happening, and what businesses should be doing about it. You could have written that report. You should have written that report. But you did not. And someone else did. And now your client is talking about them on a call with you. That feeling is not a content problem. It is not a time problem. It is imposter syndrome. And it is costing your business more than you realise. The Statistic That Changes how you see This Research suggests that up to 85% of high-achieving professionals experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. Eighty-five per cent. That is not a niche phenomenon. That is not something that happens to people who lack confidence or ability. That is a pattern that affects the majority of people who are genuinely very good at what they do. Imposter syndrome is not evidence that you are not ready. It is frequently a signal that you are more capable than you give yourself credit for. The doubt is not a warning sign. It is a side effect of expertise. What Imposter Syndrome Actually Looks Like in Recruitment In a recruitment business, imposter syndrome rarely announces itself as imposter syndrome. It disguises itself as something far more practical. It looks like waiting until the website is ready. You know the marketing needs to happen. But the website is not quite right, so you will start once that is sorted. The website gets sorted. Then it is something else. It looks like not posting because it is not good enough. You draft something, read it back, and think: this is obvious. Everyone in my sector already knows this. So you delete it, and nothing goes out. It looks like avoiding video, permanently. You know video works. You have seen the data. But something about pressing record feels impossible, so the video conversation gets shelved for another quarter. It looks like undercharging and struggling to defend your fees. When you do not fully believe in your own authority, you drop your rate before the client has even pushed back. You discount as a reflex, not as a strategy. And it looks like watching competitors win work you know you could do better. They are not better than you. They are simply louder. They are showing up. They are saying the things you are thinking. Recognise any of that? Most recruitment directors and founders will recognise at least three of those patterns immediately. And they will have filed them under time, or priorities, or just not my thing. But that is not really what they are. Why High-Achievers are Most at Risk The people most susceptible to imposter syndrome are not the least competent. It is the opposite. The more expert you become, the more likely you are to experience it. And there is a name for this: the paradox of competence. When you are a junior recruiter, you know what you do not know. The gaps are visible and that feels appropriate. But as you become genuinely expert, your awareness of the field’s complexity increases at the same rate as your knowledge. You can see further. Which means you can also see further ahead of where you currently are. You know more, and so you are more aware of the things you do not yet know. And that awareness can feel, incorrectly, like inadequacy. There is a specific version of this that we see consistently. Many of our clients built their career inside a corporate agency. They were brilliant at what they did, and the brand gave them a platform. Candidates and clients trusted them, but some of that trust was borrowed from the institution. And then they went out on their own. Courageous, commercially smart. But it came with a hidden tax. Because now the brand is them. The credibility is theirs to build, not to borrow. And a voice surfaces that says: was it ever really me? The answer is yes. Thirty years of sector expertise does not evaporate when you hand back a corporate email address. But the voice does not always believe that, and the voice is loud. The Commercial Cost you are not Counting Imposter syndrome is not just an internal discomfort. It has a real, measurable commercial cost. And most recruitment business owners have not fully calculated it. The first cost is visibility. When you are not showing up consistently, not posting, not putting your expertise into the public domain, you are invisible to people who are actively looking for someone exactly like you. Your ideal client is on LinkedIn right now, forming opinions about who they trust. If you are not there, you are not in the conversation. Visible competitors win the work you should be winning. Not because they are better. Because they are present, and you are not. The second cost is fee pressure. Authority and pricing power are directly linked. When a client already knows who you are, has read your posts, has seen that you understand their market in a way that other recruiters do not, the fee conversation starts from a completely different position. They have already bought your expertise before you pick up the phone. When you are invisible, you are just another recruiter. And just another recruiter competes on price. We saw this play out clearly with a client who had close to thirty years in her sector. Before she started showing up consistently, she was competing on contingency terms like everyone else. Within months of building a visible presence, she was having completely different conversations. Fee negotiations became almost secondary, because clients had already bought into her expertise before terms were discussed. She went on to secure her first ever retained projects after decades of contingency work. The third cost is referrals. Referrals are generated not just by the quality of your work but by how front of mind you are. If your network has not heard from you in six months, they will refer someone else. Not because your work was not good. Because the other person was more visible at the moment the referral conversation happened. Three Things You Can do This Week These are low-risk, practical actions that genuinely move the needle. Post one piece of content about what you know, not who you are. The best content from a recruitment leader is about the market. What are you seeing in your sector right now? What are clients getting wrong? What do candidates need to understand about the current hiring picture? That is expertise sharing, not self-promotion. Start there. One post. This week. Share a client or candidate outcome. Not a polished case study. Just a moment. “We helped a client hire a head of finance last month, and here is what made the difference in the search.” Two paragraphs. It demonstrates your expertise and is built entirely from something that already happened. You are not inventing content. You are making your existing work visible. Say the thing you think is too obvious to say. Your market hears these things all the time and still makes the same mistakes. Obvious to you is not obvious to them. The insight that feels like basic knowledge inside your industry is exactly what your ideal client is waiting to read. Say it. None of these require a content strategy, a copywriter, or a professional photoshoot. They require you to decide that your knowledge is worth sharing. That is the only prerequisite. Something to Sit With Before you move on, one question worth sitting with honestly. What is the one thing you know you should be saying publicly that you have been holding back? And what is the real reason? Not the practical reason. Not the time, or the website, or the platform. The real reason. In thirty years of coaching, I have rarely met a business owner who lacked something worth saying. What I have met, time and again, are people who had everything they needed and were waiting for permission that was never going to come from anywhere external. You already have the expertise. You have earned it. The only question is whether you are going to let it stay invisible. Thanks, Sharon How We Can Help Working on your marketing consistently is one of the most important things you can do for the long-term health of your recruitment business. Visibility builds authority. Authority builds better fee conversations. And better fee conversations build the kind of business you actually want to run. We have just updated our Superfast Circle programme with new resources and support designed specifically for recruitment business owners who are ready to show up consistently and with confidence. If you would like the full details, email us at support@superfastrecruitment.co.uk and we will send everything across. The post Imposter Syndrome Is Keeping Your Recruitment Business Small appeared first on Superfast Recruitment .