Hi everybody welcome back to another recruiting conversations, it’s your host Richard Milligan and if I sound a little bit giddy today, well this is take four of this podcast and life lesson learned, right? John Maxwell has, in the book failing forward, he’s got a mantra and there it goes along the lines of there are no mistakes there are only lessons, but if you don’t learn those lessons the lessons get harder, and the law of the universe is that we always learn our lessons. Well I am on take four because I’m trying to record this at home where I have four children between the ages of 6 and 17, and I have two dogs, and so in the craziness of that maybe, my lesson to be learned is that, this is not the place to be cutting a podcast, but here I am so I’m hopeful this take actually takes and I’m able to share this with you. So let’s talk about one of the things that I bring up again and again which is the need for you to have a leadership brand now what does that mean what means that you need to be representing yourself in social media in the form of an attractive leader well that brings up the question what is an attractive leader well the attractive leader is someone that has a clear vision has clear core values can articulate them extremely well and then lives and acts in alignment with that so that’s the attractive leader now think about this if we go back 2,000 years ago not a lot has changed in terms of leadership 2,000 years ago now that’s an arbitrary number that I’m not a historian but my guess is 2,000 years ago that was the era of kings and kingdoms right and so in that era there was only a couple of reasons why people would reside underneath the kingdom and one of those reasons was protection like if you’ll protect me and my family I’ll serve you another one was for provision if if you will ensure that regardless of what happens me and my family have provisions we can eat we can drink and then we’re safe then it will serve you with my life right fast-forward 2000 years and I do do believe there’s a lot of direct correlation between what we call leadership today and what we call kingdoms 2,000 years ago at the end of the day there’s only a handful of things that people require in order to reside underneath your umbrella as a leader now you know we call them some different things today we call them trust right and you trust you that means that yes protection of my paycheck provision is an important component to me but today one of the things that we have to work towards as leaders is if we’re going to be successful recruiting is building trust with the people that we want on our teams so how do we do this in an environment where the phone has diminishing results right let’s let’s remember this data says today this is 2019 data the only 9% of people are answering phone calls when that call comes from an unrecognized number I may reverse engineer the data 91% say they will only answer calls from their contacts list okay so when you look at that data you realize the phone the old methods that we use to recruit don’t work so you’re attractive leadership matters a lot in social media so with that said you are required to deliver daily content if you’re going to win at scale as a recruiting leader it’s a requirement you can’t be the in the 1% and and be outside of this like the people that are winning a scale those are the 1 percenters right and those people like this is the craziest thing I always use that terminology the 1 percenters well what is LinkedIn data say LinkedIn data says right now there’s 260 million people on the platform and about 3 million of those people post what is that it’s just a little over 1% right now now on a weekly basis those 3 million people get 9 billion pieces of engagement on their content now I don’t know about you but I want a piece of that right that’s how I represent myself as an attractive leader that’s how I ensure that people are aware what I do in my business this is how I how I grow rights how I grow and this is how you grow so you have to deliver daily content ok yes or yes I’m nodding my head so now we’ve made an agreement on that piece now how you deliver the content gonna matter right so let me give you a couple of incredible pieces that are tools that you can use and and I’ll walk you through how I use them so I create a lot of written more content now why is that well LinkedIn really is the only social business platform out there today and so LinkedIn is a is a incredible place to build relationships which eventually end up you know being being recruiting relationships and people on your team so that’s what I’m gonna deliver a lot of my content is on that platform because of that with that said I am not that great at the written word like if you saw my first draft of anything that I wrote you would wonder how any of my content ended up as good as it does the truth is that when like the truth is that I made a c-minus and probably should have gotten a D in English in high school like I barely passed that class because I was awful at English and if you follow me much on such Facebook what you’ll know is my wife is constantly correcting my spelling she’s constantly correcting you know everything from my sentence structure to you know asking me if that even makes sense and that’s just how I write like I write extremely conversationally if I don’t put my content through filters it’s really not that intelligent and so I’ve gotta have some tools around me to make this thing work because look I’m a solopreneur yes I’ve got I’ve got seven employees here that work at this organization but all of that supporting the things that I’m doing okay and so for the most part I operate like a solopreneur and so most of my content is comes directly from my keyboard it comes directly from my thought comes directly from something that I’m doing I don’t have anybody writing this for me and you don’t either for the most part 99.99% of people that listen this podcast will not have somebody delivering content for them now why have I brought up the word writing versus video versus memes right now well one of the reasons why I bring that up is because the written word in short form content is extremely how far on LinkedIn today how do I know that we manage social media at a high level for executive level leaders we have a ton of data inside three industries real estate insurance and mortgages that says that short form written content is where you’re going to get your best engagement and I’m not talking about 25% better engagement I’m talking about 400 to 500 percent more I’m gonna choke up over that number I’m talking about 400 to 500 percent more engagement so if I had a choice to deliver any type of content I’m going to live a written word now with that said not everybody can deliver the written word some people need to deliver video that’s what they’re good at but I’m just going to give you some of my own philosophy around this that you can do something with it now I write my content what’s my process and what I will tell you is that I write my content and even our freelance writers that are on staff that write content for other people we take them through a similar methodology which is a process we write it and then we put it through something that’s called Hemingway app now Hemingway app if you just go to Hemingway app com that’s free software now what Hemingway app does is it actually measures your content for several things it’s going to measure for your readability scoring index that’s important because the more difficult your content is to read the less people will engage with it so the easier it is for them to digest the more they’ll engage with it so what we try to do is we try to write somewhere between a third grade and a sixth grade level I don’t want it any higher than that because what I have been able to show is that that’s the perfect place for people to engage with your content they can read it quickly they can digest it it’s almost like a mama bird’s chewing up the food and spitting into baby birds mouth it’s easy to digest right so readability matters what I know is that when I when I first started measuring what I was writing I was typically writing somewhere between ninth and twelfth grade level which means that it was very complex so what the Hemingway editor duh is not only does it give you a readability score but it also walks through like how many adverbs are you using how many passive voices are you using like are there any phrases that you’re using that have simpler alternatives and then it will actually measure the number of sentences that are hard or very hard to read then it actually measures them in both ways hard or very hard and so it’ll actually you take your content you drop it into that that software and it’ll immediately color code it to let you know which is which and it’ll give you a readability score so what I do with all of my content is I go to the Hemingway app and I put it in there now let me give you some input if you’re recruiting leader which means that you’re leading other people communication is critical forever yes or yes so your emails right those things are important anytime you send an email out guess what I just gave you an incredible tool that will make whatever you send to your team easier for them to digest easier for them to read easy for them to respond to I think every leader should have something like this in their hip pocket today because that technology is available now that’s one of the processes that we go through the next thing we do is once we run this through Hemingway app we then go to grammarly now grammar only has a shortcut on Chrome browsers you can pull that shortcut onto your chrome onto your Chrome browser as a plug-in and simply click a button and it will actually map across whatever content that you just wrote build a spell check your sentence structure you’ll do a lot of things one of the things that I would recommend to you if you’re going to make that leap and you’re going to actually move towards creating daily content then you will want to actually have the paid version of grammarly now why do I say that well the reason why I say that is because I’m right now the reason why I say that is that grammarly will actually not only run a spellcheck on the document it’s actually going to allow you to set a number of goal on the content so one of the things that’s now beginning to take place in society is that well we are beginning to be able to create algorithms around sentence structure around paragraph structure around any type of word structure and we’re able to actually map where it were that where the sentence structure is correct where we’re delivering the tonality that we want to deliver now not sure if tonality as a word but the tone that we’re writing what are we wanting to deliver we can actually measure that now you may have heard IBM you know advertised Watson well what Watson is is Watson is an alchemy tool that you put your content into which is like your whatever the word structure is into it and it will actually tell you a lot of information about it well graham release now moving towards that grandma is gonna cost you think it’s $99 for an entire year don’t quote me on that but we hear that force they recruit and use the paid version of Grambling so what happens when we drop something in it is it asked us to set goals now here are the goals it asked us to set who’s our audience they asked us is it is it a general audience a knowledgeable audience an expert audience so most times I will actually select knowledgeable then it asked me the formality of my content so wants to know you know the is this casual or is this highly professional so the formality of is it informal is it neutral or is it formal most times in social media I’m writing informal I want a conversational the next question asked me is what domain am I going to use this in as an academic domain a business domain a general domain casual creative technical so I typically select business from my domain the last thing that asked me is what tone do I want to use it can be a variety of tones but what I typically choose is confident I want a confident tone the last question it will ask me is what’s my intent don’t want to inform don’t want to describe doing to convince don’t want to tell a story and what I would say is that most times I’m wanting to condense I want to sound as though I know what I’m talking about so I set those goals and I said they click a button and it will map across the score on what I just wrote I’m doing this in real time by the way while I’m doing this podcast I just took a piece of content that I wrote I put it in Hemingway so if you’re watching the video this which this video will be on my Vimeo channel or my YouTube channel you’ll see me looking off to the right the original content that I created was eighth grade level out of the sentences that I wrote one of those sent one of the 20 sentences was hard to read three of the 20 were extremely hard to read okay so that tells you that I’m not lying to you when I’m talking about my C minus D that I made in English in high school right so what I did then was I then restructured that I moved that to grammerly and grammerly gives me a 0 out of 100 score and then it actually creates alerts I simply have to click through it will actually correct everything that I did wrong on it by clicking through it so when I when I put this now move this over and a grammerly my overall score is a 68 out of a hundred I want to get it to a 98 or 99 and I can do that but just clicking through the things that grammarly has said need to be corrected so with that said those two tools will make you a great writer okay so you’ll have great sentence structure it’ll be easy for people to understand and read like you will be accomplishing the goals that you want to accomplish in terms of the tone that you want to set for your writing those things are important now from time to time when I’m writing an article something that’s a really important piece to me I go one step beyond that and I will use a language alchemy tool now what that does is it tells me the overall tonality of the entire piece and I can measure it by simply cutting and pasting it into that and clicking submit and it will say that this is a highly positive piece or there are times where I’ve written content and it says that I’m angry or that I’m sad and that is not the tone that I want to use like I want my content to be motivational inspirational I want it to be educational I wanted to transform people or I want people to take something be able to apply it to their business and then have that and have that actually application of that transform their business and so I don’t want anger or sadness if I want anything I’d move closer to new being neutral or positive for sure okay those are some tools now with that said here’s my process I’ll do Hemmingway up I’ll do Graham early and then I will read it out loud multiple times I want to make sure that it sounds conversational that is something that as you read this out loud people understand it very clearly there’s a concise thought there clear thought that they understand now with that said there’s another piece you need hashtags now Danis the data says that right now any more than three hashtags is too much so those of you that have gone hashtag wild you need to tame it down so here’s kind of our rule of thumb here in-house okay one hashtag that represents the leader so as an example if you follow my content I use Richard nugget okay and my and I don’t know where that came from I don’t have any like very professional you know highly intelligent answer to give you regarding that but what I can tell you is my kids have run around the house thing and some dang chicken and a biscuit chicken in a nugget song I don’t even know where it came from and I hope that that is like rated G but what I can tell you is that the Nugget word just stuck with me and so I was actually being the hero of my kids by actually creating the hashtag Richard nugget so if you go and you follow on LinkedIn hashtag Richard now guess what you will see all of my content in your newsfeed searched so that’s that I do think you should have one that represents you whatever that is it doesn’t have to have your name in it but it could be something as simple as your first name last name it could also be something that you think is important to what you want to represent right I’ve seen a leader that has a hashtag of iron sharpens iron I think that’s brilliant okay coaching leader another great hashtag that you can have so I think one that represents you one that represents your organization because when people go search your organization you want them to be able to find you and then another one actually represents the main theme of whatever it is that you’re writing so when I look across the piece that I’m writing right now and I say what what’s the main theme here that I’m trying to represent for me it’s really going to come down to recruiting conversations and so that’s going to be my tag in this it’s a it’s a conversation that I’m sharing around recruiting that would be my third tag but I see things like you know an industry-specific tag so it might be insurance industry real estate industry mortgage industry those would be tags you could use I’m at in addition to it it could be something that’s just specifically specifically hash tag leadership if it’s leadership content right so three hash tags no more and if you will take those four components into consideration Hemingway app grammarly read through it out loud multiple times ensure that you’re not using any more than three hash tags your content will will have better engagement I know this because I have the data in house to prove it that’s what we’re after we want the engagement like if we’re going to go to the trouble of actually creating content on daily basis then we might as well look to maximize the engagement because you never know when someone’s going to like or comment on your post which will then push that into their newsfeed and that person that will see that will actually engage with that as well and move that person into a relationship with you right so there you have it some great framework look this took me a long time to get to place I have written consistently every single day for several years and as I look back through him the content that I’ve created that I created several years ago one of the things that I would say is that my content has gotten exponentially better and because of that I actually have exponential better engagement and I want the engagement because I need to be seen as an influencer in my community in order to move people towards me because remember seventy-five percent of people today now move to with this if we’re talking about sales positions we’re talking about experienced sales people the experienced sales person at a rate of three out of four now moves towards their next organization through non direct solicitation they’re not being contacted this is important to your success as a recruiting leader so thanks for listening to this if you feel like someone on your team or someone inside your organization could find value from this look one of the things that’s actually hilarious to do is go take someone else’s content and then drop it in to Hemingway out drop it in to grammarly and look if you want to actually give a co-worker a hard time this delivering content that’s a great way to say your writing is too hard to read you need to simplify it listen as podcast these are some great tools that’s taken me a long time to come across and to actually create a process around so that my contents better I hope this brings value to you I know I say that every single week that’s my largest hope that someone here is able to apply what I’m teaching them and then move the needle on the recruiting efforts so if I could help you any way you know how to reach me and so I hear you or see you or speak to you again on the next recruiting conversations have a great week everybody.
