Attracting young talent continues to be one of the biggest challenges we face as employer brand specialists. From Generation Z to millennials, companies all around the world compete heavily in order to attract the best of the best to their business.
The week we sit down with talent attraction and employer branding prodigy, Lane Sutton, to find out what makes recruitment marketing work and how to truly build relationships with young people.
Have a listen to the interview below, keep reading for a summary and be sure to subscribe to the Employer Branding Podcast.
Who are you and what do you do?
I started in recruitment marketing about two years ago, but a little bit of my path essentially started out in the social media and marketing space and realized that I had this unique perspective to offer as someone really young, probably the youngest in the industry at the time, someone really young to say, “You know, here’s kind of what Gen Z Millennials are thinking but also someone who is living and breathing social media and technology at a young age,” right?
I started a blog called “Kid Critic” where I wrote reviews by a kid for kids and families. That was when I was 11 and had no idea that that was actually called blogging or content marketing at the time. That made me realize, hey, I actually like writing and enjoy using social media to promote the website. I met all these great people online and one thing always led to another. I got offered a small kind of training, consulting opportunity with a 65-year-old who’s an author. And she said, “Hey, I’ll pay you to teach me social media.” I said, “All right. You know, I’ll give it a shot.” And the rest is history essentially. I realized that that was something I enjoyed doing.
I started an internship at HubSpot which was my first job and got to really get a feel for their social media strategy, and build something that was not only better but more concrete, and present that to the team. I then came back the next summer, sort of, as a community manager, managing their entire social presence. Got a great feel for what inbound marketing looks like and how it’s used in the business.
Then fast forward, not even a year, maybe six months and I was sort of asked to run social media, not for a marketing but for recruiting. I’m going to say, “start-up” because there were 500 people at the time. They said, “We love your social media experience but we want you to use it for recruiting.” I said, “Well, I don’t know a thing about recruiting so why me,” in one sense but also, you know, “am I the right guy for the job?” They said, “Yeah, we believe so.You know, just apply sort of that social media background into recruiting and help us, you know, do something different, essentially.” They happen to be a social media software for enterprise, that was Sprinklr.
I said, “All right. I’ll give it a shot.” Essentially I worked remote, which was another challenge as well. I worked remotely to build their social recruiting program, strategy, some execution from the ground up. It was a really cool opportunity. I had no idea that there was, kind of, even a job for this or that there were conferences about it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. You know, here’s a way to be, kind of, an all-in-one marketer on recruiting or HR team, and really enjoyed that.
The next summer I went to TripAdvisor and got to focus a lot on content and storytelling and understand, you know, how a small company, relatively small, you know, given the size of other giants in the space and they’re a local company located in the Boston area. I got to get a feel for how that worked. And also experienced how marketing works on a large enterprise, a large organization, 200,000 plus.
I’ve had a few interesting experiences on the recruiting side and love it, and I also happen to be 20 years old. It’s fun to take all this in while being a student and do, you know, half-time student life and then half-time work, inbound recruiting and employer brands.
Taken from: https://linkhumans.com/attract-young-talent/