In this solo presentation, recruiting leader Richard Milligan argues that social media is now the primary channel for talent acquisition and that traditional phone outreach is ineffective. He cites statistics—only 1 in 11 people answer the phone, 45% of hires come from referrals, and top producers increasingly seek new roles on their own—to illustrate the shift. Milligan stresses that a recruiting leader’s personal and business personas must merge, emphasizing authenticity and willingness to appear on camera or write publicly. He introduces a practical framework for becoming an “attractive leader,” defined by a clear vision, core values, storytelling ability, and alignment of actions with those values. He advises a “document over create” content strategy, using everyday life (e.g., family activities) to generate authentic, relatable posts that tie back to business themes. He notes that personal posts generate 541% more engagement than corporate posts, making personal branding essential for organizational growth. The talk concludes with calls to action to his YouTube channel, website, and booking page for live sessions.
Chapters
Hey everybody, it's Richard Milligan here with Forsee Recruiting, and today I wanna talk about the importance of social media inside your recruiting efforts. Now, a big news alert, you're probably actually seeing this on a social media platform, so you get the importance of social media inside anything today. Yet, as recruiting leaders, very few of us are actually maximizing that tool to get the exposure that we need to win this game of recruiting. Statistically, you have to understand This is not something we do for fun and creativity. Statistics show that if we're going to win this game of recruiting, it's going to happen right here inside social media. What I have been— what I've noticed a trend in the last 5 years inside this realm of recruiting is that where in the past most success came directly through engagement via phone or even a direct message piece inside the lens of social media, Where we might connect and then ask for a meeting, is that that is now being diminished. In fact, when we study how people are using the phone and whether they're even answering the phone today, I've done some research inside the recruiting lane. What I found is that 1 out of 11 will actually answer the phone. That gets very difficult to scale those kinds of numbers as a recruiting leader, where, by the way, you wear 12 to 15 other hats in a day, and the recruiting hat just happens to be an extra hat that you put on. So how do you win When only 1 out of 11 will answer the phone and only 1 out of 4 will actually come to you through that lens of direct communication. Statistically, what we know is this: 45% of people today get referred to their next company. That comes through a cohort. Could be somebody in the industry that they know, could be someone that's in a very similar job position as them but at another company. But almost half, 45%, say they end up at their next company because they were referred by somebody. What we also know is that the top producers in any industry are now moving towards their next company on their own. They're not even being recruited. 1 out of 11 top producers in an industry will now seek out their next leader on their own. When we begin to study this data and understand it, what we realize is that our brands as leaders matter. Personal persona and business persona today are now one and the same. And so if you haven't grasped that concept in the past, you've got to grasp it today. Here's the fun part. When you take your personal persona and your business persona and you mesh them together, it gets easy to be you if you're willing to be authentic. I get it. Some of us are afraid of being on camera. Some of us are afraid of doing video. Some of us don't think we write that well or that our ideas are not that great. But the truth is this, is that you were created authentic. And to a select number of people, you are going to be interesting. You are going to be polarizing, but only if you're clear on who you are and only if you're authentic in who you are. So here's some easy framework. I'll give you the framework for your social media content plan. So if there's a plan that you need to have, here's the plan. Number 1, as a recruiting leader, you have to become the attractive leader. Now, if you've watched one of my other videos, you've seen me talk about this before. The attractive leader represents 3 things: has a vision, is clear on their core values, can articulate that vision, can storytell it and storytell their core values, and then lives and acts in alignment with it. So when I think of that vision and core values and understanding them thoroughly and then living and acting in accordance with it, what happens is this: you no longer have to be a marketing creation team. And I think a lot of pressure from social media is where we see great content being delivered or high-value content where someone's done a lot of work to actually produce it being delivered to the platform and then we measure ourselves against that. What I'm saying is this, you go document over create. You go identify over create. Let me give you an example. The season of life that I'm in, I have 4 kids. My youngest is 5, my oldest is 16. I've got 8 and 11 in between right now at the time that this video is being produced. What I can tell you is I have a lot of content. Some of my core values are family before business. One of my core values is that my family is just more important and I will make it a priority over anything that I do in business. And because of that, I can now document the things that I'm doing around my family. My family loves the outdoors. And so I can document things that we're doing outside— hunting, fishing, whatever it is that we're doing outside— I can document around those and put that through a very simple lens to say, how is that relevant to business? If you're curious how I do it, simply check my LinkedIn page and you'll see from time to time, maybe once or twice a week, I bring that into content that I'm using. It's very easy content because again, I'm not creating the content. I'm identifying the content and simply documenting it. So when you understand attractive leadership, we live and we act in alignment with our core values. You now have a plan for how you can become relevant on social media. It's important today, gang. 541% is the statistic data that says that anything you put out there about your company is more likely to have engagement over company engagement. So you putting something out there versus a company putting something out there is 541% more likely to have engagement from somebody. This is why it's important. If you work for an organization that needs to grow, you have to do this. I hope this was helpful for you today. You can see more videos like this on my YouTube channel. You can also check more videos out at 4crecruiting.com. And my calendar's always live if you ever need to book a live session with me. I leave a time slot open every single week. for someone like you to come in with no strings attached, and you can see that at bookrichardnow.com. 3 words, bookrichardnow.com. And until we meet again, remember, inside recruiting, your social media brand matters.
