Former Recruiter helps others rake in Millions by Writing Better Job Ads

Hey guys, welcome back to yet another episode of Top Billers Toolkit, where me and my twin brother interview top billers from all around the globe to unlock the secrets to their success. Today's guest, I'm very proud to say, is Mitch Sullivan. Mitch is a bit of a celebrity in the world of recruitment. He was a former recruiter himself, billing substantial numbers and filling 90% of his roles through well-written job ads. During that time, he spotted a huge gap in the market a lot of recruiters were just struggling to write powerful, engaging job ads that attracted the right candidates. So he decided to do something about it. For 8 years now, Mitch has trained thousands of recruiters and helped them generate millions of pounds worth of revenue. On this episode, Ben and I pick his brains about how to write better job ads, how to take better briefs from clients, and how you can start attracting the right candidates so you can make more money. So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, depending on when you're listening to this, and let's get into it, shall we?

We've been working with recruiters for probably about 3, 4 years now, but even earlier on in the days, we could see a massive gap in the quality of copywriting. There was just like this huge gap in the skill, not just for ads, but generally copywriting in general. You know, why do you think there's such this huge gap in the industry with copywriting and advertising? What's your feeling?

Okay, what I'm about to tell you is a theory. Okay. I can't prove it. I don't think anyone can, but to me it makes the most sense. And I've thought about this a lot. Why are recruiters either seemingly so bad at writing— and many aren't, many are much better than you think they might be, they just need the permission to do the right things. Yeah, and you know exactly what I'm talking about, you've done the course. But I think a lot of it is caused by the, you know, one of the big revolutions in recruitment was in the early 2000s when job boards came along. and email hadn't happened too soon before that either. So there was this novelty of things being instant. So people being able to find jobs quickly and respond to them quickly and get responses like literally within hours rather than days and weeks, you know, which is what it was like when I first came into the business. So basically job descriptions worked because people could post jobs at volume, very, very inexpensively. So it's just copy and paste, copy and paste, and it works. But it's gradually worked less and less over the last 20 or so years. But it's happened so gradually, perhaps, that people, you know, behaviors get embedded, people, it becomes the norm. If, you know, someone comes into the industry, and they see something that looks very much like a job description, they think, right, that's how you advertise jobs. So it's It's kind of ignorance breeding ignorance. That's probably not the right word. But, you know, yeah, yeah. But, you know, I've learned a number of things from running this training. And one of them is some recruiters are really good writers. They really are.

100%.

And you don't have to be a good writer to write a good job ad. You just, you have to be a good thinker. I think thinking is more important than writing. 'cause a job description is relatively limited in its creative outlets where you can take it, although that's also improving through tech, video, all kinds of other things. But yeah, it's, yeah, that's heartened me actually. That has really heartened me. So yeah, there's still hope. Yeah.

For me, I've always thought, I mean, it's not sure it was a misconception, but it's a recruiters don't believe that they're copywriters or don't believe that copywriting is as important as it is. That's my general consensus. I'm not saying that they all have that, but they— well, I don't think they truly believe that they— I think you've said this in some of your posts, you know, if you're a recruiter, you are also a copywriter or should be using copywriting in your—

yeah, look, everything starts from a keyboard. When I came into things, it all started from the phone. Everything started from the phone. Um, um, so you've got to be able to write in a certain way that gets people's attention quickly and holds it. That, that's fundamentally that, you know, there's no secret to this. It's You know, but that's what a lot of recruiters perhaps struggle to grapple with a little bit. I don't know, I have no idea how many recruiters are even aware that there are copywriting courses in existence. You know, the vast majority probably don't even know that it's a thing, you know, because, you know, a lot of my, most of my sales over the last 8 years have been through people I'm connected to or people that they're connected to. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Hardly anyone has found me via Google and signed up and spent money, probably 1% in total. Yeah.

Interesting.

Not because I've been— well, I've only just started paying attention to that now. So obviously, I want that to increase massively over the next 5 years. But, but yeah, so I don't know what else is out there, which is why I sort of refer back to, well, I'm just taking this as far as I think I can take it. I don't know You know, because one of the things that nags away at me is, well, are there only a certain amount of recruiters that are ever gonna likely to want to get better at this or interested enough in writing to want to invest some time and money in it? Maybe. I doubt it's more than 20% of all recruiters, you know. And then you take out contract recruiters because contract recruiters don't need to write good copy. Or decent copy or effective copy. They're probably— their job would be a bit easier if they could or did, but it's not that essential. It's a different dynamic with contract. You know, people's reasons for moving are not as convoluted or as complicated as they are with perm people for obvious reasons. So, so yeah, I don't know. I think there are a certain amount of recruiters that work in boiler room type operations that are heavily KPI'd where the culture is a little bit on the toxic side or a bit too male. And those types of recruiters are never going to buy from me, either because they can't stand me, or because they would see no need to improve something that they think is admin and that they're quite happy making the money they make doing the hustling that they do. And that's fine. I've got no argument with them. You know, so I don't know. I don't know.

So we had Simon Monaghan on the pod last week, Mitch, and I think it was really interesting. I think part of the problem is a lot of recruiters don't understand how powerful a good job ad can be and how much more money it can make them. And Simon Monaghan, he said in the first 3 years of his business, he's built $700K and he can attribute $324,000 of that to writing good job ads. I mean, that's just an insane amount. And I think if more recruiters understood how much more revenue it could make them, they would maybe pay it more attention. I think that might be part of the problem.

Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I've never really tried to sell the marketing my product to money or increase product. But yeah, I mean, I've had people contact me and say, look, we build, we build an extra $1.5 million this year to last year and we attributed kind of percentage of it. It was like 40-odd something percent to recruitment advertising, whereas historically all the other years it had only ever been around 15-20%. So yeah, yeah, crazy.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead, uh, Mitch.

No, no, carry on, carry on.

I was going to say, if— because probably I know what's going to happen, people are listening to this now, we're talking about the importance of copywriting, we're talking about how much money people can make, and they're probably thinking, all right, just give me some tangibles, what can I do? So If you were to give some advice to people, you know, a recruiter listening right now who's like, okay, I'm a novice, how do I get better at copywriting? What would be your kind of tips or your main focus for them, do you think?

Okay, uh, look, where to start? I mean, it's how deep do you want to go?

I know it's a tough question.

Yeah, the glib answer is, well, make people want to read your ad. Yeah, but well, how do you do that? Then, you know, so we just keep going backwards. But I think it all starts from the question is that they have to ask themselves is, is the type of candidate I'm looking for at the moment for this job likely to be employed or unemployed right now? And they should know if they've got any kind of knowledge of the sector, they'll be sat near someone who should know, or they can do a search on LinkedIn and get a sense of it, or they can Google it. There's all kinds of things they can do. But It's an important question to answer. Most of the time, it'll be employed. It won't be perhaps for certain jobs at the moment, I don't know. I'm not quite tuned into what the market is doing. But most of the time, I think we'd all agree it's, yeah, this person likes to be employed. So then the next question is, why might they be interested in this job? What are they more likely to want to read as their first point of contact with this potential new job? Is it a job description or a piece of content that tells them why it might be in their best interest to at least explore it?

Very interesting.

And then they would, they would know the answer to that question, then that informs what they have to do next, which is, well, I've got to find a way to make people want to read this because that's all a recruiter can achieve with a job ad. You can't make somebody respond. All you can do, and the only objective you should have when constructing an ad or writing it, is to get people to want to read it right to the end. If you achieve that, you've achieved great success. I mean, 80% of people who start reading a job ad don't finish it, or don't click apply, sorry. Yeah, which means they didn't read to the bottom. Yeah. And that's a staggering statistic that tells you that as soon as they start reading, they get turned off. Normally they're turned off because all they're reading is all about what the company wants. And at this early stage, why would they care about that? They'll care more about that a little bit further in the process, but not right at the very beginning. And it's— that's the fundamental bottom line, really.

Really interesting that you— I think I know part of the answer anyway because I've learned a few, but for people that don't, why is it important to make that distinction? That's one of the first things you said. Was, are they in a job or are they not in a job? Why is it important to make that distinction between if they're looking or if they're not looking?

Well, because it speaks to their motivation to even read the ad if they, if they see it. And some will sometimes Google jobs after a particularly bad day because, let's be honest, most candidates who respond to a job ad that are in a job, there's something niggling about that job, which is why they responded to the ad. But recruiters generally aren't connecting with whatever that niggle might be, yeah, because they're not promoting their job in a way that means something to the candidate. So, but they're not in a job that they need to leave or are desperate to leave, and that's the critical difference. So why, why would they read it? You know, there's got to be a good reason for them to read it, um, and you can help that by making it easy to read. And the easiest way to get someone to read anything to make it about them. Not because they're selfish, it's just that we're wired to instinctively primarily think, what's in this for me? Yeah. And that's fundamental to human nature. That's just human basic psychology. So, but technically, they need to make, you know, if somebody's already plugged into this thinking, then my advice to them would be, make the first 150 words, you know, compelling to read, or interesting to read, or informative, or not informative, because that makes them boring. It might be funny, it might be just something different, or it just tells them why it's a good job. Yeah. Why it might be the right job for them. You can never, you never tell someone it's the right job for them. But you can suggest it might be. And then the rest is up to them. But this, you know, as you guys know better than most people, it's all about conversions. The great thing, the one great advantage that recruitment advertising has over all other forms of advertising is it only needs to find one customer. But that is also its curse because I'm pretty sure that a lot of recruiters who probably deep down know better will post the job description or an edited version of it that only speaks about the company, what it wants. Because an ad like that will sometimes get lucky. Because the right person on the right bad day sees the ad and responds. And you've got a match and you've got someone at least out on interview. And that can happen sometimes. I don't know how often it happens. Probably 1 in 5, that's a guess, you know, but because it sometimes works, it clouds the issue in their head. I think that's me speculating. I don't know. Maybe.

No, I think you're right. It makes sense. It's logical and definitely would agree with you.

I'm curious, Mitch, you've trained, you said 2,000 recruiters now, which is still pretty insane. Where have you seen job ads perform most effectively, whether it be the type of recruiter, how they approach it, the industry? Is there any kind of correlation between what you've seen?

I can't answer that. Sorry, Sam, because I don't do any follow-through, which is scandalous. And it's something I'm gonna have to get a lot better at. But I've never followed through. How's it going? You know, what are you finding? Blah, blah, blah, because it's time-consuming. And, you know, I'm doing all those other things. But it's a great question. And I need to get answers to it, actually. And I'll try and have to find a way to, to get that kind of insight. But just, you know, I do get a fair number of unasked for testimonials. You know, not that many these days that come directly into my inbox as opposed to being posted on the website. And it's always positive. You know, I've achieved this, I've achieved that and didn't think this was possible, blah, blah, blah. I mean, Simon is another great example.

Yeah, he loves your stuff.

Yeah. And Yeah, so, so, and that, you know, there's lots of others out there that I, you know, most, you know, I can't remember their names now. But yeah, I, I know it works. And I know it works because I've been doing it myself throughout my recruiting career, pretty much nearly all of it. And I, you know, when, before I moved into training in, when did I move into training formally? 2011. I was coaching something else back then. But up until that point, I was filling 90% of my jobs through job ads. Wow.

That's nuts.

Now look, you know, that's massaged by the fact that I wouldn't take on jobs that I didn't think were fillable. Yeah. You know, that comes with experience and asking the right questions. And, you know, plus I use good copywriters who produce good ads. Obviously, I have some input as well. I give them great briefs, I have final edit, I give them some creative direction a lot of the time, but they just write it better than me. And yeah, I know it works. I know it works. And it doesn't have to work by much for it to be well worth because it's not, it's cheap, it doesn't cost much money. It's pocket money, really. But it's the time investment because once you do the course, you've got to apply what you've learned and you've got to keep doing it or keep doing it in those jobs that need the most attention. You can't write a good job ad for every job if you're an agency or if you're any kind of recruiter actually, particularly in the early days. So yeah, look, I can't answer the question, but—

No worries. When you have that data, Mitch, I would love to pick your brains about that. But you mentioned something really interesting, which is like the bane of mine and Ben's existence sometimes, which is fillable roles and recruiters understanding which jobs are fillable, which ones they should spend their time on, and which ones they should probably leave to the side because it's going to cost them more time and money. And I think this actually directly relates to job ads and good copywriting. But what have you— what tendencies have you spotted between the roles that you want to take on nowadays and the ones that you want to leave behind?

What, no, I stopped recruiting a couple of years ago now. And I would say no, if I was approached, I would just find a recruiter to give it to, to refer back to the client, which I've done in the past as well. So those days are over. So yeah, but my general advice is, are they— most of it comes down to are they being realistic about the target candidate profile? And, you know, a lot of the time before going into a briefing meeting or conversation with a hiring manager, I would, I would research their staff. So I'd look at the people that do a similar job to this one or the same job on LinkedIn. And I would make notes of how long they've been there. You know, I'd look at all the people that have left and how many of them are there, work out the average length of stay. Which companies did they come from? Which types of companies? Were there any specific kinds of companies that kept cropping up? All of that, which sort of arms you with the ability to ask the right kind of questions. But more often than not, there was no pattern to any of that particularly. Um, so when they start laying down the law about must have this, must have that, must blah blah, you have to push back on, on a lot of that stuff. Um, and I think perhaps a lot of recruiters just perhaps don't have the life maturity and confidence that comes with that to, to do that. But you've just got to ask logical questions as to why do they need a degree if they also need 7 years' experience? Why 7 and not 6? Why 6, not 5? Is it possible that someone with 3 years' experience but a wonderful attitude and a great work ethic could do this job? You just keep prizing it open, and if it's no, it's no. But off the back of those answers, you decide if you want to take the job on or not, really. Um, it's got to— and, and if, if If they are quite stringent and they've got a lot to sell, then okay, yeah, maybe we can take this to market. Are they paying the right kind of money? You need to research that as well. And I've been caught out on that once or twice in the past. But then if none of that's possible, then the next place to go is, right, well, let's rather than look for someone who's already got the skills that can plug straight into this job, let's look for someone for whom this would be a logical step up. So basically, you're buying potential rather than track record. And that can make life a lot easier, particularly for the recruiter. And it's probably more work in sourcing, but attracting people for an instant promotion is one of the easiest job ads you'll ever write. Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, that's—

sorry, sorry, I was gonna say, that's one of the things that we've realized as well. In terms of taking good brief, I noticed, Mitch, that you're releasing a new course to help people take a good brief, which I thought was genius. I was like, that is brilliant because for me and Sam, when we're just helping people to— because I think, you know, a brief, the concept of taking good brief is tied to, you know, different areas of marketing, which is just understanding the customer, understanding the person you're speaking to and asking good questions. But again, there seems to be a massive gap with people's skills to do that. Partly, I think, to do with maturity and expertise or training. In your experience, what— and this is a tough question or quite a broad question as well— but what percentage of success to a good job ad is the brief or the copywriting? Have you kind of distilled that down to a percentage, or is that tough to say?

No, I haven't actually, but all I can do is give you an anecdotal answer based on my experience and the experience of talking to, you know, meeting thousands of other recruiters over the years and getting drunk with some of them. I would say, well, the two go hand in hand because if you don't have the right information, all you're doing is writing bullshit in the ad. Yeah. Or, you know, what a lot of recruiters do is they'll sort of massage the job description and just throw lots of adjectives at it. Oh, exciting, innovative, groundbreaking, you know, all this kind of stuff. And that might work with people new to the job market, but it doesn't really work for people who know what they're doing. So copywriting on its own isn't enough. It's just not, it's not enough. Unless you actually are a really good copywriter and you can make a job description sound, make it easier to read just by changing the language because job descriptions are very formal. They use a lot of jargon, they use a lot of long words that don't always need to be used. Rarely need to be used. So, you know, you can, you can be a good copywriter and rewrite a job description, make it easier to read. But I would argue that's not going anywhere near far enough. So yeah, the brief is important. I should have done this earlier. I just figured there were more important things to do than start launching, trying to launch new products. But, but yeah, it's been sort of nagging at me for a couple of years now, this one.

Interesting, because I'm guessing you've trained 2,000 or they've been through your program.

And did you actually do one-to-one coaching in the last 3 years with— it's probably over 350 individuals.

Yeah.

And did you spot a trend with their ability to take a brief when you were working with them, do you think?

Yeah, but some of them, probably a lot of them. See, when I, when I do these coaching sessions with them, I'm not too bothered about the, about the accuracy of the information in the ad. And I tell them that. So because what they do is once they've done the online part, they then write a job ad using as much of what they've learned as possible, upload it or send it to me. They get access to my diary, they book a call, a session. It's crept up. It used to only last 35-40 minutes. They now last about an hour because I found more things to tell them, basically. But, you know, they know it's a writing exercise and all I want to see is that they can structure the ad in the right way. Yeah, use lots of you language, not use clichés, which a lot of them still do. They're sort of grammatical habits that you have to drag them out of. You know, a lot of recruiters, for example, will use the word the role. And like, everyone knows they're reading a job ad, you don't need to keep reminding them that the subject of this content is about a job or a role opportunity. Yeah, so, so, yeah. I don't know if that was—

I think it does mention— I was going to ask, and you might have already answered it right then, but with your one-to-one coaching, without giving away too much gold, what is the, the one thing that keeps cropping up that you are, um, helping these recruiters with? Is there one thing that you keep telling them, like, do this, do this, try and do this?

No, no, I've learned an awful lot from doing these. I really have, which is why the sessions have gone up, you know. Without my prices going up, which is something else I'm gonna have to do something about one day. There's no goal that I'm trying to protect, you know, it's the two things that the two mistakes that recruiters make the most, even after doing the online course, is, is they don't, the benefits of the job are spread throughout the ad. So they're not all front-loaded in the top half, because that's how you get people's attention. That's how you hold people's attention is by telling them what's good about the job in terms that they would understand. So, and that's because most recruiters do that because they get a blank Word document in front of them. And they type out the job title, location, the salary, and then they just get everything out of their head on the page. They just, it's called stream of consciousness writing. Is what we typically call it. And then they'll tweak it and massage the language a bit and they'll check it for typos and everything else and then that's it. And the problem with that approach is that, you know, if there's one or two benefits they talk about near the end of the ad and those are the one or two benefits that would mean most to one of the qualified candidates that didn't read that far, then, you know, in my little micro world, that's a tragedy. If somebody who's qualified started reading the ad and didn't keep reading to the end, which is why it's important to get people to want to read it. So that's one mistake. And combined with that is that they don't quite— it takes them a while to get the idea of turning a feature into a benefit. So the one example that— because it's always the one that's top of my mind of that is They'll write, this is a brand new role with an exclamation mark. But somebody who knows what they're doing would write, this is a brand new role, which means you won't be inheriting any legacy systems and can do things your own way. Suddenly, it just becomes more animated, more colorful, and you're spelling out the reason why somebody might see that as a good thing. You know, it's gonna land with all people, but all you can do is try. So there's that is number one. Sorry, and number two is frontloading it. Sorry. So I've actually answered both.

Yeah, that's gold. Love that.

Yeah. And it's, sorry, it goes back to something I was saying earlier, which is you just gotta practice. You just get better and better. Writing is, you know, writing is one of those things that you keep getting better at. I think I'm still improving. And I've been trying to be a decent writer for 30 years, really. So it never ends. You evolve, the times make you change how you write as well. You know, we live in the attention economy now. You know, it's a commodity that we're all trying to get. And so being economical with words is a powerful tool, for example. So yeah, you're always becoming a better writer, always.

And being economical with words. I love that, Mitch, being economical with words. Sorry, I just had to bring that up. That was brilliant. Might have to steal that as a slogan from you.

It's yours already.

I was going to ask Mitch, because we have this dilemma as well with some of our clients, is the frequency of posting. And for me anyway, I know that the more I write, the better I get typically. And so with your clients or the people that you teach, do you recommend a certain amount of posts they should be writing or the amount of time they should be spending every week week? Would you recommend?

No, I don't. And the reason why is I would see that as the property of the advanced course, which is also in the pipeline. It won't happen probably for another year, but, um, and that'll be Jackie's thing. She, she would, she would write, run, film it. That would, that would be hers essentially. Um, yeah, I'll probably only have 10 to 15% input in that. Um, The job posting, I don't, I don't try and advise people on how to write. Jackie's better at that than me. If somebody, if somebody books the personal program, and does the course, writes an ad, send it to me, and I read it, and I think, oh, that's interesting. That is really good. Yeah, there's not a lot I can teach them here. And I'll, I'll do 10 or 15 minutes with them. I say, look, here's why this is good because that's equally as important as giving, telling them why or how something can be improved. And then I'll book them in with Jackie or Pete or one of the copywriters that do a bit of training as one-to-one training as well because they're writers first and foremost, whereas I'm a recruiter first and foremost. But yeah, that kind of stuff is, I would consider it an advanced skill. Cool. And I try not to get too involved in that. It's let's make your ads effective. You don't have to be a good writer, you don't have to be a great writer. You just need to know what your target audience most want to read.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense, Mitch. Cool.

I'd love to—

we're 40 minutes in. I'd love to touch upon personal branding and social media because it's fair to say that you are pretty prevalent in the recruitment space. We talked about kind of micro-celebrity status. I would like to say that you probably achieved that.

Mitch, can you tell us what you—

a lot of recruiters, I don't think, are taking personal branding seriously or taking social media seriously enough nowadays. What would be your kind of words of wisdom to them? How important do you think it is for the modern recruiter nowadays?

Oh, blimey. Honestly, I don't know. I honestly don't know. I think if it's I think it's difficult for some recruiters to do that if they work for a company. Yeah, for a company that takes marketing seriously, it's easier because they'll understand the benefits of personal branding and recruitment is about the individual, really. Yeah, it's per capita, there are more good recruiters working for boutique firms than there are working for the, for the big multinationals. That is interesting. Easily. I mean, I can't even see how anyone would even try and debate that. So building a personal brand is, it can be tricky. Look, the way I did it, I mean, I think if you work for yourself and sell a product to people who are likely to be on LinkedIn, then, then yeah, it's important. If you're, I mean, the biggest group of people, one of the biggest groups of people that are on LinkedIn are recruiters. So it's the obvious place for me to hang out. You know, when I started taking it seriously, which is around 2011, you know, I was deliberately provocative. I was coaching, I was planning to move into coaching recruiters how to move to retain. That was my thing. It still is probably my specialist subject, really, if we did a scorecard on it. Didn't think I could really make much money out of it, thought it might be a bit too soon. That market has since moved on. Louise Archer now does that very well and at volume. But I just took the piss out of contingency for 3 years and there's so much to take the piss out of. And because I have a sense of humor, I got noticed. A lot of people didn't like what I said. They thought I was trashing my own industry. People to this day despise me because of that.

Really?

Well, it was a great way of sort of segmenting your audience, essentially, because a lot of people equally, a lot of people, more people got it. They thought, yeah, there's— I understand that the argument, perhaps not always how he says it, but I certainly— and, and I never posted anything that I couldn't back up ever. So I never trolled. I never clickbaited people. Still don't, never will. I only ever post something that I believe is right. And I can back up if someone doesn't, doesn't agree with me. And turn up every day. Most of the magic happens in the comments, not in the posts.

Mitch, in what sense?

What do you mean by that?

Well, because other people are writing content for you. So all you have to do is respond to it. So I read way, way more and write in comments way more than I post, even back in the day when I was prolific, which I'm not anymore. But I always turn up on LinkedIn and read and read and stuff. I think, you know, I know what that is, that's boring. I don't really have a strong opinion on it or it's been said to death. But, and obviously I gravitate towards anything that is to do with marketing. But from a learning perspective, because I learn things from particularly from people outside of my industry about advertising, some of whom I've worked with on a couple of campaigns that I've run. But mostly just to get into discussions with people. So it's kind of hand-to-hand combat in a sense. But other people, a lot of people, a lot of us forget that 90% of the impressions are people that are just reading that. So you're playing to an audience and it's a live sport rather than a post is a prepared presentation a lot of the time. So it takes longer, but if you're consistent and you do it and you read, you follow the right people and you comment on their stuff and get into discussions, you don't have to start an argument, you don't have to be rude. Although I fall on foul on that sometimes when I've, you know, been a bit frustrated by something. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I mean by the magic is in the comments. It takes longer, which time is, you know, recruiters are typically impatient people.

It's so funny because whenever I'm scrolling down my feed, I always just— your comments just pop up on random posts. And it's like, it feels neutral, but also provocative. It's kind of like these two, you've got like this magic, this perfect balance of like a neutral logical response, but it feels almost provocative as well in terms of how you comment. It's really interesting. It always entertains me.

It's interesting that you perceive it in that way. It's not a conscious deliberate thing I'm trying to achieve. I am trying to be less combative, but maybe that sarcasm just seeps out now and again.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not sure if it's sarcasm. It doesn't feel negative or sarcastic. Um, it's interesting. I, I love that. I love it because it entertains me, and I think that's what probably most other people are thinking. It's like, oh, what's going to happen next? Like, how's he going to respond to that? Um, that's kind of what I feel when I'm reading them.

Um, yeah, look, look, one of my great weapons is I have a sense of humor, and I can, I can be humorous, you know, relatively quickly. You know, I'm not a joke jukebox, but I, I, I can see the funny side of things. In fact, to take it into personal territory, it's my coping mechanism. I mean, I literally either verbally or in my head take the piss out of everything. Seriously, because it keeps me grounded. And one of the, the most important quality I look for in people that that might become friends is self-deprecation, ability to laugh at yourself. People who can't laugh at themselves never are, never people that I ever have much to do with, you know, give as good as they get. So yeah, that's important thing for me is looking things from a humorous perspective. And it features a lot in a lot of my own ads that I run for my own business. And it's part of, I think, subconsciously wanting to entertain people. Because, you know, good ads should be fun to read, whether it's a comment or a post or an actual ad, it should be fun to read and it should evoke an emotion, whether it's anger or sympathy or laughter or whatever it might be. If it evokes an emotion, it's worked.

Interesting. One thing I'd love to ask you, Mitch, because you're the perfect person to ask this in the sense that You're not afraid to— especially back in the day when you were taking the piss out of contingent, you weren't afraid to pick a side and fight for it, and you weren't afraid to piss some people off but win a lot of other people over. What I found through working with a lot of recruiters and humans in general is that they're quite scared to put themselves out there, even just a normal neutral post. They feel like something's going to happen, they're going to get criticized. What, from someone's kind of been through all of it and done the extreme side and kind of come back, what words of wisdom would you give recruiters who want to build their personal brand but are maybe too scared to start posting? What can you— what would you say to them?

Define your target audience. Who are they? What do they look like? Do they use LinkedIn? If they're not, find the right platform. LinkedIn is not the right platform for you. And then just be regular, really, you know. And yeah, most recruiters don't— won't follow this advice and don't. It's pick things that you know something about and have an opinion and be open to being wrong. And if somebody says something, you think, actually, that's a fair point, I didn't think of that, say that. Yeah. And that wins you friends. And it, you know, and it fosters more collaboration. I rarely said that I did once or twice. Some people put scenarios in front of me where contingency was the best option. I said, yeah, you're absolutely right. But it's sort of 10% of the whole. So I was very black and white in those sort of areas. With advertising, it's a lot more nuanced, as you both well know. You know, there's a lot of other factors involved, distribution being one. A great ad that isn't put in the right places becomes a bad ad, you know. The only real judges of an ad are the people that respond to it. I mean, I've run things before and I've run campaigns and I thought, oh, that one is gold and that one I'm not so sure about. And it's the one I wasn't sure about that I raved about. Yeah. So you just gotta, you just gotta try things, you know, you just gotta try things, but you've gotta, you've just gotta be regular, turn up because a lot, a lot of the, what's great about content online is it's referenceable. You can look back. I'm sure a lot of people will just go to my feed and just scroll and see, right, what's he been involved in or what's he posted? And if I was a working recruiter, I would like the idea that a potential hiring manager might do that, and then he or she can get a sense of what kind of recruiter I am, what kind of values I have, what's my approach to job advertising or whatever else it might be. And that, you know, that if I was, you know, if I was in the business of selecting recruiters, which I was between 2006, 2010, you know, that, that would be invaluable. You know, LinkedIn wasn't a discussion forum back then. Um, so it's just turn up, be regular, yeah, and, and post things that you believe in and have an opinion.

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