If you want more people to be interested in your jobs (and apply to them), companies would do well to start showcasing more hiring managers through content. Candidates want to know who they will be working for so it makes perfect sense to put them in the spotlight.

And LinkedIn is the ideal place to post that content.

So why aren’t talent, acquisition departments interviewing their hiring managers and putting that content on LinkedIn? Why aren’t leaders of these companies exposing themselves and their personalities and their culture? Perhaps many of them don’t want to expose who they truly are. 

But culture at its heart is an excellent talent attractor. After all, people don’t leave jobs. People leave bosses. So if you showcase how wonderful your people are, that’s probably as good as it gets, right? 

James Hornick, Partner at Hirewell, a 60+ person tech and marketing recruiting agency in Chicago thinks this is the biggest miss in all of talent acquisition and employer brand.

As a guest on a recent episode of the Recruiting Traliblazers podcast, he said most talent leaders don’t leverage their hiring managers as a talent attraction tool, pointing out the fact that Linkedin should be the primary channel for this kind of content.

“I actually made a post about this one day and I was kind of being sarcastic and coy. I was like, imagine a world where you had like a millions of job seekers logging in every day. And you had thousands of talent leaders and thousands of HR managers. And nobody thought to put a video out to talk about what they do. And people actually didn’t know what I was talking about. Because I thought it was obvious” he said on the show.

James Hornick

He was referring to how few organizations do videos of their hiring managers talking about what they’re hiring for and why it’s important, and reasons to join. And not putting that content all over LinkedIn.

“Our hiring has gotten infinitely easier in the past two years”, pointing out that in interviews with their candidates their content strategy often comes up as a talking point and makes them stand out. By displaying their thought leadership, industry topics and things relevant to hiring managers want to talk about, candidates “will get it”.

Good Content Attracts A Players

This type of non-transactional content attracts the most viewers because they don’t feel like they’re being sold to. The candidate is attracted to companies who push out content that educates and informs, not just to pitch them something.

So if you’re a manager in charge of a division at your company and you have strong opinions and thoughts, and you can get that out there on video or audio……you will build a following of people who want to work for you, which is, which is the entire point of all of this effort.

So think about interviewing a hiring manager once a week for 20 minutes then chop that into 2 min vignettes to share across the biggest business network. Ask questions like what resources do you find invaluable in your role, what their latest project is, what are they passionate about?

Talent Consultant Jodi Brandstetter goes a step further by saying hiring managers need a solid LinkedIn profile that represents them as a manager as well as the company brand. Since candidates use LinkedIn to research, help them understand you and your team.

But sometimes your Hiring Manger’s profile doesn’t exactly help the situation.

Case in point this example mentioned to me by Laurie Chapman: “I once had a very bad experience where a female candidate canceled her interview after reviewing the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile. His profile picture “featured” a photo of himself posing with a half-dozen bikini-clad women around a sports car. It screamed “sexist-jerk” and most certainly did NOT reflect our company culture or beliefs. Heaven knows how many good candidates we might have lost before someone brought it to our attention. But shame on us for not having been proactive enough to ensure all our hiring managers had LinkedIn profiles that were consistent with our company brand.”

The lesson, Hornick says, is clear. If you push out good content on a regular basis your company will gain a following. The trick is just being consistent with that pace and having something interesting to say that candidates want to hear.