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She was posting job postings on LinkedIn of these different roles, difficult to recruit for roles. And you think that that is the absolute perfect thing to post on LinkedIn job postings. That's why so many people come to LinkedIn. But it was getting very low rates. You should just get a hundred, maybe two hundred views per post. It wasn't really getting anywhere.

I am Robin shows you at Higher Suites and we are sourcing automation software that helps Ninan the tech companies hire the best talent at me. And follow me now on LinkedIn Qwant to keep an eye on this. OK. Hey, Madeleine, thanks for being here today. So today we're having Madeleine McCann and she'll tell us all there is to know about lending and not only in e-mails and not only job postings on LinkedIn, but actually all to build your own personal branding to watch.

Just increase your recruiting efficiency on LinkedIn. So, hi, Madeleine, can you tell us more about yourself? Hi, Robyn.

Thanks so much for having me. Absolutely. So I'm out, McCann. I was the head of human resources at a tech company and I was on the front lines of hiring. I was in every interview de-brief. I was in the back rooms deciding with executives who would be promoted. And I saw that there were so many things that professionals, if they only knew what was happening behind the scenes, if they only saw what what we see, that they would make much better career and job search decisions.

So I started building thought leadership. I started creating YouTube videos on my channel, self-made millennial, and I started posting on LinkedIn just just trying to help folks.

And what ended up happening is I really fell in love with the platform of LinkedIn and, you know, in twenty, seventeen or more like twenty eighteen, I was I was kind of like posting random things and just getting getting my name out there and really testing LinkedIn and all the different features by twenty nineteen. Suddenly I started realizing, wait, it's not just showing up to LinkedIn and being consistent. There is a method to the madness. There is, it's not just an art, it's also a science.

And I was able to unlock the power of LinkedIn and really discover what it is that allows you to build a powerful network very quickly and really in a meaningful network. And so between twenty nineteen to twenty twenty, my network shot up from six thousand to sixty thousand. And I ended up being featured on Forbes, Business Insider, Newsweek, Bloomberg, New York Times. Just really just my presence just completely shot up and I ended up building an audience of over five hundred thousand people across platforms.

And it's just been my absolute pleasure. And while I am on different platforms, I've just seen I've been the one who's been training folks on LinkedIn on how to build this brand and catapult your ability to reach people beyond just having an email, beyond just posting a link and hoping people click it, really building meaningful relationships and building this personal brand.

And if anyone is looking for a job today, they should definitely check your YouTube channel. So Millennial. But that's a topic for another. Yes. And so what's very interesting is that you don't have to build like Major and Colesville prisons to be on Bloomberg and to be on Forbes to benefit from LinkedIn personal breuning, one of the first steps that anyone can implement to build their breuning. And then what? Can they benefit from it?

One thing to know about LinkedIn is that it is what I call stumble upon content.

So if you are posting on LinkedIn, if I see your post, Robin on LinkedIn, I did not choose to read that, unlike on LinkedIn or a blog where people are Googling and finding that information on LinkedIn, it's all StumbleUpon. So it's really about understanding who am I speaking to and who not necessarily being as targeted as you would on other platforms where you are maybe speaking to a broader audience and then able to kind of bring them into your funnel, into your interest by them really seeing your headline and understanding what your message is.

So I think the first thing to do is to really start posting content that is speaking to your target audience and really understanding that, but not being afraid to branch out and speak to what I call concentric audiences. So you might have your core audience, but other audiences will overhear that react to it and then that broaden your reach.

And we hear other things about how to optimize person LinkedIn. They recently changed their algorithms. What are your tricks and your main advice on increasing the reach on one suppost?

One thing that I do is whenever I help any of my students or clients to optimize their post because I spend 50 percent of my time focused on those first three to five lines and the 50 percent on the rest, those first few lines are really what will capture people's attention. And LinkedIn does track when people click the button see more. So it's so important that you are really thinking about your hook. What so many people do is they start with from the beginning of time, like something something like that.

Right. They always do this kind of like broad. Introduction, where they're kind of slowly getting into the post, it's like, well, there's a lot of things I've done this week, but one thing that really stands out to me that I would like to tell you about is this is like, no, you need to jump into the action. You need to make sure that this person who's scrolling through LinkedIn, not choosing to look at your posts, but is just served.

It understands the value of that post immediately.

OK, cool. I'll probably ask for some advice on how to promote the book just as well, because LinkedIn is one of our major Odense. So the first few lines. And then do you have any advice? We hear that people will have to spend as much time as possible reading the article, interacting with it. Do you recommend using Bode's engagement posts? Do you recommend sharing the best your friends so they could like and comments? Do you see that in the reach?

Yes. So you said dwell time. Dwell time is super important. So, yeah, really making sure that people are sitting, staying, reading your post. Some people just do a few lines. They'll say, hmm, you know, should we reach out to candidates who have only been on the job for three months? Question. You know, it's like that was really that's an extremely short post. You're not going to get much dwell time. There needs to be more meat on the bone.

So, yes, dwell time is extremely important. Engagement, yes. Is important. So you mentioned pods, which for anyone listening, a pod is a group of people who essentially agree to engage with your posts in order to teach the algorithm. Hey, this is a quality piece of content. People are reacting, commenting, engaging with it. I think that when you're starting out early, if you're kind of building relationships with other folks, like maybe there's a few other podcasts or a few other firms like yours that is actually there is a force multiplier where if you're commenting on their posts and they are commenting on yours, like the rising tide raises all ships.

So what you're doing then is you're now putting yourself in front of their audience and they're putting themselves in front of yours. And so that commenting strategy is actually really advantageous. Where that isn't really advantageous is if it's just random, like if you're you're just commenting on random people's posts because you're not really building your audience based on other people who have similar audiences. So I think it's definitely there's an element of reciprocity. If there are other folks in your space where you want to create like a mastermind and you're really supporting each other.

I've seen that be really fruitful. But I don't really believe in pods where it's like it's almost like they're just writing. Good job, good job, good job. And it's just kind of like this really spammy thing, meaningful engagement, thoughtful comments or emojis. Yeah, but you're right. Like, not to understate that having that early engagement, having folks who are there to support you, such as if you have an email list, you might post your LinkedIn post and then you might email your email list.

Hey, you know, read more about like how to do X or or whatnot. And I could send them to that post. So, yes, getting engagement early, really driving people to your posts will help elevate you.

OK, and so the whole topic for this episode is how to use LinkedIn beyond email and job postings to hire a players then. Oh, there is about posting and building your employee brand and then how should you leverage this? What I mean is, should you be posting we are hiring this and that person then trying to optimize that post. Should you have more like an in-depth and long term employer brand strategy, building content for the audience and the people you want to be hiring?

How would you do this with hiring focus? Yes.

So I have someone who is in my LinkedIn for thought leaders course. Her name is Andrea. She is a head hunter. And before she got into the course, she was posting job postings on LinkedIn of these different roles, difficult to recruit for roles. And you think that that is the absolute perfect thing to post on LinkedIn job postings. That's why so many people come to LinkedIn. But it was getting very low rates. You should just get one hundred, maybe two hundred views per post.

It wasn't really getting anywhere. She followed my process. So I do have a posting formula that has five triggers for bi realities. You hit on all those five and you're able to really see massive reach for your post. And what she did is she focused her post instead of saying, hey, we have this CEO role open for this innovative software as a service company. She instead thought, let me speak to the people who either know the CEO or are the CEO.

And she created content that people are able to engage with. And this was able to then attract those people, see it by so many such a bigger audience. And it also helps people to feel like Andrea is a person. She's a person I want to work with. She's a. I like her personality and I want to work with her as as a head hunter versus anyone else, and so that was a huge, huge transition. And so really focusing on that, really focusing adding that value and targeted posts like that versus just post post post these job descriptions.

OK, and this formula with the five triggers, is it some secret sauce? So can you talk about it?

It is proprietary. Yeah, definitely. It is fire. It is really what my years of work have gone into that. So. Yeah. So there's some secret sauce there.

OK, and so what you say, which is very important in this wall, is you want to be a person and you don't want to be posting with a company speech.

Right. I would agree with you, Robin. I do think there are some successful company pages, but I would say you will get more reach if you are showing up as a personality as yourself.

Right. That's also a problem that veganism so veganism didn't have they tried to close with the company will get very low reach. But you have to build yourself as a person, as a recruiter, as a as an individual. And can you give us examples, very precise examples of the type of content that Andrea shared was so we can see a lot of things. You can see people share and we can see people sharing market views, people sharing lots of things on LinkedIn.

What you recommend people share when they want to target the success.

Yes, one posts that Andrea did that got great engagement and I liked was she posted about the relationship between, like an executive or CEO and their executive assistant and some tips or some observations about what makes a really successful relationship or what not. And what was really great about that is it goes back to what I was saying before of yes, she was speaking to those executives who she wants to recruit. But then also those people who have ever been an executive assistant or had an assistant or worked with one were able to overhear and also engage with the post.

So because this is stumble upon content, that post was able to reach far further than if she had written a specific thing that was only pertaining to Quito's like in a certain situation, like she was able to really open up for a larger conversation that I think you could have engaged with. I could have engaged with, even though we are not the subjects of the post or posts filled the best content to share. So I'm following you on LinkedIn and I see you are at the forefront of you all lived in you releasees, for instance, they recently released these stories and you were one the first one actually really easily.

Sorry. And my feed. Do you recommend trying? Those new features are still the best way to engage with the audience on LinkedIn.

So I would say that any time LinkedIn comes out with a new feature, be the kind of person who dives and it just gives it a go because LinkedIn pushes out new features and to a larger extent like such as when video first came out, they superficially made videos, the most prominent thing on your feed or artificially made them more prominent on your feed. And so really focusing on any new features will help you to get further reach. So, yes, I definitely as soon as stories came up, I thought, heck, I'm not sure what exactly folks are expecting on LinkedIn on stories, but you better believe I am going to utilize them, especially in the beginning, because I know that even someone like you, Robyn, would just notice that I'm using it.

I would get additional attention.

And now we see those slides popping up in our feed. Is this a new thing? And do you recommend slides as well? And if so, do you have any best practices to share? Slides?

Yes, the slides. You mean like kind of also like document posts? Were you able to click through. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Those have great dwell time. And so those I do recommend. Here's the thing. When people are on LinkedIn, a large portion of them are on their phones and a large portion of them have the sound off. And so anything where there's text is optimal because so with the slides instead of a video, they're clicking through slides.

Maybe you're making it really readable. Maybe there's just a sentence or two per slide. Maybe there's a visual, maybe there's a chart or graph. And those things are great because it's like eye candy. People are able to flip through. It's engaging. It's there's real time. And every time you click that arrow button to look at that next slide that is telling LinkedIn, this is a good piece of content and they are going to then push it out to more people.

OK, so try to make engaging slides and the query as well. A lot of people are just afraid to post something. They're just afraid to. They don't know how to. And I understand you are familiar with the five triggers for variety is proprietary, but maybe you have the formula for the five first steps that anyone should take when they want to start building their personal branding on it.

I would say the first step is to start being a committer. Stop being a lurker on LinkedIn. Over ninety five percent of folks on LinkedIn never comment on anything, never engage in anything. And what I want you to do is just start commenting, but don't comment. Great post. Love it. Comments something thoughtful really add to the conversation and that will help you to kind of get out of your box because you're not having to create the original post.

You're contributing to others and this force multiplies. You are now building a relationship with the poster. You're supporting others content. You are also piggybacking on that person's audience in a very beneficial way for both of you. And so just get your comment game down, really start doing that, and then you're able to then take notes on your phone, take notice as different things happen. Our jobs, if you are working in the recruiting function or you're in a leadership role at a company.

Oh, my gosh, do you have so much material? Every day is a news story. So just make sure that you are observing different dynamics. Of course, we need to be sensitive to not release anything personal, but it could be something as simple as really like observing something that a team member did that really helped people to get out of their comfort zone in a Zoome meeting. Just and you kind of even praise them, right? Maybe you're praising them.

Whatever it is, take these notes in your phone and that will really help to get your juices flowing for when you eventually do post. OK, cool.

And a good exercise for people listening to us to go to Mauldin's LinkedIn and LinkedIn, check the last activity and engage with our boss, especially the one releasing this episode and be good as a command post. So I recommend everybody just stop listening to the episode and start doing this right now. We'll give them ten seconds to do that. Now it's just getting so good. And then second step is actually starting writing your own posts, right?

Yes. Do you have any advice on the especially I'm thinking about when people should post. Is there really a difference? She posts in the morning and the afternoon on Tuesdays. Do you have any recommendation on that?

It's interesting. I have been monitoring this for a long time and I could give you times and whatnot that research has shown. But Rubbin, like the algorithm, is continuing to change, such as there used to be post used to last for about twenty four hours and then fizzle out. We're now seeing LinkedIn posts get an original push the first day, but then popping up on people's feeds four or five days later. So with knowing that to the time of day isn't terribly important and there's pros and cons of everything.

Right. There's more people on LinkedIn Monday through Friday, but there's also more people posting Monday through Friday. So weekends are less crowded, but there's fewer people. So there's a lot of trade offs. So I would say that do a bit of experimentation. It depends on your time zone. It depends on your audience, really. Just try a few different things, you know, and also, I think it's really the time that you're able to show up, to be honest.

Just showing up and making sure you make a habit of posting and engaging is the most important thing. And if you can only do that at six thirty in the evening, do it at six thirty in the evening, whatever it is. Yeah.

So the second step would just be just to wait and stop posting and then recommend a certain frequency for the post. Should people post every week, every two weeks or should they just post when they feel like it.

So I recommend giving yourself a goal if you're posting whenever you feel like it, unless you are a little bit more of an illustrious writer, such as you really are able just kind of sit down and just have things flow pretty frequently. If you're not like that, then I would say you need to give yourself goals. So I recommend several times a week, ideally three or so times a week that you're posting once a week is, I would say, the bare minimum.

If you do more seldom than that, it's your return is not as great because people don't tend to see you. You don't really get the return on investment. You kind of go too long with, like, really being on top of people's minds.

OK, can you post twice a day, three times today, or is there any limits to it?

I have almost never posted more than once a day. I don't think the. It is really helpful, I think a lot of people who do post multiple times a day, they are typically just pushing out links. They're just pushing out, hey, reminder, I just post this blog post, hey, this that where it's like my strategy isn't promote, promote, promote it, be a trusted friend and go to expert. And so with my posts are a little bit more of like meaningful and starting conversation because I've found that that is really it's crazy.

Robin, like with me looking to bring people into our company and hire people, I am able to message so many people on LinkedIn and I don't even need to introduce myself. I just say, hey, you know, I wanted to I want to tell you about this position. And they go, oh, my gosh, Madeleine, so great to hear from you. It's so lovely that you decided to reach out and people feel like they already know me and that I don't know if there's anything more powerful than having a relationship with tens of thousands of people.

And as soon as there's a moment for us to work together, they say, wow, so great to hear from you, OK.

And then another question is also, do you build your personal brand so as to people will come to you or do you think it's a good way to just improve your response rate on your email sequences, on your outreach, on LinkedIn? And then in the end, it's just an additional weapon that just benefits to the whole mix?

Yeah, so I think it's both. Yes, people come to me, such as I posted, I had a role open on my team and I posted that role and I described it and I talked about it and talked about what kind of leader I was and why I was excited about this role. And the company I work for is like usually broke out. It's like there's so many applicants. It's crazy right now because I framed it as not just like, here's a role that's open.

Like, I really framed it is like I want to work with you and here's why. And people were really compelled by that. And so, yes, there's like this like people come to me and it's outpouring. And then there's like when I've built this credibility, when I reach out, make outreach to people, people literally say, I am flattered that you decided to reach out to me. And that to me feels so good that I've been able to build that goodwill in that show my personality, where they say when I reach out with them, it's not a cold message.

It's never a cold message.

If they have seen your personality on LinkedIn and any way you're doing the traditional LinkedIn, the people that will reply to you are only doing so. You might as well optimize your your branding there because the people that will reply in any way.

Yes. So the second step is to get started studying, posting things. Is there a third step like we hear a lot about adding people? How do you grow your network? Because if you just have five connections, even if you build the best, most optimized post, will the good? And if not, how do you grow your network?

Yes. So LinkedIn does not really feel that you are existing if your network is below five hundred connections. So you definitely want to make sure that as you're working with clients, as you are working with co-workers, as you do programs where there's other students in the class always be adding all of those folks. If you post on LinkedIn and someone likes the post, add them on LinkedIn. Say Thank you for engaging with my post. Great to meet you.

Like you need to be constantly building this network. And I am not a person who thinks bigger network is better. Yes, your reach is better when you have a bigger network. But I'm talking about a quality network. I'm not talking about empty profiles from people who are in different countries who you will never really have anything in common with. I'm talking about meaningful. Like I said, I grew from six thousand sixty thousand in under twelve months. A lot of people like that should be a red flag for people listening, because a lot of people, the way they do that is they just blast connection messages to people that are Lions', LinkedIn, open networkers.

So those are people who will accept anyone. And that is absolutely not what I did. It was all organic. It was all inbound. So I wasn't really like reaching out to people, like hoping that the connect with me was all inbound. And so really just focusing on meaningful relationships, connecting with folks, just really showing up to the platform and creating those connections. And that's really remarkable is that after you kind of connect all these people who have connected with your content, suddenly that person has a mutual connection that you are interested in meeting.

And you messaged them and you notice that. Your earlier messages with them were something really nice about you, their post or your post or something that you have in common, and again, it's a warm intro. Again, what I what I read.

I don't know how accurate that is, but I read that the network was two minutes a factor, including the rich. But the dwell time is a much bigger factor. So you might be better off writing good messages, good posts than having tons of connections. But I don't know who that is.

And also a thing that I see so is always trying to optimize and to refresh the algorithm in the end is similar to what Google did a few years ago and still do today.

Just refresh events and people will try to optimize only for the algorithm in the end become the great losers, because you shouldn't optimize for the algorithms, but for the quality content. Right.

So it is an art and a science, right. There's different things. The interesting thing is the algorithm takes signals from human behavior. So everything I teach is both psychology and yes, LinkedIn does suppress something. So if you're if you're posting a certain way or doing certain things, LinkedIn will suppress your post. So there's there's both things. Right. So you need to keep in mind both. But a lot of it's also really understanding how people interact with the platform and how LinkedIn interprets those actions and then either boost your reach or suppresses it.

OK, OK. So I think it's also a good thing to just optimize for the person. What I think is interesting is that nobody really knows what the exact algorithms are accepted that they will just say for the post that I have the most engagement and most of all time. So in the end, to achieve that, you have to make interesting posts and engage with your community. And that will be my last question.

How would you encourage people to leave comments and to engage with both? Should you close the post with the question? Do you have any tips on that?

Yes, that is the number one thing I measure.

And the post success are the comments that shows that you are you've created good content and so really creating a post where there is something there is something to comment about. Right. It's you when you post on LinkedIn, one of the things that can be really helpful is knowing that, yes, you might be talking about yourself, but really you're just starting a conversation for others to talk about themselves. So really focusing on that type of content and then, of course, respond to every comment.

It's gotten to the point now where I just I get hundreds of comments, so I'm not always able to respond to every single one, but I do work really hard to respond to as many as humanly possible. And it's amazing how, like me responding to a comment, even if it's thanks so much, that really creates such a meaningful bond with that person.

Well, thanks a lot for the advice, Madeleine, and that's truly something I'll use for the leading post myself. And thanks for coming today. Where can our listeners find you if they want to hear more?

Well, thanks so much, Robyn. This has been an absolute pleasure. You can head to my website, Madeleine McCann Dotcom. I also have more information on the course LinkedIn for thought leaders, if that is of interest to any of your listeners and also definitely connect follow on LinkedIn. We'll put the link to my LinkedIn in the description of this podcast. Oh, great.

Then we'll engage on LinkedIn. You're on the line. Thank you. Thanks for listening. The podcast till the end. If you're still with us, it's probably that you enjoy the players pay players is brought to you by myself and higher suites. Well, building a sourcing automation software. And we already helped nine other the companies hire the best science.

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That really, really helps. Thanks a lot and talk to you soon.