I know I have mentioned it before and so too have a few of my fellow bloggers, how disappointing it is that there are so few recruitment companies that blog given the huge benefits, mind you I am convinced it would highlight the agencies that know nothing about their markets!

So I was pleased to find a recruitment company, which hasn’t been picked up by the mainstream, partly because they are based in Ireland and partly because they are working their market, which at the end of the day is the whole point. The company is Prosperity and they specialise predominantly in the media sector, which I suppose influences the garish pink website!!!

Their blog is a mix of posts which appeal more to marketeers and ad designers, rather than recruitment consultants with posts like the New Porker and Ads of the World, but that is the whole point if you want to show you are an expert in your market then there is no better way to show your passion than with a blog and hence I am happy to award them my Highly Recommended Recruitment blog badge, one of a stream of awards at the moment.

So following from my recent interview with Jonathan Fagan of Ten Percent, I decided to use a similar format to get a feel of how the Prosperity’s blog works for their company, so I contacted Garry Mullan the MD, which incidentally wasn’t difficult as he happened to be a client of Arithon before I joined.

So here goes

Garry judging by the number of posts I assume you blog is important to you?

It is important. To be quite honest, we initiated this blog because we work a lot in the digital recruitment space, and we thought it might give us a bit more kudos. However, we actually quickly started to want to use it, to post items of media or media news that we found interesting. Basically, anything that would grab the office’s attention. We started to feel the need to share these things with our client and candidate bases. We also wanted to broadcast our achievements and initiatives, and we found that the blog has been great for this.

What help do you get with writing your posts and when do you write them?

We don’t get any help from outside of the office. Our consultants are all fairly passionate about their areas, be they design or online marketing, and usually feel inspired to write these posts themselves. We do not write to the blog on a structured basis. Articles are posted randomly, just whenever a relevant topic arises or someone gets inspired. This usually makes for about  4 or 5 blog entries a month.

Since you have started blogging how much business can you attribute to your blog?

We really don’t know. But we do know that it keeps us in the mind of our clients and candidates. We are aware that many of each have subscribed to our RSS feed, and we have also receive positive feedback.

How many visits do you get to your blog and how many subscribers do you have?

We seem to have about 1,000 visitors to our blog each month. This is probably as much as a niche blog within the Irish market would attain.

What blogging platform do you use and why?

WordPress. The simple answer to Why is that this is the one our web developers recommended to us.

How much work do you do on SEO?

We do quite a bit of work on SEO, and in terms of the blog it is actually a sub domain and we do appreciate that it does provide quality links back to the rest of our website.

What mistakes have you made?

We were slow in adopting certain features, like footnote links to each article to blog sharing and social media services, and we missed out on a good seo opportunity by not using tags on all of our earlier postings.

What has been the best experience from the blog?

Well our best experience regarding the whole website is having won the Prestigious Golden Spider award for best recruitment site in Ireland. We feel the blog was a big contributing factor to this.

Why do you keep writing?

Because we enjoy it! And we have a lot to boast about these days, lots of awards!

Where do you get your inspiration from?

From what we do for at least 8 hours a day. We enjoy media, and are motivated to write about it.

Is there any thing else you would like to mention?

We feel the blog has given us a chance to portray more than our image and what we do, it has shown that we are not just a pretty face, that we have a personality also.