Last week I came across a new recruitment blog and rather than do a review I suggested that maybe they would like to write a guest post, outlining what they do to succeed. So Charlie agreed and his post is below. What did interest me was how they go that extra mile by working with the Universities.

Word of mouth recruitment

Every recruiter, whether they are a direct employer or an agency, faces the challenge of not only attracting the best candidates, but also identifying them from other applicants. At FreshMinds Talent, a recruitment consultancy for high-fliers at the top end of the job market, we are attempting to do exactly that by exploring innovative new ways of promoting word of mouth marketing.

Today, the vast majority of recruitment is done online – through job boards, recruiter websites and more interactive platforms like forums and, yes, even blogs. The internet allows you to reach far more potential candidates than ever before. But often the opportunity cost of these broader horizons is a flood of applications that somebody has to sift through. And the amount of work that creates means some exceptional candidates might be overlooked.

Don’t get me wrong – FreshMinds Talent have a very active presence on the internet. We have a website filled with useful resources for our candidates and – crucially – the information our clients need to know about our services. We also have a newly launched blog that aims to demonstrate that we aren’t just recruitment consultants, we’re recruitment experts. Yet the vast majority of our best candidates come through referrals, recommendations and our association to a number of schemes aimed to promote word of mouth.

We have been running a scheme called Ones to Watch at six of the UK’s top universities for the last seven years, identifying the best candidates on campus in their penultimate year of study (and thus twelve months before they come into contact with most other employers). The result is a network of alumni who serve not just as outstanding candidates and valuable clients, but as brand advocates. The 2,000 Ones to Watch alumni are therefore at the heart of our candidate pool – not just because they make up 10% of it, but because they have told exponentially far more people about what we do and why we’re different from other consultancies.

Over the next twelve months we are looking to launch several new initiatives to garner ambassadors for FreshMinds Talent and emphasis their importance to the company, in the more senior echelons of the business world as well as at universities. If you would like to find out more about FreshMinds Talent, take a look at our website or follow our blog for more insight into recruitment and interim management.

—More about Charlie—

Charlie heads up the marketing at FreshMinds Talent and, as an eager blogger and digital marketer, oversees the consultancy’s blog. Before joining FreshMinds, Charlie worked as a freelance journalist and even, in his darkest hours, edited a golf magazine.