The following is posted as part of my participation in the Recruiting Blog Swap:
From Jim Durbin, STLRecruiting
I've blogged for five years under many different blogs for many different reasons. But as a recruiter, I had to calculate ROI for my activities. That wasn't easy, as it had always seemed to me to be information and a sharpened ability to reason were the results of blogging.
It's difficult to quantify those traits - because as an outside salesperson, so much of my reputation was based on what I knew and how I got along with people I was not doing business with. Valuable, but hard to measure was the answer.
In a more global manner, blogging helped brand me individually, outside of my company. It set aside the corporate face and let technology managers know I'm more like them than a typical staffing account manager.
When asked to quantify the ROI, I spread it out over time spent performing other marketing activities as well as the impact that the increased knowledge had on current activities. If reading a blogpost helped me get an appointment because it made me seem knowledgeable, then how valuable was that reading time as opposed to other cold calls?
I hated cold calls - not because of the rejection, but because I felt like I was wasting time - when I could spend it making a cold call warm, and getting better results. So blogging for me, helped make my cold calls seem less of a waste of time, and more a chance to introduce myself, and my blog to hiring managers.
The result in the first year was $100,000. What is your recruiting blog doing for you?
I would have a hard time quantifying what a difference the blog has made in my business. Why? I have made too many changes to measure the results from just one. And that is okay because all of the changes were for the better! But I would say that the difference is significant and that the interaction and discussion with my readers is invaluable. So I will keep on blogging!
Posted by: Peggy McKee | January 30, 2008 at 11:22 PM