LinkedIn and AI for Recruiters: Content and Outreach That Drive Revenue

Transcription:

Clark Willcox [00:00:00]:
66% of your buyers say they would refuse to work with you if your content was of poor quality or lacked any depth. Ding, ding, ding. AI content, right? So when I hear, oh, I write stuff and I have AI clean it up, that is a recipe. I guarantee you that’s a recipe that you are hurting your brand and your potential prospects in your pipeline with posting that type of content on LinkedIn.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:22]:
Welcome to FDE+, where the conversation shaping the future of talent continues beyond our live event series.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:29]:
This special series brings our free version virtual event sessions directly to you.

Kortney Harmon [00:00:34]:
So they’re featuring thought leaders, top trainers, experts that are really tackling issues that matter most across the recruiting, staffing, and talent acquisition industries. These sessions originally happened live with real conversation, practical insight, and open Q&A, and now we’re bringing the best of them to the podcast. Listen in.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:04]:
We’re staying in all things AI and dos and don’ts of marketing outreach, because if you were just here a minute or two ago, there are a lot of things changing faster and faster, and it’s trying to keep up. And Clark prepared, he said he thought about 50 slides that he didn’t include. Like, there’s so many things. And if you don’t know Clark, Clark Willcox, he’s the founder of The Digital Recruiter, and he has built a massive following helping recruiters show up better online. using digital tools the right way. And today, ideally, we’re cutting through the noise, telling you exactly what to do, what to avoid, and when it comes to AI and your marketing outreach. So Clark, with that being said, I’ve joked with everyone so far today that if you say my name 3 times, I’m gonna go off stage. If you say it 3 times, I’m gonna magically show up like a bad genie.

Kortney Harmon [00:01:53]:
So I’m gonna go off stage. I’m gonna add your presentation and I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Clark Willcox [00:01:57]:
Yeah, the straight to VHS. Disney sequel Genie.

Kortney Harmon [00:02:01]:
I’m not Robin Williams. I would love to be, but that is not me. Yeah.

Clark Willcox [00:02:05]:
Well, welcome. Thank you for having me, Kortney and Crelate. This is super fun and excited to present just the chaos of what’s been going on this year, right, with the AI. Is it the revolution or the 2.0? I don’t know what it is. I apologize for my throat and my voice. I’m not a smoker. I just sound one. Like one today for whatever middle of summer sickness I have.

Clark Willcox [00:02:28]:
So LinkedIn is a sitting goldmine. I have the dos and don’ts of AI and outreach and marketing, but I’m actually going to start off by, well, I’ll cover the agenda. What is Digital Recruiter? If you guys don’t know, I’ll go into that a little bit. My story, my background, why I’m even asked to speak here and to hopefully share some knowledge with all of you. I think how to build a personal brand. What’s the system that works on LinkedIn for outreach? What we’re doing for automation, how we’re using that with AI. And then now it’s like, then it’s going to be how do you incorporate AI into all of this? And so that’s what we’re going to share today. And very purposely, I’m actually going to start with a lot of necessarily non-AI stuff.

Clark Willcox [00:03:07]:
I think it’s really important to understand the foundation of what’s worked. And that’s what I’ve been talking to my team about and our clients this year is AI is great, but we have to keep it what is driving revenue and pipeline and getting you towards your goal because it is easier to fall into rabbit holes. That produce no revenue, no pipeline, or it actually potentially could hurt your brand and hurt your outreach if you’re not careful. I’m gonna share some stats around that as well. So as Kortney mentioned, I’m the founder of Digital Recruiter. We help agency recruiters fix their top of funnel to drive more inbound leads and create more warm outbound, really an all-bounce system, right? Because when you’re a thought leader and your hiring managers buy into you, when you reach out to them, it reduces the friction. They’re more bought in and you get more replies that way. So we’ve worked with 300+ recruiters.

Clark Willcox [00:03:51]:
It might actually be 400+ by now at this point this year. In the last 4 years, I started recruiting in 2013 at Aerotek in the Los Angeles, one of the Los Angeles offices. I was on skilled trades, general labor, commercial. I was never on LinkedIn last decade. I hopped on LinkedIn in 2020, went from 100 connections and followers to 26,000 now this year. I’ve had millions of impressions on LinkedIn, although that is not also the main goal. I’ve never once gone viral on LinkedIn and I’ve built My whole LinkedIn, my whole business development has all been through LinkedIn, and all my referrals come from the LinkedIn engine that I’ve built. And we’ve also done this for recruiters.

Clark Willcox [00:04:29]:
We’ve helped people make billions in placement fees using LinkedIn as the foundational for the outreach and their inbound system, both with automation and content. So we’ve done a lot on LinkedIn. We do done-for-you, we do done-with-you coaching, we do the do-it-yourself group trainings and all that stuff. And no, we don’t charge an arm and a leg for group coaching. Our group coaching tiers start at $99 a month. So I’m not selling you guys on that, I’m just kind of showing because I know there’s a lot of different pricing up there on group coaching programs. This is our team, our awesome team. We have head of copy marketing, head of go-to-market operations, podcast copywriters.

Clark Willcox [00:05:04]:
But I’ve invested more this quarter in the talent in terms of copywriting and operations because of where all this is going. And so there’s a very purposeful reason to that because with AI, what you need, the people with the brains, the people that understand copywriting and outreach and still those are so valuable right now. And so that’s why we are investing more into that as a team and as a company, because all these tools are great, but I see a lot of half-baked projects and things that aren’t following through. This team here is incredible starting and finishing projects, and that’s why we’re able to execute both internally and for our clients. This is my family. You notice my wife helps in the business. She’s on the last slide. My wife Mady, my boys Wyatt and Jet.

Clark Willcox [00:05:48]:
We’re out in Columbus, Ohio, but I grew up in Boston as a big Pats fan. I mentioned I recruited in LA. My first bosses out of college, for your football fans, were Dean Blandino and Urban Meyer as I worked down in Florida in professional and college football. So that’s kind of a fun fact about me. But I’m going to share before we get into the AI why I’m in recruiting, because I think this is really This is really important in terms of building a brand and finding that balance of AI and the human touch. That’s everywhere, right? But I want to share my story because I want to be able to show where we leverage AI and where the human touch is. And hopefully that’ll resonate with you so you could take that away and feel comfortable really owning your story and meeting hiring managers where they’re at and having them connect with you there and then having AI help you get to more of those quality conversations, right? So for me, I fell into recruiting like probably every single one of you on this call right now. I was doing B2B telecom sales with a Verizon polo.

Clark Willcox [00:06:41]:
It was terrible. It sucked. If Time Warner didn’t, you know, get an install in done correctly, I had to give my commission back. It’s like, what the heck was up with that? So I put my resume up. Aerotek called me for a temp role. I didn’t want it. He’s like, have you thought about being a recruiter? I had no idea what that was. I don’t think I really understood what recruiting was until probably my second week on the job.

Clark Willcox [00:06:58]:
But so is life. Such is life. They offered me a base plus commission, so I took it. Now, a lot of people fall into recruiting, but why do we stay in recruiting? And for all you on here, maybe it’s been a year, maybe it’s 5 years, 20 years, 30 years, 40 years. I don’t know, right? But one of the things that hit me this decade is why I actually stuck in recruiting. I never really thought of it last decade, but as I’ve written hundreds of posts this decade, it’s really kind of brought me to understand, like, why is the copywriting and the approach and why I’m able to get meetings and clients from LinkedIn. And I have the best clients. Like, I freaking love the work that I get to do and who I get to work with.

Clark Willcox [00:07:32]:
And it all stems from LinkedIn and me just writing words on LinkedIn every day. Like, what’s up with that? And so for me, it’s 2 people. And my story, it started actually— I was born in France, and unfortunately my biological parents passed away when I was 5, within 10 days of each other. You might be thinking, Clark, why are you sharing this on an AI presentation? And I will promise you this will all come full circle. And so these people that you see on the screen are my uncle who took me in, was my second father. And then my grandmother, my biological grandmother. And so they brought me in and moved me to Boston the day before I was 6, got me a Sega Genesis on my birthday. And then within 4 months, I forgot all my French and I learned only English.

Clark Willcox [00:08:09]:
And growing up, these are basically my 2 therapists, if you will, right? They poured everything into me and got to know me and listened to me and cared about what my dreams were and held me accountable and pushed me and listened to me and gave me advice and just did fun things with me and just were supportive. And what I look back on to realize that they took someone that’s kind of on an island a little bit, you know, definitely very lost, right? And helped provide direction and got to know me and met me where I was at. You think about that, those are all traits of an amazing recruiter. And so those qualities were instilled in me. And, you know, when I had some success as a recruiter, I hit $10K in spread within 5 months, and, and that was the fastest at the office at the time and stuff like that. So the recruiting piece came naturally to me, and I never really understood it. Until I left Aerotek, got back into recruiting a couple years later through the LinkedIn marketing side of things, and like, why do I keep coming back to this industry? And there was something about working with recruiters and training recruiters at Aerotek and promoting them and, and the client management piece. Like, there was something about having people being heard and felt and understanding like, hey, I’m not trying to fit you into the perfect job, but like, where are you trying to get to? Like, let’s figure out that path, that journey together, right? That’s what my uncle and my grandmother did for me.

Clark Willcox [00:09:20]:
And I connect with that. And I feel because your content, your brand, everything like that really needs to lead with the heart and authenticity. So all that AI slop that you see on your feed and everything else, I challenge you guys to write your own post and study copywriting and write your own post and then use AI, right? Some of you might be using AI earlier than you actually really should be able to. And I think content’s a big one in all that. And so I really challenge you. It’s going to be hard at first, but Right from the heart, right? Really try to understand why you’re in recruiting. Why do your clients work with you versus other agencies? Why your candidates that you make a match, like, why do they work with you versus the other recruiters? How did you give them a different experience, right? Connect with the heart of your story and the experiences that you give your clients and your candidates. That’s gonna make for a really good brand and really authentic brand on LinkedIn.

Clark Willcox [00:10:08]:
So I’m gonna share everything that we’re doing right now just from that works from outreach and AI that drives revenue for us and our clients. But we’ve had our biggest quarter ever, and I’ve had AI as part of every single proposal, call brief, everything. I’m going to show you some of the tools that I’m using to work with that, where LinkedIn automation is going with AI and AI content engines and what we’re building out and the guardrails there, right? This is going to be overwhelming. And as I said earlier, it has to drive revenue. So you really have to check yourself every day. Am I going down a rabbit hole that’s actually helping me or is it hurting? me, right? I’ll have sprints when I’m using AI religiously for a week or two, and then I’m like, I don’t even touch it for a couple of weeks, right? Because I have my team, you know, the outreach team handle it or the content team handle it, right? So you have to understand where you are if you’re a revenue driver, for if it’s your solo or part of a team, where that balance is. I don’t know how the chat is working here, but I’d be curious. I’m going to try to bring it up on my end, you know, of how many people here have been pitched on LinkedIn.

Clark Willcox [00:11:05]:
you know, you could say me, me, me in the chat, I gotta be able to find where it is. But I’m sure the answer is all of us, right? It’s the same thing for your hiring managers. And so you have to remember that hiring managers are getting pitched all the time on LinkedIn. So when everyone’s getting pitched, right, we have to learn how do we stand out? So how do we build a brand the right way? And I’m gonna give you some numbers here, some statistics, and then we’re gonna go into some more of the systems and strategies. But a ton of B2B leads come from social media, 80%. LinkedIn has skyrocketed in the profiles that it has on LinkedIn. I think it’s doubled. It’s 1.3 billion now.

Clark Willcox [00:11:39]:
It’s doubled what it was beginning of this decade. 300 million plus active users. And then LinkedIn outreach just generates a lot more higher quality reply rates than cold email. Although you’re able to send more cold emails, doesn’t mean that all those are landing in the inbox, right? And it’s just agency recruiting. I always say no HR person, no hiring manager wakes up on a Monday going, I can’t wait to work with another agency recruiter this week, right? So you have the challenge of your ideal next clients don’t really want to deal with you until they have to. And then who they pick, right? It’s going to be the person that stands out. And then I hear a lot of people saying, ah, my market’s not on LinkedIn. Well, LinkedIn is full of lurkers.

Clark Willcox [00:12:17]:
So less than 1% of people, if you post more than once a week, you are in the top 1% of creators on LinkedIn. So the barrier to stand out is shockingly low. Right? You don’t need to go viral. We have people get clients, and I’m gonna show some examples. They get posts at 7 likes, 10 likes, 9 likes that drive inbound leads. You just have to show up consistently with something relevant to say to your specific market. You just can’t be boring, right? You gotta obviously solve problems, demonstrate that you can solve problems, show, don’t tell. And so this goes back to like, why did I pick LinkedIn? I can use LinkedIn automation.

Clark Willcox [00:12:48]:
So I just automate my connection requests every single day, and that’s how I’ll be able to add 25,000 connections or whatever it is in 6 years. And I spend almost no time every week doing top of funnel prospecting. But the content marketing piece, I post every single business day on LinkedIn. I have for basically 4 straight years now. I learned this from managing Sheryl Sandberg’s inbox, not her content, her inbox. She would go viral, get tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of likes, but it was the post that solved the business problem that got the least amount of likes that drove the most quality inbound leads. So that’s what opened my eyes to going viral does not turn into revenue on LinkedIn. And then recruiters are on LinkedIn every day, right? So you want to fish where the fish are.

Clark Willcox [00:13:30]:
So for me, agency recruiters on LinkedIn. And what I’ve learned with working with agency recruiters is your market, at least on the business development side, is almost always on LinkedIn. I’ve seen from construction to manufacturing to IT to SaaS, obviously accounting and finance to legal. Everyone is on LinkedIn. Now maybe your forklift drivers aren’t as much, but the people that hire forklift drivers, they’re definitely on LinkedIn, right? And so what you have to think of is the way people buy has changed. So people are buying, if you look at your own behavior, if you buy on, I think, Instagram or TikTok or whatever, right? You’re looking to build trust in like, what are other people saying? Are other people trusting this resource, right? We look at reviews and everything else. So we get a lot of that validation sometimes from seeing people’s comments or just seeing posts that really resonate with us, right? People build trust through the internet, through what they read. And if someone shows up consistently, right, they trust them more and more.

Clark Willcox [00:14:23]:
We have 60% of C-suite executives willing to pay a premium to work at an organization that demonstrates thought leadership, right? So you get increase in pricing. You get 86% of buyers are willing to include you in an RFP if they feel like you have a strong thought leadership process. And I hear that over and over with our clients. I have a client right now that was basically almost nearly bankrupt a year ago. He’s going to bill close to $500K this year, all retained search. He posts content consistently, but he’s also just involved in more proposals. He doesn’t close every proposal, but his pipeline’s full. He’s invited to send proposals to way more, and he’s actually leveling up and getting more seat in the conversation for more C-level searches, right? Because of his brand on LinkedIn.

Clark Willcox [00:15:04]:
Being authentic is super key, right? This is— and people can kind of tell, right? We can all kind of tell with the AI slop that’s out there. So being authentic, that’s why I shared my story early on, right? Being able to really tap into the source of why you’re doing this day to day. It can’t be just a tactical thing. It can’t be just a task that you check off and then expect and then wonder why you don’t get any results, right? You have to put your time and your heart and your soul into this. But the reward is I have people that don’t have to do any other business development besides posting on LinkedIn. So you just have to choose where you spend and allocate your time, and then how you approach it. The people that don’t have success with this treat this as a task. They’re not bought into it.

Clark Willcox [00:15:43]:
They don’t stay patient enough, right? There’s too much like shiny object syndrome. Now, this is maybe the most important slide of this whole presentation and maybe of this whole week for any of you, especially if you start to think about writing content on LinkedIn. 66% of your buyers say they would refuse to work with you if your content was of poor quality or lacked any depth. Ding, ding, ding, AI content, right? So when I hear, oh, I write stuff and I have AI clean it up, that is a recipe. I guarantee you that’s a recipe that you are hurting your brand and your potential prospects in your pipeline with posting that type of content on LinkedIn. So let’s do a quick recap on this section. Thought leadership gets premium pricing when it’s done right. You get more sales opportunities when it’s done right, and bad posts turn away clients and prospects.

Clark Willcox [00:16:27]:
So every week you’re not posting quality content that resonates, competitors who are posting are pulling further ahead. And I hear this all the time. I’m getting more and more veteran recruiters working with us this year that are saying, I see this agency in my space that hasn’t been around as long, right? Or they’re coming from another country and infiltrating our market and they’re beating us in getting business. Correct. Because your buyers are buying from the internet and from thought leadership and content and who they believe is putting themselves out there and demonstrating that they could solve their problem. A quick note here. Because I get this often, is your company page is fairly useless as long as it looks polished. Your personal page is gonna get way more traction when you post, right? Executive content, being a founder is gonna get way more engagement.

Clark Willcox [00:17:08]:
And so post personal, right? Repost from your company page if you want to, but focus on your personal page, right? Your clients buy from the producer, they buy from you, they don’t buy from the logo. There’s only a handful of logos they know anyway. It’s like Robert Half and Korn Ferry. Right? I worked at Aerotek, which is a huge company, and most people don’t even know Aerotek. I didn’t know the Robert Half and the Korn Ferry. Everyone else is kind of like, it doesn’t really matter. It’s you they’re buying from. And then the invisible audience, right? So the content drives revenue.

Clark Willcox [00:17:36]:
It’s hard sometimes to understand what’s working, what’s not working. This is why we do what we do, because we’re in the trenches all day, every day. But in agency recruiting, some of the issues that you have as you start to do more outreach and do more content and use AI, it’s like knowing what works. a lot of your business development posts or hiring managers aren’t going to get as much engagement. If you’re targeting more candidates and you have, say, a lead magnet, which is, hey, how to increase your salary as a civil engineer that just got their PE, but you don’t want people to comment, yes, I want this, because no candidate’s going to publicly admit that they’re downloading a guide on how to make more money on LinkedIn, right? You’re going to have to send that privately, right? So there’s different things that make agency recruiting unique in content, all that. You actually are aiming more for the lurkers and the people behind the scenes versus the people that like and comment on your post. So you wanna stop chasing likes and start chasing conversations and conversions and building the pipeline, right? Getting the DMs, hey, I love this post and I wanna talk more and yada yada. This is an example of someone in the legal space that was getting 5 likes, 9 likes, 17 likes.

Clark Willcox [00:18:43]:
What were their impressions? 50,000. 31,000, 21,000, right? So in legal, what I predicted would happen came true, which is no one in legal is going to like or comment on anything. But if the posts were good and they resonated, they would all read it. And that’s what we can see happen here. His whole market was leading to— got a ton of inbound leads from associates and some partners, which is exactly what he was looking for on the candidate side, right? So you have to be able to interpret the likes, comments to impressions. And what that all means, because it’s not just about getting likes. And so if you look at a lot of LinkedIn content reports, they are telling you to post at certain times or do certain things or post images because it’s about certain things going viral, but they can’t possibly track what’s driving revenue, right? That’s what our job is. We work specifically with agency recruiters, but we are tracking the correlation between content and content that drives revenue.

Clark Willcox [00:19:34]:
This is an example. This is a post that got 9 likes and turned into a $30,000 fee. Right? It’s the headline, the hook was there, right? The follow-up was 30 minutes later. But if you have the right post and they resonate, right, you have with the hiring manager, like, you will get that inbound traction. All right, so what is the system? This is the predictable revenue engine that we’ve built out on LinkedIn. It starts with your profile, has to be a landing page, not a resume, and I’m going to show you an example of what a great one looks like. Targeted prospecting, when a You know, building out your Dream 100, your Dream 500. I’m going to talk a little bit about AI tools you can look to help you, help you do that.

Clark Willcox [00:20:10]:
The outreach, the formula behind connection requests per day, LinkedIn automation platform that you can use, MCP integrations that are with LinkedIn automation now that you can actually build stuff out through Claude. Good consistent content. We’re going to talk about some fundamentals of good posts, right? But then how we’re leveraging AI to build out a whole pretty robust content engine. And then the follow-up. Is the last part, which, uh, I don’t know if I’ll get into as much today, but how you handle DMs, how you interact with your prospects once you become an authority with LinkedIn content, your brand actually changes. I see a lot of veteran owners sometimes struggle to make the switch from coming across like a salesperson to actually more of a trusted advisor in the inbox, right? So that’s like a mindset shift that you have to look out for when things are actually working on your LinkedIn. So for us, the way I look at it is you want outreach to start the conversation of building the network. I have people that run automated automation campaigns that only send a connection request and they don’t do anything else.

Clark Willcox [00:21:07]:
And they do a manual follow-up. Some do one message and then follow up, right? So you want to figure out, it depends on your audience and the titles. It depends on how much of a drip sequence you have. If you’re in a market that really needs candidates, you could probably get away with a little bit more of a drip sequence. and send more 2 or 3 messages. If you’re in a competitive space, like maybe SaaS and all that, which we have a client that’s getting outbound and inbound leads in the startup SaaS space right now, but she’s doing a very good job of positioning her profile, her content, and the messaging and the list building is really curated. So you have to just understand the space that you’re in. So outreach starts the conversation.

Clark Willcox [00:21:44]:
Content keeps you top of mind. So what makes a good LinkedIn profile? Clear and concise story, expertise. The featured section, what do you want your ideal market to see over and over? You know, you want to connect your company page, look official. We do have like a LinkedIn profile builder that our community members have access to, which is pretty cool. So you input your, like, your information, who you’re targeting, your story, and it spits out a pretty good looking profile for you. But this is an example of what I mean with a good profile, right? The headline, physical therapist turned healthcare recruiter. You want to show your niche and vertical in the first 5 to 8 words. Because this is the thing that people see when you send a connection request.

Clark Willcox [00:22:21]:
You want the about section. I know the formatting on this slide is off, but I wanted to make sure this was visible. You want to get your story and then you really want to dial in the results. Putting in the results and making them specific this way is what wins. And so yes, there’s a lot with AI and everything else, and we’re going to talk about that more and more. But I have to share, if you’ve seen me present before, I’m saying this over and over and over again. Put your results in the about section. This is the number one driver of getting more inbound leads from the start.

Clark Willcox [00:22:50]:
We had a whole group, a whole bootcamp of 30 people last week, the people that fixed up their profile like this, and we helped every single one of them. People are already starting to drive in more inbound leads just from fixing the profiles. And these are all new agency owners within the last— this year or last year that are leveraging their past industry expertise, right, to show, you know, what they’ve done. As an agency recruiter, but even hiring that they’ve done internally, right? And then you want to have a call to action at the bottom. Hey, message me on LinkedIn if you want to learn more. Your featured section, you can have a lead magnet, you can have your Calendly link, you have a couple posts that are some of the, your heavy hitter posts that you want new hiring managers to see over and over again, right? You want to leverage your featured section on LinkedIn. This is huge. If you have never added it, go to add section on your main page and go add featured.

Clark Willcox [00:23:37]:
And then you can go to your posts and activity, do the little 3 little dots on the top right and go add to featured. But this is a huge part of kind of creating this landing page on LinkedIn. But as I mentioned before, you know, farm at scale, then hunt. But a lot of people are using AI and personalized messages and sending it to everyone. What we’re doing differently is we’re building the targeted list. We’re connecting, we’re farming at scale, but then who is replying? That’s who’s getting the direct messages. That’s who we’re hunting, right? Who’s— and we’re building the list of who’s hiring, who has the potential to be hiring, right? Who’s growing. So you always want to be building your ecosystem.

Clark Willcox [00:24:13]:
You also want to export your LinkedIn first-degree data, do an audit, have AI run an audit or Claude or Manus or whatever you use of your first-degree data and sort it by titles and industries and all that. And that can be your low-hanging fruit of people to follow up with. Targeted list. I’ve always enjoyed Sales Navigator. Now there’s ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay. You can do connectors with your LLM with Claude and Clay and people smarter than me today and tomorrow. I’m probably gonna get more into tactical and how to do all that. We have a whole team that does that.

Clark Willcox [00:24:43]:
It helps our clients set that up and leverage whatever tools they have and kind of have the one, you know, have it connect to the LLM. And so we’re able to build LinkedIn automation campaigns and through Claude. So I have it log in, leverage my Sales Navigator, leverage our Apollo. And find new leads, check out people that are new that have viewed my profile and do some different cool things there. So the list building has never been easier to get super high intent lists with leveraging AI. And there’s so many different ways to kind of go about it, right? But getting your targeting right is critical to your messaging, your content really doing right. You have to have the right audience for any of this to really make sense, right? So the golden rule is if you’re not excited about your new connections, You gotta work on building a better targeted list. So the math behind business development success on LinkedIn, you could send up to 10,000 connection requests a year.

Clark Willcox [00:25:33]:
If you have, say, like Sales Navigator and say like an automation tool, LinkedIn automation tool, you could say you connect with 2,500 of those, 1,000 maybe reply to you depending on the messaging right away, right? You can have 1,000+ conversations within your market every year on LinkedIn if you just keep this thing running, right? And So if you have a clear lane, defined ICP, the right content, you can get 5 to 10 clients from those conversations, right? That’s where your pipeline is. That’s where you’re swimming. Tech stack right now, I’m using LinkedIn automation. I’ve used Dripify. Hey, Rish, I’m using Aimfox right now. I’m testing out voice memo campaigns. I can like a post, view profile, all that stuff, have different actions running for me. And then I leverage Sales Navigator.

Clark Willcox [00:26:14]:
That is my whole tech stack right now. I think we started getting Apollo, but that’s more for client work than anything that I’m using it for. So I have that combined, I think is $150 tech stack for me right now. And it’s driven my whole business on LinkedIn for 4 years. So you don’t have to overcomplicate it with the tech stack. Obviously you need a legitimate ATS, get something like Crelate, right? And I know, I’m sure they’re gonna be able to hook up the MCP and do all this other stuff, right? It’s gonna be super cool. So then you pull from the candidates from your database, you use your LinkedIn outreach, right? You do some MPC campaigns. from all that and have that on autopilot, right? And that’s really how I recommend you use all of this AI and your ATS is connect it to, you know, connect with your ideal target accounts on LinkedIn, post content towards them.

Clark Willcox [00:26:58]:
And then as your target accounts have open jobs, connect Crelate, right? If and when you can, hey, find me the top 5 engineers in my database that matches the software engineer opening that this target account has, right? And then create an MPC dashboard with Manus, and I’ll show you what I’m using with Manus, Facebook’s AI, right? You can basically create that in 5 minutes now. It’s ridiculous. Let’s see it. This is Aimfox in the bottom left, the MCP server, and they have a bunch of other cool integrations. I integrated with Slack as well. This is a prompt that came in on my Claude because I scheduled out tasks with Cowork. So it’s like, hey, give me an update every morning on my unread messages in my LinkedIn and my LinkedIn automation tool. So it listed 7 for me and I go, hey, go into my LinkedIn and give me a list of who’s viewed my profile, who’s posting on LinkedIn that fits my ICP.

Clark Willcox [00:27:50]:
And then it showed me, hey, you got to connect your Chrome browser. So I connected it and then it gave me a list and it did that work on the backend while I was on my meetings all day. Again, it’s just super cool what this stuff can do and where this stuff is evolving to. And yes, we help build all this stuff out. for agency recruiters. I’m just trying to give kind of a high-level overview of what is possible. And as I mentioned, less is more, right? Rachel Brown, who I mentioned on the LinkedIn profile, her whole tech stack has been LinkedIn automation, Sales Navigator, and an ATS. And she went from $100K to $500K, right, from year 1 to year 2 in recruiting.

Clark Willcox [00:28:25]:
She’s built 7 figures in the times that we’ve worked together. All our clients come from LinkedIn inbound. Right? So the tech stack does not have to be crazy. Good ATS like LinkedIn, let’s use, like, uh, Crelate, Sales Navigator automation. It’s like you’re off and running, you’re off to the races. Get a $20 Claude account and you’re good to go. So more tech isn’t the goal, using it as effectively is. This is an example of inbound leads that she gets from content.

Clark Willcox [00:28:51]:
People on the left that came across your profile, we used to work together, and hey, you helped us last year, right? So she’s getting new leads. Old coworkers and old clients all coming back from LinkedIn content. 3 posts per week, it’s 150 for the year, but you could easily get 200,000, 300,000, 400,000 impressions per year. We have a lot of clients get a million plus per year. Again, as long as you’re in that area, you’re gonna probably reach, you know, 100,000+ members on LinkedIn. That’s huge. And definitely minimum of 50, but realistically probably 100,000+. Right? So you have significant reach.

Clark Willcox [00:29:25]:
with just getting content posted. So content that converts is understanding your market, deep dive into your desk, sharing wins, lessons that you’ve learned, focus on the pain points of your hiring managers, and you’re better off writing how you talk. So using AI to, hey, help me come up with ideas, or here are my sales transcripts or my recordings and give me some ideas, or give me the pain points of my market and all that. Really use AI to study your calls and your market and then write the post. Yourself is the way I would challenge you to, because AI is not that great with hooks. It’s going to give you weird call to actions or hashtags. You don’t want any of that stuff, right? So use the AI to research your market and help you brainstorm, and then you want to write. And it’s like posts like this, you want to be specific with the first line.

Clark Willcox [00:30:11]:
So this got a whole 10 likes that just turned into 40 exclusive reps. Kirsten was able to go from $50K in a year to $500K in a year from the day one that we started working together. Because she dialed in her LinkedIn content and her outreach was super targeted, right? The content was super relevant. Other things that don’t convert: hashtags, selfies, constant call to actions like, hey, if you need help, work with us. Like, I challenge you to eliminate that. Maybe one of every 5 posts has a call to action. So one a week if you post every day. Only posting jobs that are available, right? Job posting can be super valuable, right? But look to get creative with it, but also make sure it’s part of a more comprehensive Content approach.

Clark Willcox [00:30:49]:
And then reposting always kills your engagement. So if you’re gonna repost something, make sure it’s valuable and make sure to put your own 2 cents in there and repost. Don’t just repost to repost. The final tips on the content side, I said before, lead with your heart, be authentic, be consistent, be yourself, and look to find your people, and you will, right? So now, how do we feel about AI in terms of using all this, right? And I know we’re here, so we wanna learn more. If you’re like me, I get sick and tired of it on some days, and then I love it on some other days. So again, it’s got to drive revenue. If not, I move on with my day. But here’s how it’s been driving revenue, right? So I’ve been using Manus, which is Facebook’s AI.

Clark Willcox [00:31:27]:
I freaking love this tool. I spend way too much money on it, probably every month. Well, not really, because I’ve made a ton of ROI from it. But I started with like a $40 a month plan, and I’ve spent a decent clip on it, but I’ll show you why. So I basically make custom proposals and lead magnets per prospect and per sales call now. So I will have a PDF statement of work, you know, line by line in black and white that I will send, but I’m also able to send in website form our services, ROI, a timeline, a project roadmap. And this is just super cool. It’s super professional looking, right? About kind of what we’re able to do.

Clark Willcox [00:32:04]:
Then here’s what’s included in the engagement. And here’s the timeline for the engagement, right? Month 1, month 2, month, you know, 3, 4, and plus of working together. We had an ROI calculator, which is like one of the coolest things that I have, right? So you invest a certain amount, and this is what obviously you can get back. You could do this for opportunity cost and everything else as a recruiter, right? I have testimonials in there, and these are curated to the industry that I was sending this to, the agency that I was sending this proposal to. So all this is applicable. And doable. And this all took me inputting data or importing my recorded sales call, and Manus built this out in 10 minutes.

Kortney Harmon [00:32:40]:
All right.

Clark Willcox [00:32:40]:
And then what you can do, you build it once and then it suggests the follow-up. You can make the process we used here into reusable skill, which is so easy. So we have legitimately done more this month than we did all the first 5 months combined because I’m able to create proposals and these skills on autopilot. It gets to know me over and over again, and it’s super professional. Right, looking. So it’s a combination of being consistent on LinkedIn, leveraging AI correctly, and then building the partnerships and speaking engagements and all this and just like being involved with my market day to day. And AI helps me do all the admin stuff, you know, really, really polished up really efficiently. The AI content engine with Claude is how we build this out.

Clark Willcox [00:33:23]:
I’m only going to give a glimpse because we have a whole content team that does a way better job of breaking all this down. We have like a weekly AI call on Wednesdays in our group program where we go through what’s new and live and how we’re leveraging AI every single week. So my wife, who’s a 3rd grade teacher turned recruiter, turns operations, turned AI wizard, has built a whole content engine. And what she has done is there’s memory logs, so there’s MD files, text files. So we have our SOPs, newsletters, our interviews, and this is a project in Claude. And so we’re able to then input and create a project for each client and each person on our team, right? So we’ve inputted hundreds of hours of content interviews that we’ve done live with clients, 100+ newsletters that we’ve written by copywriters, thousands of posts that are written by copywriters without AI help, the whole SOP written out by copywriters, again, without AI’s help. So we’ve inputted a ton of stuff into Claude and turned it into skills and projects and MD files. Right? But it’s not, hey, AI, do this for me.

Clark Willcox [00:34:26]:
We took the brainpower and the experience and the wins and all that of hundreds of hours of work from our team, copywriters, myself, everyone else, that tangible work, and then help us make sense of it all, right? If you’re just saying, AI, do this for me, that’s where the slop comes from, right? And even with all this, we still have to work daily to have the right guardrails. All right, so this is why I say having If you want to do marketing, you need a copywriting brain, whether it’s you studying it or having someone on your team or having someone like us. You need that copywriter brain. So a lot of our projects is 3, 6-month projects, and then we train and hand it off to a team, right? And some people obviously want us ongoing, right? The people are learning that, you know, I could have offshore help, nearshore help, but if they don’t understand the high-level strategy and what actually works to convert, it’s all kind of meaningless. Right? So you need an AI engineer, whether it’s internal or external, right, to keep up with the changes. And that’s what I told my team. It’s like we are basically in the AI operations game now. We’re masters at sales and marketing and business development.

Clark Willcox [00:35:29]:
We have to figure out the dos and don’ts of AIs and how that works with LinkedIn and when it’s used in the process and kind of what the sliding scale is. So I’m going to stop there because I’ve brain dumped a ton. Connect with me on LinkedIn. If you haven’t yet. I apologize if this is a little bit all over the place. I’m trying to just like throw as much here without getting too, too crazy in here, but happy to kind of answer questions. Again, we got a school community that’s free to join. It’s Digital Recruiter on skool.com.

Clark Willcox [00:36:00]:
There’s a link to that on my LinkedIn as well. And then we have tiers starting at $99 a month. We do done-with-you coaching work. We could set all this up for your LinkedIn. Whether you’ve already tried automation or content or not, we could set this up, build it, hand it off to you, or run it consistently for you and/or your team. And yeah, there’s a lot that’s evolving with all this, but we have experts running calls 3 times a week. We have outreach calls on Mondays, AI Wednesday, content workshop Thursday. So because it’s an ongoing process, so if you’re not in the game in a community, whether it’s me or with Keely or any of the other great kind of coaches and marketers out there, get involved, find your tribe, find who you vibe with, and just keep at this and iterate and don’t expect results immediately.

Clark Willcox [00:36:46]:
I’ve seen people make $180,000 from their first post on LinkedIn. That is not the norm, right? I see people build their biggest fees ever, say, from doing this from 5 months in from working with us after they were already doing posting content for 2 years before. So the one thing is you gotta stick with it. You gotta keep up with the changes. You gotta be Have ownership, and I think have a great attitude, right? People want to work with people that are positive but can also solve their problems. So just remember all that stuff as you’re doing all this. You know, a lot of people are expecting the problems to be solved overnight with all these tools and AI. It’s not.

Clark Willcox [00:37:20]:
It just amplifies what you’re already doing, right? So build that foundation, be authentic, right? Find the line of where AI can help you, where, you know, you have to obviously spend more time really building that rapport. I can do do all this stuff, and now my team actually has more time for stuff like this or sales call or more fulfillment calls with clients, right? Because AI is helping support everything else that we’re doing. So get creative, test out some MPC campaigns, right? Pull your candidates from Crelate, test some things out with Claude, build out some candidate dashboards, right? Send it to a prospective account, send it to an old account, right? Look at all your MSAs and be like, hey, where can I show some value? and some input to hiring managers and all that. That’s like, hey, we might, I see that you have this job open. It looks like we might have 10 people in our database that are worth speaking about, right? Or that worth meeting about. Like, do you have time? And don’t just be generic. Challenge yourself to take that next step and show a lot more and demonstrate a lot more value in that initial outreach or that initial follow-up. So, Kortney, that’s what I got for right now.

Clark Willcox [00:38:19]:
I want to leave some time for questions if we have any.

Kortney Harmon [00:38:22]:
So, I don’t know if you answered this one, and I just got a phone call, so I apologize. I was multitasking. Derek asks, is it more beneficial to use Sales Navigator or Recruiter?

Clark Willcox [00:38:31]:
You can have Sales Navigator and you can have RPS, the expensive one. You can have Sales Navigator and Recruiter Lite at the same time. I would always lean towards Sales Navigator because it works more nicely. It plays nicer with LinkedIn automation tools, and it’s actually cheaper than Recruiter Lite. And remember, the only difference between sourcing and prospecting is the message you send. Not the filters. And so you just have to always remember that. Basically anyone I’ve worked with that’s been on Recruiter Lite has almost always switched to Sales Navigator.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:01]:
Clark, super helpful day of information.

Clark Willcox [00:39:04]:
Yeah, for me too. I mean, looking at all this, it was like, how do I condense this and share everything?

Kortney Harmon [00:39:12]:
I mean, we could have done a whole day with you. That would have been fine too. Next time.

Clark Willcox [00:39:16]:
Next time. I don’t know if my voice would have made it, but yeah.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:18]:
Oh, I know. Well, if you have not connected with Clark, please do so. I am putting his LinkedIn profile right here. It is in the chat. So feel free to connect with Clark, follow him, write him an email, however. But he has such amazing stuff. He does the Digital Recruiter Podcast. He’s been on our podcast before.

Kortney Harmon [00:39:40]:
I’ve been on theirs. It’s just, there’s so much information and community to only make you better. And the voices in this industry that are sharing all the things that they know, but it’s real-time learning. It’s real-time adjustment to try to help you be successful as well. So Michael, loved what you shared. Looking forward to tightening things up. Clark, thank you. Thank you.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:02]:
Thank you. Thank you so much for everything. I’m going to let you go give your poor voice a break, drink some hot tea, and I hope you feel better, but thank you so much for joining us. Thank you.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:15]:
Thanks for listening to this special FDE+ virtual event. Do you want to be a part of the conversation next time? Our live sessions are free, open to the public, and packed with timely insights from some of the brightest voices in our industry. To follow the podcast, stay connected with Crelate so you don’t miss the next event. Until then, keep learning, keep evolving, and we’ll see you in the next one.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:38]:
Bye.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:38]:
See you at the next one.

Kortney Harmon [00:40:43]:
Bye.