Reckitt Benckiser, you might know them from brands like Calgon, Vanish or Strepsils, recently launched a recruitment blog. Well, I’m a big fan of corporate blogging and expirimenting, but this blog totally misses the point. Sorry to say it, but it does.

I feel they haven’t thought it though very well. What is the target you want to reach with this blog? It’s totally unclear to me and I don’t think there are a lot of interesting articles on it. Why? Because it’s set up as a recruitmentblog. What should they have done? What can we learn?

Well, there are two paths you might want to go on when you start a blog for recruitment purposes. First is a quality blog. We did this with Software-Innovators when I was interim at a Dutch software company Sogyo. Sogyo wants to attract top talent in IT. And why do top IT talents want to work for a company? Because it has other talents there. Because there are people there that they can learn from. So at this blog the company lets their employees blog about their vision on IT. About the high end work they did. And it works, a lot of applicants read the blog before applying and say: this person I want as my collegue.

What RB could have done is start blogs in the sectors they need people. An international FMCG marketing blog for example, or a household chemical engineer blog. Show your knowledge, show vision, show passion and attracks talent.

If on the other hand you do want to show corporate culture, this isn’t the way either. Because the postings don’t show me a lot about the company. Cool, there are enviormental friendly items within the company, but how much do the products screw up the enviorment? I don’t get a real insight into the company.

If you want to show culture, that’s ok. But you need to use more visual means, video and photo for example. And then you need to focus all your postings on some part of the corporate culture.

At this point, the blog seems without focus. But if RB wants to continue on this path, some free advice. Give your people writing training. Not that they all need to write in the same way, please not. But some postings are really hard to read because of the lack of lay out. No white space, etc. At Sogyo we had a writing training for all bloggers, just to help them write for the web. Make catchy titels, write decent sentences.

Second I’d integrate more with the social media out their. Link to the linkedin profiles for example.

Finally, I’d use on style. Now the blogpostings don’t even have the same lettertype. That’s just plain unprofessional.

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