There's a quiet army of brilliant, hard working, team building recruiters out there who don't have 10,000 Twitter followers. They don't have Thought Leader in their LinkedIn bio. And odds are, they won't be the keynote speaker at the next conference you attend.
That's because they're too busy, you know, recruiting.
Ya can't knock the hustle. Cultivating a heroic social following and unignorable personal brand is a lengthy process, and for many, that's precious time better spent sourcing, phone screening, and interviewing. This less talk more rock approach is what gets talent in the door and cracking, and if you're staring down the barrel of a careers page full of open reqs, you can't really afford to operate any other way.
Despite the honor in the walk-the-walk recruiting approach (man I'm leaning hard on idioms today), there are certainly opportunities to lend your voice to the recruiting world without making that explicit self-servicing your full time job.
There's a myriad of reasons to do so, as well. Besides the goodwill of sharing your findings with the recruiting world at large so everyone can learn from your experience, it's a great way to network and start forging the inlets for your next career move. Once Entelo starts tagging you as More Likely to Move, you'll suddenly need to be in contact with Recruiters, and you'll have an easier time of it if you have more to your Google results than a LinkedIn Profile. Simply by blogging about interesting problems you've encountered or unique ways you solved challenges, you can build up some credit in the recruiting community and give granular detail about your work to anyone who might consider working with you.
A great example of this is Talent Engineer Erin Wilson, formerly of BrightRoll and acquired by Yahoo. Erin's built up a respectable following, and it's by no means the tens of thousands of unengaged masses you'll find amongst self-proclaimed thought leaders. More importantly, Erin knows his stuff. We had him on the podcast a few months back, and he just absolutely blew us away with his experience of iterative hiring, building a recruiting team, and the true role of an excellent recruiter. He was able to so effortlessly and comprehensively discuss these topics because he had been laser focused for so long, and once he came up for air, he could rifle off the kind of detailed processes that would make any thought leader blush.
Any recruiter who has dealt with interesting problems and spent time deep in the talent acquisition weeds might very well do the same. If you're one of those recruiters who's been too busy recruiting to contribute your strategies to the talent community, maybe it's time to take a breathe and add your voice to the discord. Your own company blog is a great opportunity to explain your culture and hiring process, which can be a great resource for current or prospective candidates. Other areas you can use to build your personal brand are RecruitingBlogs, Sourcecon.qa, and Quora.