Amanda Lintott

Do you use social media for marketing?

We are still yet to see the traction from social media marketing. I can imagine and sense it, but we just haven’t felt it ourselves. I feel like it changes so quickly. We have someone working on it two days a week but we just don’t seem to have it nailed yet.

What plans do you have in the pipeline?

To continue to expand the definition of the automotive industry to broaden our client base and open our minds to exactly what automotive can incorporate. I want to keep pushing the car industry.

We are talking to motor show organisers about doing a careers expo as part of motor shows and I am looking at expanding interstate into Victoria, as there are more automotive head offices in Melbourne than there are in Sydney.

Also we are just continuing to add more services like training dealer staff, which some people may say is taking business away from ourselves, but it lets us share our insights and information with our clients and builds our reputation within the industry.

What are the trends in your industry at the moment and how are you responding to them?

With social media and different ways for people to look for jobs through Facebook, Seek and LinkedIn it is quite easy to think recruitment will be made redundant soon. It seems that the technology is picking up so much traction but I think the more it does, the more valuable recruitment agencies become, as it helps clients drill down through that. It’s an opportunity to say to clients ‘We can see through all of that and just get you great people’.

In recruitment there is also a trend to vertical agencies, so niche or boutique agencies.  There is more and more value in an agency specialising in a certain area and I’m proud because automotive hasn’t been explored that much.

There’s more emphasis in specialised agencies, so I see a narrowing of the specialization. So there might be agencies which specialise in marketing but some might specialise in social media or digital advertising.

The biggest changes will be driven by the way people look for jobs using key words and being a bit lazy, so there is more need for agencies to make themselves known to candidates as specialists.