Tony Restell

Social-Hire.com

Since 2012, we've been helping Founders and Partners to build their personal brands and generate business wins through social selling - but ONLY if their firm wanted to have us handle their company's entire social media marketing.

That meant we didn't have an option for working with individual Founders, Partners or Executives who wanted to invest in their own personal brand and social selling initiatives - until now.

We have an extensive track record of producing outcomes such as your ideal clients:

- Registering for a business breakfast, launch event, networking drinks evening or other in-person event
- Booking in for a Zoom call or in-person meeting with you or your team
- Registering for a webinar or online panel discussion
- Attending a free workshop or taster session
- Booking a screen share call to do a demo of your offering

Find out more and book in for a call below:

Personal Branding & Social Selling Lead | Founder of B2B Social Media Agency

Sometimes businesses end up finding success in strange places. Serving needs that are far removed from the business opportunity the founders had originally identified. That's exactly what's happened to us at Social-Hire - and how we evolved to become a highly regarded Social Media Marketing agency serving both the recruitment industry and SMEs!

During our early years as a career networking site, we become best known as experts in building a social media presence in the careers and recruiting space. Everyone wanted to know how we'd done it! That's when we realised that our core business wasn't being a networking site but rather helping other businesses achieve far greater results from their social media presence and through adopting the right approaches to social media marketing.

That's how Social-Hire evolved into being a Business-to-Business (B2B) specialist social media marketing agency. Today we serve i) organisations wanting to reach candidates or recruiters via social media; and ii) small businesses wanting to generate client leads, web traffic or sales through social media. Essentially we deliver these results for you - for a tiny fraction of the cost of hiring a Social Media Manager.

My own focus is to help companies understand the types of results they could enjoy with social media. Usually the most cost effective option will be for us to then be engaged to deliver on that strategy - but in circumstances where companies want to do everything in-house we're also able to help.

You're welcome to check out our packages and book in for a call via Social-Hire.com website. If you've any questions whatsoever that I can help with, please feel free to reach out here on LinkedIn or via Twitter (@tonyrestell)

I look forward to speaking with you and taking your social media presence to an altogether higher level.

Director, Social Media Marketing Agency

Engaged by leading MBA schools and universities across Europe to present in-person and via Zoom on subjects relevant to current students and alumni groups:

- How to use social media and LinkedIn to further your career
- How to use LinkedIn to get a career in your desired sector when you graduate
- How business leaders can leverage social media for themselves and their organisations

Have travelled extensively across Europe and presented at schools including Bath University School of Management, Bayes Business School (formerly Cass Business School), Cambridge University (Judge Business School), City University, Durham University, EADA Business School, EDHEC Business School, EM Lyon Business School, Hult International Business School, IESE, Lancaster University Management School, Leeds University, Manchester Business School, SDA Bocconi, SKEMA Business School, Vlerick Business School and WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management.

If you are looking for a keynote speaker for a forthcoming event, feel free to message me here to discuss further.

Keynote Speaker for University & Business School Careers Services

My original vision with Social-Hire.com was simple. I wanted to create a platform where any executive candidate could discreetly discuss their career options with any employer or recruiter in the world - without cost and without having to invest time in gradually building up a network of contacts.

However, Social-Hire became best known as an advice site for Recruiters and for Candidates wanting to figure out how to use social media marketing in their hiring or job search strategies. We also became known for our huge social reach and our success in growing our social profiles and creating vibrant, engaged audiences of followers across social media.

On the strength of this reputation, I speak on social recruiting and social media marketing topics. Feel free to contact me should you have need of a speaker or trainer in this area.


* Timeline *

2012 - beta trial proved a great success, early adopters included recruiters from Accenture, Amazon, AOL, Aon Hewitt Ariba, Audi, Avanade, Booz Allen Hamilton, Britvic, Cisco, Cognizant, Columbia Sportswear, CSC, Deloitte, General Motors, Groupon, Hitachi Consulting, JC Penney, KPMG Advisory, Legal & General, McAfee, Microsoft, Oracle, Paddy Power, Philips Healthcare, Sage, SAIC, Samsung, Sears, Skype, Sporting Index, Starbucks Coffee Company, Thomson Reuters, Twitter, Unilever, US Olympic Committee, Verizon, Vodafone, Volkswagen, Wipro & Worldpay

2013 - a job search engine was added, trawling 35 million+ jobs to help candidates quickly find career openings they may not have been aware of. This has allowed us to add openings from the likes of Apple, Bank of America, BNP Paribas, BSkyB, BT, Chevron, Deutsche Telekom, eBay, EDF, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett Packard, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, McKinsey, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Siemens, Skype, Telefónica, Tesco & Walmart

2014 - launched services to manage the social media marketing campaigns and build the social media presence of recruiting teams and recruitment businesses.

Founder of B2B Social Media Agency

YCS Digital

Provide social media expertise and delivery to YCS Digital, enabling the business to offer social media management services to those clients wanting to incorporate social media into their broader marketing strategy.

Social Media Partner

Top-Consultant.com

I was the driving force behind the sales & marketing aspects of Top-Consultant.com when launched in 2000. Without start-up investment, our team built it to be the leading management consultancy focused online careers site with £multi-million revenues derived from:

o The Annual Careers Fair held in London attracting 500+ recruiters and 3000+ candidates

o Jobs board for management consulting roles, used by direct employers and recruitment agencies

o Provision of training seminars for management consultancy firms and professionals

o e-Newletter publishing the latest management consultancy headlines and trend data

As testimony to the market leading position of www.Top-Consultant.com, the site was acquired by newspaper group Daily Mail General Trust (DMGT) and leading job board Jobsite in 2005. 

Over the years the site has served a client base including most of the world's leading consulting businesses including Accenture, Arthur D Little, Arup, Atos, BearingPoint, Booz & Co, BT, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, Ernst & Young, IBM, Infosys, KPMG, Logica, McKinsey, Monitor, PA Consulting, PwC, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, Sapient,Serco,  Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro.

The site also attracts hiring campaigns from numerous FTSE companies, major global employment brands and organisations such as Amazon, American Express, AstraZeneca, BAA, BAE Systems, Barclaycard, BSkyB, BT, Cancer Research, Canon, Credit Suisse, Direct Line (formerly RBS Insurance), Dixons Retail, easyJet, Financial Services Authority (FSA), Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Gartner, GlaxoSmithKline, Google, Macmillan Cancer Support, Microsoft, Moody's, National Grid, Nationwide, PepsiCo,  Santander, Scania, The Coca-Cola Company, Thomson Reuters, Times Warner, UBS and Vodafone.

I continue to be involved in the day to day running of Top-Consultant and remain well connected within the management consultancy recruitment market at undergraduate, experienced hire and MBA level.

Entrepreneur and Co-Founder

Jobsite

My primary responsibilities at Jobsite included:

- Formulation of Jobsite's 3 year Strategic Plan especially with regards to existing and potential new partnerships. Devised the Jobsite White initiative (launched 2012), created business case for launch and convinced the DMGT Board of Directors to prioritise investment in this initiative.

- Maximisation of the profit contribution by Top-Consultant.com, including assessing M&A and organic investment opportunities in the professional services space.

- Sharing best practice from Top-Consultant (eg. in Virtual Careers Fairs, Careers Fairs, Social Media) with other businesses within the Jobsite Group.

Senior Business Development Executive

Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

Was responsible for leading client teams on strategic consulting engagements across a range of industry sectors. Outstanding client feedback and internal reviews saw me promoted 4 times in 4 years (Business Analyst > Junior Consultant > Consultant > Senior Consultant), one of the fastest promotion tracks in my peer group.

Senior Strategy Consultant

Southwestern

Lead sales manager for a team of 15 field sales people, based in Wisconsin

Organisational Team Leader

I get a real buzz from helping B2B firms turn social selling into a growth engine for their businesses. Using LinkedIn in ways that mean the "Feast & Famine cycle" is no longer something that keeps you awake at night. Highly relevant for management consultancies, recruitment agencies and other professional services and SaaS businesses.

If you would like to bring more predictability and consistency to your sales funnel, getting your social selling strategy right is the key to achieving this.

A few examples to help you picture what good looks like:

🔹 For a newly launched consulting business, we grew their prospect audience by 798 people in the first 3 months, generated sales meetings from week 1 and set up a webinar and sales call funnel that resulted in us producing 80% of their revenues in their first years in business.

🔹 For an established consulting business, we grew their prospect audience by 902 people in the first 3 months and transformed their in-person client prospect events from having ~30 attendees to having 100+ attendees (and subsequently being able to run them more frequently, too).

🔹 For an established recruitment business, we helped them launch into a new fast-growth sector in a country they had never worked in before. We grew their prospect audience by 936 people in 3 months and then secured client meetings and speaking engagements from this audience.

🔹 For a new SaaS business, we grew their prospect audience by 954 people in the first 3 months and then secured hundreds of trial users and trialists' feedback to successfully launch the business.

So, my question for you is this: do you have a well-defined B2B audience that your firm wants to win work from?

If you answered "yes", it'd make sense for us to have a chat. I'm happy to share what works.

You're welcome to email me on 📩 tony.restell@social-hire.com 📩 or you can book a call either via my profile here, or via the Social-Hire.com homepage.

💥 This is NEW from LinkedIn - and hugely significant in terms of the recent algorithm changes we've all seen.

I received a new type of email from LinkedIn overnight, one highlighting 5 posts suggested for me. None of which I've seen in the homepage feed before.

❓ What's really interesting about this?

Of the 5 suggested posts, only 1 of them is from a connection. The other 4 were all written by 2nd degree connections.

Here's why this is so significant:

The massive algorithm change that rolled out last year changed who sees the things you post.

Whereas previously your posts were initially shown to a selection of your connections, with the new algorithm your posts are shown to people LinkedIn thinks would have an interest in them (whether they are connections or not).

Hence all the suggested posts / posts from 2nd degree connections / posts from weeks ago that we've all been seeing far more of in our feeds.

This new email looks like LinkedIn doubling down on this way of selecting who sees our posts, doesn't it?

I have the maximum 30k connections allowed on LinkedIn, so this email could easily have been filled with 5 posts from my existing connections. The fact that it's 80% posts from outside my own network is very telling.

Of course, this is a sample size of 1. So I'll be keeping an eye on the next few of these to monitor if that pattern continues.

Has anyone else received this email yet? What was the breakdown of posts in your email?

Helping B2B firms use social selling to end the feast & famine cycle | Founder of Social-Hire.com, a B2B social media agency | Ask me about our guaranteed results and industry-leading client retention rates

New "Suggested posts" email from LinkedIn

Want more visibility on LinkedIn?

Well, I've tested this (again), so you don't have to...

Despite LinkedIn encouraging us to repost other people's posts (adding in our own thoughts), this type of post performs horrendously.

By which, I mean off-the-scale bad!!

✅ So if you repost to build relationships with the people you're reposting, then feel free to continue doing that.

❌ But if you're reposting to actually get your insights seen, you should drop this activity from your 2026 plans. It's torpedo-ing your visibility.

I periodically test this by reposting posts that are closely aligned to what I post about, adding in my own insights as commentary. These reposts consistently get ~5% of the impressions I would expect from a regular post.

These last weeks I really ramped up this testing.

I wanted to have a break from creating original content so I would start 2026 refreshed - and so I have pretty much only shared reposts these last weeks.

This is at a time when I know peers have had some mega successful posts (there've been far fewer posts to compete with in getting people's attention in the run up to Christmas and into the New Year).

While their quality original posts were doing just great, some of my reposts didn't even get 100 impressions.

My best performing reposts didn't hit 500 impressions.

Normally I would expect my best performing posts to get tens of thousands of impressions.

So TL;DR --> reposts destroy your visibility, they are only good for forging relationships with the people you choose to repost.

I assume you've been seeing the same patterns?

This is both a heartwarming story, and a powerful reminder of the hidden success you can achieve on LinkedIn.

A young lad in our area has been spending the school holidays climbing and running up and down a local hill.

Sadly, this was being done in memory of a classmate who'd died of cancer, and this lad was doing a charity climb, the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest, to raise money for Cancer Research UK (CRUK).

A friend saw the boy doing this and, when he checked their GoFundMe page, was saddened to see he’d only raised £200 of his £1,000 target.

This is where things got interesting.

My friend shared all this in a school football dads WhatsApp group - and overnight, dozens of new donations started pouring in with the original £1,000 target quickly smashed.

No-one knew the boy in question, but the sharing of the story through digital media made a world of difference to his challenge.

A couple of points follow on from this:

1) if you’re feeling charitable, please do consider supporting him too:
https://lnkd.in/eaxVtEnR

2) if you're thinking of becoming more active on LinkedIn in 2026, this is a great example of the hidden successes you'll start experiencing. You may not always feel you're achieving anything by posting and commenting here, but then you start hearing about:

👏 someone who shared your post into their WhatsApp group or Slack channel and helped you reach new audiences

👏 someone who booked in for a call, having been recommended by someone you don't know but who reads your content here

👏 someone you meet for the first time sharing that they've found your insights here really valuable, when you had no idea they'd ever even seen any of your posts!

You tap into "luck" like this by showing up here consistently and not getting disheartened. Just like the lad climbing the hill with almost no donations to show for it.

You never know who's quietly seeing what you're doing and acts on that in ways that you could never have predicted!

All the best for a great start to 2026 everyone!

The most recent algorithm changes are a massive win for experts who have something real to say, but a nightmare for the 'engagement hackers' out there.

From the patterns I’m seeing across our clients’ posts, alongside various in-depth reports I've read, these are the things to be factoring in:

- The algorithm is no longer just counting clicks and engagement, it's looking for real signs of interest in your post

- That means things like time spent on the post, post saves and the depth of comment discussion being generated are key.

- I suspect that if you’re still ending your posts with "Agree?" or "Comment below!", there's a good chance you’re being penalised for engagement bait.

- The LinkedIn 'Golden Hour' is dead for all but generic content (eg. "we won an award last night").

- Any content with a niche focus, or that's written for a specific profile of person, is no longer being distributed the same way. It's being shown to people who LinkedIn thinks will have an interest in that post.

- Which may mean it takes a day or two to show your post to enough relevant people to form a view on how much interest it's generating  (hence the golden hour approach being redundant)

- LinkedIn now cross-references your content with your profile and posting / commenting history to verify your authority on a topic before it grants your post lots of reach.

All of which explains why we’re seeing specialist, expertise-led posts staying active in the feed for weeks on end...

... and why you're seeing more "suggested posts" in your feed from people outside your network (the ones I'm seeing are really spot-on relevant for me, how about you?)

Meanwhile, generic posts and those relying on engagement pods are seeing their reach plummet after just a few hours.
(think how many fewer of these posts you've been seeing of late...)

So, if you want to win on LinkedIn in 2026, you need to change your approach to content posting.

If your post can’t hold a professional’s attention, or the comments it generates aren't meaningful, the algorithm will likely bury it.

Building on that, I suggest you treat your comments section as a forum. Nurture real discussion there.

A "Great post!" comment is now worth next to nothing. But genuine, multi-reply conversations, show that your posts are being appreciated by the niche you serve.

Are you seeing your more niche posts outlasting your broader content lately? Or are you finding it harder than ever to get the same reach you had a year ago?

As we close out the year, here are my thoughts on what we can expect in 2026...


... actually, you've probably had your fill of LinkedIn prediction posts. So I'll just take the opportunity to say:

🍻🍾 Hope you all have a cracking good New Year's Eve celebration! 🎉🥂

See you in 2026!

Phew! The snow stayed away, and I was able to get to Cambridge to deliver my 6th annual session for the Executive MBA students there yesterday.

Reflecting back on what's changed in those 6 years, I'd say yesterday's group had far more executives who were already invested in using LinkedIn for their careers and had their own first-hand experiences of what had worked / not worked for them.

How the algorithm has changed, and is rewarding niche / expert content now, was one of many topics that really caught their interest.

The importance of profile optimisation, so as to be found by recruiters and decision-makers, was another.

Anyway, thanks for having me Cambridge Judge Business School - and appreciate all the questions from the very engaged group of students. Look forward to hearing about your progress in the coming months!

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Here's a 60-second exercise that's well worth doing...

Ask Google what your company is best known for.

The AI answer that comes back will help unearth how Google's AI currently views your business - and what the key sources are it's pulling that info from (if more than just your website).

You may find, as I have for Social-Hire.com, that your LinkedIn company page is one of the top info sources Google's AI is pulling its information from.

Depending on what you do find, that should spark some ideas about website changes, LinkedIn company page changes, etc., that you ought to prioritise making if you want Google's AI answers to start recommending you for the right specialities.

Hope what you find is a good reflection of your business!

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