Recruiting & Marketing Are Not That Different
by Glance Technology
Marketers got great tools to drive inbound leads, software like HubSpot and digital agency help like VaynerMedia 10 years ago.
Vayner is one of the best agencies in the world. Gary Vaynerchuk is the CEO and an absolute marketing genius. He preaches give value upfront and ask later, so much so he wrote an entire book about it called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World”. But, lets remember this is not necessarily anything new!
Marketers and Demand Generation have always been tasked with driving qualified leads into the sales funnel. If the lead is not qualified, educating the lead to the point they are qualified becomes the task.
If you want a potential customer to give you their email address, phone number or twitter handle you have to have their attention. They have to care about whatever it is you are willing to trade them for that piece of information.
In a lot of cases this means a potential customer lands on your website to learn about a feature of your product. One product I like a ton is Slack. Let’s find an example of a Slack landing page.
In this example, I found the page because I was interested in a good way for my team to communicate. I wanted to end the silo’d information flow of email and it seems like Slack would be a great way to do this. Here is the page I viewed for reference.
But, there are a lot of messaging platforms and I am not quite sold yet. So I drop my email into the box to learn more about the other features.
As I learn more about the platform I come to know another really great benefit over other applications. Slack integrates with everything and becomes a central hub for all of your other business software.
My team and I use GitHub, Trello, Google Cloud and Zoom on a daily basis. Wow, it’d be great to use one tool that connected all of those.
Approving a code release from my phone while in an Uber sounds great. Queuing up a demo without having to open my laptop sounds even better.
As I progress through learning about the platform I become ever more likely to be sticky (a term commonly used in software to mean I will likely use the product daily for a long time).
Sharing all of this information enables Slack to educate me on their product and push me through their funnel until they outright ask me to use the product. Remember, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook.
But, what happens if sharing all of this information leads me to not wanting to use Slack? Is it smart for them to lose a potential user over sharing this kind of detail about the product?
Some common objections I have heard when talking about this:
“What happens if we share so much about our product that less people want to use it”
“What will we do if users decide to use another messaging app because we are not great for outbound conversations”
These kind of questions are normal.
Slack is an incredible product but it is not for everyone. There is a small portion of the world that is best suited to use Slack.
To get the most value out of Slack you must communicate with colleagues in a professional setting, use business grade software and appreciate saving time consolidating your software into one view.
Slack is not great for communicating with people you just met.
Slack is not great for outbound reaching out. You would be better off using Instagram, Facebook or Email (with Mixmax btw). MixMax is game changing for outbound emails.
But, these limitations are exactly why Slack is great.
Slack is the best product in the world for a small subset niche of the planet. You must meet 3–4 criteria to find incredible value and the minute you realize you fit, they hit you with a download now right hook.
Brilliant marketing.
So, why should you care? This entire strategy should be applied to talent acquisition. It is not right now and that provides a massive opportunity to do it well.
Lets draw some parallels and later on provide action items to improve.
Marketers are tasked with driving demand for your companies product.
Recruiters are tasked with driving demand for your companies open positions.
Marketers qualify leads based on criteria the sales team has identified will lead to successful conversations.
Recruiters qualify candidates based on criteria hiring managers have identified will lead to successful hires.
Marketers trade your attention for information in an effort to educate you and right hook down the road.
Recruiters trade your attention for information in an effort to decide if you have the necessary skills and fit the company culture.
As recruiters we need to think of how we can apply marketing techniques to our efforts. We should right hook less and jab more. This means less of posts like these below.
Imagine if you took this approach to sales…. Here are some funny examples I made up.
“I am looking for someone who wants to pay full price and wants to pay today. Email me if you want to do that”
“I am selling a product. You have to buy now and you can’t know any of the features. Email me please”
“I need to hit my quota so buy my services, you must have a big budget and low expectations”
This would never, ever work yet we try to attract the best candidates with this kind of mindset.
If you apply this thought process above you might get 1 client to buy. Maybe 2. But these clients would be incredibly likely to churn. They happened to be in the market for a service like yours and bought because they saw your post.
They never were educated on why they should choose you over a competitor. They have no idea why you are the best solution for them. But good job on hitting your quota!
To parallel this to Slack, if I wanted to talk to my friends I should use Facebook Messenger. Not Slack. This will likely end up the case with these clients.
These clients will be unhappy and never buy from you again. To borrow another software term, you should be looking for cohorts of leads which are likely to result in net negative churn. Or in other words, you should be attracting leads to sell to who are highly qualified and will be retained after a year, and spend more money with you the next year.
Ooooh lots of fancy words. I know what you are thinking….
So….how does this parallel to recruiting?
If you are targeting the right potential candidates you should be converting those who are highly qualified for the role, fit the culture, are extremely likely to stay long term, and will help you recruit more people like them as you go.
This is the net negative churn model for talent acquisition.
Each additional hire should enable your team to do two things:
- Track data of where that person came from, their background, how much they knew about your company before and after the interview process, who interviewed them, past experience and a ton more.
- Organically reach their audience and help scale your recruiting efforts.
#2 might be a little confusing so lets study it just a bit more. Why would a highly targeted, highly qualified candidate convert into a new hire AND help you scale your recruiting efforts?
If you are getting the right people in your funnel and hiring those people new hires will be ecstatic to work at your company. Remember, only a small portion of the work force is perfect for your organization at any given time. If you find them, they will want to bring more people like them to your company.
They will tell people about the amazing, perfect for them, place they work and bring more leads into your funnel. This is scalable. Do it correctly for 10 hires in a row and watch your pipeline grow.
Lets draw all of this back to marketing. Marketing’s overall goal is to drive demand for your companies product. They do this by targeting and attracting the right leads, at the right time. They take these leads through an educational journey to confirm they are interested and care about specific benefits of your product.
Then, and only then, does sales close them.
If marketing attracts the wrong type of leads, sales will not be able to close them.
If marketing attracts unqualified leads, sales will not be able to close them.
If marketing attracts leads without a budget, sales will not be able to close them.
If marketing attracts leads who want something you don’t offer, sales will not be able to close them.
If marketing attracts leads who don’t understand why you are the best for them, sales will not be able to renew that contract next year.
All of this is pertinent to recruiting. If recruiting does not attract the right candidates, you will not be able to close them.
The best teams take their potential candidates on an educational journey to ensure they are right for the role, and only then, go in for the right hook.
The best teams do more marketing than they do sales. And when the engine is up and running you have so many great leads you can’t sell to all of them. When this happens, you raise your prices and grow fast.
This equates to recruiting really nicely. Once the engine is up and running you will have so many great candidates you won’t be able to hire all of them.
When this happens, you continue to sky rocket the barrier to entry. And as this repeats, your recruiting function becomes an incredible, incredible strategic advantage.
Your team gets exponentially better with each hire, each day, each month while your competitors are clueless.
Recruiting is marketing. Market in the year we live in. This is a huge opportunity.
To conclude I’d like to share an analogy to summarize how we “advertise” our jobs today.
Imagine you are in a super market and an individual walks up to you and tells you the following:
- I drive a Tesla
- I make a lot of money
- I only eat organic food
Will you marry me?
You will immediately reject.
You know nothing about the person, you’ve never met them before and they interrupted your day talking about themselves! They should have at least asked your name first!
We need to take our candidates on a journey. To learn about our company, what we offer that no one else does, how we make decisions, what its like to work here and only then, ask them to apply.
Don’t be the company asking candidates to marry you. In a figurative sense of course :)
