[Hi, I’m Rob Ousbey, the COO at Distilled—I haven’t blogged here for a long time. Much of my time is spent on internal issues such as hiring, so I wanted to share some ideas about how to apply techniques that you’re already familiar with to the difficult process of recruitment.]
A client asked me recently about Distilled’s “inbound recruiting” process. I thought this was a fantastic term that described a large part of our approach, even though it’s never consciously been part of our strategy.
Recruiting is universally hard, time consuming, and expensive. Distilled is super-picky about finding and hiring team members who match our core people attributes, and since we rarely write about the process publicly I’d like to share some of the the tactics that we use. I’ll be specific in my suggestions; all of this practical advice can be applied to many other organisations.
In many ways, recruiting exceptional people follows a very similar path to finding potential customers, appealing to them and leading them to a conversion, so the inbound techniques that work in other situations are often extremely relevant to recruitment as well.
To begin with, it’s worth mentioned that Distilled does actually use paid advertising for our job ads.
However, when we use an advert on a site like LinkedIn, Gumtree, Guardian Jobs, Inbound.org, etc. to announce that we’re looking to fill a particular role, many of the readers are often already very familiar with us and keen to work with us. So, while an advert is a highly visible statement of intent, it’s much more powerful after we’ve already put in the legwork to generate interest in us as a company. That legwork begins with awareness.
Awareness and brand building
A large part of an inbound strategy is building awareness for your brand or organization, and about the opportunities you provide. Through activities like blogging on our site, our content, our meetups, our conferences, and maintaining a social following, we’ve been able to build a community of followers that may one day be interested in working for us.
To cast an even wider net: The audience members may know other people who are a perfect fit for us, and having a fan of our company pitch a position to their friends can be fantastically effective. This is one reason why I’m happy we publish content that isn’t just about trying to drive potential clients.
A fair amount of our blog posts also demonstrate why Distilled might be a good place to work. The attributes that you talk about and the attributes that you look for in people will vary between companies, roles, and industries, but it can’t hurt to make sure that you allow people to see behind the veil from time to time. An authentic message will go a long way here, in terms of helping your name stick in people’s minds.
In Distilled’s case, we believe that the opportunity to solve hard problems, to work on innovative proposals, travel the world and to have fun will appeal to the right people, so we make sure to talk about those on our blog.
Finally: Building up a social following also has value for when a role becomes available; we share every new job on our Twitter feed, which immediately puts it in front of a highly relevant audience. (For free! Inbound!)
Awareness in other niches
The tactics above become less appropriate when you are looking for employees who would never have been a fan or follower of you. For example: Distilled’s audience members are predominantly online marketers, so this doesn’t help us to hire a bookkeeper, a project manager, etc.
Similarly, for a small company with less time to dedicate to lots of content production, the tactics I listed might be less effective.
Fortunately there are plenty of other inbound techniques to help you here, and I have three in particular that have been effective.
- Publishing offsite content: This seems almost trivially simple! Propose a guest contribution to a site relevant to the niche you’re targeting. For example: if you’re looking to hire online marketers, publishing on YouMoz will help to put you in front of some very relevant people.
- Using the social networks of others: In the early days of Distilled US, as we were getting off the ground in Seattle and New York, Rand would tweet our job announcements and send tons of well qualified candidates. That’s fantastic when we’re looking for online marketers, but next time we hire for sales people or finance experts, I’ll be asking influential friends in those circles to share the news.
- Put yourself in front of them: Speaking at the right events/conferences can make you extremely visible, but even just attending the right meetups can be incredibly effective. In addition: many meetup groups are looking for sponsorship. Write to the organizer of a relevant group to see what you could offer; buying a few rounds of drinks, or providing a space for them to meet will allow you to network with all the promising talent, and a chance to say a few words to everyone about who you are, why you’re supporting their meetup, and why you’re hiring.
Serendipity
Sometimes you just can’t anticipate the moments when you will generate awareness that leads to an application or a great hire.
Distilled’s classy 404 page had minor success on Reddit a few years ago. One person who visited was Rob Toledo, who subsequently clicked around the rest of the site, thought we sounded cool, saw we were advertising for an Outreach role, and applied. Rob’s now been with us two years, and has just been promoted to be the head of a ten-person team—all because he was bored online and someone had submitted our page to Reddit!
This was just something for an intern to work on; we never expected the page to help us hire multiple people.
Invest in landing pages
At the latest SearchLove conference, Rand discussed recruiting. He mentioned that organizations often under-invest in their jobs landing pages—and he couldn’t be more correct! Given the importance and associated value of these pages, they should be treated like any other important commercial pages.
The relevant pages should appeal to the right types of person: Are you looking for very professional candidates? Those who are motivated by particular aspects of a job? For some great examples, there’s a really good-looking recruitment page right here on Moz. I’m also a big fan of the simplicity of the Amicus jobs page.
So meta.
Building a fantastic page has many benefits, the critical one being that a better page (where it’s easy for people to find the information they need, read & compare job details) will generate more responses.
Analytics and testing
I mentioned “conversions” earlier on, and by keeping most of the recruitment funnel on our website (the full job descriptions, the application forms, etc.); we are able to use many of the web analytics techniques that we’re already used to. With Google Analytics installed on every page of the funnel, we can assess how people are finding us (though search, social, and referred traffic), and which channels deliver the best results. By defining specific conversions, there’s also the opportunity to use CRO techniques to improve the number of people who read through a job ad, begin an application, submit a completed application, etc.
Real analytics data for our latest marketing internship advert in London. The bounce rates seem fairly high, but many of those were people clicking the ‘Apply Now’ button and thus leaving the site.
One (rather advanced) technique that I’ve not had the chance to try out just yet would be to add a unique identifier for each application as a GA Custom Variable. In addition to finding out where your job applicants are coming from, this would let you track them through to acceptance/rejection, and find out which sources are sending the best candidates.
In conclusion
Doing what you can to help your organization “become loved” is valuable in many ways, but it can have huge benefits when you find yourself looking for great people.
Although I’ve shared learnings from my own Distilled experiences, there are many other things I know we could be doing better in this area. Specifically, having an “always open” application process to avoid missing out on an inquiry from a great candidate, greater investment in our recruitment pages, and better data analysis of adverts and applicants through the funnel.
Finally: if you have any thoughts or questions about how to generate interest from potential candidates, please do drop a comment below.
