Recruiters, Think Like Marketers

A former boss told me that the best salespeople moonlight as marketers. At the time, I was being assuaged when I became upset over a sales teams’ brutish bullying about something I didn’t do, so he was trying to create empathy. Drama aside, he was right.

Now that I am in career development, I’ll will go further and say: The best recruiters also moonlight as marketers.  

Recruiting is a great portion marketing your company as a good place to work. And now with unemployment well below 4%, marketing your company as THE place to work is critical and non-negotiable and it's ridiculous if you don’t see it that way.  

You need candidates to love your company and you have to market it to make that happen.

I’ve written about thinking like a marketer before (read this and this). Here's another layer to this approach: Develop a Candidate Persona.  It’s a marketing tactic that brands use to sell their products - they develop customer personas which drive their marketing and sales strategies. From personas, they know who they’re going after as a customer, then go directly to them mass-marketing to a general audience. It’s a way to focus.

Recruiters, focus.  

Who do you really want to join your company? Think beyond a skill set or their company history. Instead, ponder the kind of leader, thinker, questioner, and manager who will expand the current role, not just fill a cooling seat (or standing desk, if you will).

Candidates are humans, not just resumes (harnessing this mindset alone makes you a better recruiter) with characteristics, strengths, limitations, passions, expertise, ancillary interests, and logistical needs. Think about their WHY, not just their what.

Here are some questions that may help you develop a candidate persona(s) (you may need more than one):

• What ideal experience and background do they have?
• What companies have they worked for?
• What interests do they have outside of their profession?
• What do other others say about them (think LinkedIn recommendations or social profile feedback)?
• What have they done previously that they can expand in the future?
• What motivates them?
• Do they have longevity in their career history?
• How do they respond to challenges or feedback?

This is not meant to be the stringent “persona” development that may occur in a business plan and certainly recruiters can put more process behind developing these questions, but these are inspiration if you've never done it before are stuck on where to start.  You are an evangelist your company versus, not just someone who plops person A into role B. Applying different disciplines such as marketing, research, networking and data collection can broaden your creativity in recruiting and thus, your candidate pool. Give more than a cursory glance at a resume Skills section for a sense of who the person is and if they can contribute to your company holistically, culturally, as well as financially.

Good luck.