TORONTO, CANADA - This will be old news for any of my readers who are recruiters: Jason Davis, former owner / editor of Recruiting.com and current owner / ring master of RecruitingBlogs.com, recently took on the editorial responsibilities of the Fordyce Letter's new website.
If you're not a recruiter: The Fordyce Letter is the Harvard Business Review of the recruiting community. Only better. In most industries, there may or may not be a trade publication that serves as an educational beacon for its members. Aerospace, logistics, finance and accounting, whatever. I remember being in the foodservice business ten years ago and being really depressed when ID magazine fell on hard times and ceased print distribution. We all suffered.
But recruiters have TFL, which has long been offered for $189 for 12 issues. And recruiters slopped it up. Paul Hawkinson was (and still is) the editor, and every issue under Mr. Hawkinson's stewardship was an atomic throwdown of recruiting news, advice, and commentary.
For an information junkie and recruiting industry newcomer like me, it was like the smartest guys in the class were letting me cheat off their tests. In my first year as a firm owner back in 2005, I laughed all the way to the bank. Stuff I had previously thought was proprietary was actually well-documented in the public domain by TFL's stable of star writers.
Recently, under the new ownership of David Manaster's ERE.net, The Fordyce Letter has done two amazing things ...
- Put up a website and started giving away its massive backlog of content.
- Hired Jason Davis to run its website.
So far, it has been a ball to watch the combined vision of Davis and Manaster at work. Here's a publication that sells for $16 an issue, and they give it away. That took vision and guts -- the twin engines of success. Recall that when Rupert Murdoch bought the WSJ last year, he said that he was going to give away its content online. Murdoch has since waffled. Manaster has not.
Disruptive Database Marketing
In my view, The Fordyce Letter is more valuable to recruiters than the WSJ is to general managers. It's indispensable. Consider this morning's post by Jason:
If you have a database with 30,000 people in it, I’m going to venture to say that 400 of them will change jobs this year. I’m sure in that 400 there are a lot of placements you are not involved with. I think this is a huge opportunity for recruiters. It’s why I think blogs and social networks can have a deep impact on a recruiter’s bottom line. It’s where the opportunity lies.
Here is a perfect example of how to monetize your database. Your clients buy research. Plain and Simple. Imagine if you every week did a roundup of all of the news in the industry you recruit in. You then posted it on your own blog or private social network and then let your entire database of candidates know about it. Many good things will come from it. Placements and new business will come from it.
What if in the next 12 months you identify 1000 candidates in your database that you feel comfortable making an investment in. You buy each of them $100 worth of Starbucks coffee. So now you are out of pocket, how many placements?
Referrals are the lifeblood of this business and when you call, if the candidate feels they have gotten good value, they will be more willing to help. You pay it forward.
As a database marketer, I have heard this before. But somehow I forgot the message until I reread it.
And as Dan Kennedy likes to say, "If I'm a newcomer to an industry and I'm competing with guys "who have forgotten more than I'll ever know" -- isn't that the same as competing against guys who never knew it in the first place? They're disadvantaged by their own egos."
Sure, a $100,000 worth of Starbucks coffee seems like a lot. Until you realize that such an investment would likely produce $250,000 worth of business. Or more. And from a new business development perspective, could there be a more cost-effective way to open a new recruiting practice area like non-profit, logistics, or finance than to steal Jason's strategy? Sheesh, for $100K I'm sure Starbucks would even private-label the gift cards for you and automate the mailing.
Taken in that light, the $189 annual cost of The Fordyce Letter seems positively molecular.
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