Marketing Headhunter

Social Media: "Would anyone tell a friend?"

NEW YORK, NY - Not sure how I missed this great post on social media and customer satisfaction.  As they say in the business, "Damn I wish I'd thought of that."

Do you *LOVE* marketing?

MIAMI, FL - If you love marketing ... I mean really, REALLY love marketing ... then you are going to love this.  And check out this freaking magic show.  Now, I could sit here all day and gush about how great Gary Halbert is, but I won't.  You're too busy.  But for those of you who know nothing about Gary Halbert, check out this rare video.  If you get it, you get it.  And if you do, I'll see you at the bank.

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"Why Most Recruiters Stink"

ATLANTA, GA - LinkedIn Answers (a great resource, btw) featured a question last week called "Do recruiters have a bad reputation?"  The inquiry continued ...

"It seems like I see more and more stories on LinkedIn about bad experiences with recruiters. Do you have a good story about a recruiter or have you had a positive experience with a recruiter that you can share?"

Good questions, indeed.

Do recruiters have a bad reputation?  In my experience, "YES" -- and one of the main reasons is that the contingency recruiting business pays recruiters $1,000-2,000/month draw versus straight commission.  That's a run rate of $12-24K per year with NO benefits -- even though a new recruiter who does not close a deal in his first three months on the job at a well-run agency is fired.

Would any bright, aggressive, empathic, resourceful, business-oriented person with a lot of professional options sign up for that kind of deal?  It's unusual.

The result is that most contingency recruiters are incredibly transactional in their approach to developing candidate relationships: They are "incentivized" to pick the lowest hanging fruit they can find, taking any search assignment a client will give them regardless of how it aligns with their own expertise.  Candidates suffer the consequences on the front end of this process, while the tail end of the recruiting process is fraught with serious conflicts of interest.  For example, asking your recruiter if you should accept his client's job offer is like asking a barber if you needs a haircut.

Retained recruiters are under a similar type of transactional pressure, although the economics of the retained search business are different, and I won't get into that here.

The bottom line is that the compensation systems in the recruiting business engender the kind of short-termism that gives the industry a less-than-stellar reputation.

Candidates, you can read good stories about exceptional recruiters in their LinkedIn testimonials.  Great recruiters are out there, but like I said: They're exceptional.

What are your thoughts?

Marketing and "Believable Innovation"

SAN FRANSISCO - Man, am I behind on my reading!  Last weekend, the WSJ had a great interview with Reed Hastings of Netflix -- but for whatever reason, I didn't catch it until last night.

Mr. Hastings has been a keynote speaker at Shop.org, DMA, eTail, and Internet Retailer events, and he's always a hit.  Buried in the third paragraph of the WSJ article was a gem about Mr. Hasting's genius as a marketer ...

"... [Mr. Hastings] has already convinced 7.5 million Netflix subscribers that their local video store is too far away and that late fees are evil."

I have not seen a marketing premise that good since Domino's used "Fresh, hot pizza in 30 minutes or less or it's free.  Guaranteed."  Mr. Hastings' premise is actually two premises in one (a real rarity):  "Long distance + late fees = You're crazy to support Blockbuster."  It tacitly slams the incumbent while building a case for Netflix.  Sweet.

And it's not like Blockbuster didn't see it coming.  It's that vested interests within the Blockbuster organization did not want to disrupt their existing business by pursuing initiatives that would ultimately cannibalize it.  A classic Innovator's Dilemma.

Frankly, there's not much missing from the Netflix sales appeal.  It ...

1. agitates pain,
2. is simple to understand and believe and remember, and
3. is easy to tell others about in 3 seconds or less.

Boom.  If you can offer a risk-reversal proposition (# 28) on top of that, you've got it made.

Peter Drucker used to say that "only two things matter in any business: marketing and innovation."  Therefore, your business had better be your innovation -- and the thing that you market consistently across every single customer touch point.

What's the premise behind your business?  Is it as good as Netflix's?  Is it innovative?  Is it so disruptive that your largest competitor's CEO would kill it if it were bubbling up inside his own company?

Extra credit:  Click here to see Mr. Hastings on Charlie Rose.  Notice how Netflix was built on the back of a single story: "I got hit with a $40 late fee on a rented video -- and I was so embarrassed that I didn't want to tell my wife.  And I thought to myself "There must be other people who have this problem...""
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International Recruiting for Online Retail

NEW YORK, NY - Last Friday's Wall Street Journal had a nice article about US online retailers trying to develop foreign markets in an effort to assuage (a $3 word) the effects of a softening domestic retail market.

The WSJ notes that the challenges of selling online to foreign markets include taxes, duty, distribution, and language.  Fair enough.  I have lived and worked abroad three times, and international markets can be a bear to scope and develop.

So it goes with online retailers:  In 2007 I managed a search for a west coast distributor of motorcycle replacement parts, and the firm's owner told me that the American market for motorcycle parts is seasonal.  So to counteract the effects of that seasonality, the company developed a number of markets in the southern hemisphere.  Remember, it's hot in Chile when it's chilly up here.  This is called counter-seasonality (another $3 word).

Development of these markets was hit-or-miss.  Columbia was a disaster, fraught with deadbeats and returned orders.  Australia, on the other hand, was a home run.  The company took a portfolio approach to developing those markets and judged their success on an annual basis.  That was smart.

The client and I never discussed his international staffing objectives.  I'm sure we will eventually.  And until we do, I'm learning quite a bit lately.

The benefits of a global readership:  I have received roughly two dozen European resumes in the last 60 days, and about about to close my first ever international search.  A very famous European sports brand has an ecommerce position open in Amsterdam, and I was summoned to help.  What an adventure for the ecommerce executive who will fill that role!

Here's the reason for my post:  Foreign resumes are very different from American resumes.  None of the usual online retailing keywords are listed.  Much is lost in translation.  One fellow who had gotten an MBA from INSEAD reached out to me.  INSEAD is the Harvard Business School of Europe -- and one of the best b-schools in the world.  But how many US recruiters know that?

One candidate sent me a resume that was in Italian from start to finish.  Maybe he was an ecommerce rock star.  I couldn't tell, nor did I have the time to paste his resume into Babelfish to get a better idea.

Exciting times.  Weak dollar.  Increasing bandwidth.  And the world loves American brands.

I can't wait.
Harry

PS - Sam Decker of BazaarVoice and I had a fun exchange on his blog last month regarding the need for "Supply chain literate" marketing VPs in online retail.  Wait until those supply chain issues become international!  The Ecommerce Times has an interesting article on fulfillment earlier this week.  And there's more to come, I'm sure.

PSS - Online retailers, subscribe now to the world's greatest logistics blog.
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Where I work

Recruiters: "Differentiate or Die"

CHICAGO, IL - I'm not quite sure what the technical SEO lesson is here, but it has been a fairly expensive foray for yours truly.  Two years ago I snapped up the domains "ExecutiveSearch____.com" -- where the "____" was the name of a top 50 metro US city.  For example, I bought ...

• ExecutiveSearchAtlanta.com,
• ExecutiveSearchBoston.com,
• ExecutiveSearchChicago.com,
• and so forth.

Times fifty.  Then I started blogging on as many of those sites as I could.  Man.  Talk about time consuming.  It was exhausting.  Setting up all of those blogs ... changing the c-names ... editing my content so that it would match the local market ...

It's not like I'm insane.  It was a theoretically valid keyword-density play, where the URL would contain the keywords I needed to get recruiting business in those cities.  Seemed like a good idea at the time -- and it made sense from a naming standpoint.

So imagine my surprise tonight when I checked on the Google results for "Executive Search Chicago."  Not only am I not even on the first page of the results -- but even if I were, who would care?

Look at all that clutter!  How is any prospective client who uses Google (and they all do!) supposed to pick one recruiter out of the geo-mapped pack at the top of the results page?  Proximity?  Forget it.

Memo to executive search firms:  You need an instantly recognizable INDUSTRIAL or FUNCTIONAL differentiation.  You cannot just say "we have the best relationships" and expect the phone to ring.  It won't.  Which leaves you with three choices:

1. networking,
2. cold calling, and
3. SEO.

I've done all three.  SEO is by far the most effective -- and it's certainly the most scalable.  In that sense, maybe the SEO lesson here is that it's not how well you optimize your site, but that you have a business concept worth marketing in the first place.
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Self Employment: "What's in it for You?"

ATLANTA, GA - When I got laid off in the last recession (February 2002), I spent some quality couch time thinking about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.  I was 38 then; no spring chicken, even though I was convinced that the best years of my career lay ahead of me.

I knew that it was time to change industries -- away from food, where the playing field is pricing -- but my resume kept betraying me, telling everyone who read it that "I was a seasoned food guy."  I knew this was bullshit, but you can't tell that to recruiters and hiring managers who won't return your call.  I was running out of money, and the credit card debt began to mount.  With four kids and a wife to feed, what's a brother gonna do?

Perhaps you've been there.

It was like that Tom Hanks movie Castaway, where they guy washes up on a desert island after a plane crash and has to learn to live off of the environment.  That's the most extreme form of self-employment I can think of.  Being a self-employed recruiter is like that -- except I get the benefit of a phone and an internet connection.

Towards the end of 2002, with no job prospects and a cratering marriage, I "went into business for myself."  To this day, my hard drive contains literally thousands of Adobe files about marketing, strategy, complex selling, software marketing, entrepreneurship, direct mail copywriting (can you tell?), cost accounting, online marketing, SEO, database marketing, CRM, list rental, affiliate marketing, email marketing, web design and usability, and so on.  What can I say?  I was hungry to feed my family -- so I was hungry to learn.

And learn I did.

I like to think of this lean period as "my personal MBA from the University of Hell."  Unparalleled education, but the tuition's a killer.  And here's a puzzler:  U-of-H will admit anyone, but few graduate.  It takes humility to make it through the grinding curriculum, but most people refuse to admit their mistakes.  And if you don't admit your mistakes, you can't correct them.  That's why "pride goes before the fall."  It's like this in any rehab program.  I was woefully addicted to my own opinions in 2001, fell hard in 2002, got up in 2003, and kept walking.

Anyway.

Turns out that some of the very best files I downloaded are not only still on the web today -- but they have been updated.  One of the best resources I saw during the ~1000 hours I spent foraging for usable knowledge was "Self-Employment: Steps for Vocational Rehabilitation Counselors, Helping a Customer Start a Business."

The document is written by six world-class vocation counselors and career coaches as a guide for their disabled clients who a.) want to know if self-employment is right for them, and b.) don't know how to get started in their new vocation (which means "calling").  BTW, my disability was "pride" -- although this indispensable guide does not address that malady by name.

Regardless, this ebook will help you find your own professional voice.  I found mine, and last year I W2'd eleven times what I W2'd in 2003.

You can too!

The 242-page document is free, and boy is it worth reading.  Even if you don't find yourself unemployed and unemployable in the next / current recession, it's still a good idea to consider how to manage your career like a business.  Because basically, we're all in business for ourselves.

Jobseekers:  Subscribe to my blog's RSS feed right here.  I will be posting links to other stunningly great Adobe files in the coming weeks.  They were the first fruits of my own unemployment.

PS -- See also 97 Job Search Tips.

Disruptive Database Marketing

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 ...

1. Put up a website and started giving away its massive backlog of content.
2. 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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Tension Boils in Recruitoshpere!

ATLANTA - Further to my post about Business Week's ranking of the World's Most Influential Headhunters, it pains me to say that I have crumbled under the pressure of the Recruiting Animal to "cease and desist making fun of the award and its recipients."  Sadly, I have been excommunicated from the recruitosphere and temporarily suspended from the Recruiting Animal Show.  A story from yesterday's paper explains ...