Marketing Headhunter

EMAIL MARKETING: "Vote for Austin ___."

ATLANTA, GA - I love my next door neighbor, Bill.  Great guy, and I'd do anything for him.  Maybe he knows this, because today he bcc'd me on the following email ...

Please consider voting for my step-grandson, Austin ___, to win a one-week stay at Orphanage Outreach. Austin loves helping others and has helped the less fortunate in Tanzania, Africa and in the Dominican Republic in the past year. Thanks for your help.  Click here. -Bill

When you "click there," you are advised that "To vote, enter your email address below.  Once you click "vote" you will receive an email with a link to verify your address before your vote is counted."

So I voted ... and relinquished my email address knowing that I might pay for it in the future -- entirely because Bill asked me to.

I have seen alot of slick ways to build a double opt-in email list, but never one that relies on relationship marketing, "Tom Sawyer paint-the-fence" style.  Have you??

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LINKEDIN NEWS: "Thanks for being in the first 1% to join LinkedIn."

ATLANTA, GA - Today I received an interesting email from my friends at Linkedin, who just signed up their 100 millionth member.  See below.

We've done a ton of business with Linkedin over the last -- what is it -- five years already?  And in that time, I can honestly say that LI has done wonders for my recruiting business.  My company owns two of the top five ecommerce groups on Linkedin, and my personal network includes 4400 ecommerce executives (and only three recruiters).  Invite me to connect!

I'm amazed at how many clients and candidates actually READ my testimonials.  Those things have been instrumental in helping me establish trust and credibility among my new users.  I'll explain why this is important at the end of this post.

Not too long ago, I saw Reid Hoffman on Charlie Rose, and Mr. Hoffman said that he could envision 25% of the world's white collar workforce on Linkedin.  Twenty five percent.  With that kind of liquidity, it's not hard to see how Linkedin might develop a labor marketplace like Workmarket (backed by Fred Wilson's USV), or Elance.  Check out the following video (also shown below), in which Mr. Hoffman confirms that Linkedin is a platform for the free agent nation -- and that all of us are basically micro-enterprises.

I can't wait to invest in Linkedin's IPO.

Imagine the revenue opportunity for any company that can monetize the trading relationships of +100 million people.  Years ago, I wrote a white paper about a web-enabled U.S. beef industry and learned that the number of trading relationships in any market is (N*(N-1) / 2.  Try that formula with 100 million nodes in the network ...

New Day Rising

Last year, my Linkedin sales rep told me that there are +900,000 corporate and third-party recruiters on Linkedin. That's insane, but it makes sense: 900K is less than 1% of the community's membership.  Still, that's a lot of recruiters.

When I'm a party and I meet someone, they often ask me what I do.  When I tell them I'm a contingency recruiter, they roll their eyes as if I were a real estate agent or an insurance salesman.  It never occurs to them that I could be a marketer and an entrepreneur.  There's a stigma:  Being the best contingency recruiter is like being the tallest midget.  That's cool. I get it.

But that stigma doesn't absolve a recruiter of his obligation to iterate; to look at how the wold is changing and search for relevance.  Recruiters need wake up and realize that increasingly, they're working for their candidates -- not their clients.

The party's over.

I've long been a believer that the days of the 20% placement fee for throwing a resume over the fence are winding down -- especially for line level job openings.  You'll see a decline of that kind of thing as solutions like Linkedin and TopProspect get traction.  And, lo and behold, should Linkedin decide to become a full-blown ATS, then recruiters will be judged solely on the basis of their ability to attract the coolest searches that attract the best candidates, that, in turn, attract the coolest searches, etc.

Success will breed success, and recruiting agency "brands" will matter more than ever.  Why?  Because it will be up to the recruiter to leverage his brand (ie, trust and credibility) on behalf of his clients to attract the right talent.  In other words, clients who don't have my trust and credibility will want to "rent" my trust and credibility to attract the candidates who can build their businesses.  Make sense?  It has more to do with positioning than salesmanship.

Anway, here's the email I received from Linkedin.  Congratulations to them.

Dear Harry,

I'm thrilled to let you know that LinkedIn's membership reached 100 million professionals today.

Because you were one of our first million members (member number 143,XXX in fact!), I wanted to take this moment to thank you for playing a foundational role in building the LinkedIn community.

With your help, LinkedIn is revolutionizing how companies like yours find top talent and is well positioned to realize our mission of making professionals everywhere more productive and successful. We are so grateful for your support, and we look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come.

On to the next hundred million!

Sincerely,
Mike Gamson
Senior Vice President
LinkedIn Corporate Solutions

JOB OF THE WEEK: "VP of Ecommerce" (NY / NJ)

SADDLE BROOK, NJ - EcommerceRecruiter.com is the leading executive search firm serving the DMA, NEMOA, SEMPO, Shop.org, Ad:Tech, and IR-500 communities. To get our jobs by email the minute they're posted, click here.

We are working with Semprae Laboratories in their search for a Vice President/Director, Online Marketing and Commerce based in Saddle Brook, NJ. Semprae Laboratories markets women's sexual health and well-being products that will be primarily available through direct sales and online, with some retail (Wal-Mart, Rite Aid) and etail distribution.

Semprae seeks an experienced, entrepreneurial ecommerce marketer responsible for planning, implementing and executing online customer acquisition campaigns to generate growth with online marketing team. Focus will be on paid and organic search, email marketing and social media programs.

HARRY'S COMMENTS: Through the years I have been contacted by quite a few adult-oriented online retailers to handle their searches, and I've always refused on the grounds that it wasn't good for my brand. No offense to them, personally.

Semprae Labs, on the other hand, is more like a pharma play with a chewy center: a continuity-based revenue model. Think of their product, Zestra, as a Viagra for women. No kidding. The company's CEO, Mary Jaensch, explained the need for the product and the size of the current market, and I've gotta say -- these people are going to make a TON of money, especially once their ads get approved by mainstream TV (which seems inevitable).  Check out this video on ABC's Nightline ...

Zestra is a life-sciences VC-backed product. Its production is consistent with FDA guidelines, yet because it’s all natural, it does not have to be FDA approved. There are NO side effects, and according to clinical studies, it works on 7 out of 10 women. There is NO financial risk for a product trial, and 50% of Semprae's business is repeat, continuity purchase. Ka-CHING!

There is a fantastic story to be told about the founders, the product, and the opportunity.  Truly, these are wonderful people.  But here's the rub:  I'd love a candidate who has some familiarity with DRTV. If you don't have DRTV experience, I still want you to apply. However, much of Zestra.com's traffic will be driven through DRTV, so the perfect candidate will understand that medium. New Yorkers: The company is based in Saddle Brook, NJ -- a 24 minute drive from the city, against traffic.

Bottom line:  As usual, if I didn't think this was a great opportunity with outstanding underlying economics, I would not be wasting your time with it.

Please Tweet this job, and you'll be automatically entered into our monthly drawing. Just do it and see what happens: 2010 prizes included $100 Amazon gift certs, Dean & Deluca steaks, and Keurig coffee machines ...

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Position Description:

• Develop marketing strategies that ensure customer base growth with profitable returns in the context of business strategy
• Develop ecommerce and direct strategies, plans and programs to achieve business growth objectives
• Identify target customer segments in the formulation of customer acquisition strategies; develop mechanism for building more in-depth target definitions and insights
• Define, identify and implement customer acquisition strategies through online marketing channels
• Test new programs/opportunities for customer and lead generation
• Accelerate growth of per customer value through range of re-marketing strategies and programs
• Seek out new partnerships for co-marketing opportunities
• Evaluate market share and monitor competition
• Supervise two marketing managers who are implementing the programs

Position Requirements:

• Minimum of 5 years experience managing online customer acquisition campaigns for fast growing, entrepreneurial company that relies heavily on e-commerce for its direct response marketing activities
• Measurable experience in paid and organic search, affiliate programs, comparison shopping engines, email and other online programs
• Demonstrated ability to deliver a quantity of valuable new customers within the framework of ROI goals, as a key part of a successful business enterprise
• Ability to create the strategic direction of increasing ecommerce activity from a variety of online media channels to expand market share
• Ability to effectively manage range of vendors and to integrate activities with offline programs
• Skills in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) along with strong PC skills that include Microsoft Office, Excel, PowerPoint
• Minimum of B.A or B.S. required. MBA viewed favorably
• Strong oral and written communication skills

Applications for this position are being coordinated by Harry Joiner. To apply, CLICK HERE. Candidates, please be sure to ask Harry for packet #1321 of market research and company / competitive intel that will differentiate you in your candidacy. Due to the competitive nature of this search, thorough preparation for these interviews with this proprietary material is strongly recommended.

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SLICK TWITTER TRICK: "How to Get Celebs to ReTweet for You."

ATLANTA, GA - So, I'm goofing around tonight on Twitter, and I stumble across Questlove's Twitter feed.  Questlove is the drummer for the Roots, as well as Jimmy Fallon's house band.  He's mad famous, yo ...

Okay, so back to the story ... Evidently, Questlove's watching a slam dunk contest on TV.  He Tweets everything.  As of this writing, he's got 25,110 Tweets.  Assuming Questlove started Tweeting the very day Twitter was founded (7-15-2006), that's 15 Tweets a day -- every day -- one Tweet each-and-every work hour of the day.

You see where I'm going with this.  He Tweets alot.  And oh yeah: He has 1,479,326 followers.  So he's got that going for him.

Anyway, Questlove's watching his basketball game, and suddenly "Kiki90210" Tweets

@questlove Plz retweet! House votes to bar #PlannedParenthood from federal funding. http://www.ppaction.org/IStandWithPP #StandWithPP

And of course, Questlove reTweets it.  On his laptop, probably.  Between sips of beer on his couch.

For kicks I go to Kiki90210's Twitter feed, and she has asked several celebrities to reTweet this message.  I'm too lazy to see if they actually did -- but certainly Questlove did, which ...

1. gives the message a valuable distribution channel, and
2. tacitly endorses the message.

Of course!  >Forehead smack!<  Just ask your key influencers straight-up to distribute your message.  Why didn't I think of that??  Yo.

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Happy Monday

Hat tip to MakeMyMood.com

Text exchange between me and a candidate ...

TOM:  Interesting interview.  Seems like companies really don't know what they want.

HARRY:  That's why I am in no danger of being replaced by the Internet.

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ECOMMERCE CANDIDATES: "Why it pays to ask me what's in the recruiting pipeline."

Lots of times the best ecommerce candidate doesn't get the job.  There are probably a hundred reasons why this is so, but this post only covers one:  The client decides to engage a contingency recruiter only after the search has been open for several months.

A good recruiter is like the fire department: You never want to call them, but they're there if you need them.  Recruiters are expensive.  I get that.  And lots of contingency recruiters suck.  I get that too.  The old joke in my industry is that "being the best contingency recruiter is like being the tallest midget."  Politically incorrect, but true.

Still, truly great contingency recruiters are out there, and they can make a whale of a difference to a client's business if there's an element of mutual trust and respect.  But very often it takes a client several months of trying to close an ecommerce search on their own before they get to that point mentally.

"The difference between salad and garbage is timing ..."

What happens if you are an ecommerce jobseeker and you apply for a certain job before I'm awarded the search?  Well, sadly, you are now my competitor.  Yep.  Even if I know you are highly qualified for the job, I cannot represent you on the deal.  You've already applied, and according to the client's fee agreement, the client is not going to pay me to manage your candidacy.

Which sucks, because I'm sure I would have improved your chances greatly by mapping your initial resume to the job description, giving you advice on the client's hot buttons, helping you understand the hiring committee's political agenda, and covering you up with company and market research to help you nail your interviews.

There's lots of creative stuff I can do to help you get the job -- but through no fault of your own, you applied for the role and now I'm duty bound to help my current candidates beat you in the search.

Neither of us could have predicted that the client would reach out to me in frustration even though your resume is sitting right ... under ... their ... nose.

If only.

I hate this for both of us, because you may in fact be highly qualified for the job, but the client didn't know enough about you to appreciate your background.  You are a diamond in the rough, and in the rough you shall stay.  This does not make me a heartless bastard:  Ninety percent of the time my client won't tell me which candidates have applied for the role, and even when they do I am professionally obligated to help my current candidates get the job.

What can you do about this?

Nothing really, other than try not to shotgun your resume around the industry.  Beyond that, you can keep in touch with your industry's best recruiters and see what they have in the pipeline.  Certainly I'll tell you if you ask, but most contingency recruiters will say that I'm insane for doing this.  Why?  Because average recruiters are afraid that you will go around them if they tell you who the client is.  Wimps.

I have never operated like that.

If you're a highly qualified candidate, I may mention that "I heard Company X is looking for a VP of Ecommerce, and their VP of HR reached out to me about possibly handling the search.  Let's wait a week to see if I get the deal.  If I don't, then I'll call the VP of HR and recommend you for the job.  If I do get the search, then I'd love to manage your candidacy."  I might even provide some judicious commentary about Company X, its lines of business, who else may have applied, and so on.

This positions me to the candidate as a valuable source of intel, and demonstrates to them the value of waiting to see if I land the search.

Again, I know of very few recruiters who operate like this, even though I have never been screwed by an A-player when I've taken this tact.  There's absolutely nothing unethical about this strategy, and I've found that only second-rate (ie, insecure) candidates go around me.

Later, these B-players are easily dispatched by my heavily-armed A-players when I do get the search -- or even when I don't get the search, and I introduce these loyal A-players to the company's VP of HR as a courtesy to everyone.

Either way, I win.  Because in contingency recruiting, there's a lot to be said for karma.

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JOB SEARCH TIP: "Bail Early in the Recruiting Process"

ATLANTA, GA - At EcommerceRecruiter.com, we specialize in contingency-based ecommerce searches, meaning we only get paid when we close a deal.  Typically, we don't do retained work.  Nor do most recruiters.

Recruiting's fiercely competitive: InfoUSA's rentable list of executive search firms contains 7,686 records.  That number's not gospel, but it should give you an idea of how many players there are.  And there are zero barriers to entry.  All you need to be a recruiter is five fingers, a phone, and the gift of gab.

Most recruiters are generalists.

I'm not being uncharitable when I say that most contingency recruiters are generalists, and they tend to follow the money into the hottest industries.  Sometimes it's logistics.  Sometimes it's finance.  Or information technology.  It could be anything.  Whatever the economy dictates.

Today, Indeed.com lists 16,905 ecommerce jobs -- versus 217,000 accounting jobs.  Accounting, btw, has been around since the 1600s.  Ecommerce has been around since 1995.  Ecommerce is a very hot field, and it will only get hotter as the forces of mobile, local search, social media, and international trade combine.

Naturally, contingency recruiters are absolutely flooding into the ecommerce space.

But here's the thing: An ecommerce recruiter needs two things to appeal to the best candidates:  Ecommerce expertise, and a great flow of ecommerce jobs.  The best recruiters do a great job of aggregating both the SUPPLY and DEMAND of talent.  We make a market.  It's simple, but not easy.  It takes excellent candidates to attract world-class clients, and vice versa.  It's a chicken-and-egg deal.

Against this backdrop, it's safe to say that "one off" recruiters are usually desperate to close whatever deal they're working on, and asking a one-off recruiter if you should take the job is like asking a barber if you need a haircut.  Seriously.  They usually have only one ecommerce search and whatever candidates they can scare up on LinkedIn.  Again, I'm not being uncharitable.  This "specialist-versus-generalist" dynamic is common in all service industries.  Look it up.

By contrast, EcommerceRecruiter.com was contacted by [many] dozens of companies in 2010 and we took slightly more than half of the deals that were presented to us.  And our candidate database contains +45,000 resumes, most with cell phone numbers.  Ecommerce is all we do.

Why am I telling you this?

Because if you're a candidate and I'm repping you on a deal, I absolutely do not care (from a personal, financial standpoint) whether or not you accept my client's offer of employment.  Sure, I care a lot on behalf of my client.  After all, it's my job to help them land the talent they want.

But if you don't take the job, I've usually got at least one very good backup candidate to show my client ... and several other job opportunities to show you.  Most of the time, I'll close my client's search regardless of whether you take the job.  And very often, I'll place you in another job.  So, I'm indifferent.

But that doesn't mean you should be.

A while back, a candidate of mine got an offer from a client.  It was a great offer by a great company for a great candidate; and one that the candidate haggled over, too.  For a week!  The client jumped through hoops to get this guy.  The money, the role, and the title were all sweetened to land this candidate.  The client bent over backwards, and in the end the candidate decided that "the role really wasn't for him."

Negotiations that last longer than a few days usually don't end well.

I wasn't mad.  I'll close the search soon.  But it sure was unfair to my client.  The whole candidacy was like a big budget movie with a plot that went nowhere.

Candidates, please don't do this!

Sharply define what it is you want in your next career opportunity and be prepared to pounce when it's offered to you.  It's okay to window shop with the recruiter.  And it's alright to tire-kick with client phone screens.  But for heaven's sake, don't be so wishy-washy about your career that you drag a client through several rounds of in-person interviews at their expense.  At a minimum, this is a lousy way to allocate your valuable vacation days.

Certainly, I'll provide you with as much career counseling as I can, but remember that I'm not going to try to convince you to take the job.  Ever.  If you think a potential job is not going to be right for you, it's always best to bail early in the process.

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Introducing FRAM: Spam from social media friends.

ATLANTA - My company has done business with Linkedin for several years.  Happily, I might add.  I started using Linkedin in 2004 -- even before I really understood how to use it, while most of my recruiter friends insisted that I was insane for using it at all.

But I used it anyway, sensing that Linkedin would someday amount to something.  I'm so smart.

Obviously, Linkedin has since become a major force in the recruiting industry, and it has the ability to completely transform and disrupt the executive search business in the coming years.  Big time.

Looking back, every time my firm had an opportunity to subscribe to a Linkedin service, we usually went "limit up" on it – meaning, we bought as much of it as we could at the time.  And we were rarely disappointed with our returns on these investments.

So last year, when Linkedin approached us about subscribing to their Recruiter tool, we signed the deal. Except that the deal Linkedin pushed us to sign was not a typical one-year deal such as we see from CareerBuilder and  Monster.  No, Linkedin wanted us to do a three-year minimum on Linkedin Recruiter.

Three years is a lifetime to a paranoid recruiter.

And Linkedin wasn't giving Recruiter away, that's for sure.  In fact it was pretty expensive, but it gave us a substantial inventory of InMails -- AKA, the ability for us to communicate directly with anyone in Linkedin's database without going through a string of intermediaries, whether we had a personal relationship with the ultimate recipient or not.  So if Barack Obama is on Linkedin and I want to send him an InMail, I can, immediately, confidentially, and without asking three intermediaries to pass my note along.  Done.

Slick concept, especially for lazy recruiters.  Who needs to cold call when you can just press a button?  I'm so smart.

You can get a sense for InMail pricing on this grid.

Now then.  Traditionally, my attitude has been that Linkedin is much more than a standard candidate database.  Aspects of it more closely resemble online communities.  Duh: It's social.  In fact, my own Linkedin group, EcommerceJobs.com, has nearly 5000 members and is now the seventh-largest e-commerce group on Linkedin.  So Linkedin is of real, serious strategic importance to my firm.

But lately, I wonder if we made the right call by buying thousands of InMails.

The problem boils down to what it is known among direct marketers as List Fatigue, a concept that refers to prospect list that is so over-mailed that the prospects on the list no longer respond to any marketer, no matter how qualified or relevant the marketer may be.  It's a simple signal-to-noise problem.

Tonight I spent 45 minutes going through my Linkedin e-mail inbox.  What I found was appalling.  Most of the correspondence was spam, outright.  Totally impersonal and irrelevant to me, yet because I "knew" many of the senders through social media, I felt compelled in some cases to acknowledge their outreach.

Introducing FRAM: Spam from social media friends.

It was like spam, but much worse.  It often came with a weird sense of obligation.  For example, one of my (4,190) first-degree connections asked me to write a short recommendation about him before passing along his bio to a hiring manager in an industry that's totally unrelated to my own (ecommerce).  Sure, I could have been a dick and archived his InMail, but I'm in the karma business.  Plus I'm not a dick.

Several InMails were from PR flacks advising me of some new development with their software clients.  Many InMails were from social media experts inviting me to attend a webinar.  And so on.

All told, I had 47 InMails, and less than 5 contained REAL opportunities.

And immediately, I was overcome with the fear that people must feel the exactly same way about MY InMails -- all of which cost me nearly ten bucks a pop to send.  I'm not in the business of annoying people, and I don't think anyone should be.  Once you overload the user, you train them not to pay attention.

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not "over" Linkedin, and I don't think it has jumped the shark.  But there's something about Linkedin that reminds me of that Yogi Berra quote about his favorite restaurant being "so popular that no one goes there anymore."  I can see that comment applying to Linkedin at some point down the road.

How far down the road I can't say, although I'm about to enter year 2 of my three year deal.  Which means that I'm obligated to "Fram" Linkedin members for at least another two years, or watch thousands of dollars worth of InMails expire, unused.

Which is probably what I'll do.

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JOB INTERVIEW TIP: "Know your sh*t and go with the flow."

SEATTLE, WA - Ecommerce recruiting is a pretty cruel business: I will handle 120 searches this year, and for even the searches I don't close, there is only one winner – and everyone else goes home with a T-shirt. Just like the Final Four.

Naturally, all of my losing candidates want to know how to improve their game for the next time.  What could they have done differently?  What could they improve?  What did they do wrong that they shouldn't do again?  Was it something they said?  And so forth.  After all, I work with the ecommerce industry's best and brightest, and these folks aren't used to losing.

"You had me at hello."

I don't think I have ever closed an ecommerce search in which the winning candidate didn't have great chemistry with the hiring manager.  I honestly can't remember even one time.  However, I can remember lots of times when a less qualified candidate got the job over a highly qualified candidate.  And in every one of those cases, the winning candidate had great chemistry with the hiring manager.

You can't force good chemistry.  In fact, trying to force chemistry almost always makes it worse.  All you can do in a job interview is know your sh*t and go with the flow.  And even if you have GREAT chemistry with the hiring manager, that doesn't mean that some other candidate's chemistry won't be better.

Which brings me to the point of this post:

It is my humble opinion that there is no point trying to be too analytical about why you didn't get a particular job.  Trust me, if the hiring manager had wanted you to have it, you would have gotten it.  That's been my experience.

Certainly you want to prepare for your job interviews.  Look at the client's website in GREAT DETAIL.  Research the role, the company, the industry, and its customers.  Understand how you will make the hiring manager's job easier, and by all means know ICE-FREAKING-COLD how the company makes money and how YOU can help the company make money.

Have a teachable point of view on the work that you do, and be prepared to talk candidly about your failures and what you would do differently if given the opportunity to live those moments over.  Anyone can talk about how great they are.  It takes real humility to discuss one's own limitations in a way that's frank, yet not too self-effacing.

Beyond that, there's really not much else you can do, and there's certainly no accounting for chemistry.  I learned a long time ago that some people think I'm awesome, and some people think I'm a total jackass.  Certainly, I've had my moments when whichever side of that argument you're on, you'd be 100% right.

Whatever.  I believe it was Thoreau who said that "In a world of many minds, there is no reality."  You'll get the job next time.  Very few people are in transition forever.