{"id":10768,"date":"2018-01-19T06:38:49","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T14:38:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/recruitloop.com\/blog\/?p=10768"},"modified":"2017-12-13T13:08:32","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T21:08:32","slug":"talking-88-recruiters-28-days-taught-recruiters-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.zippia.com\/employer\/talking-88-recruiters-28-days-taught-recruiters-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"What Talking to 88 Recruiters in 28 Days Taught me About Recruiters and Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s Note:<\/b>\u00a0This is a guest post by Zack Gallinger \u2013 President of Talent Hero Media<\/i>. His opinions are his own.<\/i><\/p>\n

At the end of 2016 I was about to launch Talent Hero Media, a web design and online marketing agency focused on helping recruiters find new clients and candidates.<\/p>\n

I had a website filled with useful resources tailored to recruiters. I had begun to build relationships with the most important industry influencers. I had paid advertising campaigns set up and ready to be launched with the click of a button.<\/p>\n

After three months of tireless work to get the project off the ground, I was finally ready.<\/p>\n

And then \u2013 crickets\u2026<\/p>\n

I had made a huge mistake and it would take me an entire year to fix it.<\/p>\n

My cardinal sin<\/h2>\n

The number one rule in business is \u201cknow thy customer\u201d and I had neglected to do that. While I had spoken to recruiters prior to launching the company, I hadn\u2019t spoken to enough<\/em> of them and I didn\u2019t do it in a systematic way.<\/p>\n

After sitting around and waiting for the leads to pour in and finding that little was happening, I knew that I had misread my market. For some reason, recruiters were not interested in the services I was offering.<\/p>\n

With desperation setting in, I reached out to every recruiter I knew and began to ask for introductions to five other recruiters they knew.<\/p>\n

Because of the helpful nature of recruiters, I was able to make contact with 156 recruiters over two weeks.<\/p>\n

After many<\/em> back-and-forths over email, I was able to schedule 88 20-minute interviews over the next four weeks.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I learned in those interviews about how recruiters think about marketing their business and how you can stand out from the crowd.<\/p>\n

Recruiters are old school<\/h2>\n

The first question I asked every recruiter was \u201cHow do you get your leads today?\u201d Over 90% of recruiters who had been working in the industry for three years or fewer said either cold calling or cold emailing was their number one lead source. Over 70% of recruiters with more than three years of experience said that they relied primarily on referrals and follow on work.<\/p>\n

Based on my experience after the Talent Hero launch, I was not surprised to hear that there was little emphasis being placed on online marketing.<\/p>\n

As the interview progressed, I began to ask detailed follow up questions about their online marketing efforts. Specifically, I wanted to know how much time they had spent on search engine optimization, social media<\/a>, paid online advertising campaigns and email marketing in the previous year.<\/p>\n

The average answer was six hours<\/em>. In the past 365 days, the typical recruiter had spent less than one working day on all of their online marketing activities combined.<\/em><\/p>\n

Having marketed various businesses online for the past decade, I had seen firsthand how critical those activities were for the growth of my companies. In fact, I knew that there was no way any of my businesses would have been successful had I not taken advantage of the internet to find new clients.<\/p>\n

While I knew that many recruiters still had a \u201cgrind it out\u201d mentality, I was still shocked to hear it laid out so starkly.<\/p>\n

Recruiters are impatient<\/h2>\n

Anyone who has executed a marketing plan in the professional services industry knows that a campaign can take months to pay dividends.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re running an advertising campaign on LinkedIn, you\u2019re not going to run a single ad for your business and have potential clients banging down your door.<\/p>\n

You need to craft a complete plan that involves building brand awareness followed by demonstrating significant value before it is reasonable to reach out to your lead and expect to schedule a meeting.<\/p>\n

This slow burn approach runs so counter to the natural instincts of a recruiter that they are highly skeptical that it will work. When I asked recruiters how long they would take before abandoned a new approach, the average answer was seven weeks.<\/p>\n

Thinking back to what I already knew, this made a lot of sense.<\/p>\n

When your primary business development tactic involves picking up the phone<\/a> and making call after call to either cold prospects or people in your network, it\u2019s not surprising that sitting down and planning out a strategy for the next six months is going to feel unnatural.<\/p>\n

Recruiters are able to adapt<\/h2>\n

Fortunately, what I learned was not all doom and gloom.<\/p>\n

If recruiters are provided a sound rationale for why they should try something different than what they are currently doing, they are willing to change.<\/p>\n

At the conclusion of my 88 interviews, I scheduled follow-ups with 15 of the recruiters who seemed most interested in our discussion.<\/p>\n

In these follow up calls, we walked through what I would do to find new clients if I was in their exact situation.<\/p>\n

It was an exercise to see if I had made any headway in getting into the mind of a recruiter. I wanted to know if I had learned enough to offer value to the typical recruiter.<\/p>\n

In every case but two, the recruiter was on board with the plan I had come up with for their business and would be willing to try it out.<\/p>\n

The takeaway<\/h2>\n

After the six-week interview and follow up process was complete, I was exhausted. Over 100 phone calls later, I had explored everything there was to know about how a recruiter thinks about marketing their business.<\/p>\n

My number one takeaway is this \u2013 a recruiter who is willing to try something different than their competition can gain a huge <\/em>advantage.<\/p>\n

At this moment, there are only a handful of recruiters who are using social media or search network advertising to market their business<\/a>. Fewer than 10% of the recruiters I spoke with had paid any attention to search engine optimization. Even something basic like email marketing to past and current clients was not a priority for most people.<\/p>\n

In short, if you are willing to buck convention and try something new, the opportunity for growth is massive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post Zack Gallinger, President of Talent Hero Media reveals how recruiters think about marketing their business and how to stand out from the crowd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":10770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26,66,21],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nWhat Talking to 88 Recruiters in 28 Days Taught me About Recruiters and Marketing<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In this post Zack Gallinger, President of Talent Hero Media reveals how recruiters think about marketing their business and how to stand out from the crowd.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.zippia.com\/employer\/talking-88-recruiters-28-days-taught-recruiters-marketing\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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