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Oct 5, 2018
This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.

Mimi Turner and Brett Coin from Intuit opened SourceCon with a role-play set in a restaurant with the recruiting process overlaid. This approach opened my eyes to how HANGRY our hiring managers (HM) are. Our sourcing and recruiting processes are not as client-focused as we think we are. We tend to take the time to get to know the role, but don’t take time to get to know our customers (HMs and candidates). They took on a marketing mindset (Shift Left) to handle the ever-shifting employment landscape.

With this “Moneyball” mindset they began to interview HMs and candidates to understand gaps better and gather some analytics.

They got their company’s marketers and product managers involved in the design process of TA. They saw a need to create general standard profiles on roles that they frequently hire for. They developed and implemented a multi-channel (portfolio approach) marketing automation campaign that kept leads warm in the offseason. They sought to build relationships. They stressed several times that people are no longer responding to InMails or emails and we need to “Shift Left” and go where the people are, web searches, text, and social media.

Do you know what your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) is? If not, you should find out. This will help you understand the questions that matter or objections you need to address and no longer operate under “gut-feelings” or assumptions not supported by data. Data wins the day, and we must be grounded in evidence-based thinking.

Mimi and Brett gave us three scenarios where they “Shifted Left” and had some ground-breaking results.

The most impactful for me was Mimi and Brett, talking about hiring seasonal workers in their industry, Tax Accounting. They hire 3,000 thousand seasonal tax experts in December every year, and they work tirelessly until April 15th. Mimi and Brett asked the question, what do we do for these seasonal workers on April 16th? The answer they came up with was nothing. So, they “Shifted Left,” and sent out a letter of appreciation, coffee mugs, and other tokens to all their top seasonal workers. They continued to engage the former seasonal workers with a portfolio marketing approach to keep them warm. When the seasonal hiring started back, they had a 98% return rate and saved their sourcers for “purple squirrels” roles. This approach saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars in sourcing/recruiting time, increased their employee value proposition, and increased seasonal retention.

They discussed how they created a hiring event for current employees to market their current open positions. The focus was to help employees better understand role requirements so that the employees could submit better referrals.  For 6 hours’ worth of work, they got 167 referrals, ten interviews, and four hires. I am astounded at the ROI for this “Shift Left” approach.

Finally, Mimi and Brett talked about silver medalist candidates. They had created and curated this phenomenal database of engineering candidate and continually engaged them through multi-channel marking. However, through role evolution, the role requirements changed making their silver medalist candidate database almost obsolete. So, they “Shifted Left” and sent out a survey asking the silver medalists to complete a skill survey. Since they have a prior relationship, they have an 82% open rate, 32% click rate, 11% response rate, that led to two offers and one hire.

If there has been one thing I’ve to take away from this presentation and well as the whole conference, as sourcers and recruiting professionals, we must evolve our thinking and become more marking and data analytics-driven. We must be bold and experiment with ideas and strategies from other disciplines (marketing or Agile). We need to figure out how to measure the important things. They gave us a challenge, and I will pass it on to you, “Go try an idea out and test it!” You never know what positive impacts you can have with a simple idea!

This article is part of a series called Editor's Pick.
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