I’ve been working in Recruitment Marketing now for the best part of 20 years and it safe to say that it has changed almost beyond recognition during that time. The pace of change continues to increase as more and more sophisticated techniques and technologies become available.
My guest this week is a practitioner at the cutting edge of Recruitment Marketing evolution. Mike Bailen is a specialist at recruiting top talent in ultra competitive environments. Mike is currently VP of People at Lever and has also held recruiting leadership positions at Zappos and Eventbrite.
In the interview we discuss:
• How to attract top talent in a way that is unique to your brand
• Long form content and employee amplification
• The specialist skills and experience needed to be effective at Recruitment Marketing
• Talent Pipelines
• The role of smart technology in Recruitment Marketing
Mike also gives us his views on automation in the recruitment process and other important future trends
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit and Lever is spelt L E V E R Lever. Where ATS meets CRM.
Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 101 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Before we start the show, I just want to say a huge thank you for all of the lovely messages and social media shares there were for last week’s 100th episode. It’s just brilliant to hear how much everyone’s enjoying the show and finding the content useful. The Trends in Talent Acquisition whitepaper I published last week to showcase highlights from the first hundred episodes of the Recruiting Future podcast is still available and you can Download it at bit ly TrendsIntalent. That’s bit ly TrendsIntalent. And TrendsIntalent is all in lowercase. So onwards to this week’s show. I’ve been in recruitment marketing now for the best part of 20 years and I think it’s fair to say that as a discipline it’s changed almost beyond recognition in that time. This pace of change has continued to increase in the last few years as more and more sophisticated techniques and technologies become available. My guest this week is a practitioner who’s at the cutting edge of recruitment marketing evolution. Mike Bailen is a specialist in recruiting top talent within super competitive environments. Currently VP of People at Leather, he has also held recruiting leadership roles at Eventbrite and Zappos. There are some absolutely superb insights into modern recruitment marketing in this interview. Enjoy. Hi Mike and welcome to the podcast.
Mike Bailen [00:02:49]:
Hey Matt, thanks so much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:51]:
My pleasure. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Mike Bailen [00:02:55]:
Sure. My name is Mike Bailen. I’ve been in the recruiting industry for about 10 years now and I have led different recruiting teams at a couple different companies. So really got my feet wet at Zappos and then went on to lead the recruiting efforts at Eventbrite. And now I’m the VP of People at Lever. So taking a step over into the more of the HR realm, as well as overseeing the recruiting team at Leverage.
Matt Alder [00:03:24]:
What are some of the kind of challenges that you’ve sort of faced in those roles? I’m guessing they’re kind of similar, but they’re quite different companies.
Mike Bailen [00:03:34]:
Yeah, definitely. I think what was interesting about Zappos uniquely was that it was in Las Vegas. So I think attracting really great technical talent was a challenge there. And obviously attracting great technical talent, even in the Bay Area, where Eventbrite is and where Lever is, is also a challenge, but just in a completely different way. So I think for the majority of my career now, it’s been around thinking about how you can attract really top talent in super competitive environments and do it in a way that’s very unique to each company and to their brand.
Matt Alder [00:04:11]:
So how have you seen talent acquisition evolve in the last few years and what kind of sort of tools and techniques and approaches do you think work to solve those kind of challenges?
Mike Bailen [00:04:25]:
Yeah, great question. I think, like it’s involved evolved quite a bit. I always like to think that recruiting trails marketing, and we’re always looking at marketing to kind of pave the way for recruiting efforts. I would say that when I first got into recruiting, it really was, I always call it transactional recruiting, where either, you know, post a job and you hope that the right people come in and, you know, either bring them through to your pipeline or reject them out right away, or you’re just sitting there tapping shoulders on LinkedIn or other channels and just hoping that somebody gets back to you and responds. And that first touch point really piques their interest that they respond and actually want to get into your process. So what I’ve seen actually change, I think, is just this evolution to thinking more like lead generation. And how do we get multiple touch points in front of candidates and how do you really make your company stand out in different ways? And how do you highlight not only your company and your company brand, but the specific individuals within teams and the specific challenges that they’re facing within teams. So really, I think the onus on recruiting now is to really lift up that curtain, show what it’s like to work at your organization, but again, more specifically, what it’s like to work within each team and then placing that content and really amplifying that content and getting it out in front of the right pair of eyes so that person can really consume that information. Wherever they might be, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, medium, looking at blogs, wherever they want to be, they can access that content and then decide for themselves. I think we have a much more educated buyer now that they can be a little bit more discerning with which organizations they actually want to apply to and work for. So I think it’s making sure that we are putting the content out there so they can consume it and then ultimately decide for themselves whether or not they want to, you know, come into the process and apply for the job. So I think it’s changed quite a bit in the brand and the company telling candidates what they want to hear to the candidate now being able to find content on their own and then making an educated decision.
Matt Alder [00:06:39]:
I think that’s, that, that’s really interesting. And I think that that whole kind of content, content discovery and getting that sort of authentic feel for the, for the company is absolutely vital. How, how do you sort of go about achieving that though? Because I know that, you know, lots of companies sometimes have problems, you know, finding that content or have it having the resource to sort of, you know, get it out there and help it, you know, get it out there and reach the audience. You know, what, what ways have you gone about sort of solving those challenges?
Mike Bailen [00:07:10]:
Yeah, I think I’ve worked for some progressive organizations and that’s worked to my advantage. We’ve actually had both at Eventbrite and Lover now, an individual that’s focused on talent, brand and recruitment marketing. I think like as you talked a little bit about the evolution of recruiting, we used to have this concept of like employer brand. And I think for a lot of companies that means creating like a cute video or updating your glassdoor page or your LinkedIn profile or that sort of thing. And now I think it’s really evolved to adding actually some marketing, talent marketing muscle right within the recruiting function. So at Eventbrite, for example, we built a lot of stories around sales as one area as well as engineering. But we had some major sales initiatives and we had to hire a lot of people within sales. So our recruiting marketer went out and partnered with an external firm actually to develop some really great long form content. And the content was really spotlighting the individuals within the sales teams. What are the differentiators to work in sales at Eventbrite? So you have to keep in mind in the Bay Area, somebody could walk outside, walk down the street and land another job somewhere else pretty quickly. Sales professionals like engineers are just in really high demand. So we had to really think about what actually differentiates Eventbrite and our sales organization from other teams. And then we built long form content around this. And the long form content was just really visual, had A lot of pictures, but really told the story through the lens of our employees. And then we used a lot of different channels to actually I call it amplifying that message or setting it out. So one way is an easy way is actually through referrals. So what we found was we got a lot more response and drove a lot more activity by having our employees actually send out stories as opposed to just sending out job postings. So if you see a lot of organizations, they’ll have their employees just send out hey, apply to this job or we’re hiring and that sort of message instead. We wanted to again make our content more discoverable. So we just had our employees amplify that message just by saying, hey, our team’s growing, we’re doing some interesting things. And here’s actually just a story about what we’re doing. And didn’t actually say we’re apply to this job. It was more about here’s our story. That was one effective way for us to get our message out there. And then other ways are just targeted advertisements. So again like traditional marketing tactics, so doing very targeted advertisements within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And again we saw our click through rates actually exceeding what we would consider to be industry benchmarks by telling stories as opposed to just placing jobs in front of people.
Matt Alder [00:09:59]:
You mentioned there that you had sort of specialist marketeers working on the team to sort of produce the content content and drive these initiatives forward. Do you think that recruitment marketing is now that specialist skill and it’s a different skill from recruiting and you sort of need people with two sort of different types of backgrounds to do those two skills or is there still a crossover?
Mike Bailen [00:10:21]:
I do think it’s actually a specialized skill. I early on had this concept or thought about recruiting marketing. I couldn’t quite name what it was and I had somebody that was focused on sourcing step into more of this like traditional marketing role and it actually wasn’t a great fit. There’s just differences in skill and background and the way you think about things and your approach from like sourcing, for example, or even recruiting to becoming a marketer. So I do think that marketing actually has like a unique skill set and I would encourage organizations to actually look and poach from marketing organizations to bring them into the recruiting function. I think what’s really interesting about that for the person that might be making the transition from marketing over to recruiting marketing is that within marketing orgs, they’re typically pretty siloed, so they’ll be focusing on search or SEO or SEM or Just content or just different segments within marketing, but within recruiting, they actually have an opportunity to work on a lot of different things and be able to be more of a generalist, I would say, and get their hands dirty and focus on a lot of different functions or different areas within marketing. So I think it’s really a unique draw and it’s something that’s really interesting if it’s positioned correctly to marketers. But you do need somebody that’s not just like a hunter. And I think you get a lot of, in sourcing a lot of hunters, they’re going after people. It’s a little bit more tactical, but with the marketing lens, it’s a little bit more strategic. You have to think about your positioning. You have to know how to tell stories that are super rich and vibrant and that attracts the right type of people. And then also, what are those forums that actually put that content out there so people can digest it and find it at their own pace and leisure?
Matt Alder [00:12:13]:
Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I think from what I’m seeing in the market, the companies that are doing this well are the ones who are bringing that kind of specialist expertise in this, in this area to, you know, to build their brand and, and, and really sort of build their pipeline. And I suppose that brings me to the next question about talent. Talent, talent pipelines. So, you know, you’re talking about telling stories, you’re talking about, you know, sort of nurturing people towards your, towards your company. How, you know, in your experience, kind of, you know, how. How long might it take, you know, or how far in the future should people be planning their, their talent pipelines?
Mike Bailen [00:12:56]:
Yeah, that’s a great question. You know, it’s kind of an interesting game to play. So I know that just like any buyer candidates are interacting with your content 8 to 12 times before they make a quote, unquote buying decision. So you do have to think intentionally about what those touch points are. In terms of talent pipelines, it can take anywhere from a month to two years. It really just depends on that individual and where they’re at. I think it’s a mistake to not be thinking about your pipelines constantly. So you need to always be thinking about what is the type of talent you need today. And I think obviously for a lot of organizations, it’s really hard to see past today or the next quarter. There’s just recruiting teams are taxed with a lot of open requisitions, and that’s obviously really time consuming. But you’re making a mistake by not Understanding what the business needs maybe are in six months to a year. And if you’re thinking that way, you can start to actually build and cultivate these talent pipelines where you can identify what is that skill set. We need to take our company a little bit further. What are those really, really in demand roles that if we don’t get in front of somebody today, by the time we have an opening, it’s going to be way too late to actually start the conversation. So I would suggest to start to think deeply about what are the future needs and then start to actually build out those pipelines, be intentional with those touch points so you can start thinking about things like not only content, but maybe even recruiting events. So let’s say, you know, you have an opening in six months for maybe you’re going to be making a big mobile push and you’re looking for iOS engineers. You could actually start to hold meetups. I think a big mistake sometimes recruiting teams make is they’ll hold recruiting events, but you don’t want to make it about you. This is like a selfless thing. You almost want to give back to the community and really start to get to know people that are actually really interested in the subject matter. So hosting these events that you may have external speakers come in and talk about the latest technology, programming languages, whatever it might be, and then starting to really, from an organizational level, cultivating those relationships so they can come in, they can see your space, they can meet with some of your other engineers, and you can have this ongoing conversation and dialogue. So by the time you actually do have that push, in six months, you’re not starting from scratch. You’ve already met some people, you might have already sprinkled some content to them, and you’re just kind of, you know, playing that long game of nurturing. And then again, it’ll. Once you have that opening, you’ll be able to shrink the time to fill quite a bit with people, with people that are actually, like, connected to you, your brand, your values, which is probably more important than, you know, finding somebody that’s these shorter cycles where you just open a position and you hope you have that right, you know, mission and alignment.
Matt Alder [00:15:56]:
So what role does technology play in the recruitment marketing process?
Mike Bailen [00:16:01]:
I think it plays a big one. You know, I think it starts, obviously with the philosophy and the mindset, but then technology enables you to do it quicker, more efficiently, and then it actually informs you or makes you smarter in rolling these things out. So. So as you’re thinking about building these campaigns, we’ve used Tools, for example, like zoomforth, which I really love, but it’s a really quick, like, micro site builder where you can build out really rich content that’s very visual and engaging that you can get in front of your candidates or your leads, and then you can also track their activity. You can find out what content they’re actually engaging in. Are they clicking on certain links, are they viewing certain pictures or collateral or whatever else it might be. So you can start to get a little bit smarter or more informed. At Lever, we have this product called Lever Nurture that I absolutely love. And I think it’s totally different than a lot of products out there, but you can build in almost like sourcing automation. So you can start to build out your email sequences, you can send for other people within your organization. So you can really start to automate a lot of sourcing activity that takes just a lot of time. And I recognize that like sourcing is, I think it was interesting about sourcing is it’s easy to find people, but it’s super hard to engage with them. And that takes, again, multiple touch points. So what I love about Lever is you can actually automate those touch points and send from other people within the business to just really enrich the experience for the prospect or the candidate. So I think being able to bucket leads, being able to sort them quickly, and then be able to really enrich the experience and automate that experience for your recruiting team. Technology plays just such a powerful part in just this overall landscape.
Matt Alder [00:18:01]:
How important do you think automation is? Because obviously lots of companies have focus on candidate experience and giving people the opportunity to have conversations with other humans and all that kind of stuff. How does automation improve the way that we recruit and improve the way that we do recruitment marketing?
Mike Bailen [00:18:24]:
Yeah, it’s interesting because when you think of it like the surface level, it’s almost like, okay, automation can actually really damage or hurt things because if you’re not doing it intelligently, you could really come off as, like you said, it’s just not a superhuman experience. It feels like it’s, you know, coming from a machine. And that’s really not what candidates are looking for. They’re obviously looking for a company that’s genuine and authentic. So as you’re building in automation, you really have to be thoughtful with what the messages are, the sequencing of those messages, and make sure that you’re not even spamming or having multiple people within the business reaching out to that same person. And that’s something that I’ve seen a lot of, especially at larger organizations, you’re just not in alignment with the actual other players in your own company. And that’s a really dangerous thing. So that’s another place where both technology and automation can really help is you can start to actually build these sequences in, build the automation in and let the technology do it for you and you have less human error to actually come in and step on each other’s toes. So I think that automation plays a really key role, but you have to be super, super smart, super diligent and make sure you’re setting it up in the right way.
Matt Alder [00:19:45]:
No, that makes, yeah, that makes absolutely perfect sense. So in terms of sort of future innovations and technology, you know, it seems that we sort of bombarded every day with, you know, new and interesting, new and interesting tech when it comes to, you know, recruitment and sort of HR in general. What trends have you got your eye on for the next sort of 18 months to 2 years? Where do you think we’re going and what’s of most interest to you?
Mike Bailen [00:20:14]:
Yeah, I mean, like, I still am dreaming of a world where you can recycle your own database in a really intelligent way. So I haven’t seen too many companies figure this out yet, but the whole graveyard to gold mine approach, where a lot of companies have thousands and thousands of people that have applied to the organization or you’ve sourced in a lot of prospects into your database and then it goes into the, you know, the black hole. Right. So I think some sort of AI that can inform you that this person is engaging with your content, they’ve actually come back to your career site, they’ve, they’ve switched jobs and they’re, you know, gaining the skill set that you might have rejected them for two years ago. Like that type of automation will be super helpful if we’re able to bring that into like an applicant tracking system. So I think that’s one thing that I want see mature a little bit and will really power recruiting teams in the future. So if you can imagine a world where you open up a rack and then it actually shows you 10 people that have engaged with your content or again have gained the skill set needed, that would be really just super helpful for shrinking time to fill and getting the right people who again have alignment with your values into your process. So I think that’s one. Another one that’s interesting is bot technology. So, you know, it’s been kind of, I don’t know, there’s some skepticism, I think in general, just if a bot could do an effective job of representing your company, But I think that’s just one to keep an eye on. If that can get a little bit smarter. It can take a lot of just the operational time or the, you know, the administrative time away from recruiting and also help with candidate experience in some weird ways. So there’s been some technology out there where a candidate could text, you know, a company and then a bot could respond. So it could be as simple as, hey, I’m curious to know a little bit more about your benefits. And, you know, the bot could. Could act as a human on behalf of your organization and actually write back to that candidate and say, you know, here’s. Here’s a one pager about our benefits. You know, go ahead and dig in. So, and that works as well from an employee experience side. So not even thinking about recruiting, but employees within your organization being able to have quick access to information. I’ve been struggling with trying to find a great internal wiki for a long time, and it’d be great to have this really personalized touch bot that could actually answer questions for employees or candidates. So I think those are two areas that I’m really interested in seeing what happens.
Matt Alder [00:22:56]:
Mike, thank you very much for talking to me.
Mike Bailen [00:22:58]:
Oh, thank you, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.
Matt Alder [00:23:01]:
My thanks to Mike Bailen. You can subscribe to the show on itunes, on Stitcher, or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can download at your app store. Just search for recruiting future. You can find all the past episodes at www. On that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
