Recruitment Marketing is changing fast, and one of the things I’ve noticed recently is the increasing number of employers adopting the principles of Inbound Marketing for their recruiting activity. However, I think the industry debate around this focuses too much on technology when its real focus should be on content.
Who better to demystify Inbound Marketing for recruiting than HubSpot, the company who first invented the phrase Inbound Marketing. My guest this week is HubSpot’s Inbound Recruiting Manager, Hannah Fleishman.
Hannah brilliantly explains the concept of Inbound Recruiting and shares lots of practical advice which will benefit employers everywhere.
In the interview we discuss:
• What is Inbound Recruiting and how do you do it?
• How Recruitment Marketing is changing
• Different types of content for different parts of the Recruitment Marketing funnel
• Top of funnel brand awareness building
• Nurturing potential candidates based on where they get stuck in the funnel
• What formats are most effective
• The importance of having a content mindset
Hannah also gives advise on generating content when resources are limited and shares her view on the future of Recruitment Marketing.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Edward Dias [00:00:25]:
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Matt Alder [00:00:48]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:23]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 131 of the Recruiting feature podcast. Recruitment marketing is changing fast, and one thing I’ve noticed recently is that an increasing number of employers are adopting the principles of inbound marketing for their recruiting activity. However, I think that too much of the industry debate on this focuses on technology, when it should be focusing on content. Who better to demystify inbound marketing for recruiting than HubSpot, the company who actually invented the phrase inbound marketing in the first place? My guest this week is Hannah Fleishman, Inbound recruiting manager at HubSpot. Hannah brilliantly explains the concept of inbound recruiting and shares lots of practical advice which will benefit employers everywhere.
Matt Alder [00:02:20]:
Hi Hannah and welcome to the podcast.
Hannah Fleishman [00:02:22]:
Hi Matt. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:24]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Hannah Fleishman [00:02:29]:
Absolutely. So my name’s Hannah Fleishman. I’m the inbound recruiting manager at HubSpot. I’ve been at HubSpot for about six years now, started out on the PR team and moved over to the employer, brand and recruitment marketing side. And at HubSpot, we call that inbound recruiting because we do everything the inbound way. So my team is a team of marketers and content creators who work on how to share the story about HubSpot’s culture and workplace.
Matt Alder [00:02:55]:
Fantastic. And I can’t wait to sort of ask you more about that and find out the sort of the HubSpot way of recruiting as it were before. We do though, just in case there’s anyone listening who’s not familiar with HubSpot.
Matt Alder [00:03:07]:
Could you tell us a little bit.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
About what the company does and perhaps also about the sort of specific recruiting challenges you have?
Hannah Fleishman [00:03:15]:
Absolutely. So HubSpot’s a technology company. We’re based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but we have seven global offices. We make growth, we have a growth platform stack. So what that means is we started with inbound marketing software to help businesses do things like blogging and email nurturing and social media. Now we have a sales platform as well. So that’s our CRM and our sales tools. And soon this summer, we’re coming out with a customer success tool. So HubSpot’s really a platform for businesses to do everything from top of the funnel marketing to supporting their customers, customers with our tools on the HubSpot platform. And what that means for our recruiting team is that we’re growing very, very, very fast. So HubSpot has almost 30,000 customers globally and we have over 200 open positions at our job site just right now. And that number is always growing. So for recruiters, that means we have a big recruiting team based here in Cambridge, and then we have a growing recruiting team based in our Dublin office. So that’s our European headquarters. And then we have recruiters based in Tokyo as well as in Singapore. So we have a very, very global recruiting team who spend a lot of their time sourcing great candidates and top talent and really working with my team to share the story of why HubSpot is great for them.
Matt Alder [00:04:28]:
Now, HubSpot obviously famous for inbound marketing, and there are, there are lots of employers out there who are trying sort of different ways of doing their, of doing their recruitment marketing. And, you know, HubSpot comes up in conversation quite a lot as something, you know, something that people look at in terms of marketing methodology to see how it might be APPL to recruiting. But obviously, unsurprisingly, you guys are already there. So talk to us about inbound recruiting. What does it mean and how do you do it?
Hannah Fleishman [00:05:01]:
Definitely. So you’re absolutely right about kind of the phrase inbound and the approach of doing things in an inbound way. So HubSpot coined the term inbound marketing over 10 years ago. And since then it’s really caught on as kind of the future and the new way of doing marketing. So the original idea was that traditional advertising was always interruptive. So things like TV commercials, things like radio ads, they really gotten consumers away as opposed to helping them learn anything about your product or service or attract them to you. So this idea of inbound and how we think about the inbound methodology is help your customers find you by providing valuable content and really great experiences. So we do that through content creation, through free tools as a business. And a couple years ago we kind of asked ourselves, well, you know, if you look at how recruiting has changed in the past 10 years as well, it’s really a similar situation where candidates aren’t really the candidates now are the ones who are in power. So it used to be that you would publish a job spec or a job requirement and then you would hope to hear back from someone and you know, for the candidate, it wasn’t a great experience because, you know, it wasn’t up to them what content they got. They weren’t able to ask anybody questions. They just had to wait and kind of hope a recruiter got back to them. We don’t think that’s a very inbound way of doing things. We want to help people, we want to help candidates, and we want to provide value. So we take an inbound approach to recruiting, which basically means we also use the same kind of tenants as inbound marketing. We provide free content for candidates. We help them learn about what it’s like to work here before they actually apply and really work with them every step of the way and throughout the funnel. So from job application to interviews to accepting a job offer, to understand through our content how they can do that in a way that’s best for them.
Matt Alder [00:06:43]:
Okay. I mean, that’s a really interesting approach. I think there’s a few things I want to kind of dig down and find out a bit more about. But perhaps we could start with content. So you sort of mentioned content for the job seekers. What type of content do you find works? And are you using different types of content for different stages of the funnel?
Hannah Fleishman [00:07:05]:
Yeah, good question. So we do do a lot of types of content right now. And we’re trying to get to a point as an inbound recruiting team where we can make a of those resources and how to do content really self service for employees. So we’re growing really, really fast. So I would say part of our team is all about creating original great content for candidates. That’s in the form of blog posts on our careers blog content on our jobs website. We have a lot of videos and interactive information on our jobs website. That’s social media. So we have a HubSpot Life Facebook page, We have a HubSpot Life Instagram account. And then we work with hiring managers, recruiters and our leadership to create content from their perspectives about how Their teams are growing and why their team is a great place to learn. So it’s a lot of original content from our team, as well as working with other teams to use those things and the things that we learn, to apply it to their own teams and share their own perspectives.
Matt Alder [00:08:02]:
And as people move down the funnel, does the type of content, the type of content change? I mean, presume you have content that’s sort of put out there just to sort of grab the attention of your potential audience. How do you use content to sort of nurture them through to actually hiring them?
Hannah Fleishman [00:08:22]:
Yeah, good question. So we’ll focus, probably the majority, like 80% of our content efforts are really focused on top of the funnel and brand awareness. So we know that some of our biggest hiring challenges come because a lot of people don’t know who HubSpot is, let alone why HubSpot’s a great place to work. You know, if you live in Dublin or if you live in Boston, where our biggest offices are, there’s a good chance that you’ve heard that we’re a glass door, best place to work, that we’re a local best place to work, or an entrepreneur, best place to work. But really outside of that and where we’re trying to recruit more candidates from in new markets, they’re not familiar with HubSpot, let alone our culture. So if we think about that brand awareness piece, we’re really focused on top of the funnel. And that’s where a lot of the social media comes into play. And that’s why our careers blog is very top of the funnel focused with things like career tips and general career advice as opposed to specific HubSpot information. So once someone learns about HubSpot and kind of signs up to follow us, we nurture candidates by working really closely with our recruiters to understand where our candidates getting stuck in the funnel, why are they deciding they don’t want to work here? Where are they having Trouble Understanding the HubSpot story? So we really work with them to identify those gaps and then we create content about that. So an example would be if you’re a engineer and you’ve kind of seen some things coming from HubSpot about how we build products and how our software development team works and how autonomous developers are here. That’s kind of that top of the funnel interaction. You’re like, oh, that sounds sort of interesting. Maybe I’ll kind of watch that company for a while. And then for our recruiters, we talk to them and we say, you know, what are some things that engineers don’t know about HubSpot that you wish they did know. And then we’ll do a Facebook live video interview with our VP of engineering talking specifically about those things. So then not only do we have that next step of learning for the candidate, but our recruiters are kind of geared with a link to content that they can share specifically with candidates they source.
Matt Alder [00:10:15]:
And in, in terms of, in terms of sort of mix of, mix of formats because obviously, you know, photos, videos, long form text, they’re all different kinds of, kinds of content. Cool tools that can be, that can be used. What, what are you finding to be the most effective? Is it, is, is it, is it video? Is it, is it photos on Instagram? What, you know, what, what sort of feedback you getting from the formats you’re using?
Hannah Fleishman [00:10:40]:
Yeah, so I would say definitely video as well as short form LinkedIn content. So about a couple months ago, we’ve been putting a ton of energy into our careers blog and we were realizing that lately. And this is not just a HubSpot recruiting problem, but, you know, HubSpot marketing generally blog posts just aren’t performing as well as they used to. You know, Google has drastically changed its algorithm over the past couple years. It’s really hard to get found on Google now, even if you have SEO like HubSpot.com has. So we weren’t getting all of the discoverable and new traction for our careers blog that we had originally hoped for. So we started thinking, okay, let’s change our framework a little bit and think about doing more top of the funnel discoverable content in a way that makes sense for our bandwidth. So we are a small recruitment marketing team. It doesn’t make sense for our one content creator to spend all day on blog posts that really aren’t going to get a lot of traction until later on and really have more organic growth down the line. So we think about effective in terms of what performs the best, but also what’s worth the energy that we put into it. And for us, that’s really been short form LinkedIn content. And that means not LinkedIn articles, but LinkedIn status updates. You might notice that if you post a status on LinkedIn now, even if it’s like a photo of something you’re doing at work or if you share a link to something, it probably gets a lot more traction, a lot more likes and engagement and comments than an article that you post, which you then have to try to distribute on your own. The LinkedIn feed has just gotten a lot better at sharing content and really extending the half life of content. So things get discovered weeks and weeks after you post it. So one experiment that we did recently was we have a lot of open sales positions on our team. So we took 15 of our global sales managers. We gave them a short prompt every other week that said something like, what’s the biggest sales lesson you’ve learned in the past year? How do you think sales reps should think about starting their career as a BDR who is someone you’ve learned from in the sales organization and they just have to write 200 words or less. So like two paragraphs and they post that to their LinkedIn every other week. And then we track the engagement. We ended up getting over 500,000 views combined on just that content, which performed way better than if we were to spend a lot of energy writing a longer form blog post about sales. So the LinkedIn status updates for us have been doing really well. So we’re trying to be thoughtful about how we get more of our leaders publishing those on topics that candidates care about.
Matt Alder [00:13:05]:
That’s interesting. And I think that leads quite well into my next question, which was going to be how, you know, how easy do you find it to get content from the wider business? And it sounds like you’re sort of chunking that down into bite sized pieces to make it easy for people to do. How else do you sort of encourage the wider business to get you recruitment marketing style content?
Hannah Fleishman [00:13:32]:
There’s one aspect where I think HubSpot is lucky in that regard. It doesn’t always make it easy, I’ll be honest. But because we started out as an inbound marketing company and content was king, we were already a content driven company. Everyone at HubSpot has already, since day one, been thinking about content as the solution for any kind of marketing or growth problem. So when you have employees who already have that mindset, they naturally are going to turn to content when there’s some sort of problem at hand. And that problem for us is hiring. So Dharmesh, our co founder, published HubSpot’s culture code five and a half years ago. He did that not as a recruiting tool, just because we wanted to talk about our culture and thought it was important to distill it into one kind of codified piece of content. And that’s because he just thinks like a content creator. So he created the Culture Code. It now has over 3 million views today. It’s one of our best recruitment marketing tools and I think we’ve always been in that habit of creating content about our culture ever since then. Even if we didn’t have a formal employer brand team or we formally didn’t have my team, so today people still want to create content and people come to us constantly with, hey, our support team did this awesome initiative. How do we share content about it? Hey, we’re trying to hire more analysts for our business enablement team. How can we talk about a day in the life of business enablement? So we have a lot of people who want to do it. It’s just our team’s job to help guide them on what makes the most sense for their content creation skills and how they can reach the most people. So we actually have a lot of energy, which is great and we’re very good about keeping it top of mind. So housebots, very transparent. We share tons of the content that we do internally as well as externally. We show up to events, we make sure we make use of employee groups and our slack channels, and we’re kind of always sharing what’s going on on the employer brand and inbound recruiting team.
Matt Alder [00:15:22]:
So what would your advice be to an employer who wanted to start, who wanted to kind of really ramp up their, their approach to inbound recruiting? You know, what would your sort of top tips be?
Hannah Fleishman [00:15:34]:
My top tips would be first things first. Don’t try to boil the ocean. When I took over the I started the inbound recruiting team here two years ago and I was coming from a PR background and a content background and there was this big massive challenge in front of us where we wanted to formally build an inbound recruiting program which meant top, middle, bottom of the funnel, all pieces of content as a team of one. I tried to do it all for a team, for a company that has 1200 employees at the time in a lot of open positions. I realized quickly that I tried to do too much and it would have made more sense to build programs for people to really DIY and do self service content and then focus on the biggest challenges that we have, both short term and building the road ahead for long term. So as you’re getting started, try not to get bogged down by the quick wins. You’re going to have a lot of hiring managers and leaders reaching out to say, hey, can you create this for our team? Can you do this for our team? We need this kind of one pager or piece of collateral for this event that we’re doing. Can you get us this? Can you do that? You’re going to want to say yes to all that stuff because it’s easy to provide value really fast. I really recommend Focusing on the biggest hiring challenges that you have and building out a content program for the next couple of months that will help you get there both short and long term. The other thing that I would say is make it as easy as possible for employees to share the content that you are creating. Because as you’re getting started, you could write great blog posts or do great video interviews about a day in the life. If no one’s seeing them, it’s really not worth your time. One thing that we put a lot of energy into is educating our employees on what exists. So on our internal wiki, we have an inbound recruiting library that we update frequently. So it’s all the content that our team creates so that you know where to go if you want to send or share something. We really use Slack and email a lot to share kind of the new content that we have coming out and really making it easy for people with lazy tweets and canned copy to share what we’re creating.
Matt Alder [00:17:31]:
So, final question. What’s next? What’s on your radar for the sort of next 18, 24 months? How does this move forward? What kind of innovations are you looking at?
Hannah Fleishman [00:17:42]:
So I’m excited about the next year. I think inbound recruiting, both at HubSpot and sort of beyond, is finally starting to build traction. And for us, what that means is we’ve built the foundation pretty well for what an inbound recruiting program looks like. I think we have a really good relationship with our recruiters and our recruiting team so that we know how to use each other and leverage each other. So over the next year, year and a half, what we’re really going to be focused on is how do we take that content to the next level? I think we have a really good amount of content being published on a regular basis, and it’s really quality content. Our goal is how do we push that, to push the envelope on that. So do more video. If we’re already doing a lot of video, how do we figure out which videos have the most engagement and do more of those and then experiment with new video for the other. For the other kind of component of it? The other thing we’re thinking about is how do we do more, you know, thinking about things like free tools? So are there free culture tools or plugins that we could build that would be interesting to someone who’s not looking for a job? How do you extend the network beyond just an active job seeker to reach people who are just passive talent? I think one way to do that is by thinking about it like more of a marketing campaign and being more buzzy about the work that you do so that it’s not always about your company. So I’m really excited we have a PR manager joining my team next week, so she’ll be very focused on how do we tell HubSpot’s story beyond people who already know about HubSpot and really being proactive about pitching our story in global locations and being creative about the story that we’re telling. So the combination of PR some more beyond content, how do we think about free tools and kind of the future of things like chatbots for our website, sort of stuff like that, that pushes the envelope.
Matt Alder [00:19:25]:
Hannah, thank you very much for talking to me.
Hannah Fleishman [00:19:27]:
Thank you for having me. This was fun.
Matt Alder [00:19:29]:
My thanks to Hannah Fleischman. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your app store. If you’re a Spotify user, then you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site, you can 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.
