Re-tooling Your Own Recruiting Tools
The recent article in Fortune entitled Hot job: Selling Web ads is one that makes me snicker about how people don’t utilize the resources they have to recruit.
The article speaks of how pressed online advertising firms are to find great salespeople and how in-demand such people are. Companies are offering 2x salaries and using recruiters and paying higher fees in order to get people in the door. One of the missing items that I believe these types of companies are missing is the fact that they have their own recruiting tool at their disposal. What is it? It’s their own product and or business model.
Hiring a sales director "is the single biggest challenge that we have faced," says Dina Kaplan, co-founder of Blip.tv, a video-sharing site. Kaplan says she spends as much as six hours a day searching for the right person. She's close to a hire - "We're trying to steal someone from a TV network," she says - and may offer twice her own salary.
If you look at Blip.tv’s model which is a video sharing site what better way to recruit someone by using their own platform to do so? Create a very compelling, funny engaging video about what the company is searching for and distribute it via their network, Youtube etc. Make the job fund instead of tiresome, boring and spending six hours of your day doing so. This way Dina could not only push her product using her employment value proposition but she can recruit the person of her dreams by doing so.
I have seen this time and time again that companies don’t use their own tools to complete their own work, but rather go outside to spend ten times the amount of money to recruit someone. It may take a little more work, some phone calls but what better way to promote your company to recruit the right fit?