Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're gonna talk about how to attract top marketing talent. So, in the last couple weeks, actually, let's see, so this week three new employees started for me, and then we have two more starting on the paid advertising side in the next few weeks as well. So the questions is, and it's a question I get a lot when I do the Growth Everywhere interview, always at the very end people are like, 'oh you know I'm looking for new VP of marketing talent, I'm looking for new talent ...' It's just really hard to find top marketing talent. I would argue that finding great marketing talent is harder than finding great designers or developers, but the good thing about marketing talent is, once you find someone that's really good, you're pretty much set there, you can have them build out a team under them. With designers and developers you just continually hire more and more and more - I don't think there's ever a cap for designers and developers.
So, you know, going to answer the question 'how do you attract top marketing talent?' So I think first and foremost for me, if you have any type of, you know, social following or if you have any email lists at all, you know, every once in a while I'm gonna blast a list and I'm gonna send them to my jobs page, which is hosted by Workable, and from there it has, you know, my listing and things like that and they're dumped into my applicant tracking system. I know from there, you know, it sounds very basic but this is just one way to do it. Having an applicant tracking system like that just makes your life a lot easier and then you can have your Ops person, or HR manager help move them through the process.

Neil Patel: So the big thing that I found is, when you're recruiting marketing talent - and this is actually for any talent - people want to know about you, the Company, the culture - all these things are really important to them - the benefits, et cetera, it's not just about the pay. So don't just talk about it in a job description, everyone does that, but create a video. I've found that when you create a video and you showcase some of these things, it's much easier to recruit top talent. From there, because we're specifically focusing on marketing, I've tried like the [inaudible 00:02:17], the Craigslist, that hasn't really helped me. I go look at all the people who, you know, do an amazing job with their online marketing that are in similar spaces or even in my space. I then go to LinkedIn, find the people who run those departments and I literally just start poaching them. I know that sounds bad, but hey, that's the reality of it and that's how a lot of large companies recruit - it's literally a poaching game.
So go up to LinkedIn, manually recruit and what I do is, I don't directly poach saying like 'hey, do you wanna apply for this job? We'd love to have you apply.' I create an awesome and amazing job description and then I'll send out a message. Let's say Eric is the VP of Marketing for Uber, right, I'm making this up, and I wanna recruit him for my car service. I'll be like 'hey Eric, love what you're doing, I know you're in the car booking space, if you know anyone that would be an amazing fit for this job, please let me know' and when we send it to people who we ideally want to recruit but we don't directly try to recruit them, funnily enough, we get a lot of times be like 'oh, actually I may be interested' or they'll say 'hey, actually I know a few people that would be a good fit' and that's how we tend to get most of our marketing talent.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and it seems pretty basic, but yeah, what Neil says is completely right - you have to go, you know, you have to go to LinkedIn start to poach people 'cos that's where people are, right. Usually, the best people aren't looking, and the thing is, you know, even if they aren't looking or ... The best people already have a job already, right, they're not actively applying to jobs on Indeed and Monster.com. So you have to [inaudible 00:03:48] them, at least get in to a conversation with them, right. What I like to do is, I like to take them out to lunch and meet them a few times in person, 'cos often times when you're investing in, you know, a marketing hire [inaudible 00:03:57] better to be spending their money and things like that, so it's a pretty big time hire. Talk with them a few times, get on a few phone calls and things like that.
One tactical thing you could do, I actually wrote a blog post on this if you just google 'forced hiring Growth Everywhere' there's a post on basically how Mark Roberge, the Chief Revenue Officer of HubSpot, how he goes about hiring people and what he does is, you know, let's say he has people on his team, he'll go look at their LinkedIn and then he'll make a list of people that he wants to talk to and he'll talk to that person on his team and say 'hey, I made a list of these people, who do you think is worth talking to?' And then from there, you know, he might ask for an introduction or he might just go reach out to those people alone.
One other thing that I do - this is something that started working recently - Neil and I talked about writing more on LinkedIn, just writing more longer-form updates, and those updates when they are pretty good, they get a lot of reach, and in my LinkedIn profile I put, you know, 'we're looking for killer salespeople and killer paid advertising people' and guess what? I actually have people reaching out to me now - people that are reading those posts. There's this guy, his name - or I shouldn't give his name - but basically, he reached out and then he, let's say, he's like 'yeah, you know, I close three hundred to six hundred thousand dollar deals, blah, blah, blah' and yeah, I mean, you should have that level of talent reaching out to you, so that works as well.
I'm also gonna say that, some of the best talent that I've ever hired before is people that have come, you know, just kind of, when I write like a social media update, I've had someone come through, he ended up working for me and then ended up going to HubSpot. So sometimes you get lucky with that stuff too, but you don't wanna count on luck. I'd recommend creating a process, reaching out to people and using LinkedIn recruiter to hit these people up. People look down on recruiters, I think recruiters are really useful, actually, someone that we picked up this week came from a recruiter. It is expensive, but this guy is really good and he's gonna save us a lot of time at the end of the day. So, look for great recruiters, ask people, right, recruiters are worth their time and effort once you can afford them but if you're starting out, save that money, you know, just do hand-to-hand combat.
So, that's it for today and we'll see you tomorrow.

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