How we used our own tool, SalesHandy, to recruit our Marketing Manager in just under a week
Recruitment is the one thing that every firm, Big or Small, Privately Owned or Public, has in common. Every firm needs its employees whether it is an Office Boy, Engineers or Managing Directors. Employees are an integral part of any company. There is an African Proverb that fits in perfectly here: “If you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together.”
What I am trying to say is, when it comes to building a company, One man show is not enough. Hard working, Smart and Proactive employees are what keeps the company up and running.
How a company recruits its employees is a trailer of a film which you only get to see, if you are recruited. And like every other company, we too need employees and have a recruitment process through which our candidates go through before joining us.
Now, until this month, we were recruiting in a way, that a regular company does. LinkedIn, Job Portals, Internal Referral Method and some other things. But the results we were getting were not satisfactory for we wanted to fill positions, Fast! But we were not ready to accept anybody just because we wanted right people who would fit in our company’s culture.
So, we went for some untraditional method. Now, everybody knows what Email Marketing and Cold Emailing is, and we tried that for our recruitment process.
We got the data from our HR’s LinkedIn profile. You can do the same using these steps:
Step 1: In LinkedIn’s Homepage, Go to Me and then Go to Settings and Privacy.
Step 2: In settings, scroll down and select “Getting an archive of your date”
Step 3: When you will click on the option as mentioned above, it will look something like this:
Always use the default option of “Fast File only” and then select “Request archive” option. When you select that option, LinkedIn will ask for your account’s password.
Step 4: After typing in your password, You will just have to wait.
Step 5: Check after some time, it will be ready, and you just have to click on download button.
Now, using these steps, you will have a list of names, email addresses and other public information of the people who you are connected on LinkedIn with. You can then put in filters and bifurcated the data into small batches according to the Skills and Positions.
We were in dire need of Marketing Personnel and we followed the steps mentioned above using our Marketers profile as they were connected with leading marketers. This hunt for a Marketing Manager was going on for quite some time. When I say quite some time, I mean really quite some time. So, we decided to send the first campaign to Marketing People.
Here are the steps to send Mail Merge Campaign:
Step 1: Open your Gmail Account. If you are not signed in, you can sign in from here.
Step 2: Signup with SalesHandy from here.
Step 3: Refresh your Gmail account.
Step 4: After refreshing your account, click on the Auto Follow-Up campaign tab.
Now this will take you to our Web app. You can skip the last two steps and enter our web app fromhere too.
Step 5: After entering SalesHandy’s web app, Select Mail Merge Campaign option.
Step 6: You will be directed to our Mass Emailing feature a.k.a Mail Merge Campaign. Here is how it looks and works:
Here is the detailed guide on “How to use Mail Merge and Automated Follow Up” which will help you further. Of course, we know it like the back of our hand.
When I say Campaigns, I mean we sent an invitation email for an interview to around, 200 people who wanted a “Change in Job” and were in Marketing field. And with the first email, we scheduled three other follow up emails too at an interval of 2, 7 and 30 days respectively.
After the first email, the response was not that great. We just got 6–7 people replying us. This disappointed us. But we never gave up. The campaign ran its course and when the third email hit the candidates inbox, we were getting more than 10% reply rate in our every campaign. Here is the screenshot of our HR’s Mail Merge Page:
After that day, we scheduled more than 10 interviews over the period of 3 days and shortlisted 2 guys and they had their 3–4 more rounds of interviews and we finalized a guy with 4.5 years+ experience in marketing field with specialization in Social Media Marketing.
The recruitment team was on the cloud 9 after these results. I mean, after so many efforts and techniques and methods, we finally know what works and gives the results in the shortest way possible. They kept on campaigning and at any given time there are at least 20+ replies in our HR’s inbox.
Some Facts: This whole process started on 28th August and we locked our candidate on 7th September. That is like 9 days and all the people in recruitment knows, how it feels like to hire an experienced personnel. They are hardest to get. We are still looking for a Senior Software Engineers with more than 5+ years of experience. And I am sure we are going to hire our Engineer using this method only.
Change is the only constant. And we are ready to change ourselves and our recruitment process. Are you?
