Recruiting Ops Might Be Your EB Secret Weapon
It’s my strong opinion that the job of employer branding at the startup stages is to unlock recruiting outcomes. Bottom line.
45-second read (+1:48 video)
If you’re an in-house recruiter at a high-growth startup that doesn’t have a formal employer brand leader and you want that job, here’s how you can get it:
Move into a Recruiting Ops role—formally or informally.
Learn (qualitative) and measure (quantitative) what your recruiting team needs in order to book more meetings with your ICP.
Report this back to leadership in the form of:
“Our recruiting team needs [X] to accomplish [Y]. I can enable that in the short term while building our brand cred with passive talent to make recruiting easier over time. Can I own this full-time?”
If they answer yes, you’ve just become the most tactical employer brand leader in the industry.
Step 2: Get your creative team in place.
Because [X] is:
Content that your recruiters can use in outbound and on social (paid and organic) that makes starting conversations with the right people easier and hiring faster.
Long-term community building: Podcasts, webinars, fireside chats/micro-events, etc.
But first, let’s get you the job.
Some important context:
It’s my strong opinion that the job of employer branding at the startup stages is to unlock recruiting outcomes. Bottom line.
Those outcomes are:
1. Making it easier it is for your recruiters to start conversations with candidates.
It’s easier for recruiters to start conversations with candidates because candidates know who you are.
How to measure: Response rates to outbound messages, quality of inbound (not volume), and what candidates are saying to your recruiters.
2. The productivity of those conversations increases.
Recruiters are having more productive conversations because candidates are more bought-in and educated as the result of you effectively distributing information via content to consume before they apply.
How to measure: UX interviews with your recruiters, candidates, and new hire's.
3. It's easier to fill roles.
How to measure: New hire numbers like roles filled and in what timeframe.
4. Educating the vast majority of your audience that is not currently in-market.
Long-term brand content: Everything that establishes you as the experts in your space.
How to measure: You don’t. You just do it because you believe that if done right, it enables the other outcomes.
This is why I think that someone who’s already in-house with experience in recruiting ops would be well-positioned to run employer branding the right way.