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The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Serge Boudreau

by Julia Fras | Sep 20, 2023 | The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing

It’s always interesting to understand what other parts of the world are doing better, or worse when it comes to recruitment marketing and employer branding. Joining James Whitelock this week is Serge Boudreau, Vice president of business development at CareerBeacon and 1 half of the hosts at the Recruitment Flex podcast. Serge and James discuss the difference in strategies, tactics, methodology and tech in recruitment marketing in North America and Europe.

Episode Transcript:

00:01.91

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back everybody to The Marketing Rules Podcast. It’s my pleasure to welcome on board Serge Boudreau. Serge, the man, the legend. Thank you for joining me today. Now, you know I know, I follow your podcast and I follow you and Shelly’s work. However, for the people out there in Europe and UK who probably might not be as familiar with your work and background. Can you give us a little bit of history of how you started, and how you got to where you are today.

00:33.61

Serge Boudreau

James, thank you so much for having me! I thought I was internationally known, I thought I was internationally famous. But I think this is a good opportunity to give you a brief introduction. I am the vice president of business development and partnerships at a company called Career Beacon here in Canada. I am also the host of The Recruitment Flex. Number one HR podcast in Canada, we have around 260 episodes, been going on for 4 years. I’ve been in this space for around 20 years, both as a practitioner also as a leader but I’ve also spent a lot of time on the other side of the ledger, which is working with companies like Indeed and Workopolis, which was very famous here in Canada.

01:28.42

ThinkinCircles

Um, that’s quite a background ah, to be honest, you I mean this? ah you know you dropped a couple of big names in there which is ah which is good. Um, and yeah and you know what it was like before we get into the dog to what was it that you. got you into podcasting because I get fascinated by meeting other podcasters, right? and I always wonder what? Why is it what that drove you into that you know in in there in the first place.

01:53.59

Serge Boudreau

Well to be simple. It was. We started a podcast in May Twenty so think about when the pandemic hit in March um, I am a very social person I like to talk a lot I found that all my public speaking or anything that I was doing was had gone away. I knew nothing about podcasting, but I did listen to 1 podcast in the industry that really inspired me and that was Chad and cheese. Then after that I found podcasts like recruiting future which I know is very popular in the U K and across Europe. But reality, I wanted to figure out if I can do it and reading a lot on it before is like I think the average podcaster goes 6 episodes. Um, and I’m like I am going to beat that. And the first year we record around 30 and then start growing a little bit of an audience the second year was a little bit more than 30 years really when we saw a huge uptake and I’ve been addicted to podcasting ever since when did you start your podcast, James.

02:55.15

ThinkinCircles

Ah, started in late 2019 so just before the ah the pandemic hit so about six months or so 6 or four or six months before pandemic hit. Um, um, we’re on I think episode 130 or something like that. I mean, you’ve got a great work ethic and I know you guys are incredibly regular What I’ve found generally and ah this diff episode is not about recruit and podcasting right? This is we are going to talk about, but I’ve found that um just the just sheer workload is just getting the guest and it’s everything outside of the actual recording which is the bit that is that takes the effort, right? and I think most podcasters agree on it is this you know arranging it will do need all the admin right for podcasting is what takes time.

03:38.30

Serge Boudreau

That is by far the biggest challenge people starting a podcast. Don’t realize how much work there is behind it and as you get better. It gets a little bit more systemized, and you have a playbook, and you have contractors to help you out. But I’ve gotten. Down to what I think is an art as far as just I know exactly how long each episode is going to take me to edit and record and then release but it is a lot of works. But I tell you there’s nothing. That’s really been as good for my career as podcasting because the ability to talk to people that. Really, I wouldn’t have an opportunity, and this is a great way to bring them on really pick their brand get an idea of what’s going on in the industry. It’s given me ah a lot of knowledge to tell you the truth.

04:25.96

ThinkinCircles

And it’s a good way to just meet some interesting people, right? That’s all I was fine you know I mean it’s just a great way to just get to get under the skin of some real clever but clever people clever. It’s smart and I am an I ever will be basically. Um so.

04:28.30

Serge Boudreau

A hundred percent. Yeah, exactly.

04:41.20

ThinkinCircles

What we’re going to talk around a little bit today is we’re ah we’re both ah in the marketing space and the recruited marketing space. So, it would be I thought it would be a good idea to spend a few kinds of the next 20 minutes to half hour having a chat around some of the differences between the territories that we pretty much sit in. I’m going to lump all of Canada and North America all together. So, you those guys you’re that continent I’m going to take on Ku and Europe pretty much and it’d be good if we can just like explore the differences. What we do the same what we can learn from each other the stuff that we aren’t doing as well and stuff that we should be doing as well. Right? So, I think we would be good if we start right? beginning on the understanding of what recruitment marketing is when it comes to ah the Ta space and when it comes to ah you know people just knowing what they’re asking for and knowing what they want it to do right. I’m going to let you kick off with the understanding and then I’ll ship in for the for UK in Europe.

05:40.17

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, recruitment marketing is something that is not in a lot of practitioners vocabulary is still something new across the I think across the world, right? Ah recruitment marketing is all always happened. But. For us to name it and have it as a function I would say it’s the last ten to fifteen years where we’ve seen ah a really big difference and I think the difference has come because of the talent scarcity really the mismatch of the labour market has caused a lot of companies to consider. Hey just posting a job ad my job description on a job board randomly and getting hundreds of applicants those days are gone. You must be able to differentiate your company and show why this is the best place to work and I think recruitment marketing compared to say marketing is a little bit different. I think in marketing the goal is to sell as many widgets as possible as the goal in recruitment marketing is to pinpoint the right number of widgets, so you’re not overwhelmed with candidates that are not qualified. So, it’s a little bit more getting candidates to opt out then. In regular marketing is getting everyone to opt in right and this can be done through your message your channels very similar to a regular marketing practice of your distribution channels What your brand is how you’re going to market. But again, there’s a little bit of a difference and there’s not a lot of practitioners in recruitment marketing that came from marketing is my experience. A lot of practitioners in recruitment marketing are coming from the recruiter side I don’t know if you’ve seen that in your up in the U k.

07:14.77

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, we yeah, we’ve seen a little bit of that I think I know recruitment generally whether it’s we where we’re recruitment or staffing agency or whether you’re doing talent acquisition in-house. Most people describe it as you fall into it right? It’s not necessarily something you’re working towards. Think that there’s a little bit of recruiter marketing around and when we talk about recruit marketing, I’m bundling in employ branding and things in there as well right? and we were just yeah with yeah so that is it’s something that I don’t think anyone sets out probably to get into but and I don’t think over here. There are 1 or 2 practitioners from who have come from actual been actual recruiters. But at most come in who’ve maybe become um, have got like marketing degrees, and then moved into the into this space or where marketers were within an industry that is being recruited into where they’ve have had a contact and then moved into the theta space or moved into the recruitment agency. So, I think there’s more of I guess I’m going to put you know in the vertical market actual marketeers doing recruiter marketing in the Ku as opposed to recruiters who have moved into recruiter marketing. Um, and as for the understanding of what it is I think we’re even a bit we’re even slower behind you guys I think only probably in the last 5 years Is it really a thing I mean I’ve been doing this for you know over 10 years, but I think only now is it starting to become understood with ah the client base right? that this is something that can. Sit on top of just basically just of just sticking your jobs on a job board. There’s way more to it than that these days and only now is that you know is it coming and it’s starting to I guess go down the food chain of the size of businesses as well. So smaller businesses are now real understanding and again, but I don’t know if that’s the same for you guys that you’re seeing this has always been the purview of the big businesses to do this but now much more the Sem sized businesses is looking at doing more of this activity.

09:17.57

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, we’re seeing the same I think what we’re seeing is ah to your earlier point. We’re seeing a lot more marketers become recruitment marketers. But how it started was a lot of recruiters trying to muddle their way around and trying to figure it out. But yeah, to your point, we are seeing mid and smaller size companies really see the impact of recruitment marketing and what it means and what channels they should be going as everyone was just used to. Okay there’s a local job board that I can get candidates from I’m just going to put my plain old job description. They’ve realized that hey maybe I’m not that good. At this copywriting thing and they’re looking at external firms to help them, especially if they’re smaller medium size because the need is probably bigger for a mid to small size than it is for a larger company because a larger company. You’d think about just. Career pages of the largest companies here in in Canada say like a Scotia bank which is a very large bank here. They get thousands and thousands if not millions of visits to their career site but think about that small company. That’s maybe competing for the very same talent. They’re just not getting that natural attraction right? So, they must figure out a way to put themselves out there and really share their message, so people do consider them because they’re just not top of mind. So yeah, you’re right? We’re seeing a lot more of it and we’re seeing it even to companies with. Like start-ups. We’re starting tech start-ups are really focusing on employment branding understanding and recruitment marketing in general understanding that hey we got to compete against that telling against Google Meta or whatever the case is.

10:53.61

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, and I’m wondering if um if there’s a pull factor at both ends right? So, you’ve got the larger businesses that they’ve already got brand, and people are always going to want to have that on their on their on their cv also with the ah with the start-ups. They’re cool. They’re hip. They’re trendy. And people do want to work in that space because you’ve got the ah you’ve got the option to fly with them when they grow. It’s those people in the middle have been stuck there that arena’ aren’t the cool trendy start-ups aren’t they aren’t the big you know, financial brands. For instance, it’s the bits that stuck in the middle that require this more because they’ve the ones who are having the talent sucked out of them from either end I guess right because they’re just they they’re in a in the no man’s land a recruitment marketing. No man’s land. Basically, at that point. Um, yeah, so um.

11:38.95

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah know what I agree I agree completely.

11:46.31

ThinkinCircles

And what about ah you know, ah, that’s touching on the adoption of this and bringing this in, but it would be good to just to think about you know over here I think you know the pandemic probably did recruit a marketing a world of good in the fact that a lot of people within remote, so you had to change a playbook.

11:50.21

Serge Boudreau

Yeah.

12:05.53

ThinkinCircles

Right? And how you were going to get in front of these guys. It wasn’t just ah, how you didn’t you could know you didn’t have too necessarily be local anymore. You could spread your net a lot wider which meant you had to think slightly more strategically, so I think adoption then ah, took off and with a slight.

12:13.64

Serge Boudreau

Um.

12:23.20

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, better understanding but and a change of direction on how to do it better I don’t know if that was something that you guys saw as well.

12:29.66

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, we saw the same. Ah, we saw the pandemic really change how people recruited how they went to market and how they looked at talent in general right? You think about a company that was used to competing against a company across the street and now you’re competing against company across the world. So, you’re messaging needs to change. But I’ll be completely frank I expected to for it to continue and we’ve seen a drawback in the last year of those companies that were really going for talent across the world or even in different markets locally that they’re drawing back to their local market and local talent. And I think that’s a shame James I think it’s a shame because a lot of companies if you think about how many people want to work remotely and how skilled and qualified. There is why limit yourself to just that local area. Sometimes it’s just like a postal code of. Instead of having a pool of millions. You have a pool of five hundred a thousand people in total what a disadvantage, but we did see that during the pandemic, but it’s really drawn back in the last I would say last six months to a year we’re starting to see just like overall remote job postings. I think here in Canada is down to 6 or 7% and that’s peak was around 30% so we’re seeing come back. How do I track that local talent. How do we get people to be interested to come into the office. Which was not a consideration during the start of the pandemic or throughout the course of the pandemic. Really.

13:55.45

ThinkinCircles

And is that just basic is that basically because obviously business owners and business leaders are now more fixated on people back in the office. There are these concerns Around. There are trust issues. There’s you know, effectiveness issues. They want people back in in there so they can Monitor. Everybody. And physically see that people are doing the work and that whole ah holiday period of remote holiday period is now fading away is it is it that mentality or is it something different.

14:27.35

Serge Boudreau

I would say it’s part of that mentality I think it’s quite complicated right? I think one of the driving factors to be completely and this might sound like a conspiracy theory. But I think one of the things that’s driving. It is commercial real estate I think commercial real estate in the city that I’m in. Um. Is quite a driving city but downtown vacancy rates for office towers is over fifty so I think a lot of business are getting a lot of pressure to bring their people in I do think what you mention is the reality as well. There’s a lot of CEOs that in generally if you think about. The age in um, where CEOs came from There are usually um boomers that are a little bit. They’ve always worked at an office, and this was such a big shift for them. And they do light the impact of when they walk in and going into their office. Everyone looks at them. They feel a sense of control that is hard to do remotely I think remote was a great equalizer when it came to a lot of things skill really shown right? It wasn’t the power dynamic shifted a little bit. But there’s way more comfort with people working in the office with CEOs right now. It’s going to be interesting because if you think about um the leaders or the people who have the money right? The people who are driving the decisions they’re generally in their late fifty s or they’re either boomers or late generation X. And, now we’re starting to see the shift of millennials taking over leadership positions I don’t know if it’s going to shift back. Um, that’s the interesting thing I think the next five to 10 years. We’re seeing a lot of highly skilled people really push back of going back in the office full time. But there’s really no choice for a lot of these companies and as the dynamic to power shift. We might see that change I don’t know it’s going to be an interesting 10 years, but I do think commercial real estate and then just the comfort level of doing something for 30 years of your career then it’s disrupted then you must go back. I can see that being a challenge for a lot of CEOs and executives.

16:33.49

ThinkinCircles

It’s a little similar here I think I think there are larger businesses downsizing. You know I think you know in London canary wharf. You know it’s pretty much empty most of the time now and I think some of those some of those bigger businesses and bigger banks are moving offices because they simply just don’t need the space anymore. Because ah, there’s a big push in the up for people to work four-day weeks there’s a big push to continue with the remote working I think it’s you know, just from my um, diversity in equity and accessibility point of view that it makes it just easier to for people to work that way. I am getting certain demographics of the ah of the workforce back into back into work. You know working moms etc. You know those kinds of things. There are big pushes ran out. So, I think it’s a bit more I was going to say liberal with a small l right over here when it comes to that working environment. So it’s interesting that you there’s a real push so I don’t know the figures the figures off the head and this most of this is anecdotal from our client, but I feels like there’s a bit of a shift over here towards you know a much more flexible working I think that’s how it’s going here. Um, which again when it comes to. Marketing your roles and marketing your business and your employ branding is a gold mine, right? You know its’s perfect is what people want people want to have the option if they’re going for this job to be able to you know work two days at home. Maybe we’ only work four days a week that thing finish and work between so school hours and those kinds of things all that stuff is now on the table and makes it a way easier to sell that vacancies and build out your and sell your company culture because if that’s what it is right.

18:11.83

Serge Boudreau

Oh, imagine the competitive advantage there is especially with the groups that you mention as well as far as accessibility. How much easier it is and it’s a workforce that’s been under underrepresented here in North America and Canada and the us I’m sure it’s the same in Europe is. Like this was talking about the great equalizer. This was a great equalizer for them as well and the other group that had a big impact and I think we’re seeing flexibility is women and women in the workforce and unfortunately women are still um, still carried the biggest burden when it comes to raising children. So ah, the ability for a flexible schedule and going into work when it’s not convenient but in in a way that they can work around the rest of childcare pickup. All those things anyways in Canada we saw a big drop off women in the workforce during the pandemic and we’re starting to see that shift. Again, with a lot more women coming back to the workforce because of the enhanced flexibility. So, if you’re an organization that is really looking at ah looking at all talent pools, right? like in the past we had maybe 2 3 talent pools that we all aggressively went after but with talent scarcity and just the. Overall, how we look at the labour market is like how we can get more women back in the workforce how we can get people with disabilities. How can we focus on diversity equity inclusion and even here in Canada. There’s been a big focus on getting people with criminal records back to work. This is all part of recruitment marketing, right? so.

19:43.35

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, exactly.

19:45.87

Serge Boudreau

I completely agree but I think the biggest thing is companies that offer flexibility will be the winners in the coming 1020 years.

19:54.97

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, I completely agree. Um and that takes us nicely into strategy and how the and how recruit marketing strategy is ah rolled out on both sides of the of the pond we know we’ve touched on that diversity and equity and accessibility, and those themes are now playing apart. Over here. If you know it’s continually the biggest theme as is getting people with criminal records and people may have, been you know had ah a tougher upbringing getting those kinds of ah those demographics. Onto the workforce and untapped again as the that female population as well. But when it comes to the strategy on how you go about it. How you roll out your recruit marketing your employer brand your eve. Um. You know without we can. We can just it him to hit the highlights. We don’t need to go too deep there you know is there something that you think that is being done well over in in Canada when it comes to the distress year around recruit marketing.

20:55.72

Serge Boudreau

Well, I want to flip it around I think there’s something that Europe and UK does a lot better than Canada and the us and I think that is career sites if you look at career sites and the experience of a candidate applying in Canada in the us is dramatically better in Europe.

21:03.90

ThinkinCircles

Um, now. Okay, okay.

21:14.72

Serge Boudreau

Ah, just going try ahead. Ah Bos Van da hat to on my ah on my podcast and he’s in Dutch and he’s very involved in career sites and I had the opportunity just to really dig in I didn’t understand language.

21:26.12

ThinkinCircles

Um, yeah.

21:28.50

Serge Boudreau

In most countries and I think that’s a unique player in Europe that we don’t have in Canada and North America as much. Obviously, there’s a French language but the biggest thing that I notice is in Canada around 95% of sites. You need to register before you start applying and the drop off rate on that is tremendous. It’s huge. As in Europe is completely flipped around where it’s maybe 5 % that you do need to register and the reason, I point this out is you can have the best messaging you can have the most attractive brand. But if a can it comes to apply and it’s a really pain in the ass process to apply. They start thinking about your company after they’re putting these types of roadblocks in the application process imagine working there. It’s probably way worse in amount of bureaucracy and everything that you must go through so it’s a big deterrent. So, I want to call out how you guys do that way better than North America um 1 thing in if we look at strategy and how we do channel distribution in North America compared to Europe and I would say us is way more advanced than most of the other parts of the world um have quite an active economy just if you look at how a vehement they are overall. They’re going to do a lot more but 1 of the things that they’ve really taken advantage of and I’m shocked that the rest of the world hasn’t is programmatic advertising if you think about programmatic advertising and the recruit in just a regular marketing space.

23:00.89

Serge Boudreau

It’s been 9098 around maybe a little bit maybe 2000 recruitment marketing programmatic advertising has really been since um I would say 2015 and the adoption in the us has been quite high with companies like upcast Jovi Pando logic. As in Canada it’s been low but part of the issue in Canada is there’s only 1 player when it comes to say job boards or job distribution. That’s indeed so programmatic doesn’t work as well. I was shocked to see that Europe there’s. Almost no adoption and if you think about efficiencies and the ability to get to the right candidates programmatic is probably the most cost-effective way of doing it.

23:42.86

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, it’s one of these things that just doesn’t come up in conversation I don’t think, and I think there’s possibly and of a couple of reasons one the market if we’re talking around advertising and job boards. It’s fragmented right? There are literally thousands upon thousands of boards and places you could potentially.

23:56.78

Serge Boudreau

Um, yes.

24:02.42

ThinkinCircles

Ah, whether it’s through affiliate marketing and there’s so many places where you could have your message. Um, and I don’t think there’s one ah that I can think of there’s one good tool that can manage all that right? you know So I think it’s sometimes it’s just easier to go direct. Basically.

24:05.70

Serge Boudreau

Will.

24:21.90

ThinkinCircles

Then it is necessarily just you know to then to try and figure out everywhere. You should be and do put the legwork in and settle that up. Um, ah, within the staffing agency space and the and the Ta space over here is just you know.

24:24.89

Serge Boudreau

Yeah.

24:39.46

ThinkinCircles

Programmatic Average is never just a conversation which is which is which is which is strange right? and like I guess because you know because usually, I think it’s because it’s so niche right? You’re so targeted that I don’t think it comes up when it’s a slightly broader you know broader audiences, you’re after I think that that’s when programmatic probably works its best, but you know.

24:40.32

Serge Boudreau

Who.

24:50.39

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah.

24:58.79

ThinkinCircles

If you are literally looking for a certain role to fill a certain role a certain engineer or something like that. There’s probably you know there’s a niche job ball for it over there. You may as well just go just go straight directly to them right and use that as your job board of choice. Um, yeah, which is ah but it’s an and it’s an interesting, an interesting point.

25:08.30

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah.

25:10.83

Serge Boudreau

Boom.

25:18.54

ThinkinCircles

And when it comes to career sites, I think ah there was the whole candidate journey conversation blew up probably about ten years ago and there were lots of experts on how to do that and I think that really hit home at that point where you want to try and make the application process as easy as possible. You know that’s when this you know the apply with LinkedIn button. came out of nowhere and was on everything basically at that point and that has, and that philosophy has just stuck right? You don’t want to put up barriers and um, you know a lot a lot of businesses now do this whole like 3- or 4-part application process where you get the key information. You know off the applicant first.

25:39.30

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah.

25:57.45

ThinkinCircles

And then take them on that journey for filling out the rest of their profile. Um which they can then pick up. But yeah, I think over here. We’re much around to give us give us some details, right? because what we want too then do is contact you back right? Give us all that So here we can just then email you we can just go to come through Blast you with emails right.

26:13.60

Serge Boudreau

Um, it.

26:17.12

ThinkinCircles

On our latest jobs. You know that whole registered to apply thing I think just fell away because it was just seen it was seen quite quickly as just that real barrier to getting people to apply and so that’s dead in the water I think over here.

26:28.48

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, I was curious too. If g japer had an impact on the ability to register to apply and gather all that information because obviously it’s you just keeping data and keeping user data is quite different. In Europe wit compared to North America and that’s the other factor too when they talk about technology and technology that we’re leveraging um I heard someone from Silicon Valley say that japer was the great equalizer for Europe right? It gave the opportunity for companies in Europe to catch up with what’s happening in the Us.

26:47.32

ThinkinCircles

Yeah.

27:05.63

Serge Boudreau

I like I’m not sure right like I don’t know enough but does that have an impact because that’s a big difference between North America and Europe right now is exactly that legislation or that that plan.

27:19.11

ThinkinCircles

It was interesting GDPR like was everywhere for that that couple of years running into it. Um, and it was seen as ah as a real chore of an exercise to try and bring everybody to make sure everybody was compliant. Um, but like a lot of things. Ah probably.

27:27.76

Serge Boudreau

There.

27:36.87

ThinkinCircles

Probably not as more so in the euk than it is in Europe. There’s never any way to enforce a lot of that anyway, right? So, the enforcing of it isn’t anywhere unless you and because the enforcers of these of this legislation only usually go after the big names, right? So, the smaller small businesses.

27:51.51

Serge Boudreau

Yeah.

27:55.60

ThinkinCircles

So most in most cases is literally you just must prove that you’re doing your best Basically in those situations you don’t necessarily have to do everything by the book. Um, and I think most people what they did is there’s ah, there’s a statement when you’re handing over your data to say Yeah, I agree for this to be used.

27:59.50

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, no care.

28:13.94

Serge Boudreau

Um.

28:14.17

ThinkinCircles

I Don’t want it for marketing. But I do agree for you to use this to for this. Some people went to extreme lengths and had literally reams of Tick boxes say yes, yes, no, no yes, yes for these kinds of ah for these things. Um, but I think that’s quickly fallen by say but a wayside and just ah, there’s just a simple statement on most science when you’re handing over you do that? Yes, you can use it to contact me about vacancies. Or they like or don’t apply for the vacancy, right? That’s the that’s it. They’ve just taken that taken out attitude to it. Most people will just hit that hit that box. Um, and rarely I’ve ever heard of anyone asking for their details to be removed and will hand it over all their information back I Just I Just don’t think it.

28:36.45

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, anything.

28:52.80

ThinkinCircles

And of happens it might happen in other industries but not in in the recruitment space. Is it. You know because you can’t get away from it. You got to hand over your details, right? Um, so you can’t you. Ah, there’s nothing. You can go to do about it. So, I think it was the chore. But it’s one of those things that quickly dropped off the drop off the map. We do it and.

28:59.11

Serge Boudreau

Yeah.

29:10.29

Serge Boudreau

Well, I’m glad you gave me that perspective because I always thought that was rule with an iron fist that if you cross anything you were in deep trouble, and it goes to like as.

29:10.43

ThinkinCircles

Don’t really worry about it too much anymore.

29:24.28

Serge Boudreau

We’re talking it talks a little bit about the cultural difference when we talk about register to apply or anything. It’s just it’s a little bit different in how we share our info and I think it’s different between Canada and the Us as well. But. Do you find there when it comes to cultural difference in recruiting in in North America and the us so like to give you an idea even the us and Canada is so different so in the us you really must focus on make more money grow your career It’s very focused on. Status, right? As in Canada it’s like great place to work. You’ll be able to pick up your kids at work at school on time. A lot of flexibility like it’s more work life balance and I’m curious in Europe are you seeing difference between each country because like I look at Ku from and. External perspective and I see it a little bit different than maybe Spain and other countries as Ku is more closely aligned to the us when it comes to work ethic and just the overall thought of work is there. Do you find a big cultural difference in in your messaging how you approach candidates.

30:24.51

ThinkinCircles

Um, yeah, yeah, yeah.

30:33.86

Serge Boudreau

Ah, between all these different areas.

30:36.61

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, I mean there are ah some subtle and not so subtle differences between those markets on the way that you try to find cultural fit for your workforce and your potential workforce. Um. I think from the u k I think we’re probably a little bit different from the Us and I think there’s much more. Um, there’s much more a focus on flexible working, right? and that and the benefits of working and um than they then there ever were ah that whole ethos around. You know.

30:59.36

Serge Boudreau

Clamp.

31:08.29

ThinkinCircles

Get your you’re going to be in this job. Get your promotion make more money I think that’s nowhere near as important as it used to be because you know the benefit of working at this business means you’ve got what this these working hours to do that thing, I think there’s I think you know that’s similar in in for instance in the Netherlands you know, but they’ve.

31:13.65

Serge Boudreau

Okay.

31:28.10

ThinkinCircles

has been a little bit ahead of the curve than we have when it comes to you know work life balance. You know that’s been one of their big things. Um the differences in some of the other parts of Europe you know is it the legislation has dumbed down some of that and um, unionization.

31:45.73

Serge Boudreau

Yeah.

31:47.53

ThinkinCircles

has doesn’t comes into play so you look at the likes of France where it’s highly unionized. You know that you know, um, when you’re working in that space. Ah it there’s a different mentality in a different way. You go out to the to the market. Um, so yeah, so there are subtle differences. I mean I can’t speak for it. I don’t know all the different how each I don’t always like in Poland for instance, something like that. But I know we are our neighbours. You know there’s these scuttle differences and, but it’s driven by internal factors right by unions I just culture. You know, ah the economy. You know if you look at Germany and the economy isn’t greatly at a minute.

32:11.79

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah.

32:26.72

ThinkinCircles

So, you know people are just wanting to want a job necessarily the best job, right? So, I think there’s that mentality at moment.

32:34.99

Serge Boudreau

Unions is a very interesting point because there’s a mixture here in Canada and the us as you see countries like France obviously heavily unionized but is. Are unions attractive to job seekers overall in these countries is it if I’m in. Um if I’m in France as a job seeker would I prefer working for a union company or not a. Hearing candidates to make sure right? A lot of people do not want to work for a union as I don’t see the same in Europe but again, I’m judging from afar.

33:05.49

ThinkinCircles

Um, ah, will in in France because the unions hold so much power. Ah then you probably do want to be part of the allied nations, and you know the fact that that all the unions are joined up as well, right? There’s an ah they it’s quiet. You know it’s.

33:13.14

Serge Boudreau

Um, yeah.

33:16.70

Serge Boudreau

We.

33:21.42

ThinkinCircles

You can’t necessarily just put on an ah general strike but when one union goes on strike then the other ones are probably not too far behind um, and interesting I wouldn’t have normally said it was like that in the Ku would ah but there’s industries that are highly unionized and I think there is something in the pull factor. And the recruitment factor of being part of that larger group whether you are in healthcare whether young education in the frontline services. Those kinds of things are always those are things that usually are highly unionized, right? There are other unions for general workers and things like that. But I don’t think the general populace aren’t part of that.

33:51.00

Serge Boudreau

Move.

33:58.83

ThinkinCircles

Ah, you know that that thing, but I mean you have probably seen in the news that you know we’ve had strikes for the last couple of years with our healthcare workers. Our transport workers. Um, and there has been a knock- on effect that you know it started a slight ripple that one went one when started to strike then and the others started to.

34:04.49

Serge Boudreau

Um.

34:16.87

ThinkinCircles

Start to strike as well. But on the flip side if you were looking to get into healthcare at the minute would you want to because of all the issues that are going on if you want to, you’re just coming at a college, and you want to become a nurse and you were seeing that it’s Happening. You might go Well Actually it’s a pretty volatile industry. Probably not one that I necessarily want to go into. Don’t get paid a huge amount as because that’s what they’re striking around. So, I think um, it’s probably having a slightly counter ah counter effect to instead of drawing people in because your part of the union potentially pushing people away because it’s you know you? you know you’re going into a very tough job low pay. Um.

34:38.30

Serge Boudreau

Here.

34:56.16

ThinkinCircles

And potentially you’re going to have to strike to get what you did to get what you deserve. So, I’m wondering if there’s a push factor you know instead of a pull factor.

35:02.44

Serge Boudreau

Well, I think what it created is a little bit of a different market as well. If you think about going into nursing a lot of nurses or new to the feel, go work for companies that you travel right? So, a travel nurse you think about you’re going in different markets at different time. The. Pay is completely different. So obviously if you’re young and flexible. Yeah, you’re going to do that. Not even bough Ter about unions right here in candida anyways, I don’t know it might be different in and Europe and the Ku but we’re seeing a whole new subset of workers that are independent.

35:28.88

ThinkinCircles

Are.

35:40.30

Serge Boudreau

And we talk about like how the world will work has changed in the last couple of years I think that’s the biggest one is like the gig economy and the gig I’m going to give it a broad, so these are contractors but exactly to that point of: if I’m coming into a sector and it’s very challenging, low pay union strife all these things like what are my options. Yeah, I’ll travel to Canada or travel to Australia be a nurse for a year make double the amount of money I have that flexibility. So, I think the next five to 10 years is going to be interesting how the division of labour goes right? A lot of people want to work for themselves, and I think that’s like honestly, I think that’s going to be the norm in 20 years from now that we’re going to see people being contractors a lot more than just that security of working for an employer because you think about our parents like my dad worked for the same company for 3040 years I believe so that’s just not the norm anymore. That’s not the expectation so people are just thinking of work in a different way. So, when we talk about attracting people. Ah. There are ways that we can do it now that we couldn’t it’s opened a whole new economy a whole new way of working.

36:51.95

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah, it amazes me why some businesses never have ah, adopted that star like I know when we reach out to businesses who are saying look. We’re advertising this this this row. It’s like well have you considered doing it instead of it being a permanent full-time role. What about splitting it what about doing a bit more with it. Yeah, I mean you know, opening yourself up to a but you know a bigger candidate base basically instead of just pinning yourself down because that can be something of that that that word full-time and permanent might be just you know whether it was you know you know a fixed term contract or something like that. Roles that would never normally have been thought of like that right? where but yeah, I think we’re I think would be interesting and see how that how that how that works out. Yeah, and that influence of the gig economy on the wider workforce would be interesting and I think the businesses that. Do go down that route are probably going to find themselves getting way better quality and effective candidates and they probably would have if they were just holding themselves back. Um, and it’s Interesting. We talk around money and things that because I wanted to finish off on talking around investment in recruiter marketing because. What have we seen over the last couple of years that as the understanding has ah got better as the adoption has got better investment has grown as well where people realizing right? Well, we need to we can We want to do all this, but we want to put some money into its’re going to put budget behind it as Well. So, with that might include we’re going to have someone internally working as we’re going to outsource this to a business-like like think in circles or whatever you know, have you seen the just an increase in investment and money being put into that space. So

38:35.67

Serge Boudreau

Um, ah hundred percent I think we have seen I think that’s been the most interesting thing in this space in the last couple of years it’s just well I would last five years is the investment and it’s investments across every step of the way, right? like if we talk about recruitment and marketing. There’s. Five six different levers and if you think about employment brand and companies are taking it seriously because they know what the impact is channel distribution how you’re spending money how you’re going to the market. We’ve seen a big lift leveraging recruitment marketing tools as well. Which wasn’t really a thing. Five years ago, here we’re starting to see large investments. We’re seeing what companies in the recruitment marketing space ah getting bought like candidate id in the u k is the perfect example of a company that is exactly in recruitment marketing. So, to your point, I would say a lot of companies that I’ve worked with that had almost no budget or their recruitment marketing budget was a hundred percent just job board spend as we’re starting to see budgets spread across multiple channels. And both in tools but also where your ads and how you appear but also really um, I would say typical marketing things like how your copy looks all those things there never used to be any type of investment and we’re starting to see everyone up their game because they have to it’s Its force right? It’s there’s no choice in this labour market that if you’re not trying to stand out. You’re just going to be left behind and the cost of not having those roles filled a lot of business of realizes is a lot higher than spending money in recruitment marketing and getting the right talent for your roles.

40:16.30

ThinkinCircles

So, ah on that point interesting enough over here What we’ve seen ah that the spend increase is by recruitment agencies and starving agencies. They were the first ones to really start to spend a lot more money on recruiter marketing as opposed to the clients that they’re working for you know who could be struggling obviously to find roles who are then using recruitment agencies to them. But the agencies have got their own. We’ve seen agencies of all variant size. Very small have their own internal recruitment marketeers, right? And it’s now a space that is really growing.

40:49.72

Serge Boudreau

That’s interesting because it’s the opposite here. Um I would say staffing firms recruitment agencies are by far the worst recruitment marketers in Canada when it comes to a when you look at competing against Ta Internal Ta teams and. How they’re recruiting. It’s the worst I’ve and I see a lot of them. Well, they’re not spending money on it here. No, I get that.

41:09.85

ThinkinCircles

I went I didn’t say we didn’t say there were any good I said they were just spending money on it I didn’t say that I teas but no I did.

41:21.13

Serge Boudreau

But yeah, no, there is no investment from staffing the recruitment firms unless that I’m missing a big part of the industry, but I am not seeing it and I’m still seeing even the worst job ads the worst career sites are coming from staffing and recruitment agencies and I just don’t get it. And you’re right I’ve been noticing that in u k with companies like yourself. There’s a big emphasis on doze. But I think overall, and I might be wrong staffing and recruitment agencies is bigger in the u k than it is in Canada it might be like the Us. but it’s not as big and I see it first-hand when I’m working when I was working as a practitioner, and I was dealing with trying to recruit and in different markets. There was an endless list of people reaching out to me from the Ku from staffing agencies and you don’t. See that as much in Canada obviously there’s a driving market for recruitment and staffing agencies here but nowhere near what it is in u k.

42:20.42

ThinkinCircles

I mean in in the yeah up there’s ah, there’s a figure that usually gets flung around where there’s something close to 30000 recruitment agencies in the up with employing around about 150000 people in the in the in the space and it’s about you know, 0.05% of the workforces or something is in is in is in recruitment. Um, ah, um, ah, but that’s including 1-man businesses all the way up to the huge the huge businesses. Ah, which I think ah you know it’s crazy I mean it’s such a flooded market. But obviously, a market where someone can quite easily can easily start their own recruitment agency work out their bedroom work out their little office and way into the how many 6 figures per year and have a good life because that’s it that is the space in the market for it. You know, um and I maybe that’s way, most cases you just what you just steal your old Firm’s database basically and can and crack on that’s usually what happened, but I don’t know I mean I know in the and I don’t think there’s that many in the Us right? I wouldn’t imagine I think the us is a much you know there’s ah, there’s the less players on and in that space, right? And probably much more well-known players. That’s a thing I think that’s like my observation.

43:35.42

Serge Boudreau

Yeah, I think you’re right? and it’s the same in Canada. There’s a lot less obviously population is lower, but I would be shocked if there’s 10000 in all of Canada compared to 300000 right and how much should you say thirty thousand thirty yeah there’s probably not even.

43:49.74

ThinkinCircles

yeah, thirty thousand yeah thirty Thousand recruits yeah, um surge it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with you today. We will obviously include all your details in the show notes and anybody who hasn’t listened to the recruitment flex.

43:55.25

Serge Boudreau

5000 in Canada would be my best guest.

44:06.86

ThinkinCircles

And needs to go listen to Surgeon Shelley it is a great listen um way more intellectual than the thinkers are than this po podcast are yeah, it’s you have what? yeah know? Yeah, you’re a master at your art ah Serge and I love listening to you guys Um. We’ll include a detail in the show notes and ah, but for now, thank you very much.

44:24.81

Serge Boudreau

Thank you so much James this was a ton of fun.

Connect with Serge here.

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Listen to Bobby’s episode here.

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The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Bobby Banerjee

by Julia Fras | Sep 4, 2023 | The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing

etting up your new recruitment agency is one of the most exciting and terrifying times of running a business, but what can you do to get it right from the start? Joining James this week is Bobby Banerjee, Director Of Learning at Elev8. Bobby and I pool our knowledge to discuss how to make sure your new recruitment business is on the right track from the start.

Episode Transcript:

00:01.21

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back everybody to the Marketing Rules Podcast and it’s my pleasure today to be joined by Bobby Banerjee. Bobby, it’s an absolute pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

00:10.60

Bobby Banerjee

Likewise. Great too great to be on.

00:19.63

ThinkinCircles

For those who don’t know you, could you give yourself a little bit of an introduction, tell us a little bit about your background and what you do today.

00:27.27

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, absolutely. So, I started off as a recruiter myself just over ten years ago working for S3 in Birmingham so had the trials and tribulations of being a brand-new consultant in the world of the world of tech recruitment. Three, well I say that, three and a half, two and a half successful years my first year was an absolute nightmare. Um tore most of my hair around I think I did 2 deals in my first-year um and ah so most have but ah, most places probably wouldn’t behind me now but over the last seven or eight years I’ve been helping young recruiters. Essentially try and now perform the market by you know by doing a lot of training and coaching with them that looks at the humanist areas of recruitment because we forget that we’re working with humans, and it’s how do we? How would we react to certain things and using empathy-based learning I guess if you want to give it a fancy title. Um, to be able to be to be able to um, kind of get success from people. That’s the that’s the plan. You know it’s trying to get people to think about things from that that viewpoint and just remember that they were.

01:26.11

ThinkinCircles

Putting the consultant backing consultant right.

01:39.57

Bobby Banerjee

They were a candidate looking for a job at 1 point and they’ve had they’ve been people with buying power. So how do you use that that that self that self-k knowledge to then-to-then kind of impart what you do on others.

01:49.53

ThinkinCircles

I Think it’s one of those things that a lot of recruiters are now kind of paying more attention to, right? You know I was kind of I always made this joke around. You know, recruitment consultants didn’t really do much consulting. You know that was you know that that consulting part was kind of left out and I know that’s become more and more important because. As this kind of fight over good Candidates. You want to kind of be able to build those relationships and take people on that journey with you and not necessarily just sell the role but sell everything that goes around with kind of being ah just an empathetic recruiter which ah we don’t have the. Best reputations of in this in in this space right.

02:28.86

Bobby Banerjee

Well, yeah, I mean what I love about the industry is that you can be absolutely anyone and make a success of yourself. It doesn’t matter about your socioeconomic background. It doesn’t matter about creed colour race gender you can make it you could make yourself a successful you can make yourself a success in recruitment The other problem is that absolutely anyone can join so it doesn’t matter what your behavioural issues are that you can that you can make a success by having some really poor attitudes and therefore people remember those things I mean dare I dare I start using it as a marketing tool but you know it’s those things around. What has happened in our industry over certain you know, however, many years our car bought the status is it’s something that we’re 5 times more likely to rant about something that we are to rave about something so along those lines and so we then therefore are more likely to take to Twitter LinkedIn

03:15.97

ThinkinCircles

Something on that.

03:26.72

Bobby Banerjee

Facebook Google and if you ever do a search around why recruiters are and let it autofill. You should see some of the results.

03:34.54

ThinkinCircles

Ah, ah, um, yeah, I yeah, that sounds dangerous. To be honest, you know I mean and slightly probably slightly depressing as well. Um, but today what we’re going to talk about. We’re going to kind of. We’re going to tune into that a little bit right because I thought what a good idea would be is if we talk to some of the businesses out there. They are probably you’ve you know you kind of. The types of business you work with the types of business that think in circles work with who are either just starting up have just started up maybe a year or so old and some of the things that between us we think are important that sometimes can get dropped off the radar because you know you are incredibly busy. Your time and resource short but things that in the long term to medium term can really kind of play out to make you a better business, right? and more successful business. So, I think that’s a great place to kind of start and um. And you know you kick us off right? What is kind of some of the things just off the top. What we should be considering.

04:30.30

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, so well like I say um so I started I started up myself a couple of years ago and there’s a lot of things that you can think about whilst I guess being in the business and being on the working on the business at the same time. So, I guess I’d want to split it up in the exact same way because even as a trainer I found myself working in the business a lot rather than on and therefore by strategy my plan of action my go- to market kind of you know, kind of Playbook had gone out the window at of various points. So, I guess from the first point of. The first port of call is having a plan and have ah you know have a have a one-year three-year five-year plan and be able to hold yourself and help and get someone else to help you be accountable to it whether it’s a coach whether it’s someone that you trust whether is someone that you. That you value as a mentor figure. Whatever that looks like have ah have a plan that someone else can be accountable to but then I guess we’ve got to talk about the stuff that’s in the business as well. So, what generally tends to happen is people rely on their old networks people are out on restrictive covenants.

05:25.95

ThinkinCircles

Yeah.

05:38.61

Bobby Banerjee

So, you’re building something from either scratch or on a knowledge base that is a little bit lower than you’d like to like to be and so what people seem to forget in the world of recruitment that your first six months whether it’s as a business owner or as a rookie recruiter. Is essentially one massive marketing exercise and that’s so saying that just because I’m on I’m on a marketing rules podcast. But if you think about. But if you think about what you’re doing now what you’re trying to do is get your name out in the marketplace and whether that is. You know whether that is as a good recruiter whether it is a good person whether it is as a knowledgeable person in your marketplace or you’re doing at the boat is trying to get those things and you know what jobs will come in as a by-product of doing that well. So, it’s about your outreach so it’s about the LinkedIn Outreach it’s a bit it’s about the I guess the emails. The how do we build up a great database of people that are really bought into us and I wish I could say that’s all sales. But unfortunately, James I guess that’s all marketing because you’re a b testing. On the messaging that you put out to people because you are you are checking out different types of emails to see whether they fit you’re looking at things from a hopefully from an empathetic perspective and realizing what would make me respond to those to those messages whether I was a candidate or a client.

06:55.75

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah.

07:00.19

Bobby Banerjee

And so, if I take the candidate side to start off with because every good business starts with having some great candidates to speak to because again, it’s not like you can just like most businesses without a without a product offering what can you do? So, if you are going to engage with people. The first thing that you want to think about is in this market. What is going to make people want to move what is going to make people want to move away from the relative safety of their current job where they’re safe. They’re settled. They’ve got training. They’ve got coaching. They’ve got everything that they need and a progression plan. To be able to go to the relative uncertainty of a new job where they could be last in first out or you see the is it Leo the acronym. Um, you know you have those things you don’t have all the same benefits. You potentially don’t have all those increased circumstances. And so, you kind of think about what is going to make someone going to move from that situation. Once you once you understand that the outreach can become a lot easier to deal with, I mean from your perspective. What are you seeing kind of people do or not do that could be easy fixes.

08:08.14

ThinkinCircles

So um, I’m going to kind of pick up some of the kind of points that you made as well. So okay, so with a plan, right? You know the amount of Business. You don’t do that right? that we see who kind of start off their business amount of and you know what it’s more of a thought exercise doing ah a business plan than it is anything Else. You don’t have to even stick to it. Right? Most businesses don’t stick to it. It’s about actually putting something pen to paper and doing that So Anyone who’s listening who’s maybe a recruiter or just about to start their own business or has even done it over the last kind of couple of years and hasn’t written a plan. It’s still always worth doing because it’s just it’s says kind of philosophical exercise so you can kind of. Put your brain into a slightly different space and take it out of working in the business to working on the business which is the great point that you kind of Made. So do it and even if you don’t ever look at it Again. It’s just an exercise to go through the other things that we’re kind of I guess that we we’re kind of we’re seeing is um. Is it just kind of just bad communication from our from agencies, right? And that’s always the kind of thing that is kind of seems to be a bit not necessarily umbriferous. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was right? but and when I talk about bad communication. It’s just easy that constitutes of no communication, right? as well.

09:22.41

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah.

09:25.10

ThinkinCircles

You know that is one of the things that and we have every kind of tool at our disposal in the currently within the recruitment space to communicate with people whether it is you know podcasts whether it is YouTube whether it’s live streaming. Whether it’s WhatsApp groups whether it’s other communities whether it’s slack if you’re in any it space whether it’s Discord whether it’s red. There are all these places where you can communicate with people why you know? Ah so last year you know.

09:46.96

Bobby Banerjee

I mean you even forgot TikTok and Instagram.

09:54.21

ThinkinCircles

You know, but all there all these places, right? where you can have you have a touch point right? and you know, and I speak a lot about this when it comes to kind of building your brand. You know every place you’ve got a touch point is a point is a point is a touch point with your brand, right? and everyone who has any interaction with is kind of has that interaction with your brand but has the potential of being. We all want them to be either refer as advocates and in in in the recurred space. Go potentially become a client and potentially become a candidate as Well. So, there’s all of that but people just not getting that thinking. That’s such a big job to do and it’s better to you know ghost people.

10:18.65

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, totally.

10:28.83

ThinkinCircles

And worry about those consequences as opposed to try and keep in contact with people. So

10:32.87

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, and just and I think it’s also important to remember that we’ve all ghost to people before you know it’s not. You know it’s okay to have done it. It’s what you’ve learned from the experience and why you. And almost kind of doing a bit of a post-mortem on it thinking why you did it and most and from the research that I do because I speak to lots of recruits, I guess I 12 trained over twelve hundred maybe thirteen hundred now um you know, essentially, we try to avoid an uncomfortable conversation. Or something that we think is going to be more uncomfortable than it. But you know in you know, yeah in invariably turns out to be and so we’ve got to frame it and in a way that maybe isn’t uncomfortable. Maybe if yeah if that person hasn’t got the job. That’s okay, you know it’s okay that people don’t get jobs. You are going to be placing less than.

11:17.70

ThinkinCircles

11:24.58

Bobby Banerjee

10 to 15% of all people that you put forward to interview and that’s not that’s not a stat. That’s that I’ve cut that’s kind of come up with you just look at it from a general perspective if you’re working 2 or 3 jobs. You’re probably sending 7 or 8 candidates to interview of which maybe 1 maybe two get and get a job. Yeah, that’s just the cold fact ah of the world of a recruitment. So, what happens to all those conversations that you’ve had with people that have already gone through this amazing process with you and then didn’t get the job what we generally tend to do is leave them out in the cold or just I’ll just give them. Oh, I didn’t you know you weren’t quite work quite right for us whereas that person can therefore be a good advocate of your service because what we generally tend to do, and you’ll tell me about I’m sure you’re a better exponent of net promoter scores and this that and the other than I am but. Ah, net promoter score is usually done on satisfaction from usually people who have gone through the service but it’s looking at those people that haven’t had the full service and have still had an amazing experience. They’re the ones that become your biggest advocates in the marketplace. So how are you going to speak to all those people that maybe you didn’t place and go well actually I’m sorry that we weren’t able to place you and, in all honesty, the feedback that I’ve got from the client isn’t enough to help you so what I’m going to do is I’m going to find you other opportunities based on the fact that.

12:50.99

Bobby Banerjee

You know, since you were good for this company. You’re bound to be great for another couple of companies.

12:56.19

ThinkinCircles

So, the usual response that kind of comes from that is oh we’ve because we’ve got so many people applying, we’ve got so many kinds of so much coming in that we just can’t handle it. Ah which isn’t an excuse these days right? because there’s ways of the ways of automating that kind of response. So

13:09.22

Bobby Banerjee

I mean I stopped recruiting well in in in earnest on a desk five years five years ago and even then, there was all the technology at your disposal to be able to even if it was off a job board. You can green.

13:11.97

ThinkinCircles

You know so.

13:27.30

Bobby Banerjee

Amber and red people based on the based on the job board that you used and send messages out to those people who were all in red and you can easily base it based on whether you know I guess there were. People who didn’t have the right to work in the Ku or didn’t have the right skill set and you can actually just nit-pick and send little emails just say look on this occasion you weren’t quite right because we are looking for a Ku citizen but I’d love to keep in touch and the amount of people that would come back to me and just say oh my god this is the first email that I’ve had of this in months. And that makes and that makes you just think oh my god is common courtesy and common sense just two of the things that are missing from our day-to-day job because we’re just so in the moment that we forget to apply little things that maybe what that took ah an extra three four minutes out of my day. But it can have a blessing impact on your brand.

14:16.27

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah, and that’s the interesting thing as well isn’t it because you know without getting kind of to hit up in in how branding works, but you know your all those little outreaches affects your personal brand and the and the larger brand of the business that you’re either. You know, cultivating. All that you work for and all of it can have on all of it can have a positive negative or passive effect, right? And that’s what you want to get over and to come to your point about Net Promoter Score if anybody’s kind of listening and not heard of naps. It’s worth kind of It’s a very simple kind of formula for understanding. Um, ah. If someone was a kind of an advocate of your business. Basically, you’ll all have received, and you all have tried to score someone or something a product or services from 1 to 10 you know and that’s how to refer us to a friend or colleague. Yeah, exactly, and that and that and that can be and that can be adapted in the recruitment space.

15:00.50

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, and on 1 to 10 how likely are you to buy this product service yet all that kind of stuff.

15:12.81

ThinkinCircles

And is being to be used within the recruitment space and I think and ah probably to kind of I think once you go down that route you then suddenly think well, and Naps has its kind of limitations. You start kind of branching out to other and other those kind of advocacy scores but it’s a good place to start to understand. And it’s very simple and it’s quick and easy to roll out right.

15:32.77

Bobby Banerjee

Yeah, totally and the thing is what I what I noticed when we started out started the process off at s 3 the issues that usually face are people don’t realize what a good score is people have a limit on what they’re going to give um you know somewhat you know it’s a bit like the old. Football analogy of people could score a hat trick but in in the newspapers. They’ll still only be given an 8 out of 10 because that’s the most that they’ll ever give and so there’s those little dynamics that you must navigate, and people don’t really realize that it’s only a 9 or 10 out of 10 that is seen as a as a true positive.

15:55.58

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah.

16:05.29

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, it’s not yeah, you can look at you can Google it but it’s 9 and 10 of the kind of advocates and then then basically you either get the passive and then you get the kind of negatives ones at the bottom and you miners see the with the scores together you minus and.

16:07.51

Bobby Banerjee

Because a 7 or is it a 7 or 8 or a six seven or eight that is a yeah. Um, exactly pass it and yeah, the point I was coming up. Yeah, the point that I was going to come on to be the fact that if you know if you scored seventy or eighty percent in any other walk of life that would be steamered as excellent.

16:21.95

ThinkinCircles

Um, to play score and that and that’s what gives you us complete.

16:32.67

Bobby Banerjee

And so that’s why people potentially give those give those scores out because they think that is excellence in in university if you get 70 that’s a first that’s a first-class degree. So obviously we then need to educate people what that that service needs to look like to be a 9 or 10 to these people to then be able to give those scores out. Therefore, you know brings us back nicely onto the service and what is the service that you are offering what we’re not very good at with our candidates and our client is showcasing the lifecycle from start to finish. They don’t know the work that gets done by recruiters to be able to find people their role. Or be able to find ah candidates for a company because people don’t realize that the yes, there’s a lot of technology being used and but there is a Boolean search and we do look at how many keywords come up on a Boolean search but we’re also there working with candidates who invariably because. Both’re not very good as British people of selling ourselves. We don’t write very good CVS, but we miss things off or we try and write 15 years’ worth of experience and in ah in a paragraph or conversely six months in 3 pages and so. And so, it’s and unfortunately, I wouldn’t say anything in between because it seems to be doesn’t seem to be that that it seems very polar in how people do things and so if we’re having to have conversations to get this information out of people to understand what skillets they’ve had that they might not have necessarily talked about.

18:05.29

Bobby Banerjee

And so, mm.

18:05.54

ThinkinCircles

Its’s it’s a crazy thing, right? that we’re still there right after all this time, right? You know that you know we have these conversations about kind of the cv being dead or not and we’re still having trouble. We are writing them you know, and I mean it’s kind of you know we haven’t cracked the first bit you know, um. But you know from your perspective and the businesses that you kind of you work with, right? you know for the ones who are kind of in their earlier stages. Let’s say because I know you kind of coach kind of you know people coming into the space or people are new into space or new in you know.

18:21.91

Bobby Banerjee

Yet.

18:37.32

ThinkinCircles

What does that kind of you know if you’re kind of coaching someone. Ah, you know what that looks like so you if you say look first six months you these are the things you need to kind of concentrate on in la mean how does that how does that look.

18:48.44

Bobby Banerjee

But yeah, it looks to be optimist. It looks really bespoke so we look at you. So, want to work with a newish business. Um, we look at it and go like I say what’s the plan first and foremost understand what the plan is and how we can then. Help create stuff around the plan, and it can be. It can fall into several different things and it’s looking as if you know a lot of people end up getting again that that a stereotype of the fact that people think that they need to do absolutely everything in the business when they first start one. You know they need to be. You know they need to be the salesperson need to be the office manager they need to be the painter and decorator they need to be the marketing the marketing specialist and then we get all this tech to try and help us on our way, but the problem is what we’ve got up. There isn’t quite ready to use the tech like.

19:29.58

ThinkinCircles

Um, yep.

19:41.14

Bobby Banerjee

I could try and create a marketing platform using canvas am I going to no because I’m not a marketer and I don’t know enough about it and so it’s working with it. So, what I end up doing is work with companies to look at what can be what can be taken by them. What’s in their strengths. It’s almost like doing a bit of a Swot analysis with people and going.

19:57.96

ThinkinCircles

Right.

20:00.43

Bobby Banerjee

Where do you see your strengths and weaknesses and what can be done with those weaknesses and what can we do to keep building on those strengths because if you’re a Bd person but doesn’t like candidate acquisition. There’s stuff for that. You know you can outsource a lot of that. If like me, you’re not very good at marketing There are so many there are so many good things that you can do whether it’s using someone like selves, or you know there’s freelancers via fevered and Upwork or whatever. Whatever you do just have a think about if I was charging myself out what I would charge would I be looking for and would I be doing the task. That I’m doing for that money.

20:36.58

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, it’s a great point, right? You know? Um I talk about this a lot as well in some of the kind of presentations as you know as start-ups which we you know which hat you are wearing today right? is it your you know admin hat your accountancy hat your marketing hat you know, and you can’t wear them all because you just look stupid. Right? So, you can only really want wear 1 or 2 hats at any 1 time and even then, you still look a bit stupid from a man who’s wearing a hat, right? now you know I mean it is it is you know you’ve got a kind of church concentrate on would pull to your strengths. The obvious thing is like no one you know when you’re starting busy. You don’t do your own accounts right? You’re crazy if you want to do that.

21:09.40

Bobby Banerjee

In.

21:12.65

ThinkinCircles

Because you’re not an accountant that’s not what you do So the fact that you know as you kind of eloquently put it. You need to kind of outsource. Basically, what you don’t want to do and as recruitment has become more and more complex. You know, ah probably for the for the better to a certain extent. You need to be at a kind of. Move off or move out. Ah you know, take those hats, and give them to someone else do on your behalf. Basically, whether that is the marketing whether it is the kind of whatever else you know, probably not going to do your own I T that kind of stuff right? All that kind of stuff. It’s yeah obvious.

21:34.84

Bobby Banerjee

Um, yeah.

21:42.52

Bobby Banerjee

Absolutely like yeah there are some good There are some good places to go. There are some great growth partners out there. Um I’ve been working with a growth partner myself in what they do for me is get rid of you know, kind of find the right corm you know because oh my god how many hours can that take for someone. Especially in recruitment and that’s because recruitment crams. There are hundreds of them and all of them do Evers a slightly of different things and you know it’s looking at those aspects for me, you were 100 % right it was accounting but you know I’m not you know I’d like to think I’m quite good at maths but accounting. Not a chance. So why not get either some technology or the help of someone that can do that. Luckily my kind of growth partner helps me with that because he then takes all that stuff found founds tech, I’ve now just got an apt where I just must put all my receipts down. He’s going to have a go because I still have those receipts to do. Um, but it just makes your life so much easier because then it means I can get into training coaching consulting.

22:47.73

ThinkinCircles

But I think the thing that holds some businesses back and recruiters back at this point is because they’re going to. They’re thinking. Well, it will cost money, right? Well, you know that’s that you can’t really start new businesses on a shoestring right? You need a bit of, but you need backing you can do it for Ah, you know on a shoestring. But. You’re probably then that’s your mindset moving forward, right? If you’re going to try and you’re going to be tight with a business whereas. I mean one of the things I’ve learned is you know, spend money where you need to spend money right? that is kind of that. That’s kind of my ethos with ah with my business and what we try and kind of.

23:09.40

Bobby Banerjee

Um.

23:22.17

ThinkinCircles

You know, ah expect from our from our clients is you know you need to spend money to you know and I’m going to say to make money because that’s just that just crass. But there are certain areas where you need to kind of have a budget for because it’s going to make your life a damn site easier if you try and do it on a shoestring then it kind of just all falls a bit flat.

23:36.93

Bobby Banerjee

I think I think what? what we generally tend to fall in the trap of is cost versus value and I’ve again I’ve had to learn that the hard way because I tried to so for example for a cram, I just tried to use excel for the first year yeah

23:42.23

ThinkinCircles

Exactly.

23:56.43

Bobby Banerjee

Exactly what a stupid move that was especially when there are such amazing free crams out there for fledgling businesses. So then realize hang on that helps and then you know and that was because I was just too busy thinking about the cost because I had a business partner at the time, but I just thought cost. Because I wanted to make sure that the bottom line was as profitable as it could be but then I realized that the amount of time that I’ve spent sequencing. Um you know, creating mass emails that make sense to people. Um, you know, fortunate that the person that I’ve hired has now started off a brand-new ah brand new kind of email campaign where we can drip feed. Bits and pieces of exciting news each week or business development tips and it’s like you know all these weird, wonderful things that can then hopefully build business so of the off the medium to longer term sure you look at your short term and go right? Where am I where’s my next where’s my next deal where’s my next meal coming from. But. That comes from but you’ve got to have a look at your short-term goals as well as your medium to long-term goals and don’t just stray off the off the medium to long term because you know but I’ll be honest, 1 of my media to long-term goals was to be part of a networking group and that’s how we met and.

25:04.53

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, exactly.

25:07.80

Bobby Banerjee

And so, for me, you know that was a really big thing because you know in most networking Groups. You must pay some money which is fine, but it’s the Knowledge. It’s the Expertise. It’s the I hate using the word exposure, but it is great to have access to lots of different people and. And so, it’s how do you view your short to medium term goals and the money that you spend to make those things happen.

25:29.59

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, Bobby, there’s some absolutely great tips. Um, hopefully if you’ve been listening to this. There’s enough to kind of take away if you are kind of starting around business. Um Bobby as always. We are going to include all your details in the show notes if anybody wants. No map you or your business they can kind of reach out. Um, but for now it’s been absolute pleasure. Thank you very much.

25:49.77

Bobby Banerjee

No worries look forward to another one soon.

Connect with Bobby here.

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The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Evan Kramer

by Julia Fras | Aug 31, 2023 | The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing

For any business moving into a new territory and key marketing consideration is whether to translate your collateral into the local language. Joining James Whitelock this week is Evan Kramer, founder of Motion Point. Evan discusses the advantages, from a marketing perspective, of translating not just your website but all your marketing output into the local language.

Episode Transcript:

00:01.62

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back, everybody to the Marketing Rules Podcast, it is a pleasure to be joined by Evan Kramer, CEO at Motion Point. Evan it’s a pleasure to have you on the podcast. For those of us who kind aren’t aware of you in your work, maybe you could give us a brief introduction of yourself, a bit about your background, a little bit also about Motion Point, though we will cover some of that as we carry on through the podcast.

00:26.70

Evan Kramer

Thanks for having me this morning, this afternoon, depending on where you are in the world. But that’s what I do as we support a lot of global website translation for brands all over the world. A little bit about myself, really a digital marketing veteran over the last twenty-five years, I came up through digital marketing through many different technology and internet start-ups and growth companies mostly venture-backed working as a chief marketing officer for several brands, helping launch on an online automotive company an online real estate company home security business. So, over the course of my career have had a lot of those types of experiences and success selling companies in the. Sold selling a company to direct TV to an education technology company a marketing technology company and that has now landed me into Motion Point as my third time as a CEO with a couple successful ventures behind me. Joined Motion Point in September of last year and Motion Point is really fits what I do a lot because it’s about how you get more out of marketing globally or through translated experiences and that type of technology innovation. Do you need to support that. We’ve been around for over 20 years we are, private equity back company where we do a website translation that is managed for you. On a concierge platform so where we really fit is where companies especially marketing teams that don’t have internal localisation resources want to provide a translated experience ah experience and need an enterprise solution. We provide that experience on our platform. We do continuous monitoring. Of the origin site content and anytime content is updated whether it’s a blog whether it’s a home page whether it’s an image we’re detecting it in real time we’re getting it translated the way that our client wants it translated whether it’s through a linguist or we’re now using Ai. To begin to do that translation so we could talk a little bit about how Ai is disrupting and innovating in our category, but we do everything end to end from the technology platform to the translation itself and then all the professional services that come with it, so we support. Ah, some of the top global brands in the world and a lot of the us based companies that want to provide either a Spanish experience or French-Canadian experience. So, a little bit about myself and Motion Point.

03:22.10

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, well thank you for that. It’s, translation is one of those bug bearers of the marketing industry, right? It’s ah it’s one of those things that, we tend to work with businesses when they’re opening into a new territory and at some point, you have that conversation. Do we need to translate the website. Do we need to have a separate website in and in in in the in the and host language. How do we go about that and it always you just your brain starts to whirl around because you think we’ve got this website. It’s got God knows how many pages it’s got years and years of articles and blogs I mean it just sounds like an absolute. Nightmare trying to translate that. So being able to offload that onto someone else is probably the like the is ah and not using Google translate which is notoriously terrible right.

04:02.68

Evan Kramer

Death. A lot of the times over the last twenty years a lot of that has been managed by scope. So, a client would say I only have so much budget. So, I can only translate so much of my website. Some of that website is where the core traffic may go for that website. and there’s always a lot of complex decisions around website translation because it’s simple and straightforward from a return on a marketing investment if you are a transactional business, right? If you’re an e-commerce company and. You’re translating and the more you translate the more sales you get I mean that’s probably the most straightforward investment you can make in translation. But if you’re a b two b company or an informational site or publisher. what the return is I’m going to get and so I think a lot of that has been managed by scope. over time and understanding really where those benefits are, and one of the benefits of Motion Point is that because we’re concierge we can provide that experience without the internal investment. It may take to get it done and so you can understand what that return might be before you. Make that next level investment. go yeah.

05:24.30

ThinkinCircles

How is it you go about it because there is theirs, I guess there’s a couple of lines of thought when ah, translating online content is if it’s your website. Do you have a separate website. That’s in German that’s dot. D or something like that or do you have the.com site and then you have your little flags up in the corner. Do you detect it by I P Address What is it your how it is, you go about it and what is it you see is there A preferred method is there a better method.

05:57.64

Evan Kramer

Yeah, so there is ah, really 2 ways at the end of the day to translate a website one is through proxying the site which is what we do where we literally on a separate server will mirror the origin site. , and we can be based on the client’s recommendation on how they want the URL structure whether they want it as a subdomain, or a subdirectory set up that structure and so that we will have a mirrored site. , and those pages managed the other way to do it is within your own CMS. Where you can set up your own pages and bring in that content through an ape or connector or you could proxy through the browser where you cache the translation in in JavaScript. So, there’s really sort of 2 ways to go about, setting up your website translation. the one on the one side if you’re using your CMS if you’re using, sort of the client-side experience. You’ve got to have resources to manage that frontend framework whereas if you use a proxy. my team’s resources can manage that framework. So, if. If we’re queuing it after we bring in and ah simplified Chinese onto a Spanish origin site. the amount of ah characters and pixels are going to change and could break functionality. We would detect that we would fix that if that was within your own.

07:27.70

Evan Kramer

CMS experience your own frontend Framework You would have to have resources internally to manage that or wouldn’t get fixed.

07:35.46

ThinkinCircles

I mean, you make a good point there because that’s one of the things that might be that some businesses just don’t consider that the change in characters is going to change potentially change formatting. ah what the other things that businesses should probably need to take into consideration before they go down this route around translation.

07:57.90

Evan Kramer

I think that there’s first quality is the biggest area. that you need to consider. There are really 3 levels of quality of translation. There’s good enough and the good enough is really coming along with. Machine training. back in 162 when Google launched Google translate it really was the first normal machine model that was used and now with chat got and open-air you now have a large language model that can be used and so that will get you part of the way there. and you can say is that good enough. Ah, the second level is human translation using linguists and then the third level is what we call in the industry trans creation and what transcreation is not. Is taking a bit further from literal translation and localising it for that. ah, language experience so making it sound and lingo in that language. So those are the 3 levels the thing about so quality is number 1, as terms of dimension number 2 is speed. how quickly you need it translated. we manage. you can probably figure out who those customers are but some of the largest telecommunications companies in the world and when there is an iPhone release right? The day that that iPhone release happens.

09:24.13

Evan Kramer

We need to have everything translated. So, the speed for that is very important. but if you are, writing an article. and you may not necessarily need that translated for weeks or months depending on. Yeah, when you get to it so the.

09:43.24

Evan Kramer

When that is and I think the biggest area to consider is the total cost of ownership. if you are going to make this investment. Ah, how much do you invest in in this short term versus long term and a lot of reasons. Why. Ah, companies come to us is typically a managed outsource solution is about 20% The cost of doing it yourself now doing yourself. You have a lot of control. You build it into your workflows you have systems, but you’ve got to hire dedicated resources and you’ve got to really build that acumen internally. So, sort of cost of ownership is a big factor. So, speed quality cost of ownership. Those are a lot of the dimensions. the other the other factor that’s sort of evolved over time is the complexity of your front-end Framework. There’s a lot of large enterprise customers that have built their own CMS for. From Homegrown some of them are using out of the box Enterprise CMSs like Sitecore and then you’ve got companies on the word presses and drupels in the World. So, it also depends on the type of front-end Framework you’re using and how that works and plays with translation.

10:55.87

ThinkinCircles

You touched on this slightly at the start is what’s the data around. Ah the reasons to translate with regards to your marketing activity your sales activity you were. Return.

11:13.69

Evan Kramer

All the research that that we have and validated through our customers is I believe it’s about 70% Maybe a little bit higher of people in the world that prefer to have. Language in their ah first language experience, right? So, if you are a Spanish speaking ah person that that over 70% of those want a Spanish experience no matter where you live in the world and so really trying to Understand. who your demographics are who are your customer segments. And go from there. So, the biggest reason ah to translate is that there isn’t unlike the Euro which has become or bitcoin which is now becoming more of a universal currency. Ah, we don’t yet at the point where we have a universal language and so that that is truly an important factor here.

12:10.79

ThinkinCircles

That all makes sense and, what about ah, offsite What about things like social media and advertising and things like that is that an area that ah Motion Point gets involved with and what other how does that work is that again Advantageous is it work is it too much trouble. What’s the data around that process.

12:38.12

Evan Kramer

I think it’s all web content. So, the website is one of the more complex I would say after that you’ve got video and images that can be complex depending on how the, the content is embedded whether it’s subtitles. or dubbing for video whether the images have embedded text or whether they’re not embedded text. when you get to social media, I think that it depends on the strategy of the marketing team. A lot of times there might be where you want a. some comment or post to stand out or the response to that post to stand out so they’re selective about what gets translated, email is straightforward. We do a lot of email marketing where whether it’s operational emails or marketing campaign emails either. Getting the template translated or just connecting a feed to get the text translated itself. and then I think an area 2 other areas that you mentioned 1 is the digital advertising side. that is probably. A little bit more straightforward as well because it’s more planned right? Usually, advertising isn’t as real time so you’re spending time developing copy getting that copy translated. so there’s not at this point sort of a real time need in a lot of areas for that digital advertising.

14:08.93

Evan Kramer

But where there is a lot of real-time need is in the customer support side of the business. So, when you think about or even sales with online chat. online chat is now being integrated into things like Salesforce where you can instead of having multilingual customer service or sales reps on the one side. Ah, you could have the translation coming in and doing, an asynchronous flow of translation back and forth between two non-native speaking folks so that’s so across the Omni Channel spectrum is really where we focus and all of those. can be well supported like I said website translation the most vast and complex. and then images and video probably next.

14:55.10

ThinkinCircles

Do you get much involved in like real time voice translation like universal translators it because that’s another thing that we see pop up on the writer or and have conversations about on occasion?

15:04.24

Evan Kramer

We don’t get as involved in that when we work with video. We’re doing more subtitling There are a lot of companies that specialise especially in the entertainment industry in in the voiceover. There’s there was a big announcement I believe it was. I don’t know if it was late last year or very early this year where YouTube is supporting a multilingual through a lot of their toolset and so the, the supply of translation in the YouTube channel which is the largest video channel in the world is really growing so the ability to do. Ah, dubbing and subtitling in YouTube so you’re going to see a lot more and more YouTube videos TikTok videos. really become translated be able to select the language that you want to know.

15:54.69

ThinkinCircles

With that offsite translation through social advertising whatever is I guess the stats and the data points towards that you’re going to get much. You’re going to get higher engagement rate higher open rates if it’s in that if it’s in that local language right.

16:10.63

Evan Kramer

Yeah, especially on a website one of the big things as a marketer for websites is engagement, right? and so the bounce rate is very critical, and we talk about attention span and it’s. Directly inverse inversely correlated to time, right? So as time goes on in 2024 next year, I would bet the average attention span and declines further for individuals and so as a marketer you need to do everything you can to capture that attention. Ah, very quickly and so if you have a flicker on your screen or if the page isn’t loading or if it’s not translating your preferred language or the quality isn’t very good. You’re going to lose that opportunity and you spend a lot of time to get eyeballs to where you want it to make sure those eyeballs engage in what in what you’re presenting.

17:05.70

ThinkinCircles

You touched us just at the start. Ah on AI and how that is changing the or it is making inroads into the translation space. talk to us a little bit about how that is it competition. You work alongside it. How does it how it works now in in translation.

17:23.22

Evan Kramer

Yeah, so the biggest disruption in our industry. I mean it’s disrupting or innovating on a lot of different spectrums, right? So, you talk about website where you can talk about audio you can talk about video so let’s. Stick with the content format. within websites, the biggest sort of innovation happening with Ai is the ability to no longer must rely on a sending content directly to a linguist to get human quality translation and so if you were to take. Let’s say 3 chapters of text and send them to and send them through ai send them through neural machine training. you can get a certain level of quality across those 3 chapters of text and now where the industry is trying to understand how we measure. That quality so that we can provide signals and feedback to the customer client so that they can decide is that good enough for my customer or do I want to send it to post editing to a human linguist to improve the quality and so what that does is it. It creates more empowerment. on the workflow but it also reduces the cost of translation because now you don’t have to send everything to a linguist to get human quality. You try to send as much through technology as you possibly can and then probably that last mile you now translate now on the 1 hand it makes.

18:56.32

Evan Kramer

From a revenue standpoint if you’re thinking about a business side of it. The revenue I generate per word. Let’s say is going to go down but the amount of volume of scope will increase because now the customer can afford translating more where maybe they didn’t translate their blogs previously now can. translate blogs. So, there’s a balance between the 2, so I do think that quality estimation is a big area and then I think the next frontier on the content side is really going to be on that transcript the amount of localisation. And needed to optimise the experience. So just because you have ah translation literal and I like to use the example of a Chevy nova, right? and in Chevy Nova in in Spanish is nova don’t go right? and so how do you sell a car that doesn’t go. Right? So, so the literal translation in a lot of languages needs to be localised. and so, using Ai to identify hey is this good enough for that localised experience and is this good enough for search engine optimisation. and so being able to identify those areas so on ah on ah on a text world I think it’s more of innovation that’s driving whereas, but you think in the audio and visual space. It is much more disruptive because where you might have to use talent to do a voiceover, you can now use auto Ai Generated voice or Ai Generated ah people? or avatars to do things and so, you don’t need an actual human translator on the other end of the phone. When you can have sort of an ai bot doing it. So, I think on that side of the fence on translation. I’d be a lot more worried about the disruption but on the content side. It’s really about quality and estimating quality.

21:00.87

ThinkinCircles

I Know as a marketeer quality always appeals, I’m mortified if in English, we see something that’s incorrectly spelled or grammatically incorrect why you would want then then translate something and that you just get the same result but in Spanish or in…

21:16.22

ThinkinCircles

And Mandarin or something else right? I mean you’d be. You’d be absolutely mortified. this has been fascinating Evan is an area that I don’t think gets enough coverage within the marketing space and I’m sure a lot of the audience ah will want to know more. So as always. We’ll include all your details in the show notes if anybody wants to get in contact or know more about you and your business than they can but Evan Kramer for now. Thank you very much.

21:38.35

Evan Kramer

Thank you so much for having me.

Connect with Evan here.

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The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Arel Moodie

by Julia Fras | Aug 7, 2023 | The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing

For those of us that present on a regular basis, whether it’s online or face to face how do we know how effective we are as a presenter and if our content is hitting the right mark?

Joining James this week is Arel Moodie, Entrepreneur, speaker and TV host. Arel discusses his years of experience on the speaking circuit and how he came to build a platform that can support speakers to deliver effective presentations.

Episode Transcript:

00:00.00

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back, everybody to the Marketing Rules Podcast. It is my absolute pleasure to have Arel Moodie join me today. We have been backwards and forwards a numerous number of times trying to get you onto the podcast and our ice first kind of spotted you on LinkedIn I think I was kind of I think you’ve probably done a podcast with someone else that we follow. I was hugely impressed, and I thought I’ve got to have Earl on here I had Lynn had a look at your background and then it just got even better from that point. So, it was an absolute honour to have you on the podcast. for everybody listening who doesn’t know you know I know you as the likeability strategist but there are huge amounts more that you’ve kind of done. So maybe you could give us a little kind of brief kind of tour of your background and what you do nowadays.

00:44.62

Arel Moodie

So, entrepreneurship kind of was my my starting point to it so I got interested in entrepreneurship and the reason why I got interested in entrepreneurship was I was like well if I become this hugely successful entrepreneur then I get to become an motivational speaker a professional speaker that was always my love my passion. , the pathway to get into speaking happened a lot quicker than I expected started getting into speaking I’ve been doing that now for 17 years and , absolutely love the topic speaking has allowed me to speak at the white house in America TEDx stage. , it’s leveraged me to get a tv show. So, I host., Disney plus show called family reboot which is produced by Kelly Rappa again for all our UK listeners those at us so big. Kelly Rip is Us base I don’t know how big she is in the UK but to be able to do all that really happened from my love of public speaking. So, whether it’s speaking at the TEDx stage whether it’s being on Tv shows whether it’s halting podcasts. How do you create a message that resonates with lands that’s been a big part of who I am and now what I’ve done is leverage that into a tech start-up called talka.com which helps speakers measure the effectiveness of their presentations through audience data and feedback. Which most presenters get absolutely no feedback if they do. So, we’re trying to elevate the craft of speaking and that’s kind of where we are today.

02:06.99

ThinkinCircles

It is such an important kind of area and something that’s never really kind of again discussed huge amount, right? I know as a business owner myself I do a lot of public speaking I also feel I’m terrible at it right on numerous cases I’ve said I don’t think that’s gone particularly well. But I have no idea and I have no way of measuring that right I have no idea how successful I’ve been you know unlike when you do stuff online, I can tell because I’ve got either lead come in, I’ve had people listen you have comments you have feedback. But when you do it in real life, I mean I’ve got 0 idea I think I stink most of the time in all honesty. But you know it’s great that kind of you’re putting this together this kind of platform that can help people potentially like me to kind of one it works as what am I doing a good job and then how do I get better at this kind of thing right? How do I empower myself basically and use this for my business which. Kind of what we’re going to talk around today right? and is how kind of how speaking and presenting can really be tools for you know everyone who’s listening today. So, from a kind of I think would be great to kind of start off from right from beginnings like how we can use speaking as a recruitment tool right? because you know that’s our that’s our main audience. So

03:15.90

Arel Moodie

Yeah, so. Well, what’s interesting to note about speaking as a skill set is since we all speak there almost is this inherent belief that either well, I’m good at it or I’m miserable at it. There are really not many people in the in-between right? and even those of us who may consider ourselves to be very good.

03:20.47

ThinkinCircles

How do we go about that?

03:40.10

Arel Moodie

If we’re honest with ourselves every time we present when we’re done presenting. There’s that thought of well did they like it did that suck was it good? I think we can go into some specific strategies I think on how to approach the content. No matter what you’re presenting on and then how to measure it so when you’re when you’re looking to approach it. My. Philosophical approach that’s different than most is that I think most people focus on what should I say so I must present to a client I need to present to maybe I’m presenting to a bunch of potential candidates or maybe I’m doing an in-house presentation and I need to present to my team. Most people say what is it that I want to say how do I want to say it? What’s my first point. What’s my second point. What’s my third point that’s the complete wrong way to look at a presentation. It’s completely backwards the right way in my opinion to look at it is to ask yourself after this presentation. What do I want my audience to. Remember that’s the key now this is the strategy, the visualization that I put people to, and it usually allows you to get exactly what you want to say very quickly imagine whatever you’re present. So, let’s say I’m doing a client meeting and I’m presenting to this meeting, and I want this client to you know, hire me from my digital marketing skill set right. Or maybe I’m presenting to a bunch of potential folks that I’m like hey I would love for them to work with us I think would be great instead of saying here’s what we do? That’s great here’s what’s amazing I want you to imagine that you walked into a coffee shop six months from now and you’re going to get a quick coffee and as you’re running in very quickly. You see the key decision makers that were at that presentation from six months earlier having a cup of coffee sitting down and talking and they’d go hey remember when James came and presented to us. Yeah, I remember Jay I man I love to jab he’s he was awesome. The 1 thing he said that I still remember to this day. The 1 thing he said that impacted me the most was and then what would you want to hear them say in that moment to feel like yes, six months from now if you just remember that that would be amazing. And that is what’s called the paradigm shift. Every presentation’s goal is to do 1 thing. It’s to shift a paradigm to shift a perspective and if you know what that answer is then you build your entire presentation from that one idea do I want them to get that. This is a family community., do I want them to get that we’re flexible and we care about you as a person. What is that? 1 thing that if they just remember that 1 thing then you build everything you need to say around that and that’s how you put together a presentation. No matter what you’re presenting on for something that sticks lands and matters. Now you can give multiple points, but they all must lead.

06:29.74

Arel Moodie

To that one idea that they’ll remember six months from now.

06:34.40

ThinkinCircles

I mean that already I think there’s that you’ve already kind of you’ve given us already a kind of a paradigm shift right? You’ve already. You’ve you obviously kind of you’ve teased us into this basically because your paradigm shift is I remember Arow. He told us what we need to think about is the paradigm shift in our presentation so that is very clever, but so once we’ve kind of we’ve figured this kind of this this shift. What we want people to remember us for right is that you know do we is that like a single point is that a kind of just a feeling across the entire Presentation. You know how we build that kind of content into that presentation. So, it lands, and it is it is it. 1 thing can it be multiple things is it the whole thing you know.

07:15.80

Arel Moodie

So that’s where this is the part that does take reflection right because this is called the big domino right? What is the 1 thing that if I knock this domino over all other dominoes must fall because of it. So, when I’m thinking about let’s say for example and I’m making this up. I’m a small business I’m a start-up and I want to attract a talent to work with me this talent’s amazing. They could go to any company whatsoever. How do I get them to want to work with me so I was like well what is it I can say hey we’re flexible. Well, everyone’s flexible. Hey where you know we care about you? Well, everyone cares about you, you know so I want to ask myself. What’s that 1 thing that if I can nail would nail would knock down all the other things and then everything else becomes a cherry on top. So that’s really where the process of reflection and thinking comes from so it might be hey listen, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder because you’ve been working for companies your whole life and you’ve taken them from you know, 0 to $10000000 with your skillset and you’ve never gotten a piece of the pie before. So, you’ve had all these happy clients and customers. But you’ve never been able to benefit from a liquidation event from an acquisition when you work with us. We’re going to give you know points in our company or ownership in our company because we believe in you so much that not only will we get you to.

08:43.75

Arel Moodie

, market rate salary. But upon a liquidation event by working with us. You get to benefit from your skill set so it could be getting them to buy into the idea that hey you’ve grown all these incredible companies and you’ve gotten nothing when they’ve gone public, or they’ve liquidated, or they’ve been acquired why is working with us. And getting to that point so valuable. So, if I go That’s my one domino because if I can get them to say well, I know I can take your company at 10000000 but I’m still getting my salary, right? So, like you know it doesn’t necessarily affect me none. But now I can say here’s why we’re poised to be good, but here’s where you’re going to get that and again, I don’t know if that’s everyone’s individual big domino. But if I can get someone to tie into a liquidation event, I build my presentation around why we built our organization to make sure everyone on this founding team benefits upon a merger and acquisition liquidation event. Why that’s so important then I build up think about all the organizations you’ve been with that have gone to these amazing things and you’ve gotten nothing that ends with us because we want our success to be your success not just in theory but in practice. So, if they leave in six months from now. Go oh my gosh like. The thought of this company. You know getting bought and me getting to set up my future children. That’s the 1 big domino so you really must ask yourself based upon the situation we’re in based upon the person we’re speaking to what’s that 1 big domino that knocks over everything else. That’s unique to us. And once you nail that it’s it. A lot of the presentation takes care of itself. But there are specific elements that I’m happy to go over that should be in every presentation to get to that paradigm shift.

10:26.64

ThinkinCircles

Sure, So I mean this is also almost like kind of a you know, almost like a go to Marketed philosophy to a certain extent as well. Right? I mean what you’re talking around there. You can put you can put this into your business philosophy doesn’t just have to be part of your presentation and how do you have people remember your presentation or remember a talk that you’re giving this is much this can go way beyond that right? because the great example, you just gave is is maybe more at the kind of values of that business can kind of kind of push in that direction and that’s the that’s the 1 thing that you know makes their employer brand. Better than ever other people’s because they’ve got this 1 example which you know which is going to attract people from all over the place.

11:06.80

Arel Moodie

Yeah, and that and that’s exactly right because the thing is when you can figure out and I think this I call it you know coffee shop strategy. It’s not liked a fantastic like name. But conceptually if I know what’s that 1 big Domino what moves it, I can build entire campaigns around that I can and then I can look at every single nuance of. Why this is important why people don’t other people. Don’t do this why we’re different and then when you have like you said a go-to-market strategy that’s messaging when you have messaging that’s memorable. That’s really what we’re going for. You know when people say things like we have the best customer service we care about people the most it’s like. That sounds really like kind of generic. But if I say well, what does I want my audience to remember about us I want them to say that hey we’re elevating this industry by you know for example with taluka dot. Our goal is to elevate the speaking industry by allowing data to be present. We want the best speakers to be brought to the top. And the worst speakers to either get better or drop out right? like that’s what we want to do because how many boring horrible presentations have, we all sat through in some conference or another and there’s no way to judge it right? So, if we can bring it to the top of everyone can go well hey look, I don’t want to be bored when I’m at an event. I want to be the best version of myself I want data to prove that I want this like rising tide to lift all boats. So, when you when you create that message that is memorable. Yes, you can use in a presentation, but you can use it in your blog posts. You can use it in your digital marketing strategies in your recruitment process to why should you work with us.

12:40.80

Arel Moodie

And you won’t sound like everyone else and I’m a big advocate. part of my process in putting together. A message is asking myself. What has my audience probably heard a million times already and how I make sure I don’t sound like that now I could talk about the same thing. I just can’t talk about it in the same way and that’s very important to knowing who’s your ideal audience who you’re trying to bring so you don’t necessarily have to create a brand-new idea, but it does help to talk about it in a different way and that’s being clear with what am I trying to achieve what are my goals. And those things sound so basic they can be like forget forgotten but it really does help us create a memorable message.

13:24.38

ThinkinCircles

You see what I like about this as a marketeer you’ve kind of got an entire kind of campaign built around what your message can be and then that weaves its way into your presentation and into everything else that kind of sits either side of that and around the back of it as well. 1 thing that some., just did occur to me is you know are. You’re very kind of charismatic. You speak very well your practice this and you kind of you could do this. You know like that what about for some people who maybe aren’t as kind of forthright or as confident potentially as you come across. How do they then kind of elevate their presentation kind of skills from beyond what you just said from the people who kind of who are kind of who aren’t the great presenters but might have a great message and great thing to talk about you know is there a disconnect there. How do we? How do we match those 2 things together.

14:14.31

Arel Moodie

This is what I recommend in that case so the first thing to understand is, you know someone like the Dalai Lama and someone like Martin Luther King Jr have very different speaking styles very different orders if anyone’s ever seen any of their historical speeches. There. They’re almost as night as day as possibly can be but wildly effective in their individual pursuits. So, the first thing that I would encourage someone to do is to find a presenter whether it’s a historical figure whether it’s someone on YouTube whether it’s someone within your life or your company. That you say they’re on the same frequency or vibe that I’d want to be on one day, right? and this is important if I’m super soft spoken and super quiet trying to be this big bombastic orator will be so uncomfortable and so outside of your normalcy. You’ll never achieve it so you kind of want to say like based on my vibration. My frequency am I a more you know laughable. You know, charismatic personality am I a more subtle am I a more you know Steve Jobs type presenter that’s a little bit more like straight to the facts and so you’ve got to find someone who’s already achieved greatness. That just has the same frequency the same vibration of what you resonate with and then genuinely in the beginning you try to channel that person and I know this sounds like not the best advice because most people say be yourself. Don’t be anyone else I think in the beginning you don’t know how to be yourself yet as a public speaker. You don’t know what your public persona is so it’s better to find someone that you okay, you know what? I really like you know; Simon Cowell I’m just going to choose him is not necessarily a good speaker but like I just like how direct he is, and I like how like to the point no nonsense. He commands a room. I want to I want to emulate that. So, then you just literally if you spent, I would give it 1 to 2 hours it’s not even a lot of time watching YouTube videos of him interviewed you in interviews watching him giving feedback noticing his manual arms. How does he say and then when you speak literally try to channel. Your inner Simon cow if you will, you’re not going to be that good right away because everyone’s a mess before they a success, but you’ll be able to be like well how would this person say it and then you do that and then what happens is you stop wanting to be that person and you want to be your own person. And you find your own voice but, in the beginning, if we’re so caught up in sounding stupid or sounding bad. We don’t go after it, so I encourage people to find someone that feels like they’re the same frequency as you channel watch like some videos get some tape into your subconscious mind of that person. Channel that person when you present and do it enough times until you start going I don’t really like saying it this way or it feels too much like them I want to do it this way then you’ll start getting your footing and find your unique way of speaking.

17:18.75

ThinkinCircles

That’s some great advice and it’s something I’ve personally done. I know when I first started the podcast. There were a few people that I kind of listened to repeatedly and followed them and kind of thought as almost and tried to emulate them until I found my own voice. 1 of the things that I suffer from a little bit and then I think I know a lot of other people do when it comes to presenting generally is nerves right? And that can you know I’ve seen people kind of presentations become absolutely crippled by someone who’s particularly nervous and you can see that they’re nervous and that affects all you think now, man, this person looks nervous you must have some tips for how we kind of go about kind of tackling that thing you know, whether it’s imagining the entire crowd naked for focusing on 1 person at the back of the crowd. All those kinds of them. You must have something else. You know this? This must be you. You must get people over this.

18:13.95

Arel Moodie

Yeah, so I’ve never I’ve never seen I’ve never thought picturing the crowd naked would be helpful I never understood that like I’ve heard that since the beginning of my career and I’m always like why that take one that seems like such a mental exercise to do and 2 Why would I do that so there’s 2 ways to deal with nerves the first thing to understand is nervousness only comes from lack of preparation that is the only place that nervousness comes from when you know, no one gets nervous in the morning to tie their shoes. You don’t get nervous to go down and be like am I going to do this right? But if you’ve ever seen a five-year-old try to tie their shoes. They’re really flustered by it because it’s just new. So, whenever you’re nervous about a presentation what that’s really saying is there’s something about this that you’re not prepared for so that’s like basics number one, so you’ve got to prepare and that just comes from repetition you know. Would love to say that there was you know don’t do hard work like it is work but so if you’re nervous, typically what you’re nervous about is a certain point in your presentation. Typically, you’re like I feel good up into this point then I blank out and I kind of forget the next part and I’m so nervous I’m going to blank out. Well, that means that there’s, there’s a transition point that you need to either create a visual cue for create a written cue for or something there must be something that reminds you of what you need to say so that’s preparation. The second thing this was my like big a. that completely made me feel comfortable in front of. Any audience that I’ve ever spoken in front of, and I’ve spoken in front of some really like high pressure audiences and ones where I’ve psyched myself out and, it’s always been true. What I’m about to say literally no one in your audience wants to see you fail. No one think about it for a moment. Okay.

20:07.40

Arel Moodie

I’m a listener of this podcast right now. So, I’m listening to James I’m listening to me speak. You don’t want me to suck as a guest. You want me to be a good guest. You’re not you clicked on this, you might be driving right? now you might be going for a jog or washing your dishes and you chose this episode because you were like. I want it to give me something so in reality no one in your audience wants you to fail because if you fail that means they fail now what every presenter who gets nervous often thinks I don’t say every presenter most presenters think well they hate me they don’t want me to be here. They think I’m stupid. They think I’m done. No, it’s the opposite. It’s like hey listen I’m giving you have an hour of my time you’ve got this podcast I don’t want you to I want you to do well. So, once I realized everyone’s rooting for me to do a good job even when I mess up, I just acknowledge that I messed up I say oh you know oops You know of you know that’s embarrassing and I have never had an audience that hasn’t been like it’s okay or laughed with me. But if I start going? Oh, I’m so sorry I shouldn’t have I should have been more prepared I I’m so embarrassed I let me let me let me start again. Let me start again is they’re like dude, it’s fine like just. You don’t have to start? please don’t no one ever wants you to start again by the way like no one ever sets 15 minutes in get a mulligan and start over right? So, if you just realize that your audience wants you to succeed and if you mess up, you just address it now. Our fear is oh but like what if this client thinks I’m not professional or what if this candidate thinks that my company doesn’t have their stuff together almost 100% of the time from my lived experience. People will see you as a human if you mess up you acknowledge the mess up and then keep going. No one really will hold it against you. I think when we think we must be perfect. We become almost a caricature of who we are. And then we trust that character less and we don’t know why whereas if you are able to just realize oh look, you’re listening to this Hopefully you’re like wow this is helpful and if you think I suck that I’ve lost, and you’ve lost. We’ve all lost. But if you’re like no I want this to be good and I mess up and even if 5 minutes of this isn’t good. Hopefully the rest of it is good and that’s how we all win. So, once you realize everybody wants you to win and you’re prepared I mean you can literally go out there and vomit on your audience and you’d still get like a rounding a round applause.

22:32.40

ThinkinCircles

I You know I don’t recommend anyone de gooses and does that, but you’d be prepared. I mean that’s some amazing advice and don’t recommend. Is it up chucking is that what we call it up chucking I don’t I don’t recommend any up-Chuck okay, no up Chuck but if you did, you’d be okay.

22:48.80

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, something I will kind of take to my next kind of presentation I am so guilty of underpreparing though for presentations. Usually that is kind of where I think my nerves come from, I think sometimes and when I’ve kind of done things more than once and I’m a bit more kind of used to doing it a bit porn practiced. That’s when I get a bit more relaxed about it. I always try to equate it to be being a bit like a muscle the more you work it the stronger you get it right? It’s one of those things and you’re right? You do have to put the kind of hardworking just being, kind of charismatic and for funny or confident isn’t necessarily always going to take away from a good presentation because again as we’ve talked about in the time. Content matters, right? and taking people on that journey to leave them with that the big domino basically was the big Domino. So, let’s assume right? we’ve that we’ve had we that we’ done our presentation whether it’s internally whether it’s to externally whether we’re talking to a client a new client whether we’re talking to a group of people at a conference or whatever it might will be now we want to know how well that went. You know? So how do we measure this? What’s the measurement of success for your presentation I guess this is where some of the technology that you’ll bring in kind of can support us.

23:52.34

Arel Moodie

I’ll give a I’ll give a no tech and a tech way to do this right? So, I’ll give a no tech in a tech way, right? So here is the no tech way to do it ask yourself. What’s the 1 thing I want my audience to remember from this presentation, right? So, you get clear on that and then. Right? after right after an hour later if you can’t do it right? after a day later if you can’t do it. An hour later doesn’t matter if you can find the audience just ask? What do you remember about the presentation. Do they respond consistently to what you wanted them to remember. That’s the low-tech way to do it. So, if I want you to remember this is your opportunity to succeed upon an exit, I want you to benefit from an exit and I go speak to them and say what do I you remember and theine I just remember you were nice. Well, that means your message didn’t land the thing you wanted them to catch. They didn’t catch. So, the very low-tech way to do this is you know to go up to like maybe 1 of your co-workers if you can’t like maybe you’re talking to like clients or recruiters and you don’t have the luxury of asking them. But you’ve got like a co-worker or a team member that’s with you simply ask them. What did you remember most about my presentation and. If their response is somewhat like what you wanted them to remember that means you, you’ve nailed it. That means you’ve locked it in if it’s not no issue. now the other thing which is also low tech. If someone talks more about how great of a presenter, you are and not how great the message content or thing was for themselves. There’s something that needs to be calibrated some speakers are so caught up in saying poetic things or being fantastic on stage that it becomes distracting. All you remember is how funny the person was. There’s a lot of people were just stand-up comics and then they say go out there and believe in yourself and then they walk offstage, and they just told joke after joke. So, you’re like, you’re funny, but you know you’re not you were funny but your message in its impact me and at the end of the day anytime we’re in a place of public speaking. Our goal is to impact our audience. So that’s low tech if we want to go tech. That’s why we created talked so what tlacoyo is a very simple software. We have a free version. A paid version. We have users all over the world that use it after you present if it is appropriate like if I’m doing a client pitch, I probably wouldn’t use a Qi code; but we have a talk slide that has a qi code that’s built in and if it’s like a team development a staff development. Maybe it is a public presentation at a conference or an industry event. You say hey the only way I can get better is I want to know what you liked about it I want to know what you disliked about it so I can improve upon it. Take 2 minutes scan this Qi code. Let me know what your thoughts are and what takeout does is it takes the audience data and automatically turns it into a visual chart, and we track your responses over time and put all your data together. So, you get individual views of your data. What were your scores on how valuable it was do people want to , reattend. , things like where it is engaging interactive inspiring and there’s different things you can measure that’s pre-built in and then you can literally see a graphical representation of what the audience thought because one of the biggest things that happens after we present, we go did I do a good job and if someone brings you in to speak. They’re curious. Did you do a good job. So, if you have data that says yes, my audience found it valuable or no, they did it then you can look at the qualitative feedback and go well, what did we miss because the way talks dot works is it moves based upon how people answer so if they answer in 1 way it goes in one direction the answer another. So, we’re always capturing the most relevant data. So, if someone doesn’t like it. We capture that for you. And now if they don’t like it because they go, I don’t like gingers and I didn’t like the colour of your beard. Well then like there’s nothing. You could do about that like keep it moving. That’s not valuable feedback. But if it was like I felt like you were rambling, and I didn’t know what the point of this presentation was until halfway in oh that’s actionable feedback I need to get to the point quicker so that audience feedback you just must learn what’s useful and what’s not useful and if you get that and you get periods of time where you get data over time. There’s no way you don’t get better with that kind of insights.

28:05.92

ThinkinCircles

I mean I mean it sounds incredibly useful, right? And I suggest everyone who is into kind of presenting or presents a lot or that even kind of webinars or does any kind of public speaking I would suggest kind of go have a look at talk it up., Aria it has been an absolute pleasure talking to you today if anybody wants to know more about you. We will include all your details in the show notes, and we’ll include links to the two talked as well. So, everyone can have a look at that sign up for the free version and or even try the kind of pay for versions as well. We haven’t coughed anywhere near as much as you. You can possibly do today because we haven’t talked about the likeability strategy, I talk about the authorships that present other there all kinds of other the three that left out there that we could talk about. So maybe we will kind of have you back and we’ll talk about a few of those other kind of points in the future. But now arrow moody thank you very much.

28:56.75

Arel Moodie

Absolutely and you know what I want to eat my own dog food I don’t know if that’s a saying out there I’m in America I don’t know this is a saying I hear anyway. So, in the show notes you’re going to see a link that says talk dot ac slash moody, that’s my feedback link. Let me know what you thought about this episode when you if you click on that link if you put in the code rules are you les I’ll know that it’s from this episode. So let me know what you thought about it was it helpful was it not helpful. So, in the show notes you’re going to see that link and I want you to see in in action and I want feedback if this sucked let me know that it sucked. If it was helpful. Please let me know is helpful because it’s how I become a better guest on podcasts like James is here. So, thank you James for having me. Thank you for listening and make sure to make memorable messages.

29:39.17

ThinkinCircles

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you very much.

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The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing: Mike Ames

by Julia Fras | Jul 28, 2023 | The Marketing Rules Podcast in Writing

Sales and Marketing, Sales & Marketing. There is a difference the first is 2 different departments, the second is both functions working together.

Joining James Whitelock this week is Mike Ames from Flair, growth consultants. Mike discusses how to align your recruiters and your marketing and how to convince them of the value of marketing.

Episode Transcript:

00:01.38

ThinkinCircles

Welcome back, everybody to the marketing rules podcast and it is my pleasure to have Mike Ames from Flair with me know I think Mike probably a lot of our listeners will probably know who you are ah because you’ve got a pretty good personal brand and a pretty good profile. But for those who don’t. Ah, I haven’t car ologist you before. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about flair and the work that you do there.

00:28.30

Mike

Okay, thank you James and delighted to be here with you talking about a very interesting subject today actually? Um, okay so I am best described as a scalability consultant. So, I help people scale their business There’s this myth. But all you need to do to scale a recruit in business is add more staff get more clients get more vacancies fill them repeat and if you do that? What will happen is your business will implode and you’ll eventually become what they call a yo-yo company and recruitment is full of them. You need to create a solid foundation and what I do is help people. To do that using our 7 pillars methodology which some of you might have heard about at the moment we’re in the process of um, putting more of our content online so that people can access the sort of stuff that we normally do as a coach or consultant and people pay us for like live. But going to stick that sort 2 thirds of the way through now stick in that online so people can access it whenever they want, I’m very excited about that project to be doing well.

01:27.11

ThinkinCircles

You do a lot of live streaming and things yourself right? You where you know presenter yourself.

01:38.39

Mike

Recruitment show, which used to be every Thursday, but we’ve now changed it to twice a month because we’ve also launched a much shorter sort of 5 minute ask Mike ah YouTube channel. So, if you’ve got specific very granular questions. You can ask them, and I’ll nail them for you at least I’ll give you my viewpoint on it which. May or may not agree with. So yeah, we do and um, um, and occasionally we do webinars we do workshops we do all those things for free. So, I’m sure if people check me out on LinkedIn. They’ll see them all. There.

02:02.70

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, yeah, well as always, we’ll include all your details in the show notes at the end if anybody wants to know, ah a bit more but as you said what we’re going to discuss a day and dip into your wealth of knowledge. Um, specifically to with regards to recruitment agencies is sales of marketing. Um, and how you get the 2 to work together. You know there is the old and adage that you know the marketeers think of the sales guys over there picking up the phones and shouting down the phones and the sales guys think the marketeers are the colouring in department. Um, now as a marketeer myself. I’m more than aware that I know exactly what? what? What we do and I’m very aware of what the sales guys do but a lot of businesses that do are in the position to have a marketing team or an outsource marketing team and they’ve got their recruiters getting the 2 to work together and to really gel. And get them to communicate together is really it can be quite difficult. Um, so let’s start there. How do we get the 2 let’s what how do we get the 2 teams to talk together to talk about the same thing and get and talk the same language which is maybe the first thing to overcome.

03:12.00

Mike

Okay, that’s that is an interesting subject. Um, and I’m glad we’re talking about this because in my first business which was quite rapid growth. We went to forty million quid in 10 years seventy odd million in today’s money because this was in the 90 s. We didn’t spend a single penny on marketing, and I was very proud of that. Um, and the reason that we didn’t spend any money on marketing is I didn’t know what it was quite frankly we were a relationship sales business, so we built relationships with people and then we sold to them is what we did. So, in my mind, marketing was as you say colouring in, I’m going to use that from now on it was pretty much mishmash money that was spent, and I couldn’t really see the benefit of it, so I didn’t do any of course had I known then what I know now about marketing. It would have been one hundred and forty million turnover business you know because. Um, if it’s done properly recruitment ah marketing particularly can be a massive support to the client facing team that you have if it’s set up properly and I think the first thing then in answer to your question is a proper awareness of what marketing can do for salespeople. In some cases, I think it’s viewed as a well they do that it doesn’t make any difference to us because I’m a salesman you see James good balance today on today’s show I don’t really care what they do because I’m just going to go and win clients really so you go ahead and do that boys and ah and we’ll just do this and actually it shouldn’t be like that at all I think the formation of a growth team which has marketers and salespeople and perhaps communicators on there as well I think is really important to bring it all together but awareness in answers to the question I think James.

04:51.14

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, and is that do we get there by just as simple as having the 2 teams even just sit near each other or work in the same environment or be able to bring 1 person from each team in on those team meetings. So, someone from a sales team joins the marketing meetings, and vice versa. Ah or is it the marketing team presenting to the sales team and vice versa. How do we get the 2 kinds of communicating.

05:19.80

Mike

Okay, when most of the recruiters I deal with don’t have a marketing function or have a very basic one and I help them build something which is you would probably think it’s quite rudimentary because you’re a professional marketer I just want. Something that’s going to support the sales function I just want people to see the benefit of it and I think to answer your question. First, I think the marketers must make very clear what products effectively or services if you will. They’re offering the sales team and then what they will get from that, so it is a traditional feature benefit model look we can do this for you, and you’ll get that from it and then the third part of the triangle is they can prove that they deliver it look when we did this last time this happened, and you got that. So, if we do it again and you do this then we’ll get more of it. I think for me marketing for this is going to this is going to show my very simplistic view of marketing and I’m embarrassed to say this in front of you James but there you go here. We go as a salesman marketing for me is what we call the four cs, so I want someone who’s going to produce good quality thin. And chunky content is on both types I need both types for sure I want someone who’s going to produce some collateral which can have all my key messages in it, and I can use when I’m with a prospector with a client and I want it I want it to save me the bother of having to say things because it does it for me. Um I want someone I want um some campaigns to be built so that I can start a conversation with people add campaigns you know connection campaigns so that I can point the campaign at somebody and when I come in at the end. It’s no longer a cold call. It’s now a warm call. And lastly, I want a communication strategy which means all of our content and all of our collateral is being pushed out and put in front of the people that I wanted in front of and I want dashboards all over the place and then what the heck’s going on because I know as a salesman if I have that my job is easy because don’t Forget. In Recruitment. You must build a business which is going to produce exceptional results with average people because statistically you’re going To. You’re going to employ average people. You know, ah, it’s ah what do they call it a bell curve statistical Bell curves. You can’t fight that you know when you’re very small. You perhaps have all these brilliant people. But as you get bigger, you’re going to hire average people so you must have those average people delivering great results and one of the ways that you can do that is take away a lot of the heavy lifting with your marketing team. Let it do the work instead of your salespeople in those areas and leave them to do what they do. And I think if it’s presented in that way, we can do these 4 things for you. This is what you’ll get from them. This is how you use those things, and this is how we monitor it I think you get a completely different view of the from the salesforce of the marketers and what they do.

08:12.92

ThinkinCircles

Um, I mean I think that’s I don’t think that’s simplistic at all. What we might dd on is that strategic element as well. Like you know how does it align with the business and that’s one of the other things that um I always think is important that that marketers need to get involved with is right? What is marketing actually doing for the business where does the business wants to be here in 5 years’ time does marketing align to that and how does it achieve those is apart from the the day-to-day running stuff of getting your getting your message out in front of people and some nice some nice pretty presentations for when you’re in those client meetings you know were how going to ah, ah, move that forward. I always think that finding something that the 2 teams can work on together. Okay, if there’s something that they can if there is a push for something within the business, I think that always helps right? So, we need. You know we’re looking for. We’re opening a new office here to get the sales teams and the marketeers to work together on that. I always think when you can get them a line like that then that’s always that always works right.

09:33.66

Mike

I Think so I do like the idea of having a growth team though. Growth team meeting growth teams which are made up of different aspects of the growth function because that project becomes a whole lot easier then because look, we’re going to do this thing, what do you think what can you bring? Well, we could do this, and we need this, and you have ah a collegiate meeting rather than and us and then type of meeting. Well, it’s art marketing again, you know doing those things. Oh, bloody salesman not bloody. Ah you know I do think you’ve got to move away from that. Um, the starting point on that space. So, I would say would be the key messages definition of the 7 key messages that you need in marketing because when you have them, you’ve got a very clear definition of the people you’re going for what you want to say to them. Um, you have an idea of why you’re different why you stand out. Why. Clients would give you an opportunity. You know why they would choose you over someone else once? those are all defined which I think you must do together I don’t think you can just leave marketing to that, and you certainly can’t leave sales for that. That’s for sure if you can do that together. That’s a great start I think as well. Around the communications when you’re pushing content out or collateral 1 of those just as again, it’s all about nomenclature I suppose. But for the purposes of my discussions today content is just adding value either as thin content which is like blog posts or LinkedIn posts or chunky content which is content almost good enough to pay for almost good enough that the client would pay for it and so again, the salespeople are saying well you know we need this sort of stuff to go out so that people are going to react to it, or we need this piece of content chunky content Because. We want to offer it to all these prospects I aren’t really talking to us because you can change the dialogue away from hey gives a job or we’ve got this great candidate to hey would you be interested in this because it like deals with that problem I know you’ve all got it changes the narrative away from those transactional sales to something around a conversation that you can have, and more people are going to start a conversation with someone if they feel that they can get some benefit from it Well chunky content will do that, and the marketers produce a chunky content. So, but they don’t just sit in a room, and do it they work with the salespeople to make sure they get the right content that the Target market.

11:55.93

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, I completely agree. Um I think that that that stuff is as obviously they would as a market incredibly powerful, and I think it you know it. It can be the initiator of that conversation and build that awareness of the brand and make that done cleverly can make sure you’ve got a warm content when you do follow that through and um and target those people a big fan of that way of working. Um, so that’s the content piece and it’s interesting. You talk around like the growth strategy because we’re finding more and more marketeers considered as growth could cast themselves as growth. Marketeers. So that’s a very much more trendy term now for because that whole growth piece is a is where we I think the marketers want to position themselves within the business. It’s not just marketing. It’s growth marketing. Um, and I know from our own experience that. We define ourselves as a growth marketing agency as well. We what we have done in the past and that those 7 points that those 7 book key messages. You know a marketing speed. You know that’s your positioning statement. That’s who you are what you do? why? you do it who you do it for and why you’re better than everyone else at doing it. Um, and I think that again any business listing in if you can get to a stage where you’re defining that stuff which is difficult though as ah as a recruitment agency because you do some stuff. That’s very similar to everybody else more than likely. Um. And so, defining that I think can be difficult. So maybe so explore a little bit that but bit more Mike that would be interesting.

13:28.90

Mike

Oh, it is here. Well, the new term that people are using now is the flavour of recruitment and it’s a mix of different things. So did you know that ice cream I don’t know what your favourite flavour of ice cream is James but mine happens to be room and raisin. Moment, I don’t know whether you’ve got a favourite but that there you go. But if you did, I’m turning it we well that’s 98% the same as roman rain but it’s the 2% is a bit of colouring a bit of flavouring and in my case, a few raisins tossed it.

13:51.60

ThinkinCircles

I don’t I’m not a massive ice cream fan if I’d be honest, um, yeah, but yeah, but I do it would be chocolate or something like that right? And yet we prefer one over another quite vehemently and I don’t like min I don’t like Cho I like this that there’s a 2% difference recruitment is the same 98% of it is 5 boxes on a whiteboard you know, get client get vacancy and find candidates qualify candidates in place right? So, it really isn’t that difficult to do, but it is very hard to differentiate because we’re all doing the same thing. So, what you’re looking for is that 2% which is different which then gives you a flavour so that then you can say to the clients look you know if you if your tastes happen to coincide with our flavour and we can prove the flavour taste the way it does because we got all these video testimonials right? so. If it does and you eventually will work together. It’s not ah, it’s not a timing issue whether it’s three months three weeks or 3 years it makes a difference. This is our flavour and if you like it then come to us if you don’t then my advice is with due respect just go down the street and get somebody else’s flavour because this is ours and that’s alien to most recruit us because they want to embrace everybody and include everybody’s big mistake push away the people that aren’t right for you and the people that are will be attracted to you and this concept of productization which is a brand for ages I think it’s got out of hand quite frankly now to be fair.

15:20.99

Mike

That flavour is your product but it’s much more than that as Well. It’s your values. It’s your ups. It’s your promise of service. It is your plan the things that you offer with the feature benefit pairs. It’s you’re pricing. It’s the value ads that you give what else? do you do as well as put a Bu on a seed for somebody So that’s your flavour and you can really ran that out. And somewhere buried in the middle of it is we put a boom on a seat just like everybody else and I think if you focus on building a flavour when you do get in front of somebody because the marketers have run a campaign and at the end of it. Someone has said. Yeah, well Okay, what have you got then you can say well Okay, let me tell you what we have. And if you like this, we’ll do great things together if you don’t then we’ll just go our separate ways. It’s a massively compelling sales approach to take and it really works very powerful.

16:06.32

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, um, it’s an interesting point that um that your being very selective over your clientele. Um, which is difficult I think for a lot of recruitment agencies because you know, especially when they’re starting out. They’re going to take on everything. Um and that that message gets very much diluted very quickly with all good intentions. They set out going to be as niche as possible. We’re always told that recruitment recruiters need to be as niche as possible because as the as the ah our American Cousins butcher it.

16:35.46

Mike

Um, well I don’t necessarily agree with that. But I know I know people take that? yeah.

16:37.74

ThinkinCircles

Ah, riches the riches are in the niches, right? You know you know? um, but um, but yeah, it’s interesting being selective over your clientele and I guess the marketing can help with certain amount of that real defining who you want to work with yeah.

16:52.17

Mike

Massively so massively so because certainly with your communication strategy with the c that deals with communications and the thin content that you put out for sure as well as your collateral. Obviously, you put in this stuff out there and it’s basically saying look if you want. This flavour of recruitment and what you do your market is part of that flavour right? So, if you want this flavour of recruitment were you guys. You know you know you want to come to us if not, you need to go to those cats down the street because they’re the ones that do that. And I remember years ago in the 90 s we got a piece of work, and it turned out it was introduced to us from one of our competitors. 1 of their best clients because the client had asked for something that they couldn’t do, and they said Well it’s not as you need to talk to those guys they came. They did this one little bit of work for us. And then they went back to him, and we never saw head and a hair of them ever again. I think it’s that view that you’re comfortable in what you do, and you are at the very highest level, but you’re write on what you say about the stages that recruiters go through I heard about it as being or heard of it in in terms of the. 3 stages of mankind so that when we started out on the plains of Africa the question was what can I eat right? Sorry how can I eat so I’m just I just need to whatever I can do today to feed myself I’ll scavenge I’ll kill things I pick things or do whatever I can.

18:18.30

Mike

Hunter Gatherers and of course that’s a very unpleasant experience so you need then go to become a farmer then it’s what can I eat so have a choice now Ill plant things plant things I want pick can choose what I want and then the third stage which we all want to get to be where can I do lunch because we don’t really know where the money is coming From. We don’t care if wave got this business. Does all this stuff so stuff and we pony around at the top of it and when you start you are how can I eat but you don’t want to stay there. That’s for I’m sure you need to get out of that phase quickly and get into what can I eat and then become known as the guy to guys go to guys or go to girls that do that thing in the middle, and whatever that is for you. We do this I mean we can do all these other things as well. But we’re not going to talk about that. We’ll only talk about that when you’re a client but right now as an entry board. We are the go-to people for this and then they come and once you’re in well you can sell them whatever you like aren’t you. But. I think in that positioning which is a tremendous amount of marketing I think is involved in that so that people look at you and say I mean whoever hired average at anything I’ll go out and I’ll hire someone I’ll get the most average person we want the best person we want the person who’s that is the. Well known. Ah, as being able to deliver in that space. We don’t like at an average Joe average. So, I think it’s important for us as recruiters to be able to make sure that our image is such that with a go to person for whatever it is that we make the most money out of.

19:43.36

ThinkinCircles

Yeah, I mean I like that 3 stages of recruitment growing up and it’s interesting because you’re marketing and how you market and what you market will change will develop with that. Um, if you are a start-up then there’s no what you’re not going to be able to afford ah a marketing agency. You’re going to have to get your hands dirty at that point. Um and have a go it yourself and then you get to or growing up and what you talk about now you know, but.

20:08.81

Mike

You can smart sort it out. You know that many of the things that you need things like your key messages you can. You can have a gut you can. They can be good enough to go out with you know your communications strategy I’ll make a LinkedIn post every week I mean it doesn’t have to be complex. To start off with and I would argue it never has to be complex. But you know that’s just me. But I think that you the simpler it is the easier. It is. You’ll make a start and the and the sooner you’ll make a start the sooner. You’ll start to get the benefits from it.

20:37.92

ThinkinCircles

I completely and absolutely agree and I tell you what that is a great place to finish on our today I think Mike um, thank you very much It’s been an absolute pleasure ah dipping into your brain for the last 20 minutes um I’m sure we’ll have you back on at some point in the future if anybody does want to know more and work with Mike then we’re going to include all of your details in the show notes. So, anybody can. Reach out. Ah but Mike Ames thank you very much for being guest today.

21:01.70

Mike

Thank you for having me.

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