The thing about recruiting is that it’s usually very manual and labor intensive, and the opportunity cost (as well as the actual cost) can be very high. But on the other hand, hiring is perhaps the single most important activity you want to get right.
So how do you balance the cost of hiring with the importance of hiring?
Automation.
A friend of mine, Phil Laboon, recommends a hiring tool called Dux-Soup, which is a Google Chrome extension that lets you easily scour LinkedIn for sales prospects or hiring prospects. Dux-Soup can basically help you semi-automate the upfront part of your hiring process (identifying candidates). It’s about $15 per month.
Right now, I have a version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator that’s $49.00 per month. With this paid version you have more filters to search through.
For example, if I’m looking for someone who’s in sales and advertising, I can easily set those filters. For years’ of experience, my favorite range is between three and five years or so. Then I’ll directly search for relevant keywords in profiles. Second-degree connections and group members are also great, because they’re a natural warm intro and referral.
Ideally, you’re looking for probably a minimum of a couple hundred results and up to about 500 results. In some cases, your criteria may be too narrow, so you might want to use fewer filters.
Once you’re getting good results, save those filter settings. Then you can go back to it later for other hires. Sometimes, if the hire is particularly important, you’ll want to do the exact opposite and make your search criteria even more granular.
Related Content: How to Conduct Effective Interviews to Get the Best Hire
If you think your search results are looking good, just click on the Dux-Soup Chrome extension. First, you’ll have to tweak your settings.
Once your settings are saved, all you have to do is click Visit Profiles.
It’s really important that you don’t let your computer go to sleep because once your computer goes to sleep it’s gonna stop visiting profiles.
That’s why I have a little add-on called Caffeine for Mac. It makes sure that my Mac doesn’t go to sleep when I go away. Just make sure you turn down your brightness and that the computer is plugged in.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that a lot of companies, even great ones, are lazy when it comes to recruiting. They have these inscrutable job postings that are like product spec requirements, and they don’t really care about the copy on their postings. That’s a mistake—it drives away some really talented people from applying.
Another mistake with recruiting copy is to not leverage your own profile. For example, on my LinkedIn profile right now I have “We’re looking to hire a killer salesperson for our marketing agency” at the top of my summary with a link to the job posting.
By doing this, I find that I’m getting more warm referrals and saving a lot of time and money.
To summarize how you can semi-automate your own recruiting process cheaply:
Follow these simple steps, and you’ll have a solid recruiting process without having to pay a couple of thousand dollars or 20% of the first year’s salary, which is typical of headhunter fees.
I’m not saying that recruiters aren’t helpful, but to be honest most companies can’t really afford them. And whatever money you have to spare should be focused on sales when you’re growing. After that, once you’re in the high 7-8 figures per year, then you can worry about investing more into recruiting because at that point your focus should be on hiring the best possible talent.
Related Content: How to Onboard New Hires
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
What if I told you that you could automate a lot of the $10/hour marketing and sales tasks that you do every day?
How much time would that save you? How about money?
Zapier is a tool that makes it easy to automate tasks between web apps. (Note: I have no affiliation to Zapier.)
To paint a little context on just how many web apps we use today, let’s just take a look at what private companies valued at $1B (also known as unicorns) and above use:
In a group of 50 unicorns, over 976 web applications are used.
That is a ton.
Obviously, there’s utility to using one web application. But if you could have them talk to each other, what would that mean for your business?
Even better, what if you could create a rule where multiple applications talk with each other? Think of it like a marketing funnel—where users are continually moved through a workflow based on their behaviors.
For us, Zapier has been indispensable. We consider it one of our secret weapons, and I’ll show you why.
Here are 15 time saving Zapier workflows to create if you want to save time (and money):
We create a decent amount of content and for us, it’s important that we spend 80% of our time on promoting vs. producing it. As our content production calendar continues to get more aggressive, it’s hard to keep track of new content as it comes out.
Sure, we have a checklist that our content promotion specialists follow, but it always helps to have a quick alert when a new piece of content is published.
Free Bonus Download: Get a list of 10 insanely actionable first steps to building your own sales team – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
We use Slack as our chat program and use the Zapier RSS Zap to hook new posts into Slack.
Here’s what it looks like in our channel:
Read this post here: How To Write Blog Posts that Actually Convert Readers into Customers
Bonus tip: We also have other channels dedicated specifically to marketing topics such as Pay Per Click (PPC), content marketing, and more. Pick one or two top industry blogs and have those RSS feeds pushed into Slack so that your team can continually be updated on the best posts. Don’t put in too many, though, as it can get unwieldy pretty quickly.
Main benefit: Get your team to take action on new blog posts as they go live.
Your e-mail service provider and CRM might differ, but the concept is still the same: you want to know as much as possible about your new leads.
We connect our ESP (E-mail Service Provider) with Full Contact to scour the web for information such as:
After Full Contact pulls the information, it’ll automatically load it into our CRM, which is SalesforceIQ.
Main benefit: Find out more information about your leads.
If you’re in a service-based business, you know that the process for onboarding a client can be tedious. What if you had a workflow that could do everything at once?
Here’s the workflow we put together:
Here’s what it looks like:
Main benefit: Reduce human error in your onboarding process and collect cash faster with automatic invoicing.
If you have a ‘free consultation’ type of form like we do, it’s helpful to get these leads texted to your sales team on the fly. We use Gravity Forms for our forms and it plays well with Twilio.
Read More: The Ultimate Recipe for Effective Lead Generation
Whenever someone fills out a lead form, we’ll get a text within a few minutes so we can act on it quickly. This is especially helpful if you’re not looking to shell out a few hundred bucks a month for sales technology.
Bonus tip: You can also have these leads sent to your chat program (like Slack or HipChat) for quick access.
Main benefit: Act on warm leads faster to generate more revenues. Remember: time kills ALL deals.
If you’re investing in content marketing, it makes sense to have a content bank to keep track of all the material that you’re putting out there. By doing that, your content team can reference past links and cite all the great stuff you’ve published. It’ll also keep your managing editor on top of what has or hasn’t been created by your team already in order to eliminate redundancies.
Free Bonus Download: Get a list of 10 insanely actionable first steps to building your own sales team – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
Here’s an example of what our spreadsheet looks like:
Main benefit: Creates a content bank to help drive your content strategy.
If you’re producing video or audio content and you’re interested in driving more organic (SEO) traffic, transcriptions might be of interest to you. In my opinion, if you’re spending 30+ min talking, you’re already creating long-form content. Why not max out on the benefits?
Transcriptions used to be another tedious step in the content creation process, but with Zapier, it’s now much easier.
And what if I told you that you could automate that process?
Here’s the workflow:
Main benefit: Save time and gain more organic traffic by utilizing transcriptions.
How many of you go to conferences and eagerly collect a bunch of business cards only to throw them away afterwards?
*slowly raises hand*
Well, I used to.
But what if you could simply take a picture of a business card and have the following happen:
That’d be a lot more valuable, right?
When someone sees you make the move to actually add them on LinkedIn and sees what you’re all about with your LinkedIn updates, you start to build a relationship.
Much better than just throwing a card away (a.k.a. throwing a potentially fruitful relationship into the dumpster).
Main benefit: Saves you time by adding contact information and sending a LinkedIn request by just snapping a photo.
Free Bonus Download: Get a list of 10 insanely actionable first steps to building your own sales team – advice not found in this post! Click here to download it free.
With over 500+ apps, the combinations you can create with Zapier are endless. Here is some additional inspiration:
8) Automate social media posting – Imagine taking one more thing off your social media manager’s task list. Simply hook in your blog RSS feeds with a tool like Buffer to put social media posting on autopilot.
Main benefit: Save time.
9) Twitter lead generation cards auto-responder – If someone fills out a Twitter lead generation card, have Twitter send an auto reply to engage with the new lead. You can also add in a delay with the new Zapier workflows so it doesn’t seem so automated.
Main benefit: Save time and build a more personal relationship.
10) Follow up with new leads via Gmail – If you aren’t using an e-mail service provider, a simple way to instantly follow up with new leads is to hook in your lead form with an e-mail zap to stay on top of the communication. Remember: the fortune is in the follow up.
Main benefit: Close more deals.
11) Nurture webinar/event registrations – Let’s say you just finished a webinar and you want to put attendees and registrants into two separate e-mail auto-responders. No problem. Just connect a tool like GoToWebinar with your e-mail service provider (e.g. Drip, MailChimp, AWeber) and load them into the proper sequence. A lot more effective than sending canned e-mails from GTW.
Main benefit: Increase your funnel conversion rates.
12) Build a social media advocate list – Automatically populate a Google Spreadsheet with a list of people who are engaging with your content (e.g. liking, sharing, etc.). Sort through this list once a month and identify the influencers who can really help move the needle and see what you can do to help them out. In return, you might just see some benefits in the future!
Main benefit: Build a list of your most rabid fans and create a deeper relationship that will pay dividends down the road.
13) Chat widget to CRM – If you’re using a chat widget like Intercom.io or Olark, it’s helpful to load the leads directly into your CRM (e.g. Salesforce, Pipedrive, Close.io). Chat leads are especially warm because they’ve taken time out of the day to engage you for a few minutes (sometimes more).
Main benefit: Close more deals.
14) Trello to Dropbox – Let’s say you’re having a meeting and you’re responsible for taking all the notes. You might house these notes in a tool like Trello (or Evernote or Basecamp), but you also want to keep the notes for safekeeping in a folder that everyone can access. It’s simple: just connect your project management tool with Dropbox and your whole team can have access to the notes.
Main benefit: Save time.
15) Send calendar reminders to your chat program – Let’s say you have an all-hands meeting every Monday sitting in your calendar. You can hook in Google Calendar with Slack/HipChat and remind the group every week.
Main benefit: Keep your team on track.
Connecting your web apps by using a tool like Zapier (or IFTTT) can be an amazing way to gain back lost time, increase your revenues, and save money.
My recommendation is to make a list of all the critical web apps you use and figure out how to get them to play nice with each other. In fact, get your team together and brainstorm possible workflows that you can create. You’ll be amazed at what you can do.
One more thing: If you liked this, you might like our growth marketing agency Single Grain, which focuses on scaling customer acquisition.