Want to Recruit Top Talent? Start Thinking of Work as a Product That You Sell.

Talent is a discerning consumer that you need to thoughtfully market to.

So many times, I’ve heard founders ask me, “How do I find great engineers?” or “Do you know any awesome marketers?”

That always struck me as the wrong way of looking at the problem—but I couldn’t quite figure out why. I realized that you’d never ask this question if you had built a consumer app and you were trying to do customer acquisition.

No one ever asks, “Where do you find users for my dating app?”

That would be weird—because they’re kind of all over the place, but “finding” isn’t the challenge. The challenge is converting them.

Instead, you start with the value proposition of the product itself and you make sure it’s clear why someone would want to use it in the first place compared to all the other dating apps. You would make sure it’s clear to someone who winds up in your conversion funnel through message testing and user interviews.

Once you had that squared away, you’d start testing various acquisition channels, optimizing them regularly for cost-effective conversion.

To me, that’s the way you need to think about your recruiting process—and to do that, you need to start thinking about work as a product that you are selling.

You sell “work” to your customers—i.e. the talent. Talent pays for work with their time and expertise. Work is very expensive because they’re forking over a lot of time to buy the work that you’re selling—so it’s going to be a very thoughtfully considered purchase.

The value proposition of “buying" work for the consumer is not only the receipt of money, but conceivably a great work environment, challenging problems and perhaps a mission worth working on. Consumers aren’t a monolith, so not every consumer is going to value each of these things equally—so you’ve got to think about customer personas when you’re selling your work product.

Is your target customer an alpha that wants to feel like they’re working with all-stars on only the most cutting edge of problems? Are they creators who like solving problems for a community of people just like themselves? Or are they solely focused on making the most money possible? Perhaps they’re looking for a nurturing environment where they are encouraged to grow their skillset and learn new things.

Whatever it is, you’d never attempt to sell a consumer product without thinking about it this way—so why is everyone recruiting this way?

That’s because companies are stuck in the mindset that they’re the customer and they’re out in the market buying talent. When you’re the buyer, no one vets your suitability as long as you have the money to pay. That’s why founders are super confused as to why the process isn’t working for them.

“I have the money… why is this so hard to find someone??”

When you flip the script and you realize you’re selling your work opportunity to a discerning customer, you put yourself not only in sales mode, but in product marketing mode—making sure that what you’re offering clearly meets the customers’ need and that it’s fairly obvious to them that it does.

To that end, here are some questions you need to have answers to if you’re going to successful in recruiting:

• Who is this work product for? What specific persona of employee are you a great product for?

• What’s the value proposition that differentiates your work product from that of any other company trying to sell work? Is it better money? The opportunity to work with better people? (And how is this made obvious to candidates.) More challenging problems? Opportunity for growth? Try to be objective about this. What are you selling that I can’t get elsewhere?

• What sales channels are you testing to get your offer of work out there? Are you continuously measuring and optimizing your efforts in these channels?

• In what ways are you borrowing or buying audiences to put your work product in front of potential customers that don’t already follow you? Are you sponsoring ads? Are you discussing your company in places where potential customers are likely to gather? Or are you just posting job ads which is a little bit like getting your CPG product on retail shelves but not doing any in-store marketing or activations?

There are a lot of opportunities out there for talented people and until you think of yourself as a seller versus a buyer, you’re going to look like everyone else trying to throw money at them with little regard for marketing yourself differently.