This is a job ad from August 2023. It was up for about 4 days.
802 applicants!
There are a few reasons this is a massive problem
If you’ve ever run job ads you know that most people who apply are entirely unqualified.
You’ll have SDRs applying for Enterprise AE roles.
People who hit 1/10 requirements
And that’s before we get into people who are applying on the proviso they’d only work remote (when you’ve explicitly stated that you MUST be in person).
If you run 3 separate job ads - a Marketing Manager, a VP Sales and a Mid-Market Account Executive, you’ll often have the same person apply to all of them.
Spraying and praying!
Thankfully there is a better way
We can go outbound and find great candidates, reaching out them directly.
Sourcing candidates is an art and a science - I've found on average, with some experience, and a good target list of companies to go after, it takes about five minutes to find a good candidate. If you sit down and spend an hour, you should be able to find 12 or so high quality, relevant candidates.
And your outbound recruiting messages should have HIGH response rates
What do you think has a higher ROI?
Looking through 800 people who clicked "Easy Apply", and reaching out to the top 5%
OR finding 84 high quality candidates, knowing even a poor performing message should have a 10% positive outcome.
Here's an interesting data point from the CEO of Mercury (my business bank of choice)
1 hire per 330 applicants. Ouch
So the question, if job ads don't work, were we running them last month?
SDR hiring - it’s the one role that works best with job ads.
And specifically LinkedIn ads (I’ve tried Indeed as well… you get a much worse type of candidate).
It’s the one role where logic inverts itself - you want people who are actively putting their hands up to get into sales.
I have found that targeted outbound approaches don’t really work at the SDR level. It’s the only role in the Go-To-Market space where this logic applies.
If you want help upping your recruiting game, book time to speak here.