As we know, social selling can help salespeople build pipeline and revenue, however, from personal experience I’ve learned that social can help with hiring talent too.
Digital is changing the way progressive companies are attracting talent. Modern companies who have taken the plunge into digital and social have increased their ability to:
1. Attract the right talent, and 2. Retrain talent through various platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Ralph Barsi, Senior Director, Global Demand Center at ServiceNow, is a prime example of this. He spoke at the Digital Growth Conference about how ServiceNow and other modern companies are attracting, and retaining talent through digital.
Let’s rewind back to three years ago, Sales for Life was just a mere two-employee company: me, Jamie Shanks, and my business partner, George Albert. In three years, we’ve grown to 20 team members! And this happened organically. We never plucked our team members from another company or courted them with dinners, drinks and all the other traditional means of recruitment.
Instead, every single employee came to us through a hiring magnet—and that hiring was influenced by social media and content.
Video as a hiring magnet
The reality is that candidates, particularly the millennial generation, wants to understand what the culture and environment is really like inside an organization. And that information isn’t provided in the job posting or promotional materials.
Source: May The Force Of The Millennials Be With You! by Forrester Research
These candidates need to know that there’s a greater purpose, a cohesive culture, and a team environment. They want to know that the job will be enjoyable and that they’ll enjoy coming to work every day—that they’ll be working at something they believe in and can commit the next few years of their lives to your organization. In a nutshell, they want authenticity.
If they’re going to leave their current organization for yours, they want to know that the grass is truly greener on the other side.
Social and digital help with this in two ways:
1. The hiring magnet
In his book #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about his company, VaynerMedia. He has thousands of applicants per month, some asking to work there for free!
Gary has created a magnet—an environment in which candidates can watch videos and get a sense of what it would be like to work there. Videos can help answer such questions as:
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What would their day-to day roles and responsibilities be?
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What kinds of accounts would they be working on?
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What kind of business does the organization want to become?
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What kind of culture has the company created?
All of this information is so critical for candidates. The process of job searching is now very much like the way you buy a home. Home buyers go online, take virtual tours, check out the neighborhood on Google Earth maps, and so forth. Before they have an in-person showing, they’ve already done a huge digital taste test of that home.
A candidate that wants to join your sales team is thinking the exact same way. They’re not interested in your promotional materials—they want to know what it’s like to truly work at your organization, especially after the honeymoon period is over after the first 90 days. And this is where social is the ideal outlet to showcase your company culture.
2. Sales methodology
Candidates also want information about your sales methodology, such as:
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How are we going to sell?
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What kind of accts will I be going after?
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What will my territory be like?
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What will be the approach/sales process we’ll use?
More and more candidates are becoming involved with digital. So they want to come to an environment that leverages these platforms as a means of communicating with their buyers. The last thing any candidate with digital experience wants to do is go to an organization that does 150 dials a day, barely leverages the Internet, and has no intention to become digitally savvy.
Those are the traditional organizations that create a terrible flow of inbound leads, so the sales force will be forced to drum up nearly 100% of sales pipeline through their own means. This makes it more difficult to attract talent, since the sales pros at these organizations are nearly one notch away from a 100% commission sales pro.
A Changing Approach To Talent Retention
Digital provides a big competitive advantage, and we’re going to be taking advantage of it here at Sales for Life! Look out for us changing how we approach video in the latter half of 2016 going into 2017.
We’ve recognized that if we want to become a global brand, and if we want to attract Toronto’s greatest sales talent, then we have to continue changing. So we’re going to be filming many aspects of our day-to-day lives – from our internal culture, to internal meetings, to customer engagement, to events and parties. We’ll also be hosting events through Meetup.com on a monthly basis. We’re going to give people insight into what it’s really like inside Sales for Life. Why? We want the best talent to come to us, and leveraging digital will help us achieve that goal.
Interested in getting started with social selling? Join our next online workshop and learn three actionable tips that drive pipeline.
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