#117: Career | When to Make a Move, Negotiating Offers, and Working with Recruiters (with Kelly Gordon and Matthew Kanter from Creative People)

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1, 2, 3, 4. Exit. Exit. Exit. Kelly and Matt are here and we just were chatting before this and I was saying, and I'll say it again now. I'm super excited to do this episode because typically I have somebody on every week that is a subject matter expert in B2B marketing. That might mean a CMO, a VP, a SEO expert, somebody who's great at video or podcasting. But Shantal, who works with us on Exit 5 was like, Hey, I got this idea for a podcast. You should talk to recruiters because everybody's out there thinking about their career. And our mission with Exit 5 is to help people build successful careers in marketing. We only talk about the marketing tactics. But a big part of this is where do you work? What do you do for work?

Who do you work with?

How do you find the right company? What should your job title be? What should your comp be. And I've always thought, man, we should do more content around this. So this is great timing. So we're going to talk about that today. I think this is going to be one of our more popular episodes just based on the topic before we dive in, just so we can hear from our awesome speakers today. Matt, why don't you go first and just do a quick intro who you are, what is Creative People, and Kelly, grab it from there and then we'll get into this thing.

Yeah. So I am a former marketer turned recruiter and sometimes I find it's weird to call myself a recruiter because I think a lot of what we're doing and building at Creative People is reimagining the way that standard recruitment and the thought process around recruitment has been done. And so what that means is building an experience that is more advisory, consultative to both candidates and clients. One where you could view us more as an agent than that recruiter or salesperson. And so I take a lot of the experience that I had within primarily retail and E commerce marketing and have used that to now build out marketing and currently brand creative teams at Creative People. I've been here five years. I launched the marketing team from the ground up and it's now led by Kelly. And it's been a great ride to work with fast growing and stable brands throughout both the B2B and B2C landscape.

So creative People is a recruiting firm?

Correct. We're a recruitment firm focused within primarily the series A to series D hypergrowth landscape.

All right. And Kelly, you joined Matt. Talk about your role leading this marketing function.

Yes. So I joined Matt just under three years ago. @ this point, my background was more in creative services as well as tech, so I was doing kind of similar things at Droga Google Creative Lab. Then I've taken short stints in more B2C and fashion, but ended up at Creative People and I came in and helped him build out more of the content and brand wing. And then recently in the past four months, I took over the marketing side of the house, working very closely with Matt. And we do everything from community managers all the way up to cmos, so really run the gamut and kind of have structured our recruiting team to mimic the teams that we are building, which is great.

Awesome. So, and just so people that are listening can kind of place this in their minds, you all have put some great people in at some B2B SaaS, companies that I'm sure people will know. Just give us some sense of the Companies and types of roles that you've placed and you don't have to list names but roles in companies I think would be helpful.

Yeah, definitely. You know, we've placed throughout the product led growth and B2B landscape and I think the word SaaS has taken on a thousand definitions similarly to growth marketing and what growth truly means. And so I think without giving specific names of the clients we worked with, they tend to be ones that are looking for first time hires. Now that could be the first social media hire being placed or that could be the first CMO hire to be in C following a massive round of funding or a new phase of growth or product. But to Kelly's point, we're kind of built out like some of the brands we represent and work with in the sense that you know, if you need someone that is from brand marketing, you're going to work with one person that focuses on brand marketing here at cp. If you need that head of design that works there, you will be able to find that through specific agents that we have on the team that are experts within that specific domain.

So a bunch of people that are listening to this and in and around the Exit 5 community are actively looking for new roles or just thinking about maybe I should be looking for a new role. I'd love to try to like unpack that process a little bit because I think for a lot of people, there's a lot of people who are unhappy in their role or maybe might be completely happy, but there's something liberating about just like even if you are happy, and this is a controversial thing, but I believe in this, even if you are happy, you often don't know your own worth until you know what might be out there at other places. And I'm just curious to like, I'd love to try to talk towards the marketer like yes, you should work for your company, you should go all in on your company, you should help that company grow. But like we've seen in the last couple years some craziness. People who were air quotes family get laid off after three months only to then join another company and then to get laid off again. And so I've always been a big believer in you are your own company, a company of one. This is, I am Dave, I'm a marketer. I might go work at a bunch of different companies and that's okay. And I think more people can create an advantage for yourself if you can adopt that mindset. How do we help people think through like when's a good Time to start looking. What does the process look like? What if you're happy at your job? Should you still look? Can we kind of talk through that and, and maybe go on the offensive with like helping marketing people find the next role and figure out their worth, Get a new job title, move to new company. I'd love to try to spend some time on that in this episode.

I think that you should always be ready. I think that one of the most stressful processes about finding a new job is actually getting yourself prepared to submit applications, knowing the types of roles that you're interested in. I actually have a lot of exercises that I make my candidates do all the time because I do think that your dream job can pop out of nowhere. Even if you're incredibly happy at your specific role now, you never know what a certain call will lead to. So I typically have my candidates every maybe six months, you know, write down three things they're really good at, write down three things that they love doing in their current job, and then three things that they want out of a company and job. So it gives them a little bit more of a mindset of you're not just starting from ground zero at all times. You kind of have like a base understanding of who you are as a marketer, what you're really good at and what you'd really be looking for in the next steps. You're not just applying willy nilly and panic. I guess applying.

I want to add on to that and I think Dave, like your term of being on the offensive, that's something that I think is really important to note in terms of you want to have your resume ready. If you're a marketer especially, I think LinkedIn is a great marketing tool for a personal branding perspective. You can create your own voice outside and different than just what your company's voice might be. And so making sure that all of those fundamentals are there so that you're marketing yourself the best way possible is huge. But to always be looking and of course we're a little bit biased in that type of suggestion, but there's a lot of opportunity there to see great opportunity. Especially when you're in a position where, to Kelly's point, you're not necessarily panic recruiting or hopping into the first thing that's in front of you.

Yeah, I like that exercise about, there's just something simple like that about what are you good at, what do you want to do, what do you not want to do, what type of company you're going to look. Those seem like Basic questions, but like, how many of you listening have actually taken an hour out of your day or your week, sat down and just map those things out and down like, can I achieve those things here in my current role? There's so many variables to, like, is the company growing? Are you learning? You might feel like you're a little bit underpaid, but the company is a rocket ship and things are going really well. And so that's a trade off. I could go maybe get 30% at this other company, but am I going to get to learn learnings?

There's.

It's like this constantly evolving thing. It's not as black and white as, like, yeah, go get a 30 pay raise at this other company. Well, you get in that new role and you're like, whoa, this company, like, moves at a much slower pace and it's not the same culture that I wanted. And so there's a lot of variables in there, and I love that. Just as a takeaway from this episode, like, how many of you have done that? And even if you're not going anywhere, should you do that once a quarter and just kind of like evaluate where you're at? I wanted to ask you each about what should people be interviewing the company for? I think a lot of times we go into interviews and we're on the other side of it and we're answering their questions, but a lot of discussion comes up. And in Exit 5, we talk about, like I have said, life is too short to work for a CEO who doesn't get marketing, which is like a little catchy phrase, but that's also not often the reality. You know, when I was 26 and had no resume, I couldn't just choose the CEO that I wanted to go work for. Right. And so there's going to be different stages, but how can we help people? What should you be going and asking a company? Right. What are the questions? You see people. How do you coach people through an interview for figuring out if the company is the right fit? And also, a lot of people, a lot of companies put on an amazing show in the interview process, and you don't really dig past all that kind of fluffiness and get in there. And you get in there in two weeks and you're like, oh, no, this was the wrong move. So anything you've learned in helping people get through the interview process?

Yeah, I think, like, to start right at face value, you always want to ask the current state of business, right? What is funding? What's product market fit? What are you really hoping to see on day one out of this hire. And a lot of times like the job description and the preliminary interviews can answer that. I think there are two more telling sides of the coin and number one being the previous history. Is it a first time hire? Is it a backfill? If so, why did that backfill maybe not work out? What has the previous relationship been with the CEO or founder to the marketing team? Because that will then set you up for the more important question, which I think tends to be six months go by after I start this role. How are you deeming my hire a success? Right. And it's interesting to see what people immediately respond to because sometimes you'll see, oh, they built out a great team and cultivated an amazing culture. Other times it's just I need to get ARR to 10 million and the answer is there. And then also the resources that they will allow to provide will be very telling of what it's going to be on day one and how that will evolve with time. But I think getting the history behind the role and the intent to hire can be very illuminating, for better or for worse.

What do you think, Kelly?

Yeah, I also just always remind my candidates whether they're, I think more from the junior side perspective is interviewing really is a two way street and people tend to forget that. They always just think that they're interviewing for the company but at the same time they need to interview the company as well. What Matt noted about asking individuals at the company, where's the company sitting today? All that's very important. I think during each interview you should always be asking similar questions to see if the team is aligned, especially if you're getting into cross functional interviews. So if you want to ask something like how do you find the culture here? What are the biggest goals that you see the team driving towards in the next year? I think it also is really illuminating to see if people are actually aligned on that and if teams have the same idea because a lot of the times you can get in and the product team has a very different vision than the marketing side of the house versus the engineering side, et cetera.

What does the timeframe look like these days for a good, a good process? I've been involved in the startup hiring days and that can be maddening for a candidate because it's like, yeah, we have this idea, let's go talk to people. Actually we're going to go in a different direction and that can be like a shitty process on the candidate end. But if you had an ideal timeline Working with a company and a candidate, what should people expect?

I think without putting too many barriers around, you know, let's say an open role of saying five interviews, eight weeks long process from beginning to end. It really comes down to like the commitment and engagement that you're getting from the hiring team. I think for us the best scenario would be a thorough process, but one that keeps momentum. And so I'd say anywhere between five to six weeks from first round interview to an offer being presented. But there are times, of course, where it'll drag out and I think to the previous topic we were talking about of assessing, you know, a company and the role liability, like if they're dragging their feet, if it takes two weeks to get feedback, that may be a little bit of a warning sign. Maybe it's not, but you have to balance those things compared to the other factors of the role. But under two months is ideal. That one to two month mark, in my opinion. Kelly, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think again, more on the more junior side of the house, I would say that we like to keep our processes pretty quick, maybe four rounds. Recently we've been seeing kind of an uptick in projects which we try to eliminate if we can and maybe do a whiteboard session. But I would say that there's also been times where companies are really keen on a hire and someone can start an interview process and end it in a week and a half and get a job offer. So we kind of come in and try to help mitigate surprises or understand expectations on the candidate side because that can move really quickly. But sometimes a client knows exactly what they want and if the candidate feels excited and ready to go, amazing. But at the same time, that can be a little jarring sometimes, wouldn't that?

Yeah, but that'd be the dream for you too. It's like everyone just have week long sales cycles as opposed to like, you know, to be engaged. And it can be such a tough, emotional roller coaster. It's like we got this great candidate, we got this great company after six weeks, like it didn't end up working out. Let's get everybody in a week would be amazing.

Yeah, yeah. And that's where being an agent comes into play. Right? Versus just like a salesperson. Like we're on a texting basis with every one of our candidates. So I will literally text that CMO saying, hey, I know this sounds crazy, but you're going to get an offer like end of this afternoon, it's been two weeks. How do you feel? Let's Hop on a quick call. Maybe we've met in person already. And it's more like talking to a friend or another colleague versus the sale or transaction trying to be done.

So.

But it's honestly sometimes more scary when it happens that quickly because you might not feel like you have as much control, but that's our job to do.

So you work with a lot of first time hires and this is an area where as an executive I struggled, which is when you've never had that role before. It can be really tough to articulate what good looks like and what you need. And you often think you might have something. But part of the first time, the first time role process is like I've found that the interview process is a key. Like we have a job description, but the interview process is actually key to helping me figure out what that role should be. Right. Because I got to talk to five people to be like, nope, not that one. Wow, that was really interesting actually. No, I just talked to her and now I'm kind of thinking about this role differently. There can be a lot of wishy washiness, which is a technical term and I think that can be unsettling for some candidates. But I think oftentimes what the company needs to be able to articulate what they to be able to like come up with a good brief. It is like marketing in that sense. It's like you're going to get a better hire when you can articulate what this person will do. What does success look like, what does good look like? But with a first time hire that can be harder to navigate. Do you have any lessons or guidance around that process?

I think a lot of it also comes down to the candidate's appetite to be at more of a startup. We tend to see these types of hires in earlier stage. So a lot of our job and what we kind of probe for is are you okay with things being open ended? There's clearly three defined goals that you need to get to, but everything else is kind of up to you and working with your cross functional partners or maybe no one to, to get you there. So I think that as a hiring manager it's really important to kind of dive in and ask questions around things that might make the candidate feel uncomfortable and not try to paint it all as rainbow and butterflies. I'm sure it is, but you don't want someone stepping in that expected it to be very easy. Lots of resources can kind of cruise when you really need someone that is very much about rolling up their sleeves and not afraid to make mistakes quickly and move on from that.

You think people should be out there. If you reach out to somebody, even if they're not looking, obviously you're going to say yes. But like, how do we tell people, like, take the call from the recruiter, why not? What do you got to lose?

I mean, at the end of the day, I'm going to talk from our perspective because every firm is different, but a lot of our job as agents at Creative People is actually about networking and getting to know the best people within our market. So there's individuals on our team who have a very deep network within product marketing. And even when she doesn't have roles, she's just trying to understand the landscape and understand what people are.

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Are excited about what different roles look like at a series B team versus a series D or an IPO brand. So we kind of frame it as more of a general intro chat. Like why not just get on someone's radar who can help you down the line or maybe even now? And at the end of the day I have a lot of calls. I mean, Matt might not be that happy about this, but that just have to do with getting people in my network and not necessarily selling them into a role.

Well, you can't fake that, right? Like if this is the agent role, like you need to be well connected and you need to know people and so you have to be willing to like take calls even. You have to take the just relationship call even though this is not going to go anywhere because if you take 20 of those, you're going to connect with four or five interesting people. Now you have four or five interesting people that you have a bunch of companies you can go. So it's totally strategic and it's not too dissimilar from sales in that way where like, yeah, actually the best way to sell is to be helpful and to kind of go in without, you know, if you only do calls when you have a specific role in mind, you're not going to be very successful.

Yeah. And that's all that we're about, right? Relationship building. And listen, great. If we have a role with Duolingo for a senior marketing position and we reach out, hopefully it's a good fit. Right. But if it's not, my suggestion here for anyone looking for a role is do your research on the recruiter and the recruitment agency. You know, if you go to our website, you'll see the breadth of clients we work with and if that duolingo role isn't of interest to you for whatever reason, maybe one@Monday.com is or at Dropbox, you know, these other great clients that we do work with. And so I think that's where it can be less of just a random intro call to a recruiter you'll never work with again, and more of a relationship that on both sides you start to foster so that when that perfect role comes up, even a year from now, we're coming to mind or that candidate's coming to mind to us so we can get them into that dream position.

What do recruiters and companies think about LinkedIn and personal brand and brand building? I. I've often heard people and I'm a big advocate of LinkedIn. I have a lot of followers there now. It's become an advantage for me. So I'm very skewed in my. And I've grown a strong personal brand. So, like, I'm very skewed in my opinion of this. But there's also a flip side of this. So people are like, well, I just, I don't want to play that game. And like, I've seen people who are great at writing content on LinkedIn but, like, they're not a great candidate. And I think that's totally fair. Curious to hear, where does LinkedIn sit as a recruiting tool? Like, is it valuable? Should people be spending time there? Can you still get a good job without it? How do you see it? What do companies say? See if people are candidates getting unfairly skewed because so and so is a prolific writer on LinkedIn and is always talking about their stuff. Like, I see you reacting to that, man. I'm curious to hear what you. I love it.

I'm just smiling because Kelly is 85,000 followers on LinkedIn.

Oh, let's go, Kelly. Let's go.

I'm using it for my personal brand. I think LinkedIn is immensely helpful. I don't think it necessarily.

Hold on, hold on. 85,001. Let's go.

Okay, let's go. I need to get to 100, so guys, follow me. No, so I think that, seriously, I think that I've used it more as a tool to help showcase personality and personal interests and kind of show a well rounded candidate. I've never had someone be kind of like touted because they're a great writer on LinkedIn, but their skill set is not necessarily where the company needs it to be. But I do think it really helps show the company that you care about the industry that you're working within. We always say it's really great to geek out on your industry. It just shows that you're passionate and that you have an opinion on things. So my first area that I go to look at a candidate, I don't even look at their resume. I look and scan if they have a LinkedIn link and then click around there. I think it's a really great visual tool and it also allows you to add a lot more than just a few bullet points. So please use LinkedIn.

Yeah, like you don't have to use it to be a thought leader, but like it's basically an interactive version of your resume where you can add more character, show your work. Like, let's say you're a creative director, right? You have a LinkedIn profile built out. You can explain who you are, what you do, what your beliefs are, which companies you work at. That's like the minimum. You just do that. It's a better version of your resume. But what if like once a month you wrote a post like recapping some of the like creative work that you're proud of that your team did. You don't have to try to be a thought leader. You're just, you're showcasing that work. I, I don't see how you wouldn't want to make the time to do that. It's essentially like, hey, I could send you my resume, which is a static PDF that I'm going to send you, or I can go to LinkedIn and get a little bit better feel, match those two things together. It can create a huge advantage. And I also found like a lot of it, it goes down in the dms. Like, you know, I can't tell you over the years how many times I've never applied to a job, but I go to LinkedIn, I'm like, whoa, this CEO of this company messaged me or this recruiter messaged me here. And I think without having an active presence there, like you're not opening yourself up to that inbound that might come to you.

Yeah, that's how I got my job at Creative People. Matt posted on LinkedIn and then I cold outreached them on LinkedIn. And I think it also, it's basically a social network so it feels a little more casual than sending a full blown email that you're just scared about how it's going to look and show up in someone's mailbox. Everyone knows that the network is for finding jobs and maybe hiring, so it's not weird to just message someone out of the blue. But yeah, I am such a big LinkedIn proponent. I need a hat or a shirt or something.

Well, yeah, but, like, you got 85,000 followers and you haven't even posted in two weeks. So, like, we got to get you back on the horse here.

Over.

Don't worry, 100k is wait. I hope the scheduler is full. You said an important thing there, which is I think this is how I'm kind of using this to make a point about LinkedIn. Not necessarily specific to recruiting, but all of us have jobs or need jobs or want jobs. And LinkedIn has morphed into, like, it used to be this professional digital networking site, and I used to only accept or connect with people that I met with. So, like, we have a call today. I'm going to send you a connection. It's now morphed into a social network where, like, you can follow somebody that you don't know because they're posting content. And so B2B, B2C, whoever you are, like, we are all thinking about our jobs and our work. And as humans, we're very motivated by, like, what we do for work. And so why not tap into that on LinkedIn? And I even see people sometimes who are like, well, I just don't know what to post. It's like, it's not that much different than any other social media site. And you actually don't have to show all of the personal things that you don't want to show. Just if you're a creative director, again, talk about your perspectives, your beliefs. Almost everybody that I've ever met in my life through work in this context is like, creative director has strong opinions about how things should be done. Head of demand gen has strong opinions about how it should be done. Like, or like what they've done. That's all stuff that you can be writing and sharing there to increase your recruitability. And I think that's how those inbound opportunities come your way.

Yeah. And for marketers, a lot of it can be each post being a cover letter in a way. Right. Either you're showcasing the campaign you're most proud of, or, you know, KPIs that you hit for your team. And so it's okay to be a little bit boastful in a way, maybe in a professional manner, but showcase that work. And I'd be surprised to hear from a hiring manager now that would prefer a resume over LinkedIn. Almost every single hiring manager or founder we work with is asking for the LinkedIn. And for marketers especially, it can actually be more of a yellow flag if they don't have a profile picture. If they don't have things built out, they don't have a description under the work that they did in their past three roles. Like, you know, if you're doing the work on an updated resume, you might as well even just copy and paste it into the Description of your LinkedIn profile to make sure that it's a.

Direct reflection of that you're able to put in so much more and give it so much more character than your resume. All right, we got to talk about money and job titles. I'm not going to ask any questions. I'm just going to hear where either of you take this because I have an idea. I don't want to lead you there, but what role does that play in this process and maybe what mistakes do you see? Candidates. We're talking to the candidates here. We want to help the people. What mistakes do people make with comp and title?

I think from my perspective, it's when a candidate hasn't had that honest conversation with themselves and perhaps their loved ones on what non negotiables are. And now I'll loop in title compensation. I'll actually include location now because I think that's a massive conversation as well. When we ask what are you looking for in your next role? It's our job. It's in our best interest to get you the highest, but we also don't want to undercut you and not send you a perfect opportunity just because it's 5% lower than what you said you want to be at in your next position. So if you've had the honest conversation with yourself as a candidate to say I absolutely need 100k, not a dollar less to take this role. I want to at least remain consistent in my title. I'm let's say currently a manager level and I'm open to New York or la, but no other city outside of that that allows for us to advocate for you in the best light. But there's so many facets of compensation now that it's not as binary. And so just understanding what those non negotiables are personally and then professionally will allow for us and for honestly just you. Even if you're not working with a recruiter to get that ideal role that checks all those boxes for you.

I think another thing to note as a candidate, titling means very different things at different companies. So sometimes there are individuals who are stuck on a director leveling, which is totally fine. I'm not saying anything's right or wrong, but this is just something from talking to many companies, if you go to a bigger company, a director level may be actually two levels above what you're at right now. So taking a manager title is not technically a step back, maybe from a titling perspective, but from a comp and day to day job perspective it's actually higher. So I think taking everything with a grain of salt is very helpful. We're not trying to offend you if you get a senior manager job from us, but it's a series D company and currently you're at a very small stage startup. So titling, I'm always like do away with it a lot of the times too. Companies have their internal titling systems but will allow you on your resume or LinkedIn to call you whatever you want within reason. So I always am very cautious when I'm pitching a role to someone like titling out of the way because there's different ways to go about it. What do you need from a monetary perspective? Because that usually is pretty set in stone with companies and budgets, etc.

How do you know what you should ask for?

Do the research a little.

But how, like where is that information? Like I should be making X. Like I've only learned that through basically like what someone has told me they would pay me and that becomes at the end and then it's just like, it's kind of this insane process and I don't know if there's another way around it, but it's basically like you get a job offer, it's never just like great, sign it. It's like get a job offer. I had a family friend who just went through this, get a job offer. Wasn't going to ask for more, ask for more, got 20% more. And it's like, hold on, that's ridiculous. If you didn't ask for that, would you have gotten it? And what's the best advice? Just always ask for more. I don't, I don't understand how, I don't know how I would deal this. Luckily I employ myself so I can decide what I want to pay myself now. But how do you manage that?

I mean with the research standpoint, there's resources out there. I think there's a couple, you know, free compensation tools that you can just Google marketing manager salary, New York City and see what pops up. You can also aggregate some information on LinkedIn. Let's say if you're looking for that marketing manager role in New York, salaries have to be posted and you can start to get a sense of averages and minimums. I think sometimes the ranges, I'll just say it are, they're not helpful, right? You'll see Netflix posting and it's like 150k to 250k, right? And that's not really helping any of the candidates that are looking. And then the second point to that though is ask your network and it doesn't need to mean, hey, I see your marketing manager. What do you make? But you can say, if I were to join your team, what's the standard range for this type of role? Ask your former managers that have gone to build other teams and other companies what they're seeing in the current space and try to get that sense. Every quarter it changes drastically. What a VP of growth was making two years ago is way different than what they're making now. And that changed and ebbed and flowed over those past two years quite substantially with 10 to 20% Deltas. In terms of the negotiation aspect, if you're working without a recruiter, I'd always try to get ahead of it and asking what the range is for the role before they ask you what your expectations are that can be done. In that first screening call, did you.

Say legally that is something that a company. Is that only in one state or do people have to have a range for a job now in advance?

You have to have it in New York posted on a job advert or job board. So LinkedIn, company website, et cetera. I'm unsure about the rest of the, you know, 49 states, but I know that there are a couple others that have included that there. So I think that has been a helpful start. But if you do a quick scan for some New York related roles, there are pretty wide ranges and I think that's hopefully with positive intent to cast a wide range of diverse candidates. But at the same time it might not help from a job seeking perspective.

Kelly, you have anything to add to that?

I definitely agree with asking the team if you're not working with a recruiter. I do think if you are looking to negotiate and you feel like you can get a little bit more, you're dissatisfied with what they've put on the table. We always talk about levers and looking at a package holistically. So you know, there's base salary, there's performance bonus, there's sign on bonus, there's equity pto. There's lots of different ways that you can kind of create a package that you're excited about these days. If you do go back to a company, I will say they don't want to do a Ton of back and forth. So if you're just trying to see what you can get from a company and you still want to reject the offer, even if you ask for 120 versus 100 and they give it to you and then you were, that's not going to look good if you reject that offer. But I think if you have exactly what you need or there are two different levers that they could pull, whether it's more equity or a sign on that would get you over the line. Be honest with them. Say, I am very excited about the potential of joining. I would really like to see the salary at 120. If we can get there, it's a done decision and then it makes them feel a little bit more confident in going back to their finance team and fighting for you knowing that you will be joining, it's 99% chance that you'll be joining.

All right, what else have I not.

Asked you that we should cover for folks before we wrap up?

I guess something if you were working with someone like Matt and I like with a recruiter, I think that we get a bad rep sometimes. And I mean I've worked as a recruiter before, so I understand that we can drop off, we can ghost or you might not trust us. At the end of the day, if you're working with someone from creative people, I think one of the biggest things that we find helpful on both sides of the equation is transparency. So as Matt mentioned, like knowing what your lowest low of the salary is, knowing that you are excited about this role but you have two others in the hopper and one is actually your dream job. We're here to manage expectations and represent you in the best light. So the more that you tell us and the more information you give us, the easier the process will be. And that even can come down to you taking a final interview and saying, you know what, this is not for me because at the end of the day, we don't want the team to come to us and say we're so excited we're going to put together this great offer and you reject it. We'd rather get ahead of that. So we are your friends, we're here to help and we want to get you as much money as possible as well as your dream job.

Love that.

My opinion with some of the outreach as well is when we post an open role and when companies post open roles, there's an influx of messaging. Right. I posted a role today for VP of offline growth marketing and I already had 80 messages within my first two hours of posting that I try to get back to everyone even if they're not going to be a good fit from the jump. But one additional thing that I have seen as a successful metric of me actually getting back to people that I think could be a good fit is when they outline in an even bulleted format why they think they're good for a role, what those non negotiables are and kind of get ahead of that almost as like a mini cover letter. For example, I've managed offline growth marketing and grew spend from X to Y. I was a part of this company when they were X million in revenue to Y million in revenue. I'm now looking for a role that is VP or above within growth and performance marketing. Those are aspects of an outreach message that allow for recruiters and more importantly hiring managers and clients that are not even doing recruitment in their day to day to get back to you and to get that first round screen. So try to be short and punchy with those outreach notes. Be human, showcase that. And I think that's evident by LinkedIn versus just email and those strategies can go quite a long way to getting that hopeful response.

Awesome. All right, well thank you both for doing this. We could have a quarterly session where we come on, I'd love to bring, we should bring out some like anonymous marketers, like blur them out, give them like the witness voice or something like that. That would be awesome. But hey, if you got some value from this episode, we'll link to your both of your LinkedIn profiles. Matt has like a 50,000 and that's not about followers. Followers are vanity metric. Wink wink. But you know he's got a 50,000 follower gap to Kelly. So go to LinkedIn, find Matt, find Kelly, connect with them. Also if you're listening to this, you're a prime candidate for somebody that they might help find their next dream role. So I hope this episode was helpful just a little bit something different. If you enjoyed it, send me a note dgavegearhart.com or hi@exit5.com Connect with Matt Connect with Kelly Matt and Kelly, thank you so much for giving us an hour out of your day to come hang out on exit 5 and give some advice to marketers. I hope this will result in some kind messages back to you. And I also hope that this was helpful for you if you're a marketer out there at least, at the very least just giving you the little push to like think about your career and your company of one heading into this new year.

Amazing. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Dave. We appreciate the time.

Thank you. Exit.

Foreign.

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