INBOUND Bold Talks: David Meerman Scott "Inbound Job Search"

Thank you, Laura. It's so great to be here. And it was so great to follow Dharmesh and Brian. They're awesome, aren't they? In Brown job search. I've been fired three times and I'm damn proud of it. The most recent time I was fired was in 2002, and the company that I was working for was acquired. And they said, you know what, get out of here. You're not really very important anymore. So what did I do? I made my resume and I put all this quasi important stuff, or at least that I thought was important, onto a piece of paper. I did outbound marketing to try to find a job in 2002, and it was brutal. If anyone looked for jobs during that period of time, I mean, I suppose anyone, any time you look for a job, it's brutal. But oh my gosh, was it brutal at that time. And it was hard. I had to interrupt my friends, I had to interrupt my parents friends. I had to interrupt my friends friends and say, I'm looking for a job. Please look at my resume and send it to anybody who you think might be interested in me. Guess what? We're just using the new tools and we're doing exactly the same thing right now. At least that's what I see. These people that I haven't spoken to for a really long time, finally they reach out to me. Oh, cool. Haven't heard from you in ages. What's going on? I'm looking for a job. Well, gee, thanks a lot. Why didn't you reach out to me a real long time ago? So, LinkedIn, great tool, but it's all about this interruption thing. I'm here to say, let's make it about inbound marketing. Let's make it about when you're marketing yourself. Why not make it inbound? We're all marketers. We're all inbound marketers. Yet so many people and even, even people who want to get new jobs in inbound marketing are using outbound techniques to try to do so. There is such a huge opportunity to twist this and turn it and put it on its ear and publish really great content, whether it's blog posts or YouTube videos, tweets. Get it out there, show us who you are. And then guess what? The companies that are looking for what you have to offer are looking or they're finding, or when you network with people. Oh, my God. I have to tell this person about this person. No, no, no. Oh, sure. I'll send a link to your blog post any day of the week. When I get that email or that tweet, hey, I'm looking for a job. Would you mind retweeting this? Yeah, happy to do that. It's all about getting found. Now, I don't need to say this again because we've all heard it so many times, but I'm going to. We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in human history in terms of communications. No doubt about it. The biggest revolution in communications and human history is going on right now. We're all a part of it. We're at the very top of this revolution. We are leading this revolution. The second biggest revolution in communications in human history happened 550 years ago with the invention of the printing press. 550 years ago, with the invention of the printing press, finally people could read for themselves. They could afford books that were printed, and they could learn that it was all that. Maybe those religious leaders aren't telling the truth. And now we're doing the same thing with mobile technology and the technologies of inbound. You know, more people have mobile phones than have toilets. Did you know that? More people have mobile phones than have toothbrushes. Kind of gross, but true. So earlier this year, I was in Cairo. This is me in Tahrir Square. We used inbound use social media, not we, the Egyptians, to bring down a government. It looks like they're going to bring down three governments over the course of about two and a half years. I'm supposed to speak there in October. Do you think I should go? I do. My wife's in the room. Raise your hand. I don't know whether she's going to let me. But when we get there, we'll figure it out. So, Tahrir Square with mobile devices. This is Kangandi in Kunayala in Panama. And this isn't a remarkable village of 300 people. They moved the entire village, the entire village 1 km from the side of a river to the top of a hill. Huts and all. Everything moved. It took them several months to move it. Why? Because they had mobile phone reception at the top of the hill. They have no running water. They have no electricity. They charge their mobile devices with a solar system. They have iPads. They don't have running water. They don't have electricity. Transformed this village because they used to have to take their canoes and go down the river to sell their products. Now they can actually do the deals with their mobile devices. So transformational. Absolutely transformational. We are in the biggest communications revolution in human history. Yet the way that we look for jobs and Frequently, the way that companies look for employees is still as if we're in this outbound era. It's all about, wow, did that slide get screwed up? It's all about attention. Did I get your attention with this horrible slide that was not checked? Always come too early to the room and do a sound check. That's my rule. Why didn't I do it this time? You got me. I broke my own rule. There's a block posts in that, Tim. Okay, let's talk about how a couple of people got hired. How did Dan get hired? Dan was creating great content on the web. He actually then got connected on LinkedIn to HubSpot and he got a job. I love Dan's stuff, by the way. Dan Lyons, dude, he does. Is this fake Steve Jobs? He does the secret. He did the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Dude, I invented the free friggin iPhone. Have you heard of it? And everybody loved what Dan was doing at the time. His fake Steve Twitter feed. And HubSpot hired Dan because of the content he created. There's a great blog post you should check out, why I hired Fake Steve Jobs that Mike Volpe wrote. Some of the reasons. Black turtlenecks, white sneakers, yoga mats. There's other reasons, mainly about content. Eric. Eric wanted to work at a company called Vreeland Marketing and Design. So he did a series of YouTube videos. Now, in his case, it's a little different. In his case, he targeted a company that he knew he wanted to join. And then he created first a YouTube video saying why he wanted to work at Vreeland and why he should work at Vreeland. And he pushed that out. He actually got an interview. He went and did the interview, and then he did another one, another YouTube video thanking them for the visit. And these are just a couple of images of the YouTube videos that he did. He thanked them for that and he got the job. He targeted one company in particular. You can achieve a similar success. I've seen it so many times. There's no question that you can achieve a similar success. Lindsey was a student at Tufts University until she graduated last year. Lindsay created a great blog and a great website about how to market to millennials, her generation. And she pushed those pieces of content out to serve as her inbound marketing. She also. This is her great blog here. Now think about it. People trying to reach millennials, they're of sort searching on millennial marketing. How can I reach Millennials? They find her. That serves as her inbound job search. Inbound marketing. And she got hired as A result of it. There's Lindsay's Twitter feed. One more small example here. Sam. Little bit different in Sam's case. Sam saw that there were a bunch of interesting positions on the HubSpot website, and he goes, wow, I want to get one of those. And I love this. This is a fantastic. Sam made a webinar and he invited people from HubSpot to watch his webinar about why he should be hired. Is Sam in the room by any chance? Sam was hired. So there we go. Those are just four quick examples of this idea of inbound marketing. This idea that the content you create shouldn't just be your marketing content for the companies you work for, but it should be the content for. For you as well. And that should serve as the way that you find your next gig. It should set you up for your next gig if you end up wanting to go out on your own or start your own agency or start your own company that serves as your calling card for the VCs or anybody else that you're trying to reach. One thing that I also noticed about this idea of inbound job search is how few companies relatively are using these same ideas to find people. It's actually about 40% is the latest data. I've heard of companies that are looking for people through social who are doing searches on Google for people. So here's a really interesting question. If you're in the job market or your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend or. Or a relative or a friend is in the job market, what happens when they Google their name and the most recent company they worked for? Because guess what? Whatever pops up, that's who you are. Because on the Web, you are what you publish. If you're publishing great information, like Dan and like Sam and like Lindsey, then you're great. If you're publishing nothing on the web and the only thing that pops up is some arrest record from 20 years ago or something, then on the Web, you're nothing. And if you're publishing bad information, then on the Web, you're bad. So some people say to me, well, okay, David, these ideas might work for people who are looking for marketing jobs. So I have a final story to share with you. And Yukari doesn't know this is coming, but it's the story of our daughter Alison. And Alison came to us when she was 16, and Allison's not here. We should have invited Allison. We should have invited her. Alison, when she was 16, says, I want to go to Columbia. And we're like, oh, my God. All right. Yeah, Nice. Nice girl. Nice kid. Let's aim for the top. And we're like, okay, Yeah. I mean, she's got good grades. She's got decent extracurriculars, but lots and lots and lots of kids do. And I said to her, yukari writes books. She's got two books about Twitter. She tweets, she blogs. So you can. And we only have one daughter. Only have one child. So you can imagine our dinner conversations, right? It's tweeting. It's blogging. My daughter's like, would you guys stop talking about that? She says to us, would you please put away your mobile phones? Would you please stop doing that? We're in a restaurant. Oh, it doesn't exist unless it was tweeted. Could you guys stop doing this? Completely the opposite of most households. So I said, alison, we will work to get you into Columbia. And she goes, oh, dad, Daddy, don't tell me I have to tweet. I go, no, no, no. It's not about Twitter. It's about blogging. So I convinced Alison to start a blog about neuroscience. And because she wanted to go into neuroscience, she wanted to be a neuroscience major at Columbia. And again, why not think big? I want to be a neuroscience major at Columbia. Columbia. And so she started a blog, and actually, she got really into it, and I just helped her to get going. And she did everything else herself. She helped create the masthead. She started to do the categories of it. She did all sorts of things herself, and we didn't make it look too slick. It's her thing. And this is the last post she did before she had to submit her application. And that's Oliver Sacks, a Columbia University neuroscience professor whose book she reviewed. Smart kid, right? So she took it beyond where we talked about it, and she did this great blog. Now she sends in the application. It's electronic these days, and back in the days of paper for me. And on there is a link for how the admissions people can link to things. And no one ever uses that space to put a piece of content there. Nobody. It's all black and white. It's, I'm on the swim team, and I'm on this, and I play the French horn, and I'm a member of the debate team. And nobody says, I write a blog about neuroscience. I create content. And that blue link, people are just itching those admissions officers to push that button. And they did push that button. And then when we got. There's Alison at Columbia freshman year, when we got. She got in. And they tell you electronically and then they sent a hand. The head of admission sent a letter with a handwritten note on there that we loved to read your application and check out your blog. Which is just the point. They don't expect that. It's about content. It's about job search. It's not just marketing. It's everybody. And it's about anything you'd like to do personally. The biggest barrier to this is the four letter word that begins with F, and that's fear. We have to stop making excuses. When you're looking for a job, even before you're looking for that job, get out there, create that content. I'm David Meerman Scott, and this has been Inbound Job Search. Thanks very much.