Neil Patel! Live on Shally's Alley.

Hey everybody, welcome to Shelly's Alley! You are now live and it is October 4th, the first Shelly's Alley of October. So welcome! I'm super excited to have a very special guest today. Neil and I have never met, but, uh, Neil, you were introduced to me by, uh, I'm assuming a mutual friend, Luke Dubler. Is that someone that you, uh, you're familiar with? Uh, one of your many fans?

I, I don't know if Luke's a fan. I, I could have done something with Luke in the past or not, but I get so many emails it's hard to keep track. So Luke, thank you for the introduction, and I'm sorry about the name issue on my end.

No worries. Uh, Luke said, well, you're gonna— I ask everybody on the show who should be our next guest, and Luke said 'Well, I think you should have Neil Patel on, but I'm not really sure he's going to accept your invite.' And you know, I said, 'Look, I can only try, right? I can invite and see if they accept.' So, thank you for accepting. And thanks, Luke, for the recommendation. For those of you who don't know who Neil Patel is, because, you know, most of our listeners are in the world of talent acquisition, Neil is a well-known author and expert in digital marketing. And in particular, I, I think— would it be fair to say you're best known for growth hacking marketing? Is that right?

Sure, any performance type of marketing.

Performance, okay. But digital marketing is definitely your, your forte. You know, New York Times bestseller. I think you were voted top 30 in digital marketing, top 30 under 30 or something like that in digital marketing. So lots of accolades precede you. And what I was really curious about was what can recruiting learn from your, your side of the world, your industry. And it'll, it'll sort of preface this with saying, in my personal opinion, after 30 years being in the business, I feel like recruitment marketing, which is of course a, you know, a subset of marketing, I feel like recruitment marketing is often the redheaded stepchild of marketing. It's like, you know, big ad agencies don't really want to stoop down low to our level. It's, it's sort of not the, you know, not the nice top-level, um, uh, marketing agencies that really want to get involved with us. And that may not be the case, but it just feels like we're sort of like an afterthought in a lot of ways. Like, oh yeah, we have a great marketing department. Who does recruitment marketing? Oh well, uh, yeah, I don't know. So I feel like we have a lot to learn and maybe just don't really understand how this discipline can really help us. So, my first question to you in that context would be your growth marketing, your growth hacking, basically marketing. How can growth hacking be applied to corporate talent acquisition? Are there any untapped channels or strategies that recruiting teams should be exploring that they're not exploring?

Sure. So, a few things. One, getting awards for like best places to work and stuff like that will increase the odds of people actually applying for a job. Because you're looking for some of the best candidates. Two, a lot of big corporations have job boards on their own website, job listings. They don't optimize them to actually get traffic. So for example, we work with quite a few massively publicly traded organizations and we rank their job boards and job listing pages on Google. It actually drives a lot of demand for them. Just like how you do SEO for a website to sell your products and services, you do SEO for your recruiting section of the website to get more job applicants. We've seen that to be super effective. But in all reality, well, we've seen from a marketing aspect, because we own a digital agency, but as an entrepreneur, we recruit, we have 1,000+ people.

Right, you've got your own business.

Yeah, and the way we tend to recruit is you win a lot of awards, like best places to work and stuff like that, makes it easier to convince people. But your best candidates typically come from referrals from other employees. So you can either try to do internal marketing to compensate them, encourage them. And B is from LinkedIn. So let's say there's this person named John and I'm trying to recruit John and John is an amazing designer for a software company. And I own a software company, this is all hypothetical. And I'm looking, ideally I would love to recruit John. So what I usually do is message John saying, Hey John, big fan of your work. Love what you're doing at company X, Y, and Z. Funny enough, we're actually looking for someone like you at our software company. Do you have any recommendations of people that you think we should talk to? And then I go into some cool things about our organization that may interest anyone John would recommend. Majority of the time, people will hit us back saying, hey, I'm actually interested in the job, we should talk.

Right. Yeah. Yes.

That is usually our number one recruiting strategy to get people. And we usually look for someone who worked for a competitor, someone who's got continually promoted, because everyone says they're amazing and they cause growth. But if someone continually got promoted, it means a company felt they were valuable. Someone who's been there for a while and someone who's worked a few jobs and continually been promoted at all the jobs, which means many people have found them valuable. Then we try to interview those people. Even if you can't afford John or Sally or whoever it may be, or Susan or Ricky, you'll end up learning a lot just from the interview process of how they've tackled problems for competitors, you know, and what you can do to grow your organization. So we love that model. I know a lot of the people listening here may be like, well, I'm not an entrepreneur, I'm in recruiting, But if you're listening to them and be like, this is how I solve this problem and this is how I solve that. Well, now you'll have ideas on how to better qualify the next candidate that you interview as well.

Right, so it's not a waste no matter what.

Correct.

Let me pull a thread on the first thing that you said, which is getting awards. I feel like maybe sometimes in talent acquisition, we feel like we might not qualify, right? It's like, are we really good enough to get the award? So what's your recommendation for that? I, I, my, my opinion would be you don't know until you, until you try. But I can see how some organizations just hesitate because they don't want to like be a runner-up.

It, it doesn't typically work that way. They usually have a list of like top 50 places to best places to work or top 100 or whatever it may be. You apply, you either get selected or you don't. If you don't, no one knew anyways, right? You do, you can use it. It's like the, the cons aren't really a con other than people filled out a survey and whoop-de-doo, nothing really happened that hurts you from a publicity standpoint.

It's a little bit of work, but not a whole lot of— it's not— return on investment is huge is what you're saying.

I don't think the return on investment is huge, but it helps.

Every little bit adds up to help you get better candidates.

Right. And maybe start with the ones that you know, are closer to what you're actually— what you're— what you're— if you're known as the best employer or a great employer, then start with that. Yeah, that makes sense.

And before you go for national ones, look for the ones that are within your region, right?

Local, regional. Yeah, that's a good one. Okay, the other thing I did— the next thing I wanted to talk to you about is something that's really difficult for us in talent acquisition, and I think— I have a feeling it's difficult in every industry. So, you know, not singling our industry out, but content marketing— content marketing tends to be, um, it's, it's almost like marketing agencies and marketing experts will say content marketing, content marketing. That's, you know, that's a mantra. But in talent acquisition, it's particularly hard because our jobs are really not exactly you know, content. So you've helped a lot of businesses grow through content marketing. How do we learn from that without falling into the trap of like, hey, our jobs are content, because it's really not. Our jobs are advertising, but not exactly content.

The description of the job, assuming your job listing pages are thorough, it is content, and you can use it to get higher rankings on search. So think of it as if you have a crappy job listing that's not thorough, it's not going to do as well from a traffic generation standpoint as something that's very thorough.

Got it. So expand on the description of the job.

Expand and be super thorough, not just of the job, of the company, of your awards. Have a super thorough page where someone reads and be like, huh, Oh, this is interesting. Like some employers are now even putting videos on some of their job pages and be like, this is what it's like to work in marketing. This is like what it's to, or this is what it's like to work in customer success. This is what it's like to work in sales, et cetera. So then that way people are like, oh, this will be cool.

I just finished a study on that actually. It's gonna be published next month about the impact of video messages in the outreach. Inside of the email, right? You know, so reaching out with a video and they click on the page, land on the page, and it has video. What kind of— aside the job description, what other type of content resonates with talent, with candidates?

So, uh, there's different formats. There's images, there's text, there's video. Then you got your descriptions and how you want to convey the message. But what a lot of employers miss is it's more black and white. Here's what our job entails and here's the requirements that we're looking for and here's the experience we're looking for. They're missing the heart and soul. They're missing that emotional connection, and that's what you can convey really well with images and video, and that really helps people choose your company over other.

Okay, that makes sense. Okay.

So you want to be happy where they work. People don't want a paycheck. They want to enjoy.

They want to work with good people that they like or they get along with, or that company that's got a trajectory for them, a career progression or meaningful work. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe I'm thinking about it wrong because I was thinking the job may not be content, but what you're saying is the content can be in there if you are connecting with that heart and soul of the company. So use your advertising space. For better content. Okay.

So for example, if I was posting a sales job and it was an intro job, I may pick on someone who's been at the company for 10 years and be like, yeah, I'm now, you know, SVP of sales. I started at the company as associate. These are my qualifications. This is what the company taught me. Then, you know, a few years later I got promoted to this and then I got this and that. And we have this career mapping and we want to help people not just be good at sales, but we want to help people, you know, develop their careers and progress. This is how we help people get to the next stage as well. I'm a proof point that anyone can do it. I've been at this company for X amount of years and look at me now. I started here and, you know, here's the image and now look at where the company's gone and how I've grown with it as well.

So don't be shy to use your own story, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Tell me a little bit more about SEO, search engine optimization for jobs. It's oftentimes we don't, as recruiters, we don't have the capability of making changes to the framework of our website, which is dictated by, you know, the corporate brand and all that. But we can very often, for the most part, edit the actual job itself. Are there any hacks that we can use to help us with SEO? That aren't the, you know, the old, you know, keyword injection and stuff, which I'm assuming doesn't really work anymore. So what are the kind of the new SEO hacks for the job posting itself?

[Speaker] There's not really new hacks. It's a lot of the traditional stuff continually works, but more so a corporation needs to work with their internal marketing team to make sure these pages are optimized and connected to the rest of the site navigationally. They're indexable pages. A lot of times bigger corporations use this job posting and management software. If it's not indexable, it makes it hard for Google to crawl it and it be indexed. But you need to work with your marketing team to make sure it loads fast, it's linked to throughout the site, it's easily accessible, you're cross-linking jobs together, the pages are optimized for keywords where it makes sense. But, you know, I would recommend HR or talent to work with, I think it's HR and recruiting, but to work with, uh, marketing on it.

Because what you're saying is like the, uh, the system posts the job almost like it, it's a different website. So, you know, company.com and jobs.some technology.com and they're not related. So connecting those two will tie things up in, in, in SEO. Okay.

And ideally it should be on your own domain and not on some other person's domain.

Right. And that's frequently what happens with these technologies. It's, uh, company.the name of the technology.com as opposed to, yeah, that makes sense. How do you address personalization in a large scale with candidate journeys? So personalization is very central to marketing success and targeting, of course, but in recruitment, how would you address building personalized candidate journeys at scale? 'Cause one-on-one is great if you're a small company, but if you've got thousands of jobs, personalization becomes a pretty overwhelming obstacle, right?

[Speaker] It actually isn't because if you look at journeys that people go through in an organization, there's usually tracks. And even if you have 10,000 employees, there's not usually 10,000 tracks. There's maybe a handful of tracks. So what you can do is you can put a quiz on the page and be like, let's map out your journey as a potential candidate for X, Y, and Z company. You ask them basic questions that allow you to personalize the experience, and at the end you can give them one of the tailored/personalized approach based on the survey questions or the quiz questions that they answered.

So it's tailored at scale because there's only X amount of tracks. That's brilliant. Yeah, a tailored experience. Okay. In talent acquisition, there's been a lot of talk about automation. And I know marketing, just from reading and watching experts' videos and everything, marketing's definitely embraced automation in a variety of ways and generative AI and all that. Where do you see their risks or opportunities for this kind of automation in what talent acquisition does? So what should we watch out for, both, both good and bad?

We're big believers in AI, but in talent acquisition, at least for the short run in the next year, I would avoid using most of it on the front end. And the reason I say that is people want that personal connection and I would recommend giving them that personal connection where I would recommend if you want to use AI for things like screening. So for example, if you're looking for engineers application, uh, uh, AI can tell you here's all your past candidates that have been successful at the job that continually got promoted. This is what they have in common and they can look for commonalities with all the people who submitted.

Mm-hmm.

But you have to be careful for that. And there's the example of Amazon using AI for engineering jobs and it looked at the past roles and it was mainly males. So when females submitted application, it would just weed 'em out because they're like, oh, well, the past candidates were males and they were successful. Well, in the past it was mainly a male-dominated industry. It's changed over time, right? Right. There's still probably more males if I had a guess. I don't have stats on it, but that doesn't mean females aren't qualified. So you got to make sure AI doesn't have bias built in.

Yeah, and that's a big picture item is, you know, the data and the historic data may have bias in it based on the fact that, like you said, was the population then and it shifted in many ways, you know, geographically, you know, minorities and gender. So I think a big component of preparing for this is to take a deep dive and understand your data now before you start applying it to, you know, understand what your template is now before you start applying it to the future, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, that makes sense. Now, you've pioneered social media for business growth. I've pioneered social media for recruiting and talent acquisition. Where do you think this is gonna go in the future? How can companies prepare for the platforms that we are starting to see evolve? You know, LinkedIn would definitely, it's here, but Instagram and TikTok, for example, for talent is not, it's not quite there yet.

It's not a place to really do recruiting, but it is a place to show the company value and the culture. Okay.

Got it.

And showing events, offsite stuff, cool pictures around the office or culture, any of that kind of stuff is great because it may make people think, hey, I should look at this company more. Maybe they're hiring, or maybe, you know, indirectly it can help you potentially get more job candidates.

So your heart and soul, put your heart and soul on your Insta, but not like, you know, it's not a place to go advertise for jobs necessarily.

You can, it's just not as effective. We find putting your heart and soul out there just connects more with people and makes more people want to work for the company.

What about reaching out? What about, you know, email is still king in a lot of ways, and texting has been adopted more and more, particularly as generations, you know, younger generations are kind of native to texting. But messaging, direct messaging on Instagram and TikTok, is that still not there?

Not for recruiting. I think direct messaging on LinkedIn, sure, it's the right platform for the right job. And, uh, I don't think Instagram and TikTok are for that. I'm not thinking—

Not yet or just not ever?

I don't see it really in the next few years.

Okay.

Unless they adapt and change drastically. It's not that you can't get a candidate for them. You're going to be spending so much time direct messaging to try to get a candidate. The amount of time you're spending for your success rate is going to be so costly that you're probably better off just using LinkedIn or something else.

It's better spent elsewhere. Yeah, email or text or LinkedIn.

Because you have to remember, right, these internal people working at these corporations whose job is to recruit and help fill these roles, they cost money, and a lot of them are paid solid six figures. You can't have them wasting time on things that aren't really producing results.

Yeah, dead ends. Yeah. Well, speaking of scaling, another thing I've noticed a lot lately with mergers and acquisitions and and just simply companies getting, well, just more global, right? You've worked with a lot of— I know on your website you have like, I don't know how many countries. And by the way, I'm gonna put a link to your website here on the marquee in a second. But you've worked with companies in a variety of global locations and countries in different languages. How do you maintain— it's a challenge to maintain consistency across different markets, particularly because of the way some things are interpreted in those. So what advice do you have for globalization of recruitment marketing?

Yeah, sure. So we operate our ad agency NP Digital in either 19 or 20 countries, 1,000+ people. And it's a really simple model. You just hire really good people. If you hire really good people, which I know is a little ironic, but if you hire really good people, they'll translate and transcribe and adjust it and represent the culture and the company and the values and all the regions.

So basically you're saying your people will do this as opposed to there's not like a global strategy for globalization or you have to, it's a grassroots, you have to do it from the ground up.

Yes. Hire the people that help you do this. Someone in operations is leading it.

In that region to translate that brand and maintain that consistency in that brand. Okay.

Correct. It's usually someone in marketing. Sometimes operations, sometimes product. It depends on the company type.

But yeah. Gotcha. When it comes to the future, you know, everybody has, I'm sure, the crystal ball question. So, I'm not even going to go there. But do you notice or predict any shifts in the next let's say 5 years on how companies will attract and engage separately, right? Attract and engage with talent that they need to start preparing for now. You know, what do you feel like we need to prepare for today that will start hitting us in 5 years?

I think it's gonna go back to the heart and soul, and here's why. With technology, you're gonna have a displacement of some jobs. You're gonna have a creation of more jobs or in other areas. And what's gonna be hard for corporations is the cream of the crop is gonna rise and they're gonna be more in demand. So it's not just gonna be about money, 'cause a lot of people have money. It's not gonna be just about, you know, future growth. A lot of people have future growth. It's gonna be what really separates you, that heart and soul from the competition. What's fun about your job that's not about someone else's. And I think that's what's really gonna be important 5 years from now because I think AI's gonna change the job market. Not from an aspect too much of recruiting, but more so from an aspect of it's going to eliminate certain jobs and it's going to make the cream of the crop rise. So you're going to— and it's going to be really competitive for those people. So you got to showcase how you guys are different.

Okay. So people were in talent acquisition will be more in tune with those, uh, intangibles of the company and that maybe not as money-driven. And I think pay transparency— I don't know if you're familiar with what's going on in the debate around pay transparency, but it's definitely getting pretty messed up because there's different rules for every, you know, every state. In case some cities and regions within a state have different rules about pay transparency, different countries have different rules, right?

There's sites like Glassdoor and how accurate are they?

Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, that may contribute to how maybe money is not so much what people will focus on, or, you know, maybe not even career trajectory, but you're saying these other, how a company makes you feel, how an employer makes you feel, how an employer aligns with your personal views is probably more important then, or maybe more important.

Correct.

Okay.

People can get money from a lot of places.

What people—

the reason a lot of people don't stick around is it's not just, uh, the track for progression. It's a lot of people, they say that, but when we really dig in, a lot of people just aren't happy.

Yeah, man, that's a big issue nowadays. We call it engagement, uh, you know, employer and employee engagement. Not engagement with your audience, but like, you know, engagement with your your talent, your staff, and how, how much they're actually contributing versus just sort of, you know, punching the card, right? Or, or just checking in and checking out, as they say. Um, you, you're very passionate about transparency and storytelling. How do we learn from that to engage high-quality talent? And specifically, so you're saying, you know, talk about the heart and soul, So, kind of marry those two, the transparency and storytelling with the heart and soul. You know, put your, I guess, do you put your laundry out there? Do you talk about the good and the bad? Because people, I think, are getting tired of this pretty picture that's almost too good to be true, right?

Well, it's not just talking about the good and the bad and leveraging storytelling, but it's about being authentic. So instead of some highly produced campaign that recruiting is doing, have people just bust out their phone and record and walk around or tell their story. That is what people resonate with in today's world. You don't need a film crew recording something that's high quality. You just need people busting out their phones and talking to a camera and showcasing it from their viewpoint.

And how do you address anything that might be I don't know, confidential or privacy or anything like that. You know, walking around the company with your phone, you might accidentally capture a whiteboard where they have the secret formula.

I'm just, you know, blur some of it out then, you know, like you get in editing, you can fix that.

Just, uh, yeah, so still authentic, but you don't have to leak, accidentally leak any, uh, any secret formulas. All right, exactly, that makes sense. Well, I know I told you I was only going to keep you for half an hour and we're a little bit past the 30-minute mark, but I do have 2 questions that I always ask my guests. And despite your fame and fortune, you're not going to be immune to my 2 questions, particularly because the reason you're here is one of these 2 questions. So, the first of those questions is, who should be our next guest?

There's a guy named Eric Siu that has recruited quite a few people, made a lot of mistakes, done well over time, cleaned up a broken company. He's probably worth interviewing. Not probably, he is worth interviewing. Probably give you a lot of insights on his failures and successes over the years with recruiting.

S-I-U-X or—

Last name is Siu.

S-I-U, Siu. Okay, got it. All right. And then, the last question is I fancy myself as being a bit of a thought provoker as opposed to a thought leader. So, I like to leave folks that watch the recording, especially over the weekend, with something to think about. Is there a question that you think we should ask ourselves for personal growth in whether it's recruitment or marketing professionally? But something that we should ask ourselves. I don't want a pulpit lecture. I want a question that provokes our internal thoughts. So, what would you ask us to think about?

So, you're saying if you're a recruiter, what's a question that they should ask themselves?

That's right.

What are the type of people that we're going to need in the next 5 years with all the changes that are happening in the world?

Okay. What are the type of people?

What are the type of people? Are they adaptable?

Can they make the change?

Do they know how to leverage technology? You know, like all these things are really important.

Not just skills, but what are their core?

Yes.

Your core skills.

Every— you're not going to hire someone who doesn't have the skills, but you need adaptability because things are changing so fast. If you can't get people who are adaptable, you're going to have to start recruiting, firing and recruiting all over again. And it's just a messy process.

Filling in, backfilling and backfilling. Yeah, no kidding. Right, right. Excellent. Well, that's a great thought to leave, uh, leave with. Well, you know, what are the kinds of people that you're going to want in the future and to help your company grow? Okay, well, thanks a lot, Neil. I appreciate you being a guest.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Reach out to, um, Eric. Hopefully he'll accept my invitation just like you did. Appreciate your generosity.

So awesome.

Thanks everybody for tuning in. If you, uh, if you want to come back next week, we're going to have Chrissy Wilson as our guest. So tune in then. Otherwise, until then, be