Andrew Lewis Podcast Transcript

PODCAST INTRO: Coming to you from Silicon Valley. I’m Marcus Edwardes and I am on the hunt for recruiting leaders, producers, innovators, and pioneers who’ve made their mark on the industry and can’t wait to share their points of view. We will tackle the tough topics and dig deep to find the answers you’re looking for, and some actionable advice you can take to the bank. So stick around and stay tuned, and welcome to “Recruiting Trailblazers”.

Marcus Edwardes: I’m very excited to welcome my guests today to Recruiting Trailblazers, Andrew Lewis is the Senior Manager of Talent Acquisition for Higg, which is a sustainability insights platform for consumer goods industries. Now, Andrew describes himself as a strategic thinker, an innovator, a leader, and a teacher who sees life through an entrepreneurial lens. So I think this conversation is going to be very interesting indeed. Welcome to the podcast, Andrew Lewis.

Andrew Lewis: Marcus, thanks for having me. Excited to have this chat today.

Marcus Edwardes: Me too. Really excited to get you on the podcast. I’m seeing you on LinkedIn all the time. And we’ll get into content creation a little bit later in this conversation. But first of all, I usually like to start the podcast off by sort of asking about mindset, how important is the right mindset to be successful these days as a recruiter? How would you describe the mindset of the most successful practitioners that you know in this business right now?

Andrew Lewis: I think that’s a great question. I think, you know, mindset is everything with recruiting, because it’s really easy to get into a recruiting in a market like this, that we’ve experienced over the last two and a half years, you see the opportunity, it’s really, you see a lot of people coming into the space, whether they have experience or not, and everybody can have some level of success. But mindset is really what’s gonna get you through the difficult times, or through the challenging times, not just from a client standpoint, if you’re in the on the agency side, but with the candidates as well. And so, when I think about mindset, the biggest things that are most important to the makeup of a recruiter are tenacity. The ability to kind of persevere and push through adversity, because as we know, there’s great months, there’s bad months, there’s great quarters, there’s terrible quarters. And so we have to push through the bad times to get to the good times. And that’s, that’s, that’s part of the fun of recruiting. But also, I think, another layer to this, which you probably wouldn’t hear this too much maybe 10, 15 years ago is creativity. I think having a creative lens and a creative perspective around recruiting and saying, how can I find people? Where can I meet people where they’re at in order to start a relationship with them, to have start a conversation with them and potentially get their interest in a way that you normally wouldn’t find through a recruiting lens? And so I think that’s kind of a new one that I’ve adapted with the mindset of a recruiter is not only just being able to persevere, but also thinking outside of the box, and really challenging the norms. And as you probably have seen from some of my content, that’s what I’m all about is kind of looking at things a little more holistically and saying, how do we potentially look at this a different way in order to progress forward.

Marcus Edwardes: I couldn’t agree with you more. I think today, it’s all about differentiation, how do I do something slightly differently? Because I think a lot of recruiters do rely on the rather fantastic LinkedIn recruiter platform, which has delivered all of us tremendous amount of success over the years. But there’s no doubt that response rates have been declining over the last sort of year or 18 months. And so I think creativity is very important, how do we skate to where the puck is going to be, and not just send out gobs and gobs of InMails hoping for a different result?

Andrew Lewis: 100%. I think we’re starting to see this trend. And this is something that I have really started to adapt is this idea that content and community are what I think are going to be really the drivers of success and recruiting moving forward. Now, that’s sounds a little dramatic, because I think there still will be success with your traditional methods. But what I’m seeing, and I think what the market is seeing is recruiters who are differentiating themselves through content, and then also there’s this layer of community that’s now involved, you see it in sales groups, you see it in recruiting groups, the Slack channels of the world. All these kind of online communities where people are, this is where recruiters need to start looking. This is where we need to be, we need to be joining parts of, and this goes back a few years to Facebook groups and Twitter. Like, there’s different forums that we could join. But looking at community more holistically, instead of just saying, Hey, I’m going to InMail all these people on LinkedIn, or I’m going to follow these certain people on these platforms really want to look at like how do I engage in a community of people who would be interested in potentially working with me? So content and community are two outliers that I think are going to really come to the forefront in recruiting in the next few years.

Marcus Edwardes: I think it is coming to the forefront right now. And a lot of good recruiters that I know are engaging in distribution of really valuable content. And we’ve had quite a few of them on this podcast. And some people call it personal branding. So it’s important to join the communities where your prospects are. But it’s also important to assemble your own community by giving an incredible candidate experience to everybody you speak to, and then keeping in touch with them by creating and distributing valuable content regularly to stay top of mind and to sort of to build your own community. Not everybody’s doing it, but that opportunity definitely exists right now, doesn’t it?

Andrew Lewis: And they definitely tied together. Like you said, I think you framed it really well. Content can drive your own community, you can build your own community on places like LinkedIn or Twitter, simply by posting every day by showing up. And it’s not just posting, there is that consistency layer, but also really thinking deep about how can I serve as people? How can I provide content that’s valuable? Because you got a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn, that are kind of regurgitating the same four or five big topics that get a lot of clicks. The work from home, the great resignation, those are all talking points but we’ve heard it all before. How do I actually dive deeper peel back the layers and provide value to a job seeker or to a client potentially, if you’re using it for lead development? How do I use my voice? How do I use my perspective, to drive engagement and to really start a conversation and build a community right on those platforms, rather than just trying to get engagement or get your light count up?

Marcus Edwardes: Because when you join other people’s communities, as a recruiter, they’re quite wary of you because they kind of know why you’re there. Whereas if you start your own, and you focus on delivering value, rather than transact in your community. I think people say that your 9 out of 10 posts should be value posts, as opposed to sort of transactional posts, job postings, or whatever. Because you need to earn the right and that’s the problem we talk about on the podcast is the way recruiters tend to rush their prospects up the aisle. Sometimes just in their very first email or in mail, it’s like, here’s a job, are you interested in it? And I don’t think that’s the right approach these days, you have to adhere or respect the social contract the same way as you would in your personal life in your business career as well and utilize that sort of that format to build proper relationships that are going to last. Now, one of the problems since we’re on the topic, we’ll continue on this road for minutes. One of the problems that recruiters have when you talk about developing good content and building a community is how do you explain the ROI of a good content strategy to hiring managers who need people right now? They want you out there prospecting, finding people today, more calls, more InMails, more submissions. And you’re out there saying, I’m just writing a post on LinkedIn about the candidate experience. How do you explain the ROI to hiring managers as I said, who need people today?

Andrew Lewis: I’ll start by saying, when you look at kind of how to really generate a good candidate experience, agency recruiters and for context, I’m in house currently, I have worked on the agency side as well. But agency recruiters have a much easier, not an easier time, but an easier opportunity to build more holistic relationships with candidates, because typically, if especially your niche in one space, you have hopefully a handful of options for these candidates, or you’re at least there’s a potential use for finding new opportunities for them in the future. So you can have a little bit more of that open ended conversation and you can build that relationship I think the struggle with in house recruiters is, you’re up against type metrics, company metrics for hiring, a lot of times it tends to be transactional, it’s really easy to make it transactional, because you’re just trying to fill the position that’s in front of you. And so the conversations I’m having with leadership is we need to look at this more holistically. Like, the idea is the ROI. And it’s hard to put dollar figure on it. But what we’re really trying to achieve is we’re trying to create this top of the funnel opportunity where we have inbound leads coming, we have a list of desired candidates or candidates who really are interested in our mission, and what we’re trying to accomplish as an organization. And the idea is to bring them into our funnel and cultivate that community internally so that when we do have those positions available for them, or even if we just keep them engaged via drip campaigns or whatever we choose to do, the goal is to have that kind of that fan that those fans or that audience of people that bench of referrals, or people who want to join the organization. And so that’s the approach that in house teams need to have specifically because what you’re really building is an organic talent brand. And you want people to even if you don’t hire them, maybe, and maybe it doesn’t get very far in the process, but you want them to walk away saying, hey, you know what, I really enjoyed speaking with Andrew. I really enjoyed learning about that organization. I love their mission, I love what they’re about. Even if it doesn’t work out for me, I have a couple friends who are potentially interested in this space. You want to create that opportunity for people to share about your brand, but then also to stay engaged with you for future opportunities. So the ROI is creating and it’s tricky, because it is more of a marketing approach versus a sales approach. We’re looking at, how do we create kind of this organic brand around hiring? And I really don’t think it’s as complicated as people make it, there needs to be good alignment between an internal marketing team and a recruitment team. And the marketing doesn’t really have to shift, the conversation doesn’t have to shift from what the marketing team is already doing. They’re just slight tweaks in regards to targeting verbiage that would attract a job seeker versus a client or a customer.

Marcus Edwardes: And you’ve got to be able to explain to your prospects audience what it feels like to work there in an authentic way. So people are interested. And a typical marketing funnel is attention, interest, desire action. So what you’re talking about there is, if you already have someone’s attention, it’s much easier to generate interest in a role, than if you’re just reaching out to people saying, Hey, have you ever heard of our company, and that’s okay, if you work for one of these big brands, or a Fan Company, etc, you don’t have that problem. But for the vast majority of us, there is that problem of recognition. And so if you do sort of distribute and create great content and at least get to that sort of attention part of the marketing funnel, it’s so much easier to translate that into interest down the road. In fact, I’ve always thought that you need to be talking to the people today who you intend to recruit a month, three months, six months, or even a year from now. The danger going back to what you’re saying about metrics is that it forces recruiters into the wrong behavior, because it’s a very much a bums on seats tomorrow kind of philosophy, isn’t it?

Andrew Lewis: Yeah, 100%. We have to look, and this is where workforce planning comes in. This is the in house model of trying to plan out what are the hires going to be for the year, but hiring actually starts, and I’ve heard this possibly on your podcast, hiring really starts 6 to 12 months before you actually start recruiting for a role. You got to think about it in terms of, I want to start building engagement. I want to start getting interest from candidates as much as possible beforehand. And so when I look at more of a holistic method like this, I’m also, it goes far deeper than just building a talent brand for the company, but also I want the recruiting team to be the boots on ground, the evangelists for the talent brand. I want them to be in on LinkedIn potentially, or other communities and engaging with job seekers, providing value any way they can. That’s why you’ll see a lot of my content. It’s not just geared towards recruiting topics, but it’s also career development and leadership, really just trying to engage conversation with people who potentially would have interest in our brand, and have interest in working with me as a recruiter. And even if I don’t have something for them at that moment, I’ve had people reach out to me and asked me to review their resume or to provide them tips on getting into a certain industry. And all it may take 10 to 15 minutes of my time to craft a response, or to look through a document they send me, but ultimately, what I’m trying to do is tap into that trust in that relationship factor which recruiters unfortunately have done a lot of damage to just because of that sales approach. And I think the more people see a recruiter as somebody that can help them, but also somebody that’s trustworthy, that’s ultimately, what makes the biggest difference.

Marcus Edwardes: I completely agree with that. And I think that because recruiters feel like they’re behind the eight ball, it’s very hard to adopt this kind of behavior. And this more longer term approach to building pipelines, and building relationships that are allowed to sort of oxygenate and mature over a period of time because again, your hiring managers like “Yes, but I need to fill these positions tomorrow. So the temptation is just to get out there and see if you can find someone today who can come in and have an interview tomorrow”. And I think so what needs to be happen or what needs to happen is that talent acquisition leaders, and people leaders need to re-educate the business to understand that there’s two parts of being a successful recruiter, there’s the transactional side of recruiting and putting people through the recruiting lifecycle, but there’s planting the seeds is having those non transactional conversations, there’s the content development and distribution piece. And talent acquisition teams either need to allow and make space for recruiters to do both of those successfully, or they need to sort of divvy up the responsibilities and just have like content people, and then transactional recruiters who take over at the sort of the interest or the attention or the desire phase of a marketing funnel, so to speak. We’re slowly getting there, people are beginning to understand that opportunity exists now with all of these social platforms and with email and InMails, there’s so many ways that you can potentially reach out to and continue to communicate with prospect candidates. And it doesn’t always have to be sort of a yes or no, today, or tomorrow, you can you can take this longer term approach. And sure enough, you’ll eventually have a thriving community of people who are at least open to hearing again from you.

Andrew Lewis: I feel like in recruiting, we’re kind of always fighting against outdated practices, we’re fighting against more of, and this is one of the things that drives me crazy is. On the agency side, traditionally, you’re taught that recruiting is much more of a sales function. On the in house side, you’re taught that recruiting is much more of an HR function. And, you and I had discussed this previously, but really, those are just two small pieces of the pie. I mean, recruiting is its own beast, and really the best recruiters, I know probably the best recruiters are excellent in multiple skill sets. Obviously, they’re great communicators, and closers, they can close people on opportunities, but they’re great at establishing trust, they’re great at rapport, they’re great at marketing. They’re great at being evangelists for markets and opportunities. They’re great at account management and negotiations. There’s a whole mix of skills that go into being a recruiter, and it drives me crazy here. And recruiters when they put themselves in one of two buckets, we’re a sales organization or sales focus, or no, we’re more a function of HR, I really think it’s its own its own entity. And we have to treated as such, we have to honor the fact that there’s multiple skill sets that need to be developed, if we really want to be elite in this type of field, especially in a market like today, where the attention span is so short with candidates. And there’s such limited trust, because of the abuse of some of these old practices that we need to we need to say, hey, how do we rethink this? How do we build trust, build engagement and look at really everything we can do on the front end? And hopefully, it’ll make the sales process of recruiting much easier as well.

Marcus Edwardes: Indeed. And I think it’s inevitable that the sort of comparison between recruitment and sales is always out there. And sales gets a bad name, because I think good recruiters and good salespeople do very much the same thing, they solve problems. Bad salespeople, and bad recruiters are out there just trying to sell a role, trying to convince people to do something before they’ve really understood what people want to do, and what makes them tick. And so therefore, I think there is a good comparison between recruitment of sales, but only on the good side of the equation. As I said, great recruiters solve career problems, they don’t just go out and sell opportunities willy, nilly. And we talk about this all the time on the podcast, I’m not going to go any more in depth on that today. But just sort of finishing up on the content side, what kind of stuff has worked for you in terms of starting to build your brand? Because you’re becoming much more present on LinkedIn on a daily and weekly basis. Maybe that’s just because we’ve recently connected maybe you’ve been doing it for quite a while. But what are some of the best practices that you can share with me today about your LinkedIn journey so far? And what advice would you give other people as recruiters?

Andrew Lewis: To be honest, I’ve really only been going, I’ve really only gone all in on LinkedIn for the last probably 90 days or so. So that’s probably why, why you just started seeing me pop up. I made the decision that I was going to go all in, I was going to post pretty much daily, unless, it was on the weekend, or I had some other engagement that I wasn’t allowing myself to do that or commit to that. But for me, I’ve really used this last 90 days to kind of just have more of a marketing approach, just test different types of content. See what I like, see what type of conversations I’ve been able to start and what people have resonated with. For me, I have found that there’s a lot of people writing on LinkedIn. And there’s nothing wrong with written posts and whatnot. One of the biggest still to this day, and I might one of my mentors was all in on video three, four years ago when it first came out. And still to this day, I’m amazed at how few people on LinkedIn use video to its full capacity. I think video is a huge opportunity because recruiting at its core is an exchange of energy. A recruiter, if you really especially if you put it in the context of say feels like you want people to engage with you, they want you want people to feel your passion, and your drive your energy for what you do. And you can’t really copy somebody on video. There’s this big thing, this big movement on LinkedIn where people are basically saying, we’re stealing successful types of posts, and then kind of putting our own spin on it. And hey, I guess more power to them. But you can fake being an expert, when you are stealing written posts and posting that way, you can’t really fake your expertise when you’re sitting in front of a camera and sharing it in your own voice. So for me, I’ve really enjoyed the video aspect, I’ve only put a few videos out there. But I’ve really enjoyed it just from the sense of being able to share who I am, and putting a voice to the words, so to speak, voice to the page, and really getting people to see me in a different way. And what’s crazy about LinkedIn is, you can’t look at it from the perspective of likes, you have to look at it from how many views am I getting? Because I’ve had some videos that have gotten 15 likes, but they’ve had over 4000 views. And so I’m still getting, this is still being shared right among these communities and these people that that matter. And so for me, I like video, I like pictures. You know Ashley Pereira? I think you had her on the podcast, she does a lot with posting pictures of herself. And I liked that aspect as well too, because it kind of personalizes content a little bit more as well. But I’m still very much in the testing phase and seeing what’s working and what’s not. But I do think recruiting recruiters have still this giant gap of opportunity to be able to kind of step in and put their own voice out into the ecosphere. Because there’s so many recruiters out there that are just regurgitating the same things that everyone else saying, and it’s not important but it’s really hard to differentiate yourself that way.

Marcus Edwardes: I know if I see another post about that open to work label, I’m going to go crazy

Andrew Lewis: It drives me crazy.

Marcus Edwardes: But listen, I saw your last video, and it was very good and you come across extremely well. But not everybody does. I actually posted videos about the podcast, the first sort of 15 or 16 weeks, and I thought they were very good. And I got a few compliments, but I never really got the traction for the work that went into the videos. It’s a lot harder to produce a good looking video and a fluid video than it is to sit down and just bang out a decent post. And I think that’s one of the barriers, is it worthy effort? And also, the other thing is that people’s fear of public speaking, which is basically what it is, when you’re posting videos of yourself on to LinkedIn is definitely one of the major factors that’s preventing people from doing that. It’s very difficult to sort of stick your head above the parapet, especially in the form of a video, and then sort of wait nervously to see how it’s going to be received by your network. And most people choose not to because you’ve got to be really brave to do it, and certain people are really good at it, certain people aren’t, certain people are afraid of it. And a lot of people probably don’t quite know how to do it, or how they edit it, how they add text to it, or how they produce it in the right format. I think there are a lot of barriers to video, but I respect the fact that you’re doing it. And I may give it another whirl myself, but I’ve become quite good at just banging out a fairly decent post in about 20 minutes or so. And I’ve been getting a ton of traction on LinkedIn recently. And with the type of people that I’m interested in speaking to which specifically is recruiters because I want them to come and listen to my podcast. So interesting stuff. I mean, keep up the good work. Because I’ve noticed you, I mean, that’s why we’re having this conversation right now. And you’ve got some excellent points to make and you’re good on video, so keep it up.

Andrew Lewis: I will say this just to put a bow on this. One, I think you need to everybody needs to find their own voice on LinkedIn. I think the goal of your content always comes back to you want people to look at you and say this is somebody I want to have a conversation with or this is somebody I’d be open to chatting about an opportunity with. So for some people they’re wordsmith, they’re great with written word and if that’s your lane and that’s where your expertise is then by all means go all in on it but I don’t want people to be afraid of video or photo. Because the other aspect of it is, people are gonna see you regardless. I mean, you may be able to try to hide it with how you closed it. But if you’re getting on a video call with someone or a phone call, they’re gonna see you regardless. And so you want to think about it from the terms of, do I want them to feel or will meet hopping on a video or posting this photo? Will this maybe help them feel a little bit more comfortable when they do get on a call with me and it’s just a little bit of a different way to look at it? And not everybody feels comfortable with that upfront. But I think with every skill set, it takes time to develop that into and commit the time to feel uncomfortable. I don’t think anybody on their first video was feeling like a natural. To me to this day, I’d be lying if I said, I did everything in one take for sure. I don’t do that. Like, it’s a series of events for me. But again, I encourage people to just kind of test things out, see what you feel best with and what works for you. And not just what gets the most likes up front, but also the content that resonates and serves your audience best.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah. I think a lot of this is actually about consistency, because people need to get used to seeing you. And in theory, because we’ve all spent so much time on zoom in the last couple of years, we should all be pretty good by now at seeing ourselves on video, and maybe producing a video to distribute. But I still think that people are just, it feels like you’re standing up in front of an audience when you post a video on LinkedIn. And I just think that the barrier is just a little bit too high for most people to engage at that level when you can get out there. And just, as I say, bang out a fairly decent post in 15 or 20 minutes. So it’s therein lies your opportunity. I mean, differentiation as a recruiter is absolutely critical these days. In any way that you can achieve that is going to serve you in the long run. So if you’re comfortable doing it, keep doing it. And then a year from now, we’re all say, God, I wish I’d taken Andrews advice and actually got on there and does video. He’s got 100,000 followers now. So the other thing that we were going to talk about, which I know you’re fairly passionate about are, in fact the other key recruiting skill sets that you need to master to succeed in today’s markets. And so we’ll put contents was side right now. What are some of the actual skills that you feel today, you really need to master as a recruiter, and maybe some of the best practices that you’ve helped people adopt on their way to success?

Andrew Lewis: One of the biggest things I’ve learned in my own personal journey developing as a recruiter is, I can’t just listen to other voices in recruiting. I mean, I love to listen to your podcast. And there’s a handful of recruitment and talent podcasts that I like to listen to. But what I found is when I started following top marketers, or top sales voices, and it could be podcast form that could be on LinkedIn. But when I started listening to people who were mastering skill sets, that were kind of on the outlier of what I do, maybe not directly correlated, but still tied in somehow, it really got my creative juices flowing thinking about different ways to approach the candidate experience, different ways to approach conversations with candidates, hiring managers clients, it just really gives you a different perspective outside of what you normally hear in the talent acquisition space. And so I would start there by saying, if you’re not following top marketers, and if say your recruiter in software, or in the B2B SaaS space, I would be following top marketers in that space, I would be following top salespeople in that space, maybe even more operational type personnel, or C level executives, just to get a different perspective of that industry. Like, it still ties together into the ecosystem. But it’ll maybe give you a little bit different context as to how you can better serve that community, or the hiring managers or the candidates. So I would start by saying that, but when it comes to the true skillsets of a dynamic recruiter, we already kind of touched on them. But I think recruiters in this day and age they have to look at becoming great marketers, whatever that looks like for you. Maybe LinkedIn is the platform for you maybe it’s not. I know people that are trying things out on TikTok, I know people that have YouTube channels and are doing great things there. So you have to look at how can I create this voice for myself in this space for myself? Two, skill sets, or the sales skill set is really massively important as well. And I think most recruiters, this is the one skill set especially coming from the agency side that you do learn, how to close candidates, how to close clients, but really looking at kind of the finer aspects of selling to someone, it’s not just the clothes, but also building trust, captivating and storytelling within that conversation and looking how you can kind of get people on the hook to buy into the narrative, and that sounds like a bad way to say that. But really just to understand that the opportunity at hand is really worth considering.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah, and I think that one of the biggest opportunities that recruiters sometimes miss out on is how they treat candidates who don’t get the job? Both internally and agency recruiters, because if you think about it, 9 out of the 10 people that you speak to on a daily or weekly basis are not going to get the job that you’re currently considering them for or that you’ve sourced them for. And I think, because of the transactional mindset that we talked about earlier, the temptation is basically to discard those candidates, and maybe not give them the white glove treatment that you would give a candidate who enters the funnel, enters the process, and who you sort of managed through the recruiting lifecycle. But it’s the people that don’t get the job either at a very early stage when you first speak to them, or first reach out to them or later on in the process where they might get rejected, or they might opt out by themselves. And I think it’s what you do after that that really defines your success as a recruiter these days. Because if you can have everybody leave that process, whether they with the job, or without the job and say, it was a real pleasure working with Andrew Lewis on this specific role, then you’ve got a great chance of adding them to your network and potentially getting referrals and information and all sorts of other great things out of them later on in the sketch?

Andrew Lewis: Yeah, absolutely. I think what you explained is kind of this deficiency in relationship building that we see in recruiting. I mean, people almost oversell, recruiters almost oversell when they talk to a candidate, and they’ll hype up an opportunity. They know how to say the right things, push the right buttons, but really the conversation should be, hey, I don’t know if this is the right fit for you or not? It sounds like my job here talking with you today is really just to kind of learn about you, I want to learn about your background, I want to share with you about what I’ve got going on and see if there’s some connectivity, if there’s some fit there, and really almost creating kind of this authentic relationships to say, Hey, I’m in your corner, I want to help you, but I can’t guarantee anything. I think one of the biggest opportunities, believe it or not, in recruiting today is just being honest and just communicating well. I think those are two skill sets that are so obvious, but yet they’re overlooked because recruiters like any other human being on the planet, we don’t like confrontation. We don’t like being the bearer of bad news. And so it’s much easier to just not text that person back or not send them an email saying, Hey, didn’t work out. It’s much easier to go that route than to take more of the longer term view and say, ‘Hey, it didn’t work out, but as we discussed, I want to stay in touch, I want to potentially be a resource for you in the future, whatever that looks like’. It doesn’t really take much time, but it’s almost kind of the human nature side takes over of wanting to avoid conflict. And so recruiters tend to kind of run away from that when they really should be leaning into it. Because, like you said, that’s where the opportunity is potentially down the line.

Marcus Edwardes: I mean, especially with candidates who you have in process, I think the temptation for recruiters, because we’re always sort of dealing with the urgent and de-prioritizing the important, but I think it’s just as important to keep in touch or call a candidate with no news as it is to actually call them up with news, just because you know there’s no news. They might be sitting there going, why haven’t I heard from Andrew in the last week? So you have to sort of set expectations and then sort of over deliver on those and say, just wanted to give you a quick call, I’m still waiting to get some feedback from your last round of interviews from a couple of the hiring managers over there. But just wanted to touch base and see how you’re feeling about the opportunity, has anything changed since we last spoke, how’s it going, and just stay top of mind and just show that care, and not just show it but mean it and do it for the right reasons. Because every time that you have an opportunity to speak with a candidate, whether they’re in process or not, is an opportunity for you to sort of double down on that relationship and really show your true colors. So you never miss a chance to speak to a candidate, even if it’s with no news.

Andrew Lewis: Yeah, I have a set time block in my calendar. Every Friday afternoon, I’ll send out I have an hour and a half blocked off where I’ll send out feedback to candidates that are in process whether or not I have a true update for them or not. But the goal is, like you said, just to keep them engaged, and so that they’re not waiting patiently to see what’s going to happen, and they don’t have to go into the weekend with that kind of anxiety, not knowing what’s going on. Am I perfect? No, 100% not. I think that’s an evolving skill set for everybody. But I think just the intentionality of it right and saying, hey, let’s dedicate our time on Friday, whatever that looks like, just to follow up with candidates. And again, maybe there’s no update, there’s no news for you, but just want to let you know that, we’re still thinking of you and we’re still trying to get you through this process. It goes a long way. I’ve received even just sending basic communications to candidates, I’ve had so many candidates, especially in the last year and a half reach out to me and say, well, thank you so much for just sending me this email, you’d be surprised how many companies don’t get back to you, and I’m like, that blows my mind. I understand we’re all busy but I still think even as simple as it is communication and just building that relationship is so crucial.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah, you just have to exceed the expectations of candidates and their expectations are actually set quite low, because they’ve probably at some time in the past been burned by a recruiter, so many people have. I don’t think there’s anything more important than the people who are in your pipeline. And every day we used to when I worked at a bigger agency, we used to say very first thing in the morning is, what can we do with the people that we have currently in our process or in our pipeline just to move that situation an inch further forward. Even if we have no news or nothing has changed? What can we do just to inch it further forward? Just a quick phone call to say, as I said, previously, no news today, but just wanted to say hello, I think every day, there’s something that you should do just to move the situation forward. And you should never ignore people who are in process or in your pipeline for more than a day or two.

Andrew Lewis: Right. And it’s amazing, and I’m guilty of this especially in the last two years, we’ve complained about lack of candidates, and candidate shortage, this, can’t find people. I wonder how many people if they just went back and looked in their own database. How many people are not touched, or haven’t been spoken to since they applied? That’s so much one money wasted, all the money you’ve spent on getting candidates into your ecosystem and into your pipeline. But then two, what a missed opportunity. These are people that at one time expressed interest in you, and maybe they are no longer interested, but why not have that conversation and reengage them? And so that’s one of the big things we’re looking at internally is, how do we create kind of that community aspect where, you know, even if people aren’t the right fit for certain positions, we keep them engaged via drip campaigns, newsletters, whatever it may look like, but just to keep our name front of mind, because again, you never know when that opportunity is going to come up again. And it’s a huge opportunity for especially for companies like mine, which are mission driven, we’re hugely focused on the result we’re trying to get which is sustainability. And you have a lot of people that want to be a part of that journey, and a part of that mission. And so if you’re in a company, or you’re working with companies that have those strong missions and have those strong ties to a certain outcome, you really should be leaning into that, because chances are those people applied for a reason. They weren’t just looking for a job, but they wanted to work in that space as well.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah, that’s a great point. Because mission, vision, values, these have all become important parts of the recruiting conversation in the last five years, and it just didn’t used to be the case. And if you are a mission driven company, like you are, and a lot of companies claim to be, but you actually are because you’re in the sustainability business. Do you make that a big part of your messaging? I mean, how do you manifest that part of your message out in the sort of candidate marketplace when you’re reaching out to people or keeping in touch with people?

Andrew Lewis: Yeah, I think it’s still evolving. Right now, some of the things we’re doing myself in marketing, we’re really looking at creating assets to share online and redistributed online that share a little bit more about from a high level what Higg is doing in the marketplace. Because, again, what we see in tech, there’s so many tech companies out there. There’s so many data platforms, it’s amazing how many companies have popped up over the last few years. But there’s this growing need, where people or this growing market where people in tech are wanting to work for ‘Companies that are doing tech for good’. And so one of the things we’re really trying to do is attract those types of people, those people that have those technical skill sets, or maybe that core experience, but want to use it for a bigger mission. And so those are kind of the people we’re trying to loop in. So from a marketing standpoint, really looking at how do we create assets that we can share on social? How do we really build our brand visibility, because we’re still very young as a company? So those are the big things. And then when it comes to how I engage with candidates on a one on one level, the prescreen conversation you have with candidates, that initial touch point, is such a crucial opportunity to really engage candidates into the mission. And so I’m very big on how I outline my prescreen conversation. I think a lot of recruiters might be surprised by that. Because that doesn’t tend to be usually people just are like, I want 15 minutes of your time to figure out if it’s the right fit, and then we move on. I use it as an opportunity to sell Higg as a company to sell the position, and how it ties into the mission of the company and then really reengage the candidate and learn about their experience. So for every pre-screen that I do, my first 5 to 10 minutes is dedicated to telling the story of Higg. And it’s more of a high level, but I really share our journey where we started, where we’ve been, how we grew to where we are today, the problems that we’re currently solving, and the problems and even challenges that we have ahead. But really just kind of capturing people, it goes back to that storytelling element that we talked about previously is, recruiters have this opportunity to capture people via storytelling, especially if you have a strong mission that you’re representing. Because people really want to use their skill set and their experience for good. I think we’ve seen that big trend in the last few years especially in the tech space. And so I’ve really leaned into it, quite frankly, and that’s really how I drive a lot of engagement with candidates to where even if it doesn’t work out for them, we stay in touch, we stay engaged, they follow me on LinkedIn, they comment on my posts, they liked my posts, because they’re captivated by the mission, I wouldn’t say it’s just me, it’s definitely the mission. And so I think there’s a huge opportunity there.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah, and I’m not sure whether it’s the right strategy to do it at the very beginning of the call, or the middle of the call of the end of the call. But I know one thing for sure, and that is, it’s critical to be able to really outline what the opportunity is not just what you need. And I think a lot of recruiters fail at this point or fail at this fence. They talk about what the job needs and what you need to be good at in order to be successful at the job. But they don’t approach it through the lens of how it would actually enhance that individual’s career, and how it would help those potentially that person meet their goals, which is why I’ve always advocated for doing some discovery upfront at the beginning of the phone call, so that you can truly reconcile the parts of your mission and the parts of the role and the opportunity that means something to that person. But on the whole, I’m agreeing with what you’re saying, I think it’s really important to outline the opportunity. And if you’re a mission driven company, share that as quickly as you possibly can, because you’re going to generate more interest at the top of the funnel.

Andrew Lewis: Yeah, and I think if I was working in agency, the conversation might be structured a different way. And I think that’s kind of what we’re getting at, obviously, the situation is a little bit different for an in house recruiter, especially if the candidate comes to you, or if you source them directly, because they can tie it directly to you, they can do research on the company, they can kind of get an idea before versus if you’re an agency recruiter, you’re coming to them a little bit more cold. And they might not know anything about you other than what they see on LinkedIn. So I definitely think there’s room to restructure the conversation. But the point still stands that what you’re really trying to do is captivate somebody and grab someone’s attention outside of just going over a job description, or talking about what’s your previous experience? I mean, that’s all important. But at the end of the day, we also want to have a conversation with them, we really want to learn what gets them ticking. Why are we having this conversation? Why did you express interest, I’d love to learn more about the type of work that you want to do? And so I think we’re kind of touching on it from different angles. But the point still stands that we really just want to get to know people and learn what motivates them deeper than just a job title or what’s on the job description?

Marcus Edwardes: I also think it’s important to treat active candidates or people who’ve responded to an ad with the same white glove experience that you would treat a passive candidate, because I think sometimes we as recruiters, and it’s easy for me to stand here as a podcaster. And say, this is the gold standard, but we’ve all done this. Sometimes we differentiate between those two types of individuals, and we don’t give active candidates, the same experiences, we’d give a passive candidate, and we don’t take maybe as much time because they’ve already expressed the interest in the company. So sometimes we sort of overlook that part of the conversation, and just get straight into right, this is what you need to be good at. But I think it’s important to treat both active candidates and passive candidates with that same sort of like, I’m going to build a great relationship with this person, whatever the outcome of this phone call may be, so that we can keep in touch for the future. And I’ve established credibility in order to potentially seek referrals and information in the future from this candidate. And I know I bang on about this all the time on the podcast, but it is the core of my belief as a recruiter, and someone who sort of mentors recruiters.

Andrew Lewis: Yeah. And that goes back to, I shared a post a few days ago about not trying to automate the candidate experience. And what I meant by that was, recruiters are especially in this day and age, really focused on trying to make everything more efficient and automate everything, and I understand that there’s great tools out there. But we can’t automate relationships, relationships are the one leg up that we have in this industry. Being able to build trust and credibility with people is so crucial to what we do. And I think what you’re saying and I agree with it 100%, we want more of this long term view with candidates. We don’t want to just be transactional in nature. And again, this goes back to kind of the damaging teachings that we were all taught in agency recruiting early on which work closes to the dollar and fill the position that’s there. And I understand the value of that. But at the same time, what we should be doing is looking at it a little bit more holistically and just saying, at the end of the day, I need to be a resource for this person, whether it’s the right fit or not, I want to do right by them. And maybe we won’t have another conversation after this. But my goal shouldn’t be to try to fit a square peg into a hole, if it’s not the right fit, my goal should be, how can I serve you? Here’s what I do. Here’s the type of industries I work in, if there’s some sort of fit love to build that relationship and potentially be a resource for you. But if not, I still want to be an advisor to you or support you in any way I can. And it’s just relearning some of these bad practices that we were taught, and thinking about it more from the aspect of an advisor and not just an order filler.

Marcus Edwardes: Yeah, Zoom out and look at the long term. It’s good advice. And when it comes to automating, I’ve always also said on the podcast, you can’t automate relationship development. And when they finally do that, recruiters, we’re all going to be out of work. That’s the bit that’s most important in the whole process is that human connection is being able to gain the trust of somebody and then influence them in one way or the other and solve a problem. And that’s something I don’t think AI can do yet. So you have to be careful. You’ve got to pick your battles when it comes to automation. That’s a much bigger conversation that we’ve got time for today, because we sort of reached the end of the podcast, but point well taken. So Andrew Lewis, thank you so much for coming along to Recruiting Trailblazers today. It’s great to have a conversation with you, great little fireside chat that we’ve had today. Really appreciate your time and obviously, we’re gonna keep in touch. And anybody who wants to connect with you can just look you up, Andrew Lewis at Higg and connect with you. And no doubt we’ll speak again very soon, Andrew.

Andrew Lewis: Yep, thanks for having me, Marcus. It was a great time as always.

Marcus Edwardes: Excellent. Cheers mate.

Andrew Lewis: Cheers.