Jon BryantJon Bryant, InsideConnector Gain Attention, Build Trust 1+1 With InsideConnector
Welcome to an Talent Acquisition channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting. Joining us today is Jon Bryant, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of InsideConnector. I met Jon at the recent SourceCon Conference in New York and asked him to share the story of InsideConnector with us.
Jon is the Co Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of InsideConnector, a 1:1 social recruiting platform that helps recruiters begin conversations with their most highly sought after candidates. He has been in recruiting for over 15 years and has provided talent acquisition consulting services to many prominent national companies including Booz Allen Hamilton, Avanade, Deloitte, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Lucent, and Equifax.
Throughout the 2000s, as the recruiting industry was developing new tools and methods to find and attract top talent, Jon recognized that acquiring "the perfect resume" is useless unless the candidates will respond to a recruiter's outreach. He began testing innovative ways to adapt "old school" recruiting approaches to our "new world" of social recruiting. This led to studying digital engagement, consumer behavior, branding, neural marketing, web 2.0 & social media, mobile communications and other approaches in order to find the most effective ways to engage top talent in one-to-one discussions. After years of study and testing, he and his partners incorporated the most effective formula into InsideConnector and launched it as a commercially available product in late 2010.
TotalPicture Radio Transcript: Jon Bryant
Peter: Welcome to an inside recruiting channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. This is Peter Clayton reporting. Joining us today is Jon Bryant, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of InsideConnector. I met Jon at the recent SourceCon Conference in New York and asked him to share the story of InsideConnector with us.
Jon, welcome to TotalPicture Radio.
Jon: Peter, thank you for having me.
Peter: You describe InsideConnector as a one-to-one social marketing platform that shares personalized and relevant information with individuals and facilitates meaningful two-way conversation. Can you expand on that a little bit and then explain what you mean?
Jon: I’ve watched with interest the phenomenon of social recruiting as it’s grown through the years. Initially, with LinkedIn I guess starting back in 2003 and following on with recruiters being involved in Facebook and Twitter and as it’s evolved, I’ve watched the way that our industry has used social media to help find candidates and then later to attract candidates. It’s been interesting to me watching that evolution, but it occurred to me a few years ago really that social media isn’t necessarily a great platform for engaging candidates in conversation, because by nature, career discussions are confidential and much of social media is so public, so particularly with passive candidates that are happily employed some place else, I felt like there was need for a new platform that would be a private channel of communication. Having the same familiar-looking feel of social media but really being a very personalized one-to-one area of discussion, so that was much of what we decided to build in to InsideConnector was a way to share rich media as you can with social media, but to have a private way to have this career discussion with candidates.
Peter: You bring up a very salient point here that social networks have – the noise level has expanded to a point where it deafening. You can’t have a conversation with people without Facebook coming up or Twitter or LinkedIn, especially in the recruiting space.
Jon: True and an interesting point in that is that with each of these social networks, the candidate or the person that’s involved in the social network has to set up a new profile. Profiles aren’t portable from one place to the other, so there’s an investment in time that goes with it and people are experiencing social media fatigue – should I focus on one social network or another or do I need to be on all of them? And so we tried to overcome that within InsideConnector and that when a recruiter or a marketer reaches to the specific individual that they want to connect with, all that individual has to do is click a link. They don’t have to set up a profile. They are there on a personal landing page that was created just for them and it contains personal and relevant information that’s unique to their situation, so we were able to get around many of the short comings of the traditional social media.
Peter: Speaking about LinkedIn, in reading your LinkedIn profile, you’re a partner and consultant with a company called Concourse Services which specializes in consulting engagements related to talent acquisition, strategy and execution. How did InsideConnector get started and what was the inspiration behind this?
Jon: I’ve been a recruiter for many years and Concourse is essentially a recruiting services firm, and so through the consulting work that we do with corporate clients at Concourse, I came to realize that there was a big hole, really, in the recruiting process. We spend as an industry a lot of time and money and effort figuring out new ways to find candidates and so we’re continually searching and pushing candidates into our contact management systems or into our ATSs. It’s sort of a never-ending cycle.
We’re also putting a lot of focus on how we attract candidates to us, so through Facebook corporate pages or LinkedIn groups or Twitter streams we’re attracting people and that includes job postings on the job boards. So we attract people to us, but it occurred to me through my own recruiting practice that finding the perfect candidate is ultimately useless, whether we find them or attract them, it’s ultimately useless unless that person will respond to our outreach and have a conversation. I really started focusing on what can I do to increase the likelihood that the top candidates will respond to my outreach, because most of them being contacted by recruiters all the time, whether they’re a passive candidate that’s notable in the work that they do and so they come to the attention of recruiters or they’re an active candidate that has posted their information out there on a job board or a social media site.
In any case, recruiters only have about 25% chance that that candidate will respond to them, so my inspiration really came initially in 2006 in a conversation with Rob McIntosh who’s one of the most brilliant sourcing leaders out there and at the time, he was with Deloitte heading up a sourcing team. He said, have you ever thought about the impact downstream that would happen if we can increase the response rate from candidates, increasing it from 25% to 30% or 40% or 50%, so that the top candidates call us back and you don’t have to be in that continual cycle of looking for new people. That kind of set me off on a multi-year journey to test things that would increase engaging and response from candidates.
Peter: What kind of results are you getting from InsideConnector from those who are using this service? Has it, in fact, increased the response from the talent, from the candidates that they’re trying to connect with?
Jon: That’s been probably the biggest thrill that I’ve gotten from this whole process. Through the years since 2006, I’ve tested and tried many, many things and found things that work and found things that don’t work and one thing that I’ve learned is you got to test, test, test. Because much of this recruiting is really marketing. I borrowed concepts from our friends in the marketing community and have done a lot of testing on what works in engaging people and ultimately increasing the response rate, so what we did was ultimately we built the things that worked into InsideConnector and the neat thing is the really positive and enthusiastic response that we get from candidates.
In most cases, across geography or across generations and across candidate profiles, we get a very, very consistent response rate and it ranges from 75% to 87%. Whereas prior to the techniques that we built into InsideConnector, response rates were usually in the 25% overnight. Unlike a branding campaign that takes a number of impressions to create a higher response, overnight the techniques that are built in to InsideConnector generate a 75% to an 87% response very consistently but the thing that I love about it is that the candidates when they respond, they over time after time say, “That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” and “no one has ever contacted me that way before” and “I felt like I owed you a call back. I usually don’t call recruiters back but I felt like I owed you a call back.” Hearing that scores of times from candidates has really been a fulfilling experience for me.
Peter: That’s really exciting, so can you name some names? Who’s using Inside Connector?
Jon: We launched at the end of 2010, right at the end of 2010, so we’ve got a small customer base right now that’s using it and a bunch of pilots going on with some of the huge global companies.
Peter: You launched this at ERE last fall right?
Jon: Yes, last fall at the conference in Hollywood, Florida.
Peter: You’re going to be at ERE Spring in San Diego this year?
Jon: We’ll be at ERE Spring in San Diego. In fact, we’re sponsoring the live stream. ERE is so generous to put their information out there, live stream these conferences and so we wanted to support that and we’re sponsoring the live stream. In mentioning ERE, I should probably bring this up as well.
From the time that we started the concept of InsideConnector, the ERE community has been unbelievably helpful to me. I go to most of the conferences, whether it’s ERE Expos or SourceCon or social recruiting summits and that let’s me interact with recruiters, practitioners and leaders across the country and becoming more global as well and really polled these folks on what’s important to them and what’s missing in the process. It’s been through the interactions with my ERE friends that I’ve really learned what’s important and asked them to test it for me and give me responses and let me know what we need to add or subtract from our product. I’m incredibly grateful to that community.
Peter: I’d like to follow up on that Jon, what does the roadmap for future enhancements to InsideConnector look like? What are some of the features and some of the things that you’re currently working on that you hope to build into the product this year?
Jon: We hope to add a little more real-time interaction. Part of the concept between InsideConnector initially was that it’s a time-shifted interaction and by that I mean we’re providing rich media, like videos or links to websites or messaging that happens and it’s forwarded to the candidates, so they link to a website and that way, they’re able to view it at their leisure and respond to what would be like a message board, a private messaging system between the candidate and the recruiter. Some of the things that we plan to add this year, three really large ones.
We plan to optimize for mobile. It’s all viewable right now on mobile and the interaction can happen there, but it’s not optimized for mobile, so that’s one of the big pieces that we’ll add this year.
And then two others is we will probably add live chat capability, so that you can have a live interactive chat between the candidate and the recruiter right there when the candidate is ready to have that interaction.
The third is we will likely add video chat as well, so essentially having a Skype video call between the recruiter and the candidate.
Those are the main things on our roadmap for this coming year.
Peter: Do you have angel investors involved in this? How is this getting financed?
Jon: So far it’s all been through the internal operations. We were fortunate enough to have a successful company, CONCOURSE that generating income and so it’s been through the investment from our existing firm that we’ve been able to do it so far. To this point, no outside investors.
It’s been a learning experience for me. One of the things that I’ve come to really appreciate is the risk that entrepreneurs take when they invest in their own products which are not inexpensive to build and the risk that the investors take as well, so I’m very appreciative that we had this ongoing company that was able to fund it. I’ve got huge respect for those that are able to prove to the investment community that they’ve got something worth investing in.
Peter: On your homepage on InsideConnector.com, the headline is Gain Attention & Build Trust, which I again, back to this whole thing that we were discussing earlier about all the noise out there in social media, building trust is such a huge obviously important piece to the whole recruiting process.
Jon: I agree and this is something that again, I borrowed from our friends in marketing. One of the big influencers to me is Seth Godin and he’s written at least 12 bestsellers and I’ve read most of them and two that really impacted me were his book on permission marketing which talks about it’s more important to matter a lot to a few than to matter very little to the masses.
Peter: Right.
Jon: We try to build that into InsideConnector, the one-to-one aspect instead of it being a broadcast, it’s very much a narrow cast to an individual and we built in personalization, relevance and the expectation from the candidate, really that they opted in to this as a platform that they’re comfortable interacting with you on.
Seth also wrote another book called The Purple Cow that talks about being unique, having a unique approach. It’s those things; it’s uniqueness, relevance, personalization and hopefully getting to the point where the candidate opts in that helps you cut through the noise.
Peter: A couple of the things that you mentioned earlier that I think are so critical to this first of all is time shifting and essentially, that’s what I’m doing with TotalPicture Radio and Jobs in Pods, I mean our content is available when people are in a position that they can access and interact with it on their time schedule. I think that has become such a huge piece to this whole equation, especially around social media. And then I think the other thing that you mentioned that is going to be critical with this is mobile because, let’s face it, smartphones and tablets and mobile devices have become so critical to this whole market.
Jon: My good friend Michael Marley who, like me, lives here in Atlanta, fortunately I get to interact with him and learn from his experience in mobile, he’s one of the leaders especially in the recruiting field in all things mobile. He’s had a big impact on my thinking, including helping me realize that people are so busy today that they’re what he calls media grazers; they grab a little bit here and a little bit there and they move quickly from one thing to another, but they also want to be able to have that interaction on their mobile. So I’m with you; I think that the ability to time shift and make the information available to people when they have time to see you or hear from you is important and being able to deliver that content on whatever device, they prefer to see it on whether it’s a PC, a tablet, an iPad or a mobile.
Peter: Jon, thank you so much for taking time to speak with us on TotalPicture Radio. Is there anything that we haven’t discussed that you think is important for the audience to be aware of from the respect of InsideConnector?
Jon: I guess the main thing is just to underscore that with the candidate marketplace today, like everyone else, we’re just all bombarded with different people and entities and companies vying for our attention and so the attention of candidates is probably their most scarce resource. So whether it’s with InsideConnector or any other medium, the success in gaining people’s attention and ultimately earning their trust is going to come from being able to personalize your message, deliver relevant content, and do it in a way that is expected and in a medium that they prefer to have. I think that’s where we’re headed in recruiting and marketing in general, and we’re enjoying riding the wave.
Peter: Thanks again Jon. One thing that I think needs to get mentioned here is that there is a war for talent out there and it’s very intense and the emphasis on the word talent, right?
Jon: Yes, absolutely.
Peter: I think something that I’m sure that you’re seeing as a recruiter is that when we talk about talent, it used to be 10 years ago companies were vying for very specific people in very specific niches and with very specific degrees and today, it seems like whether you’re GE or Microsoft or Intel or Geico, you’re looking for the same folks; you’re trying to recruit the same people into your organization.
Jon: You’re definitely right. The war for talent is intense and I think that the battlefield really is moving from how we find and attract to how we engage them because if a top candidate isn’t willing to return your phone call and engage in a clear discussion, finding them or attracting them had no value, so the companies that will win this war for talent are the ones that find a way to engage the candidates and increase their response rate.
Peter: In saying that in creating a relationship with that – an ongoing relationship with that candidate who may not be interested today but six months down the road, maybe interested as long as you have that relationship with them.
Jon: Absolutely. It’s a relationship that has to be nurtured over time and ultimately based in trust so that whether it’s today that the talent is ready to discuss their career or some time in the future, having that relationship built on trust and really having a way for the candidate to stay in touch with you over time in a way that they’ve opted into is critical. It’s going to be the differentiator.
Peter: Again Jon, thank you for speaking with us today on TotalPicture Radio.
Jon: Peter, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. I’ve enjoyed it completely.
Jon Bryant is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of InsideConnector which is InsideConnector.com. You’ll find his podcast in the Inside Recruiting Channel of TotalPicture Radio, that’s TotalPicture.com where you can join in the conversation and this is Peter Clayton.
Thank you again for tuning in to TotalPicture Radio, the voice of career and leadership acceleration.
About Peter Clayton
Peter Clayton, Producer/Host, is an award-winning producer/director of radio, television, documentary, video, interactive and Web-based media who has created breakthrough media for a wide array of Fortune 100 clients.
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