Kathleen Steffey is the CEO and Founder of Naviga Recruiting & Executive Search. For 19 years, Naviga has been helping domestic and global business leaders achieve revenue growth by recruiting top-performing sales and marketing professionals.
Her background has given her unique insight into the corporate talent acquisition world, agency recruiting and what it takes to manage and lead a team of marketers and recruiters in the digital landscape.
Describe the state of recruiting right now, from your standpoint?
It's telling right now. I think the state of recruiting and how competitive it is, it really is showing the colors of recruiters and recruiting firms, and you've got to have your fundamentals in place, and have best practices in place, in order to be very competitive in the world right now, period. Yeah.
Do you have any cautionary tales to tell us about, in this really hot job market?
I feel like we lose candidates over something weird all the time. I will say that client behavior is at the forefront of our interests, where they really need to behave and really step out of their comfort zones, if you will, in order to attract talent. They need to be speedy, they need to be concise in their messaging, they need to be action-oriented. All these different things in order to differentiate themselves in the marketplace right now. So, I know that's not something funny or weird that happened, but it's something that we're really paying attention to in this marketplace.
What percentage of your clients don't do that stuff? Give me an idea of how many are not doing it right.
I would say maybe 25% needed advisement, on what to do, how to do, and give a little coaching through the process if they're misbehaving, if you will.
So tell me about how you company approaches recruiting?
So we've been using a pretty progressive approach out there for many years now, maybe since 2018. We started with a blog called salesjournal.com.
In order to position ourselves as experts in the marketplace. And that was after conducting focus groups and developing personas in order to communicate to our audience properly. And so it started with that, right.
Communicating at a higher level about our expertise in the space, not necessarily recruiting, and then reaching out to those audiences. So we just have so many different channels and marketing approaches, from social, to email, to blogs, to our website, to video, reputation management, you name it, we're doing it right now.
And it creates a boomerang effect for leads coming to us where we can say, "Listen, I don't think we want to work with this customer, because all the bells and whistles aren't lining up for a win-win. So we're going to pass."
Which social media channel do you recruit from most?
We use our content across different platforms, Tik Tok isn't one of them, but LinkedIn is a dominant platform that we use consistently, and email, but LinkedIn, we post, if we make a placement, if we landed a new client, we have their logo up there, we get permission. We're a retained search firm, so I don't mind if people know who we're doing business with. I'm not threatened by that at all.
And we put best practices on LinkedIn, try to get engagement that way, but mostly it's to have our different audiences look at what we're doing. So when they are ready to hire, they know who to call, and they're watching us through our connection requests, right? They're connected with us. They're connected with our brand, and they're watching in their feed. So.
Will you go so far as source on sites like Twitter and Facebook as well?
We are on Twitter consistently. We are on Facebook consistently. Don't get the ROI that I get from LinkedIn on these other sites. So our dominant platform is LinkedIn, period. We are on Twitter. We are on Facebook, because we get some return, but it's not the same.
So how do you stand out so much? Because every other recruiter is using LinkedIn, right?
Yeah, I think we have... I was going to say sex appeal, which would have sounded ridiculous, but I mean, I think we have a showing of our brand that is consistent, and we don't let down on that consistency. And it's fresh, in terms of images and creative, along with the content that goes out there. But then we tease them with just content, quick content.
We do surveys, we do polls, and it's not selling our services. Okay. That's how we keep them engaged. It is all about communicating about the community around us, the sales, the marketing, and executive community around us. And we're non-threatening that way, right. And so they don't think we have a mission at the given time that they see our post, which we don't, we don't want them to... We're not asking for their business right then and there, but it's a strategic way to have them contact us when they're ready.
Talk to me about InMail. How do you approach InMailing a candidate today?
Oh my God. InMails. I have a story about InMails. So LinkedIn really me off last year, around this time, because the problem was the default setting for any user, let's say, would be not to receive InMails, but notifications, in terms of notifications, but they would receive notifications if they got a message request. So that was the default, right? So our InMail ROI was decreasing dramatically, in a way that I was like, "We are throwing our money away."
So I looked into a couple of other platforms to start using, to get information on candidates, like phone numbers, emails, and we were doing that kind of circumventing our process on LinkedIn, and it was tougher. I mean, the response was not there compared to LinkedIn, and it was choppy, the process of circumventing it. And I'm like, "This is not me. This is not our organization." But we were doing it, still while we were paying for LinkedIn, and LinkedIn must have heard the recruiting community out there about this problem with InMails, because about, I'd say six months ago there was a change.
The response was there, we were having issue connecting with people as it came down to InMails. So last year I got rid of all licenses, but one or two, and as a result of them adjusting it, we went back up to four or five. So I've had a love hate relationship with InMails and-
So your ATS is CATs? How long have you been with them and what do you like about it?
Since 2019. Most favorite thing about CATS is a plugin they just created that is an absolute game changer for my team and me. They created a plugin where we can see, based on a little green mark or red mark by the LinkedIn person's profile, if they're already in my system.
It's unbelievable. It's a game changer. So that is my absolute favorite part of CATs right now. We do a lot of candidate campaigns and nurturing inside CATs, so they've got some cool stuff associated with that.
So it has some CRM capabilities?
Yeah. Some CRM capabilities. I mean, it's not as robust as a CRM, but it does what we need it to. So that's my plus, my negative is I wish it updated real time data, like a LinkedIn, where I don't have to spend money and get a third party to update my entire ATS, to get it relevant to today.
Any other technology you guys use to recruit?
Yeah, we got Seek Out. It's a generation of names, and emails, and phone numbers. We also use Zoom, same thing, right? They've done a better job at getting more mobile phones in there. We actually moved to Seek Out because we were having problems with Zoom in the pandemic, and people aren't in the office. And Zoom just offers in office numbers, and this is a joke. It was almost like what we paid for became obsolete. So, we use Seek Out as a predominant information tool, as well.
Tell me a sourcing story from your days, Kathleen.
Yeah. What comes to mind is probably amount of touch points, high volume touchpoint stories, that me and the recruiters have. So, you might be inclined to, after two touchpoints, say, "I'm going to give up." Maybe even three, and we've got a system in place that keeps going, and it's automated to hit them an email, "Hey, I haven't heard from you yet."
Or "You're still not interested." Or whatever, and maybe after the sixth touch point, we'll stop and say, "All right, we'll stop and go away." And whenever we get the hit, let's say at that six touch point, we're like, "Oh my god, we got this hit." It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, and we see it working, keep going and keep touching, it's like a celebration.
Is there an average number of touch points you would say is effective?
I would say the average number of touch points... Let's see, we ping them on LinkedIn or Database. We text them, and then we email. I'd say three solid. It's the average, and it's most effective, because if they're not interested by then, the odds of them being so busy, in a hole that they're not getting pinged by us in these different manners would be odd.