The Connective Good Blog
Recruit Your Next Marketing Quant, With Some Help From An Indian Taxi Driver
I learned an important lesson about recruiting from an Indian driver-for-hire named Ramesh. The year was 2005, and I was criss-crossing India with colleagues on a business trip, studying India's rural postal system. We set off to meet various officials, often driving...
Ask Yourself These 8 Questions Before Accepting That Job Offer, and Other Career Advice
This blog is focused on practical tips for recruiting analytical marketing talent. But every once in a while I capture some of the tips I commonly give when coaching candidates for my searches. Fast Company published two of my pieces recently... enjoy! Ask Yourself...
The Four Things That Matter Most When You Hire A Recruiter
Happy New Year from The Connective Good! I asked you last month to share your experiences with hiring retained recruiters. Many of you responded -- thank you. Here's what you've been sharing: 1. You are most likely to decide to do a retained search when your network...
The Talent Land Grab In Marketing Technology: How To Win
Pop quiz time: What percentage of new hires come from posting job ads on LinkedIn? (Hint: It may be much lower than you'd think.) Answer: Just 3%. Yikes! This stat comes from a Career Xroads survey of 50 companies who collectively hired thousands of new employees in...
Recruiting a VP of Research in San Francisco
Hi all, I've just been retained to recruit a VP of Research in San Francisco. This is a very cool role with a company I've worked with quite a bit. It's a good fit for someone who wants to reinvent industry research, be a thought leader at the intersection of tech and...
What Real Estate Purchasing In A Tight Market Teaches Us About Recruiting
Six months. That's how long my husband and I spent hunting this year for a condo in our fair city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. After so much waiting and hoping, we were getting downright antsy. Finally we saw a contender! It ticked all of our boxes -- a study for me...
How a 15-Person Company Uses Marketing Automation to Build a Scalable Recruiting System
Interview with Paul Roetzer, Founder and CEO of PR 20/20 Today we do a Q&A on applying inbound marketing approaches to recruiting. Here's an interview I did with Paul Roetzer, Founder & CEO of PR 20/20, a firm in Cleveland that specializes in inbound marketing...
Going Feral: Are Independents Too Wild To Hire?
"Once you've been an entrepreneur, you're pretty much unemployable." --Dharmesh Shah, Co-Founder and CTO, HubSpot, speaking at the recent MarTech conference "If you've been on your own for too long, people think you've gone feral!" --A friend of mine who is looking to...
How My Friend At Meetup Attracts Talent While He Sleeps
Recently I emailed my friend Andres, who works at Meetup. A moment later, I received this out-of-office message from him: I thought, "What a great idea!" Andres is using his out of office response as a marketing tool, to: Showcase the sabbatical perk at Meetup Point...
Your 90 Day Plan For Advancing Your Marketing Analytics Capability
Landing talent. Building momentum. Scaling. If you are building an analytical marketing capability, these three challenges can keep you up at night. Today I introduce you to someone who has written the book on these topics: Cesar Brea. I've interviewed Cesar about his...
The Case For Recruiting Like A Satisficer, Not An Optimizer
Optimization is great for some things, but can cost us when selecting new talent. Please meet my purple couch. A custom-made, velvety soft, 1920s style, pucker-backed, purple couch. I went on a frustratingly long journey to find this couch. It started with me wanting...
How Leak-Proof Is Your Recruiting?
Is your recruiting leaky? You can patch those leaks -- with either a quick fix or a full renovation -- to stand out from your competition and attract more top candidates. With a recruiting project, you start with a landscape of possible talent, and narrow it down to...
Differentiating Diamonds From Duds: How To Surface Your Next Client-Facing Star
At age 18, I spent the summer scooping ice cream at a Cape Cod institution called Nick and Dick’s. Little did I know at the time that this job would be great training for my later career. My manager at Nick and Dick’s was a guy named Rick. Rick at Nick and Dick’s. Go...
Recruiting a Director of Trends & Insights NYC
The Connective Good is currently working on a search for a Director of Trends & Insights for a startup consulting division of a media empire in NYC. This infographic below describes the role. (Thanks to the wonderfully talented Lisa Finch who designs these...
What House Hunting Teaches Us About Headhunting……And About Compensating Quant Marketers
Greetings from Cape Cod, where I arrived last night for Christmas. Within minutes I hopped on the couch and snuggled in next to my mom. It was time for our ritual marathon of watching HGTV – the purveyor of gems like “House Hunters” and “Love It Or List It.” Not...
Does Your Recruiting Speed Or Splutter? See How You Stack Up
My new husband, age 41, is learning how to drive. We have been practicing together every morning. Which means that I clutch the armrest in utter terror in Boston rush-hour traffic, while gritting my teeth and forcing my voice to be calm, saying, “Next time, let’s...
Five Steps To A More Predictive Recruiting Process: Going Beyond Interviews…To Assessments
Have you ever hired a carpenter? My guess is if you did, you probably didn’t vet that person by saying, “Tell me about a time when you solved a challenging problem.” Instead, you probably said something like, “I have this room that I want to make bigger, but my...
How To Vet A Potential Recruiting Partner For Your Needs: Turning Up Great Candidates Without Turning Them Away
Over cocktails with my friend J. last week, she mentioned her challenges finding Java programmers for her team. She had tried to partner with several recruiters. But the candidate pipeline she was seeing was as thin as a rail. She needed one recruiter whom she could...
Get Along Or Get Appreciated? A Tool For Candid Cultural Fit Conversations
Do you remember the best conference you ever attended? My most memorable conference was a Sonoma boondoggle, er, rather, leadership retreat hosted by Monitor’s Global Business Network. (May Monitor rest in peace.) At the conference, the organizers watched small...
Is This Analytical Marketing Person Any Good? Interviewing With The BATS Framework
Recently I awoke at 2 am to a very odd ‘whoosh’ sound in my bedroom. Whoosh, silence. Whoosh, silence. I tried to ignore it but the whoosh continued. Struggling awake, I realized that there was a bat in the bedroom! I did the natural thing for 2013: Grabbed an...
Get It Right Or Get It Done? A Framework For Figuring Out That Elusive Cultural Fit
A Tale Of Two Parties My idea of a party used to be grabbing some chips and salsa and decompressing with friends. I’d spend a maximum of 30 minutes preparing. Then I met my lovely fiancé, Matthias. He has evolved our parties to an art form. He simply will not stand...
Five Tips For Making Your Job Descriptions Attract The Talent You Need
How you can attract more top talent and compete with the big name players -- in half a day I was on the phone with a designer who I'd hired to come up with a logo and brand identity for my recruiting practice. “It has to be VERY professional,” I warned over and over,...