6 Free Recruiting Tactics for Startups

Published by bruinbear on Tagged Recruiting, WooMe

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It’s been a couple of weeks since the last post. My lack of activity is mostly attributed to my head being down in the Mac, learning everything there is to know about Woo Media and the Web 2.0 space, not to mention working on the million tasks needed to be completed, yesterday, to move our company in the right direction. Between taking calls with PR agencies and developing the marketing plan for the www.woome.com site later this year, I have been spending a lot of time ramping up the marketing team.

We are intending to focus much of our marketing effort in California for the launch and since I am currently working out of the home office in Los Angeles, it seems to make sense to go out an get the best and brightest from the local schools here in LA. I am in pursuit of a young, hungry, smart, passionate, entrepreneurial type who simply knows how to execute, to fill my #1 priority position for the moment. The Marketing Manager will report to me directly and become immersed in everything there is to know about online and offline marketing. Sure, having some experience previously at an internet company would be nice, however, as I have found over my career, its far more important to find good people than it is to find someone with domain expertise. In this case I believe that to be even more true, since social marketing is in such a nascent place, the methods of marketing continue to evolve virtually everyday so whatever domain expertise someone might have today would no doubt be somewhat irrelevant next week. I need someone aboard this marketing team to be able to “figure it out” regardless of how, when and why the game changes. Below is a link to the Marketing Manager positions

Marketing Manager

As you can imagine, costs are a significant concern for our “little” startup and we are all, across the board, doing whatever we can to minimize our operational costs without sacrifice to the quality of our work. This is of particular importance when it comes to recruiting. After running an IT staffing firm for nearly 6 years, I know far to well how expensive fees are for a recruiting. Using a recruiting firm to fill a junior / mid-level marketing positions could cost up to $20K, important $$ I would rather have at my disposal for launching marketing campaigns to grow Woome.com’s user base.

As it turns out, with all of the recently developed and even some older recruiting techniques and tools now available, depending on the position, there are few reasons today for a startup company to pay recruiting fees for hiring members of its operating team, unless of course, the specific position are in high demand. With that, I have included the list below of the tools I have used over the past couple of weeks to hire Woo Media’s Marketing Manager and will no doubt continue to use to keep our recruiting costs down and personnel quality up!

• Linkedin – I have used this tool extensively during my deal making days at Shopzilla. I had received lots of job notifications from my Linkedin network in the past and felt it was time to utilize the “job notification service” for my own purposes of hiring. NO FEE to use and you get to send job descriptions to up to 200 contacts within your network. The power of the network shines through using this tool.

• UCLA Career Center – I have circumvented other recruiting tools like Monster. Hotjobs and Career Builder in favor of going direct with local university systems. I know how expensive and ineffective the aforementioned tools are and felt that going directly to the university was an easier way to get this job description in front of the candidates that I am most looking for. Also, not a bad idea to start building a reputation directly with the university for future hiring needs as well which are no doubt on the radar over the next few weeks. Unfortunately, USC is working with Monster to manage their job postings for their students. I think this is a big mistake since young, innovative companies like Woo Media don’t have the funds to post on Monster, limiting the kinds of position for USC students to those of larger, more traditional companies that have deep pockets

• Facebook – I tried out a marketplace listing at Facebook for all of $2. You can target the schools that you want to include the posting for, but since this seemed to be “buggy” when I posted, I went ahead and included in the Los Angeles network. Not much traction from this post thus far.

• MySpace - I tried out a classifieds listing on mySpace. Total cost, $0!! Now I see first hand why the newspapers are struggling. Hard to compete when online offers the same classified listing for FREE. No way that I know to segment and target by university so went ahead so like Facebook, included in classified for Los Angeles.

• Shopzilla Email – as I have written about often on the blog, Shopzilla is filled with some of the most talented, young professionals that I have ever come into contact with. The energy and smarts that just about everyone exudes at Shopzilla is second to none. So, what better way to find candidates with similar attributes for the Marketing Associate position at Woo Media then by reaching out to all of my younger former colleagues requesting that they send the job description to those within their own personal networks they felt were as good as them, if not better. (I am explicitly NOT recruiting current Shopzilla employees, only reaching out to my former colleagues to tap into their highly targeted networks.

• Targeted Email – Of course, this recruiting tactic has been around, for a long time, essentially, since email came into existence. However, sending out a job description to your own personal network directly to those people that you know have great access to the type of people you are looking to hire is one of the BEST ways to create the viral exposure of positions that ultimately lead to highly qualified candidates,

This campaign only began earlier this week, with many of these tactics only having launched a couple of days ago, therefore, it would be difficult to provide an assessment of success / failure for each method so far. However, once I have hired on my two Marketing Associates, I will be sure to add further insight to the blog.

Total recruiting costs to Woo Media, to date $2.

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July 27th, 2007