Marketers Unleashed
Welcome to Marketers Unleashed!
The podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We’re here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success.
From dissecting daring campaigns to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night, we’re unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently.
Marketers Unleashed
Not All Recruiters Are Evil - Unleashing the Power of Collaboration with Recruiters
In this episode of Marketers Unleashed, host Kathryn Strachan interviews Rowan Fisk, a partner at executive search firm 3Search, who shares his detailed observations and advice on the job market. The discussion covers the 2024 job landscape, the impact of market swings, effective strategies for job searching, and the importance of networking and personal branding. Rowan also provides insights into how recruiters work, the value of staying in touch with your network, and tips on making a lasting impression in the job market. Tune in for honest, unfiltered conversations aimed at inspiring and educating marketers to think differently and redefine success.
Social Media Links:
Kathryn Strachan - linkedin.com/in/kathryn-strachan
Rowan Fisk - linkedin.com/in/cmoexecutivesearch
Website: 3search.co.uk
Welcome to Marketers Unleashed, the podcast where marketers break free from the noise and dive deep into the raw truths of the marketing world. We're here to go beyond best practices and uncover the bold ideas, untold stories, and hard lessons that shape real marketing success. From dissecting daring campaigns to confronting the challenges keeping us awake at night. We're unleashing honest, unfiltered conversations to inspire, educate, and challenge you to think differently. Get ready to conquer the untamed side of marketing. I'm your host, Catherine Strachan, and this is Marketers Unleashed, where we're not just talking marketing, we're redefining it. For anyone who doesn't know me yet, I'm Catherine Strachan, author of Scaling Success, Building Brands That Break Barriers, international keynote speaker, and fractional CMO for cutting edge brands. I've spent years navigating the ever changing world of marketing, and I've seen it all. As your podcast host, I bring my expertise and curiosity to the table, diving deep into honest conversations with industry leaders to uncover the insights, challenges, and bold ideas shaping our industry. Let's get started. Hello, and welcome to Marketers Unleashed. Today, I'm really excited to be here with Rowan. I'm going to let him give you a little bit of an intro into who he is and what he does before we really dive into the nitty gritty and the depths of all of his expertise.
Rowan:Hello! It is lovely to be here. Thank you for for having me really excited to get stuck into this. So yeah, quick intro. So I'm Rowan and I'm one of the partners at 3Search and I lead our executive search team for the last 15 years. I've specialized in working with marketers the last 10 years or so, senior marketers, CMOs, CGOs, CCOs and kind of leadership team as well as non execs. helping them secure wonderful new roles in our fabulous client base. So yeah, I'm really, really looking forward to chatting.
Kathryn:Yeah, and I'm really excited to speak with you too, because I feel like the recruiter story is not one that we hear a lot of meaning you are on the coal face, you know what's going on in this market, probably better than most of us do. So, I mean, tell me a little bit about like, what you're seeing, obviously, like 2024 was a bit of a hard year, but I mean, what, what did you see in 2024? And what do you think we can see in 2025?
Rowan:At the start of January recruiters inboxes explode. January is, it's like candidate season for us. You have all these people who have spent Christmas contemplating their life and their future and their career and it, it takes a few weeks for clients to come back and get their feet under the desk and remind themselves of what their budget and their strategy was for the next year to then push into the recruitment. But we spend a lot of time speaking to candidates. I'm sort of three days into my working year, and I've spent the majority of the last three days speaking to people about their job search, and a lot of them have just kicked it off, right? And so what I've heard is a kind of recurring theme is quite a lot of trepidation. A lot of people saying, God, it sounds really tough out there. It sounds like there are a lot of candidates out there. You know, we've all seen how many applications there are per vacancy on LinkedIn. How the hell am I going to get through all of that noise? And I guess the first thing to say would be, I think it's a lot better than you would perceive it might be. You know, 2024 was a kind of, it was a bit of a tale of two halves for us. The first part of the year was tough. It was challenging, but. We were in this sort of wait and see cat and mouse game where we work with lots of businesses that are kind of like high growth scale ups that are often beholden to funding that had cut a lot of their infrastructure in 2023. And then we're in this state where they're like, right, we don't think the universe is going to explode. We think it's going to be all right coming out the other side of this, but we just need some glorious, radiant macroeconomic sign to give us the confidence that it's going to be okay. And then we'll start hiring again. And then on the other side of that dynamic, you had all these investors that were sat there going, we have capital. We need to deploy funds. But the longer we wait, the more assured we can be that the market's going to be in the right place. And also, the longer we wait, the better deal we can get as well. So let's just sit here and wait and see what happens. And then the catalyst really was the general election. It was such a foregone conclusion. We don't need to get into politics, obviously. But I think a lot of businesses at that point weren't right. Change is coming. It's probably going to be positive from a, from a macroeconomic perspective. Let's get on and do this. And so The second half of last year, we just got kind of progressively busier and busier. It was still a little trickier than in previous years, because I think there's still a backlog of great candidates who hadn't secured roles yet. But I really feel like the market is improving. I feel like we're past the worst of it. And I think a lot of the noise that people hear is bad news is projected the loudest, right? And it is often the people that are Out of work that have got the time to share their experience. And also as Brits, we're all really self deprecating. Like, there aren't a lot of people out there that are going, Look at me, I've got interview processes underway. Look at, there's all these amazing businesses that want a slice of what I've got to offer. So, I think the echo chamber of LinkedIn and, you know, marketing WhatsApp groups has a, has a bias for the more negative news. But I can speak to you as a part of research where, you know, a 45 person business, we have more data around what's going on. In the market from a job flow perspective than probably any other organization from a holistic perspective and we've seen it sustainably increase and we're feeling really positive and optimistic for 2025 now I don't want to give false hope because there's a lot of people that are feeling really vulnerable at the moment and are still actively hunting for a new role in a really competitive landscape but I do think that is better than where the narrative is at and I think is the market. Comes to life this year as budgets get signed off as bonuses get paid out and therefore reservations happen. I think there'll be some really positive signs in the next 6 months or so.
Kathryn:Yeah, I mean, market swing and roundabouts too. So, I mean, we've had we've had the dip in 2023 and 2024, but we all remember the great resonation in 2022 when, like, Jobs are gotten like hotcakes and you could not, you know, keep your team if you only paid them like this market average, you had to pay them like above the average, you had to like come up with creative ways to keep them engaged and incentivized. So I mean, market swinging roundabout. So I mean, I've got hope that these things will come back around.
Rowan:And there's a sort of rolling stone gathering moss effect to this as well. You log on to LinkedIn when the market is improving, and your feed is full of people that have secured a new role. And that makes you more open to change, and more confident that change will be a good thing for you, rather than where a lot of people have been for the last few years, which is like, I'm just gonna get my head down, better the devil you know, and combine that with More vacancies in the market, which means that you're getting approached by more headhunters about opportunities that makes you feel more confident that you're a valued asset to more organizations that creates more movement in the market, which creates more resignations, which creates more vacancies. I don't know, um. How buoyant it's going to be this year. And I certainly think 21 22 was a bit of an outlier, right? I didn't think we'll see a version of the Great Resignation.
Kathryn:I wanted to go back to something you said earlier, because when you are job hunting or when you're on LinkedIn, you do hear lots of stories about people who have had to spend 18 months, two years looking for a new role or have applied for 500 applications and not gotten any interviews or you go to apply yourself and you see. You know, a hundred people have applied or clicked applied. They now changed it recently, quite interestingly changed it to click apply, which is different. And I think that's an important difference, but it's interesting that LinkedIn is picking up on that kind of feeling as well. And I mean, I like that you said that bad noise screams the loudest, but I'm sure you actually have insights into like. What the reality is so that's probably not the reality, but kind of can you tell me a little bit about what the reality is
Rowan:linkedin is my professional hub and it is simultaneously the best professional tool and the worst professional tool, you know, linkedin, I think with great intention lowered the barrier of what it is to make an application a few years ago, we all remember like the, you know, Old clunky systems, you'd log on to them, you'd have to write an essay about why you're a wonderful candidate. It would take you 20, 30, 60 minutes to make an application. You'd get bored halfway through, your children would start screaming, you'd log off and you'd completely forget about it. And with good intention, LinkedIn wanted to reduce that barrier to entry. The problem is it's gone so far the other way now that applying at the click of a button, it's a broken system. As a headhunter, when I have a new vacancy, I do not advertise it on LinkedIn. The reason I don't do that is twofold. Firstly, when I get contacted by businesses who need our support these days, they're not saying we don't know how to develop a pool of candidates. They're saying, oh, we've got 500 applications here. We either just don't have the time or the capacity or the capability to be able to sift through that and pick out. The best 3456 however many but also if I think about a managing my work and be doing my job in a an interesting and enjoyable way I don't want to review 500 applications because the reality unfortunately. Is you're not one of 500 applications, you probably want to 20 relevant applications that sit in a pool of 500 that somebody has to sit through. Unfortunately, a lot of people will say, yes, I've got this term in criteria when they don't have the determining criteria. So from a productivity perspective, my time as a headhunter is far better spent rather than sifting through 500 CVS going. How do I find. The five people who are excellent and they might be in my network already, or they might be somebody that Catherine knows. I call Catherine and say, Hey, I've got this vacancy. You probably know the right person, you know, everyone. Right? And so if a client's expectation of me is that I go out and find the best person, it shouldn't really matter whether they have applied for the vacancy or not. It shouldn't matter whether in the market my job is to, is to find them and to attract their interest. I guess on the LinkedIn thing my caution to people is it's very easy as a job hunter to make LinkedIn your home base and to log on every single morning and to sift through to doom scroll your way through all of these vacancies that you probably saw the day before and it firstly is not productive. And secondly, it's soul destroying and it is hard enough and it is vulnerable enough being a job seeker. My advice to people that are looking for a new role is to start with who are the people that I know, who are the people that I've worked with previously, like grab yourself a big mug of coffee, sit down one afternoon and just scroll through all of your mutual connections and then just make a list of who are the people that I haven't spoken to for a period of time. And then shoot my note and say, Hey, look, it's been ages, a long time to speak. Hope you keep him really well. I'm a bit of a professional crossroads. You gave me fantastic advice from your work together at X business. Can we grab a coffee? Can I pick your brains? I've really value your insight. And actually, if you work concentrically outwards from the people that you know, and like, and rate already, then you've got. This distribution network of people that are thinking about you in a positive and productive way, but also you're just going to have a much more positive experience. I know both you and I know Mark Evans and he gave, he gives great advice, which is like, well, the person somebody helps you once they're more likely to help you just a second time. And I think. It is Brit, we're, we're incredibly self deprecating and we don't like to ask people for help. People love to help. And so if you go out at the start of your search and say, I'm going to go and have a hundred coffees. Somebody gave me that advice once. You're going to have a hundred coffees over a three month period. A, your search will be inherently more productive. And B, you'll just have a much more interesting engaging time. And you'll be amazed at what sort of opportunities come out of that, whether it's consulting engagements, opportunities within the business that the person's employed in. Opportunities within the business of that person is employed in if you work from your immediate network, including people you work previously, but also headhunters at first and outwards from there and focus on the quality of relationship, you'll have more success naturally anyway.
Kathryn:Yeah, I mean, it's nice to hear you say that because actually for all of my friends who are on the job market, you know, they, they do, they spend hours and hours every single day, like applying for roles. And, you know, I say to them, if you spent time networking and building a personal brand, you're going to find an opportunity much quicker than applying for all these roles. I mean, so much value comes out of your network and not just from a, uh, careers perspective, but from a publication perspective, speaking opportunities, like so many opportunities come from your network. When I built Copyhouse, my old agency, I started with a networking goal of meeting 50 new people every single month. And you know, I've maintained that for all the years, so five years now. That I've been up in my professional career and almost all the opportunities that I've had in my career or in my life have come via my network in some shape or form. Everybody I've hired has come by my network, you know, they're normally people that I've known or who've interacted with me. And then, you know, you add personal branding on top of that and personal brandings, like how you stay in touch and stay top of mind with everybody in your network. I did a post. Last week about looking for, you know, an additional fractional opportunity because one of my clients had unfortunately have budget cuts themselves. And, you know, within a day I had, you know, I probably have seven new business calls this week, just off that post, not being afraid to like, put yourself out there to share with your network and not just your network of like people, you know, but also your network at a wider range. So, you know, talking, sharing your expertise, being active on LinkedIn, even like, you know, a lot of people are scared to even just put like the green screen. Banner. Uh, and there's a lot of criticism that like, if you use a green banner, you're desperate. I mean, what's your take on the green banner as a recruiter? Is it helpful for you? Not helpful?
Rowan:It is helpful to know when somebody is active in markets. A part of it depends on the level of seniority and a part of it depends on the process. If a client comes to me, the way that I work is I'll map the entire market. I'll go and find all of the relevant people, we'll work with them to identify, right, here are the top 100, 150 people that are in this market that we think would be the right sort of people for us to go after, and then we go after them. And I would complete a market map looking at all of the candidates irrespective of whether they are active in market or passive in market. It is my job, they are paying me a appropriately handsome fee to go and find the best person irrespective of whether they're, they're active or not. However, if there is a, an urgency to a search, if it's an interim search, just to be really honest as well, there are recruiters that will cut corners. And so A very easy way to cut a corner or to exclusively focus on people that are immediately available for an opportunity is to look at that green box. Now, I don't think it's anything to be self conscious of or mindful of firstly, because it's normal and it's, you know, it's a human thing to. Sometimes be in work and sometimes be out of work. And when you are looking for a new role, I don't think there's anything wrong with with broadcasting it with publishing it. And I think people are appreciative and mindful of the fact that has been a lot of volatility and movement and redundancy and market over over the last short while. I'm not constantly checking. To see whether your green box has changed. I'm not checking to see how long it's been there for. And as a recruiter, I don't have any visibility of when you were open to work from so on the point of keeping it open for too long, that will be in your head and nobody else's for me personally, whether somebody's open to work or not, and whether they're broadcasted publicly or not, doesn't make much of a difference. But I think on the aggregate showing that you are open to your opportunities, probably a more helpful thing than not.
Kathryn:You, I mean, you talked there about making a market map of like the top 100 candidates that you would put forward for a client. How the hell do you get on that market map?
Rowan:It's a good question. Depends on the search. So I'll give you an example. So we are, we are about to kick off a search for a direct to consumer brand. It's a subscription business focused in the pet space, and I spent two hours running a discovery session with them yesterday. We sat down, we talked about their business, we talked about their mission, we talked about their growth journey, we talked about their revenue, and then we sliced and diced with them the determining criteria. By which we would identify, qualify, and select candidates. So for example, with this business, an essential criteria was somebody has to work in direct to consumer businesses that have a subscription element to them. Another essential criteria, so this is like a growth role, so they need somebody who has got a strong track record in performance marketing with a focus on acquisition, particularly meta, but also conversion rate optimization. That's where they've structured their teams. We need to find those candidates. One of the desirable criteria, not a must have, but a nice to have, is that they have worked in complementary categories. So that could be pets, but it could also be healthcare, it could be wellness, it could be supplementation. And so We would then take that criteria and then bounce it into the market and recruiters have access to we pay for access to a even fancier version of linkedin. It's called linkedin recruiter and linkedin recruiter can become your database to a certain extent, right? I might look at all of the candidates who have got keywords like performance marketing or meta or conversion rate optimization or CRO or, you know, every iteration of that to be able to find the right sort of people and people who have. previously or currently worked in organizations that would be interesting and relevant. You can search on job title, you can search on proximity to location, you can search on how connected you are to that person. I mean, it is an amazing, amazing piece of technology. So what most recruiters will do is they'll take a search, they'll work out from the client, what boxes do we need to tick to be able to qualify a suitable candidate, and then they will go and make a list of. Who are the people that are in my network already, which might be 20 people, it might be 30 people, it might be 50 people, that would either be right for this search, or may not necessarily be right for this search, but would probably know interesting people, so I'll write a long, long list, I'll give Catherine a call, she would have a good chat about that job, and then Bye for now. supplement that with the candidates that you don't know that are out there in the market. So how do you make yourself available for it? Well, firstly, you've got to optimize your LinkedIn profile in the right way. The skills that you have, make sure that they are put into your profile, so that somebody can search. On them from a keyword perspective, a lot of recruiters will search based on job titles, so sometimes people panic and they'll come to me and I'll say, my job title isn't reflective of the sort of roles that I'm looking for, and I would encourage them to just go and speak to their previous employer and say, hey, what's going to say on my reference? Like, if somebody decides that they want to employ me, and then they send a reference letter, uh, Is it going to say Catherine was marketing director for this business, or is it going to say Catherine worked for this business, or what information they're going to include I'm not asking for anybody to be honest, but that there are ways that you can play the system in a slightly more creative way to make sure that you stand out for the relevant opportunities and then I think the other thing that's really important is get to know people like me and leverage your network and make sure people know that they're available to you because you and I've. Got to know each other a bunch over the last few years, therefore, were I to find a role that would be suitable and interesting and relevant for you, you'd be one of the people that come to my mind and I'd jot your name down on that list and we'd have a chat about it, but alternatively, more people that know that you are in the market and that like you and rate you and know that you're generous with your time, the more you are likely to be front of their mind when I call them up and say, hey, do you know who's awesome? You know, there are definitely some. Some tactical tools and tricks on setting up LinkedIn in the right way, but, you know, a huge amount of this will come through your network as well.
Kathryn:Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, so recruiters often get a bit of a bad rap and I often think it's because of there is like a misalignment between perhaps when a candidate expects a recruiter to do and what a recruiter. Will actually do but I mean, can you tell me maybe where that like misalignment or misconceptions kind of come from? Because obviously like all recruiters are not evil, you
Rowan:know Recruiter is an interesting experience. I always remember. I don't know if i've told you this story before but i've got two amazing daughters who are six and four and we did nct for our Our eldest when we first became parents and those who have done NCT will know that you, you have this awkward moment at the start of it where you come into a sort of grubby town hall somewhere and everyone makes a, you know, makes a cup of tea and says, Oh, who are you? And what do you do? And, and I walked into a conversation with these two guys, two new dads who are good friends of mine now who are having a chat. And the conversation broadly went along the lines of, Ugh, I'm trying to find a new job at the moment, and I've got this recruiter, and he's an absolute arsehole, and he's only out for himself, and they're all the same, aren't they? They just care about them and their commission check, and, you know, I know that they'd flog their mother if it meant that they'd fill their next role. Anyway, what do you do? And I was like, Yeah, I'm a recruiter. And he was like, ah, funny, funny, funny, funny. No, really. Like, yeah, that's really what I do. I understand that people, generally speaking, have a negative perception. And it's a double edged sword because I know when I call somebody up and I say, hey, I'm a headhunter, I'd like to have a chat to you, that their shoulders are probably going to drop. But I see that as a wonderful opportunity. Because if I can show them that I'm well networked, and care, and I'm thoughtful, and interested in them, then it creates a point of difference very quickly. I've done this 15 years now, and over that course of time I've worked with hundreds of recruiters. And it's like everything, like, there are some bad eggs out there, but generally speaking, it's filled with Good people who want to do good work, and who are spread very, very thinly from a time perspective, and who struggle to manage all of the requests that come into them. I would say, on a daily basis, I probably have somewhere between 10 and 15 people get in contact with me. And yes, because I built a big network over a long period of time, but for each person that reaches out and says, Hey, we're a long time. They speak, help you keep him. Well, can we find some time to catch about your role? You know, if I said yes to every single one of them, I wouldn't be able to actually deliver the work for the people that pay me. And I think you have to understand and appreciate the, the relationship between candidate and recruiter is product led relationship in the sense that you as our candidates are our products and The value exchange is that if we can offer that product, I don't mean to commoditize people, but in the purpose of trying to explain it, if we can offer that product to somebody and create an opportunity, positivity, commerciality, why wouldn't we? It would be in our interest. I think the reality is just that a lot of recruiters don't know how to manage all of these people and so they, they work from a default state of. I don't think I can help therefore I'm not going to respond which is the wrong way of doing it but but actually like it's a young person's game I think we all learn expectation management as we develop and progress and mature I've just been doing it longer than most people that I know how to have a grown up conversation and say hey great to hear from you rest assured difference of mind I don't have anything here and now but I'm in your corner I think it's really tricky and I understand that, and my heart goes out when people talk about having a negative experience working with recruiters. I get that more than anyone, believe me.
Kathryn:Yeah, so from a candidate perspective, I mean, what can candidates do to nurture a better relationship with recruiters or stay more top of mind or, you know, make sure that they're more, you know, just having a better relationship with a recruiter? What can they do to, you know, maybe make that situation a little bit better?
Rowan:Yeah, I mean, there's a few things that I would suggest. So, so firstly, if you are looking to connect with a recruiter for the first time, don't send them an email. We get loads of those and you can't respond to all of them. It would be physically impossible. Find somebody that is a mutual connection. Ask them if they know that Recruiter well, and if they know that recruiter well, ask them to make the connection and the trick there is to try and find the person who is as senior as possible on the other side of that and I get a message from a footsie 100 CMO who says, Hey road long time no speak, you should connect with Catherine. She's great. And she's looking for a new job. I'm going to make the time for Catherine because it's important to me. To serve the highest value customers in the best way possible, so there is a trick there in making connectivity, I guess, going a step backwards from there is like, how do you find the right recruiters to work with in the 1st place? Because recruitment is an incredibly spirit disconnected industry, you know, the vast majority of recruitment businesses are less than 10 people that I think there are 40, 000 recruitment businesses in the UK. So everyone will have a different roster of who they should speak to and you need to have enough Recruiters in your back pocket to know that you're being thought of and represented in the right way to and through enough people But not so many that you can't manage an interesting human relationship as well So I would say that number is probably Somewhere between four and eight headhunters, and I would simply ask the people that you've connected with and said, Hey, I'd love to take your brains. Who do you work with? Who have you had a positive experience with? Who do you like? Who do you think cares? Who do you think is well connected? And you do that 20 times. Trust me, the same names will keep coming up time and time again, and that will create your list for you. To the point of like, well, how do you continue connected with them? I think there's a lot of fear from candidates of if I haven't. Spoken to this person every couple of months, but I haven't reconnected with them every couple of months. I'm going to be out of sight out of mind. Most recruiters have systems and processes in place that are sophisticated enough that they will come to you when the right opportunity presents itself. It's in their interest to find the best possible people for the role. They've taken the time to get to know you in the first place, probably because you've come recommended to them. So, like, why wouldn't they reach out at the right time? But. Most recruiters just don't have the capacity to kind of continually stay in touch. So, you know, if a candidate comes to me and says, so should I, should we check in again in a couple of weeks time? As much as I'd love to, I wouldn't physically have the bandwidth to be able to do that for everybody. So, I think it's a really good idea to either shoot them a WhatsApp or shoot them an email saying, hey, just checking in, here's something that you might find interesting. Right, because the, have you got any vacancies for me? It then creates a task for me to respond to. I've then got to go, oh, I'm really sorry, I don't have anything for you. It makes me feel a bit crap. You're much better to say, thought of you the other day. I was chatting to this person and we were speaking about this thing and it made me think of our previous conversation. Or, hey, I saw this article about Resignation 2. 0 being around the corner. Like, you might find this interesting. And the implication within that message is, By the way, I'm still looking for a new job. Let me know if anything comes up. But, you know, in the same way that you would do as a marketer thinking, what value can I contribute to my target audience? Think of your recruiters, think of your network as your, as your target audience. And the more value you can put back to it, the more, the more you'll get from it. As well, from a frequency perspective, I think doing that every couple of months is a great idea. But if you build a great relationship with them, like, take, take the time to, to, to nurture it, right? Like, great candidates that I know, who I've worked with over the last decade or so, they drop me a call and want to have a catch up or they shoot me a note, I'm going to make the time to catch up with them. Because for me, it's about the quality of relationships over the quantity of relationships. So I don't think you need to feel Shy or overly conscious about about reconnecting with people. There's just a better way to do it. Strategically.
Kathryn:Yeah. Yeah, I think that that's really true. I mean, you connect with people because you want to and every relationships a two way street. So, like, what are they getting out of that engagement with you? Is it learning something new? Or maybe you have like a cool event that might be of interest to them or maybe it's even like a A podcast you were on that might have some interesting insights or a speaking event you did. I mean, why not share that with them? But I mean, I think it's great advice to think about it as if you are marketing yourself to the recruiter. So, I mean, what is it that they want or need or how can you help them? What might they learn from you and kind of seeing it as a as a two way relationship.
Rowan:And on that point, you know, I think a lot of candidates will say to me at the end of the call. If you ever need to tap into my network, let me know and that is appreciated as a sentiment, but I would encourage you to maybe go a little bit further with the people that you really know and trust and like, like, really think, how can I get in this person's good books? How can I get them to think of me? I have a wonderful relationship with a guy who. I offered a role to about five years ago and he didn't accept the role and by the way it was the right thing for him to not accept the role it wasn't the right opportunity something better was presented to him and we shook hands and just went let's park this but he did something really really sweet. And unintentionally, incredibly clever, which is he sent me a bottle of wine is from I won't name the brands, but like one of these big wine companies, right? We just noticed that I really appreciate your help. Thank you so much. But by the way, this is not a plea for people to fill my wine cabinet. It was a lovely thing to do. And what was fantastic about it. And intentionally is he put my mobile number into this company's database so that they would contact me when the wine had landed on my doorstep, which is nice. But I now get a message every six weeks or so saying guys called GURPS. Hi GURPS, good news. We've got this wine installed that you might find delicious. Get in contact. And because, you know, I'm. An idiot. I just haven't clicked. I haven't pressed the stop message on my phone. So every now and again, I just send him a message saying, you're still front of mind. I'll still give you a contact when everything comes up. So like, I'm not suggesting that everybody subscribes to their favourite wine distributor in my name and sends me lovely bottles of wine. Wouldn't go a mess. Um, but yeah, it's a lovely, it just always keeps him front of mind for me. Completely unintentional. I
Kathryn:mean, I think personal branding does that as well. Cause if you're already on LinkedIn, I mean, recruiters are on LinkedIn all day, every day. And you see somebody's post, then that's going to remind you of them as well. So, I mean, that's one of the benefits of like having a personal brand, but there are lots of ways to maybe stay top of mind, but it's thinking about how you do stay top of mind and how you stay in front of your network without, you know, um, Spamming them or, you know, asking too much of them when they're already quite time poor and, you know, time strapped.
Rowan:I mean, recruiters are some of the most time poor people on the planet. And we are the account manager, the business developer, the project manager, the. The marketer, occasionally the bailiff, when a client doesn't pay their fee, right, we have a, we have a million plates to spin and, you know, people say job hunting is a full time job, try doing it on behalf of thousands of people at the same time, and I think just recognizing that no response doesn't mean that you're shunned or they're completely disinterested in you, but they don't quite have the right opportunity at the right time. I don't think there's malicious intent in that. I think there's a better way of doing it. We as a business are trying to get better at being as kind as we can in our responses when we're not able to help somebody. I don't take it personally that firm, that headhunter will get in contact with you when the right opportunity presents itself.
Kathryn:Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's, I mean, not to take something personally is probably one of the best lessons in business, hands down, because a lot of things aren't personal, but we all feel too personal about, about most things. And I think nothing is more sensitive than your job because it's your income and it's what provides for your family and for your life. So, you know, of course,
Rowan:it's an incredibly vulnerable position to be in. We're past the worst of it now, but I remember working with a candidate. Yeah. Halfway through 2023 and saying, Oh, look, you know, a really nice conversation be nice to meet you for coffee sometime. I'm in London these days. Let me know when you can come in. And the guy was like, look, I'd love to meet you for a coffee, but I'm broke, can't afford the train ticket. I've got mouths to feed at home. I hope you understand. Oh, my God. Of course. I understand. And what a joke. What a terrifying position to, to, to be in, you know, it is not lost on me that every candidate I speak to without a role has a finite amount of money in a pot and they don't know when that pot is going to be supplemented and they don't know when it's going to run out and they've probably got some mouths to feed at home. It's like, that's scary. I think it's so important for us to remain mindful of that as an industry, both headhunters, but also hiring managers really easy when you're in a role outside out of mind, busy, which the reason you need to recruit in the 1st place, it's really easy to forget. There's a human being on the other end of this, but if you can treat people with compassion. It goes a really long way.
Kathryn:Yeah, I think that's incredibly important. I mean, it's a very vulnerable place to be in and you want to make sure that, yeah, people are treated nicely. But you always want to treat people nicely, I think. So, before we close today, I just want to ask you one final question. You know, what advice would you have for anybody who's currently looking for a role and, you know, finds themselves in that really vulnerable place that we just talked about?
Rowan:I give three pieces of advice. I'm going to change. I give three pieces of advice to anyone who's looking for a new role, irrespective of how senior they are, irrespective of their discipline. The first one we talked about already, have a hundred coffees. The second one I would say would be open minded. Explore different opportunities. There will be some, some vacancies out there and you'll look at the job description and go, that's me, this, this is my role, perfect for me. And then you will interview for it and you go, oh my god, I want to work for that bunch. But there will also be roles that will positively surprise you. Yeah, it might just be a business that writes a terrible job description, or it might be that there's a bunch of stuff that you learn when you speak to them or get a sense of their culture. And so you've got this wonderful opportunity to explore and you will get out as much as you put into the search. So taking the time to be open minded and to, and to look at lots of different opportunities is a really, really valuable exercise. And it leaves you informed at the other end of the process. You want to feel confident you've made the right decision. The final piece I give. Is the patient. It's very easy to correlate open-mindedness with reducing your expectations. But the reality is, the decision you make around picking the right business and picking the right role will progress your career further in the work that you do within that job. I, I have clients and they go find me someone from Airbnb or Meta or Zapier or where, wherever it might be, and it's like they're buying the brand. So I'm not saying pick brands, but like. Pick businesses where there's an exciting journey that you can win in, and there's work for you to do that's really interesting there, and it will have a huge impact. It's really interesting philosophy around this as well, you know, candidates have a positivity bias, clients have a negativity bias. What I mean by that is like, candidates look for reasons that jobs are right for them. If you're in the market, You might get some red flags, you might get some warning signals, and it's very easy to block them out and look for a reason that a job would be great for you. Clients are the opposite, so they have a negativity bias. They will say, look, I had a great conversation with Rowan, he can clearly do the job. But I do have this concern, I do have this worry, and our job as headhunters is to sort of bridge the gap between the two and come to a place of objectivity, right? If I think about the people who've made it to the very, very top of the game, and people who just don't quite get there, it's not that they're harder working, it's not that they're more conscientious, it's not that they've got more experience, it's not that they're better leaders, it's just that they've picked winners. And A part of that is dumb luck, but actually really listening to your internal tuning fork, taking the time to get it right, maybe doing some consulting work, keep the wolf from the door while you wait for the right opportunity to come along, not diving into the first thing that's presented to you. It's all very well and good if a business wants you, but you've got to want them as well. And if you're not staying awake at night going. I love that role and then take it if you if you if you come at it from that perspective you will find a great new position
Kathryn:I think that that is really awesome advice and I think that everybody listening has got some really great insights today you know I certainly have. Thank you so much for joining us.
Rowan:My pleasure.
Kathryn:That's a wrap for this episode of Marketers Unleashed. Thank you for tuning in and diving deep with us into the unleashed world of marketing. We hope you're leaving with fresh insights, new ideas, and maybe even a few awful moments to fill your next. If you've enjoyed today's conversation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss a new episode. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Drop us a review or connect with us on LinkedIn to share your thoughts and join in the conversation. Until next time, keep thinking bold, challenging the norms, and unleashing your inner marketer. After all, what's the worst that'll happen? I'm your host, Katherine Strachan, over and out.