Passive talent
16 Jun 2020 - Rob Calvert Stage: Finding a problem worth solving --> Find a solution that people are willing to pay for Market: Internal talent acquisition managers at 20-100 employee tech startups Job: Recruiting passive candidates (specifically engineers) Value prop: ??? Solution: ???Last Sprint: We found a problem worth solving
We entered this sprint with one main aim; doing further interviews to find a problem worth solving.
More specifically, we had a reasonable idea of the main jobs/pains our target market had, but couldn’t rank them.
Over 10+ inverviews we asked broad open questions such as:
- “If you had a smart, switched on and hard-working intern, what one task would you delegate to them?”
- And “How could a tool or service make you twice as good at your job? You can define “twice as good” however you like”
We also asked them to rank top pains/possible ‘gains’, using information from previous interviews to setup a card-sorting exercise as follows:
The card sorting exercise for ‘upsides’ (gains). We shared our screen, and asked interview participants to select 3 top-priority gains.
Following analysis of all these interviews, we were able to re-organise the RHS of our Value Proposition Canvas to accurately reflect the jobs/pains/gains of our target market:
The RHS of our updated value proposition canvas, with an accurate reflection of top-priority jobs/pains/gains for our target market. Here’s a link to our Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
And score customer jobs against their importance, tangibility, the degree of unsatisfied pains/gain (‘Unsatisfied’ in the below), and size of market/willingness to pay (‘Lucrative’ in the below):
Our ranking of high-level customer jobs, based on our research. Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
Before I continue it’s probably worth highlighting that ‘passive’ candidates are those that would move but aren’t actively hunting. (Candidates actively job hunting are ‘Active’ candidates).
Perhaps this ranking comes as no surprise. When it comes to recruiting software engineers, there aren’t enough quality active candidates to fill open roles - so companies either headhunt themselves, or use recruiters, or both.
For this market, the vast majority of 20+ (or at least 40+) startup companies have internal talent who actively source passive candidates. When you ask them what their pains (or unrealised gains) are, everything points to this.
We’re aware this isn’t a new problem, but it has problems with it. Response rates on LinkedIn are low, candidate data is often incomplete or out of data, market mapping takes weeks, and all-in-all it’s a lengthy, tedious process.
In short, it’s a big thing, and no-one’s cracked it yet. If they had, recruitment companies would be declining rapidly - and they’re not.
Next up; finding something people will pay for
First, a caveat; this is just the very start of this process. We’re not going to get the answer with one ‘ideation’ session, but we’ve got to start somewhere.
As such, we followed a classic process for generated ideas.
Throughout this process, we didn’t get too bogged down into the details of a solution. Instead, we’re trying to find a high-level promise (i.e. value proposition) that people will pay for.
It went as follows…
First, we did a quick customer journey map to pinpoint where there were most pains/unrealised gains:
Typical customer journey map for finding candidates. Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
Then generated and ranked ‘How might we’ statements:
Ranked HMW statements. Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
Looked at how products/services in analogous industries looked to solve the same problems (including Watford FC’s recruitment policy…!):
A snapshot of analogous products we looked at. Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
Then generated and ranked a bunch of ideas:
A few ideas we generated… Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
Before ranking them, and outlining how we’ll get initial signals for them:
Initial plans for testing Here’s a link to ur Miro board if you want to dig into the detail.
We ended up with three ideas that would be directly used by our market
- A service that uses highly-targeted social media adverts to increase response rate
- A service that scrapes all publicly available information (LinkedIn, Github, etc), and does a degree of pre-screening and information-filling to present passive candidates that are more likely to response to direct outreach
- A ‘Lunchclub.ai’ for Europe’s ‘top 5%’ of tech talent
Stu also pointed out that it will be difficult to sustain a competitive advantage with any company unless you’ve got access to candidate data (e.g. willingness to move, salary expectations, true indicators of technical ability), so we’re beginning to investigate ideas down that route.
Next Sprint: Testing initial value propositions
Aaaand breath. There’s a lot there, I know, and there’s still a lot further to go.
Here’s what we know:
- None of these ideas will stand the test of time
- This was from one ideation session, and there could be plenty more ideas out there
- We’ve loosely taken competition into account, but need to dig more deeply
- We haven’t even scratched the surface candidate-side
- Needless to say, we haven’t yet covered details of the solution, channels, pricing model, etc
But we’re taking it step by step, as per our process.
Next up, we’re generating 4x landing pages for these ideas. (I know, more landing pages - sigh - but we did look at other methods so test them, promise!).
The three company-focussed value propositions contain a ‘high bar’ element, visitors will be asked to enter a lot of information to ‘get a demo’.
We’ve done this because internal talent acquisition managers will readily sign up for anything that might make their life easier, so a normal ‘Join the waiting list’ won’t be a good signal of intent. We can also use the form to fill in gaps about our knowledge. We’ll be driving traffic to these using LinkedIn ads.
Our one candidate-side idea is focussed on one pain point we know about without doing any research; constantly getting spammed by recruiters.
We have no idea yet how to solve this, so we’re doing a ‘vision/mission’-based landing page, and seeding it into appropriate forums (Reddit, Twitter) etc to see if it gets any traction.
Just the start, and a long way to go - but a good progress from 2-3 weeks ago.
Other Comments
- We were previously looking for ‘quick flip’ tools, but our attitude has shifted a little, mainly because solving a 10x more valuable problem isn’t necessarily 10x harder.
- With the help of a friend, we’re also looking at which other markets have an acute problem with finding quality passive candidates.
- Using the Value Proposition Canvas also helped broaden our horizons beyond focussing on ‘pains’ alone. I used to struggle with the idea of ‘Gains’, but it’s simply ‘unrealised value’. Something that a potential customer really wants to do, but can’t achieve it with any tools/services out there (rather than it being promised by a tool/service but not realising itself, which is a pain)