What if we told you that you don't need professional networks, Indeed, Glassdoor, and beyond and their often expensive and often unfruitful solutions to find your next perfect candidate?
You don't – let me prove it to you and show you why you should believe me.
Just recently, here at Enrich Layer we personally did that with just a little over $350 and hired for a senior-level marketing role, using primarily free tools:
Hiring stage Tool Costs
Candidate search Enrich Layer Person Search Endpoint $350
Outreach Sendy Free*
Screening Google Forms Free
Interview Google Meet Free
*P.S. We paid a one-time $69 using Sendy, but we stated free because you can use your own email marketing platform, or use whatever free trial available out there.*Hired!
Before diving deeper, a quick definition:
Source: Indeed.
She's definitely 100% as real a person as you and me.
This is her professional networks profile.
Right off the bat, she sure has a wealth of experience and knowledge in marketing, with her latest stint involving using data analytics to drive marketing growth.
In the succeeding stages of hiring, she even told us how she built a business using data-driven marketing strategies and then sold it off for a handsome amount some years back.
Strong experiences, plus a strong propensity to actually make things happen equals we hired her.
She's joining us on the 20th of September (two days from the date of writing) and bringing her magic to Enrich Layer. We can't wait
You might ask, "What's the catch?"
Fair. I get it; it sounds too good to be true like we aren't disclosing the full story along our executive search process.
Nope.
The only catch that we might think of is that it involves coding. If you are a software engineer, that's perfect. But if you're not, don't worry, we'll expand on the technicalities below.
Enough talking, let's get into the actionable content.
Enrich Layer Search API is a product for advanced searches of people and companies with Boolean search. It consists of two endpoints:
Person Search Endpoint
Company Search Endpoint
For the purpose of our hiring, we used our Person Search Endpoint to search for candidates.
In this endpoint, there are a whopping 46 filters and data attributes that you can implement to filter the exact profile of candidates you're looking for, more below.
For our executive search, since we're looking for a marketing and growth talent preferably familiar and comfortable in a startup environment, we implemented the three search filters based on countries, company size, and current job title:
Countries
Singapore (SG) Malaysia (MY) Australia (AU) New Zealand (NZ) Sweden (SE) Israel (IL) United Kingdom (UK) Germany (DE) United States (US) Canada (CA)
Company size
`# The desired candidate should be currently employed in a company with a minimum of employees and a maximum of employees
current_company_employee_count_ current_company_employee_count_ ` Current job title
`#The target candidates should hold a current job title that loosely matches any of the following
Chief Growth Officer VP Growth Growth Manager Head of Growth CMO VP Marketing Director of Marketing Marketing Manager Content Strategy Manager Digital Marketing Manager SEO Manager Product Marketing Manager Head of Marketing ` Enrich Layer Search API supports Boolean search, making it super flexible and versatile. We wrote a full guide on the Boolean search operations in Search API.
But, for us we got our beloved ChatGPT to help. This is the Boolean expression that encapsulates the aforementioned job titles:
(chief || vp || head || director || manager) && (growth || marketing || "content strategy" || "digital marketing" || seo || "product marketing" || cmo)
or,
(chief OR vp OR head OR director OR manager) AND (growth OR marketing OR "content strategy" OR "digital marketing" OR seo OR "product marketing" OR cmo)
We ran the endpoint and it returned a list of the candidates' professional networks profile URLs which are also automatically enriched with other data points. We ran the script to compile the results into a CSV file with the following columns:
First name Company name professional networks Profile URL Current Company's professional networks Profile URL Current Job Title Company Employee Size on the platform Country Email
Of course, the purpose of this whole project was to reach out to the potential candidates, and we were doing it via cold emails. Thus we used Enrich Layer Contact API to get their emails.
We didn't look up the contact numbers but if you want, Enrich Layer Contact API supports that too. We needed only emails for the next step in our executive search process.
And we got a grand total of 7209 candidates and their emails.
Sample rows in CSV:
Plug this CSV file into your preferred email marketing platform (we use Sendy) and you're good to go.
Now to the exciting part - reaching out to the candidates. We are a self-professed professional cold emailing team, case in point:
How Cold Emailing Grew My B2B Startup To $100k MRR
Revealing our $124 cold-email hack that got us $83333 in monthly recurring revenue
I cold emailed our way to $1M ARR in 18 months. Here's the story.
This was what we sent to the 7209 candidates.
Some learning points:
Noticed we didn't describe the role at all. That was because at this stage it was just the first cold email, the purpose was to get a reply from candidates, to gauge interest levels among the 7209 of them. A long-winded elaboration of the role would backfire and diminish people's interest in wanting to find out more.
Instead, we paint a beautiful picture of why the recipients should continue talking to us - in this case, to show them the amazing growth Enrich Layer has been achieving.
We always end with a simple CTA (call-to-action), i.e."Are you open to a senior marketing role with Enrich Layer?". This is to squeeze out a reply from candidates. CTA (in all its forms and formats out there) does work.
With this, most of the time, you'll get a much higher response rate, albeit with short replies from your recipients like, "Sure, I'd like to know more", "Do share more", etc.
But these are more than enough for you to continue piquing their interest and continuing the conversation.
Just remember this:
Less is more in cold emailing. Your sole purpose is to get any response from the recipients.
After getting a reply from tons of interested candidates, you still need to screen them carefully to ensure fit and suitability.
In alignment with the spirit of how we do things, we definitely didn't want to do extended back-and-forth emailing with each candidate who replied. That would take up TOO much time.
We thus used the good ol' Google Forms. In the form, we can ask lengthy questions such as their experiences, how they would solve possible marketing problems, their understanding of Enrich Layer APIs, and even their expected salary package.
We also included a lengthy elaboration of the role and its expectations at the front of the form.
These were otherwise too heavy and lengthy to ask and show in an email.
So for each person that replied to the first cold email, we'll send them this Google Forms link laden with details and questions, all packaged in one easy-to-read form.
A peek into the Google Forms we sent each interested candidate:
A lengthy intro of the company, role, and expectations
Multiple screening questions on candidates' experience, capabilities, background
And more.
Now, you've got some amazing submissions through Google Forms, and you've shortlisted a handful of potential candidates.
You've got to do a video interview to do a vibe-check and have a chat with the potential hires.
It's needless to say there are a wide variety of tools out there to do video call.
Pick your poison.
It did for us.
Of course, this is but another recruitment method out of the many out there. But let us put things into perspective on why it worked for us.
The fact that we can specify exactly the profile of candidates we want, i.e. based on job titles, countries, and even company size with just a few lines of code.
You need to pay a huge premium to do the same on job sites. Free job listing can never allow for such customization.
Granted, even though we scraped as many as 7209 candidates, possibly only a percentage of them are open for job change. After all, this is outbound recruitment.
Comparing this with inbound recruitment i.e. listing on job sites, you might get hundreds of applications from people who're really looking for a job, but there would also be equally as many who are totally not a fit and are spammingly applying to any job listings they see on job sites.
(We found out there's a term for such a group of people - serial applicant).
Cost savings are a huge factor too. This method was definitely worth it for us considering the level of search customization and the scale in which we can carry out this executive search.
Most importantly, we achieved the goal of our executive search - we hired a great talent, who is Grace
For this round of recruitment, we filtered for only three attributes. Search API allows for much more than that, as much as whatever you can imagine:
Search candidates by industry e.g. healthcare, tech, education
Search candidates by past experiences e.g. ex-Stripe or Paypal
Search candidates by city, not just by country
Search candidates by stages of startups they're in - via funding amount
Search candidates by education background
And more.
Check out this article: The Definitive Guide to Executive Searches: Automatically Find Qualified Candidates for the exact codes for these recruitment use cases.
Purchase 100 credits for only $10 which you can try out the Person Search Endpoint for your own recruitment. $10 for 100 credits can give you 22 candidates. If you like what you see, get the higher-tier plans that will give you more credits per dollar.
Our APIs are known to be incredibly simple to use: simply register an account, purchase credits, get your API key, and start recruiting immediately.
We are more than happy to share about our recruitment processes using Enrich Layer APIs, email us at [email protected] if you'd like to find out more. Subscribe for weekly updates on more exciting stories and updates like this or [check out our Twitter](https://twitter.com/Enrich Layer).
