Joe Mullings: Building Companies and Careers

The Business Development function will no longer be a “desk-level” effort as it has been since the beginning of the search business. Historically the success of a search firm has been limited exclusively to the aggregate of the “billers” and dependent on how hard or intelligently the billers wanted to work. If they earned enough, they stopped working. The development of the marketing and awareness/attention function that can be driven by the organization itself will be a step-change for the organizations that initiate these functions in their practices. The organizations that invest in their brand / reputation will reap the benefits of having the top-of-the-funnel business that can then be incubated and developed by the office itself. The level of call-in business that will be booked and/or ushered along for business will grow.

The term “Branding” may be overused for your taste. It is and it is also misinterpreted. You are really building and scaling your reputation. In this episode, I share with you how the building of your reputation and the reasons for it are critical for your success at a desk level as well as at an office level.

One of the ways that you bring the greatest value to any marketplace is to be a gateway to information, insights, and interpretation of events. In business, patterns emerge, human behavior simply takes on new costumes. On par, principles remain the same but processes merely speed up. Developing yourself as a gateway and an important touchstone to career and business decisions makes you valuable to your entire marketplace. It requires a tremendous commitment and insane amounts of work and giving. This session goes into the philosophy and mindset of being a gateway.

Think of LinkedIn as your industry sponsored cocktail party for the masses. If you really want the interaction to become more intimate, you need to take it away from the party and towards more of a one-on-one relationship. Position briefs / Custom landing pages are the way. In this episode I share what is one of the most powerful tools that puts a massive amount of information into the individuals hands in order for them to decide to move forward or not regarding an opportunity. Using a media heavy digital landing page that controls the individuals journey through your or your clients opportunity. A faster path to truer yes’s and truer no’s.

Technology empowers search firms more than corporate companies. Understanding that marketing, sales and customer service are the three critical buckets of the full recruiting process. This approach allows you to reach the force multipliers who are not actively looking in the market. I discuss why a solid marketing effort with an average search business beats a great search firm with no marketing efforts.

Our perspective of job postings on the internet and how to overcome the “white noise” of job postings on the internet. Understanding the psychology of the “A Players” that you get paid to deliver and how to reach them. The new approach has resulted in an 80% inbound recruiting effort.

Understanding that you make a choice of paying yourself first or your organization first? You cannot serve both. You are either building a machine or using it as a cash machine. I discuss the mindset of hiring best athlete to build a championship team. Adopting a mindset of making it challenging to get hired into your firm and a perspective of hiring the right mindset and skillset at a desk level, a social media role or operations role.

The story of how I made the transition from a pure “old school” recruiting practice to our current digital marketing efforts and how it serves our clients. The lessons learned, how I would do it differently as well as the things you want to think about as you make the move to effective digital branding and how it benefits your firm and more importantly the people in your market.

Strategies on making the shift from the legacy analog search industry which is classically a 1:1 phone call equals 1 conversation to a scalable high value practice migration to a digital media forward search and recruiting business. Why your personal or firm brand marketing should be a core competency and commitment for your recruiting efforts and more importantly how it serves the market you are in.