We’re looking for a journalistic content marketer to help recruiters do better outreach.
Hi there, we’re ContactOut.
We have a database with everyone’s personal email in it.
That’s why recruiters use ContactOut to contact (and hire) the world’s best candidates.
And we need to hire a content marketer with a journalistic background to create high quality videos, podcasts, articles, and videos to help attract recruiters to our brand.
This content will help recruiters perform their most important task: cold outreach. And it will become a key part of our marketing strategy, because recruiters will spread it virally amongst their network once they realize how helpful it is to their colleagues.
You will be expected to:
- interview high performing recruiters from the best organizations (think ex-Facebook, ex-Tesla, ex-McKinsey)
- find out how they do outreach to candidates effectively
- package that information into videos, podcasts, and articles to teach the world what they learn
Sound fun? This might be the job for you.
(By the way, ContactOut runs on top of LinkedIn. You click a button and get the candidate’s email and phone number. It looks like this:)
BACKGROUND
So far, ContactOut has had a great run. We were founded in Silicon Valley in 2015 with the backing of 500 Startups and Startmate/Blackbird Ventures. Since then, more than 500,000 people have made use of our Chrome extension to connect with the candidates who mean most to them.
Currently 3 out of 4 of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 depend on us in part for their daily operations.
But we’re just getting started.
For the past six years we’ve focused strictly on giving our clients a way to find the contact details of the people they need to talk to.
Now we want to become the world’s #1 source of information on how to reach out.
Effectively. Respectfully. Authentically.
And that’s where you come in.
You: are a journalistic person. You know how to interview people and find out how they do things, then share that with the world.
And that’s what we need you to do.
Interview the world’s best recruiters. Find out what they do that makes them so good at outreach. Then convey that to the world in video, audio, and written articles.
You’ll interview these fine people on Zoom, then turn that video into a great YouTube tutorial. And then repurpose it into a podcast. And a blog article-slash-tutorial.
On topics like these:
- How do the world’s best recruiters sift through LinkedIn to find the perfect candidate for extremely hard-to-fill positions?
- How do they craft a cold email that gets those qualified candidates to reply with rapt interest?
- How do they send those emails and manage their massive pipeline of eager candidates?
- How do they politely but confidently follow up when they haven’t heard anything back? How long do they wait? How many follow ups do they send? What do they say in each follow-up?
These are the types of questions that plague recruiters every day. They google. They ask friends. They sit in agony in front of a phone or a blank screen, not knowing how to start. They crave connection. They worry that they’ll fall behind and the company won’t thrive (or even survive.)
And this problem is a critical one to solve. The current response rate for cold emails is a dismal 1%. Cold phone call and texting response rates are not much better (and some consider them borderline abusive.)
But the solution isn’t to stop people from connecting.
It’s to improve the conversation.
THE BARACK OBAMA WAGER
Giving any professional in the world the ability to reach out to any other professional may seems spammy.
I actually hate spam. (I acknowledge that’s very hypocritical — I wrote a tell-all confessional about my first startup, which made millions of dollars spamming Google.)
I hang up on cold callers without saying goodbye. If an email I didn’t solicit fails to stick to the RRR formula, I mark it as spam. I reject LinkedIn connections with a note that isn’t personalized and report back to LinkedIn that I don’t know the person.
But I don’t discount all cold outreach as invalid. And I invented the Barack Obama wager to prove this.
The wager goes like this. If I was dead asleep at 3am and Barack Obama called my mobile phone to invite me to lunch, I wouldn’t angrily tell him to never call me again and hang up. I would accept the call. And lunch. And whatever head of growth position he was offering me to do for his kickass new startup transforming American civil participation in police or community affairs (sorry, Rob, but Barry’s on the list — if he comes calling, I gotta accept.)
The Barack Obama wager says that what defines spam is not the act of cold outreach, but rather the audience and message.
And it dictates that we, ContactOut, as a data company, have an obligation. If we’re going to help professionals reach out to each other, we also need to make an effort to help them do it to the right person, with the right message.
HOW YOU FIT IN
One caveat for the below: it’s all very specific. If you have a background in journalism, you’re probably interested in all this stuff but might not have experience in all of it. That’s ok. We’re patient. We’ll give you time to grow and learn these skills. But you’re open to it all, and it sounds like the person you want to be.
So we need to share with all the world’s recruiters how the best in show do their job.
How do they choose the right person to reach out to?
How do they craft the message?
When do they reach out?
Which channel?
How?
Then turn that into easily digestible content (in video, audio, and written form) for the world.
This is a tall order.
One befitting a person who has the following two qualities. You should have:
1. A background in journalism.
Journalists don’t get the due you deserve. You take a story that is often highly controversial, break it down and determine who is best qualified to weigh in on it, then use whatever means necessary to reach that person and evoke an authentic, meaningful response from them.
That’s what we need.
Someone who can get in touch with that world class recruiter who used to get all the best talent at Facebook, or McKinsey, or Tesla (all happy ContactOut users) and inspire them to share their best practices with the world.
Interview them on Zoom, turn that into a YouTube video, then distill it into a podcast and blog article.
So you, you’re good at interviewing. There’s something about your voice, your charisma, your personality that just makes people feel at ease talking into a microphone. People confide in you. You’ve heard the phrase “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this” more than a few times at an intimate café or a student lounge where a colleague or classmate goes into a story they’ve never told anyone else about how, when they were seven years old, they stole a prized vintage Mickey Mouse doll from their grandmother’s collection and hid it in the back of their closet for years — it’s probably still in there.
2. Content creation skills.
You use every brush in the content creator’s palette to convey a story. Podcast audio. YouTube video. Long form blog articles. Whatever it takes.
These are the media you’ll be using to train the world’s recruiters how to do outreach respectfully, effectively, and authentically.
So you, you write with flair. People say so. Maybe your third grade writing teacher used to faun over you. You love reading and listening to audiobooks, feasting on adjectives and verbs and seeking out turns of phrase to steal for your next piece. Sometimes you wake up at 3am (Barack Obama cold call?) and sit down at your computer and words just pour out of you.
You. Just. Want. People. To. Get. It.
AND THAT’S (MOSTLY) IT
That’s the whole job post. Also, for the best fit, you would have these three values (we aspire to them):
- Responsibility. In this job, you’ll be remote and track your hours with a time tracker. Other than that, we’re not going to police you much. You’re an adult. You like autonomy and you’ll work hard to earn it. In this job, you’ll be responsible for teeing up meetings with high performance people, so you keep a tight schedule and you’re ready to sign on for a job that requires you to always be on time. You probably check your Google calendar multiple times a day (or think that sounds like a reasonable thing to do.) Sometimes, when you get stuck in a conversation you don’t care that much about, your brain drifts to what you’ll be doing with the rest of your day.
- Authenticity. Remember that guy from the previous paragraph, whose conversation you didn’t care about made your brain drift off? You acknowledge that and tell him, “hey, I gotta be honest, I’m honored that you want to share your passion for the Fast and the Furious movie franchise with me, but I’m finding my brain wandering because I’m not super into action movies. But hey, earlier you were talking about mini golf, I love mini golf, do you play?” You’re probably the one in your family who gets mom and dad talking again after they fought over him buying that expensive new riding mower without her consent. When your uncle goes into his rant about illegal immigrants, you hear him out with care and then share your own views (it’s only fair.) Your friendships can stand the test of time despite arguments, because your friends know that your communication comes from a place of authenticity and care.
- Integrity. OK, maybe you’re not always on time (nobody is.) But even when you can’t keep your word, you honor your word by acknowledging when you’ve stuffed something up. And then you go and fix it, or at least offer. Integrity in a building doesn’t mean it’s perfect. It means it stays standing up, even after an earthquake, or a poor interior design choice (chandeliers in the bathroom? what is this, Elvis’s house?) In other words, you do what you say, even if you regret taking on the challenge, even if that new episode of Rick & Morty is screaming your name, even if it’s late and you want to get to bed already. (Believe me, I’ve been there.)
TO APPLY
Try the product. ContactOut. Go and find a few people’s contact details with it. Think of how it might help recruiters. Send me some samples of your content, and stories and proud moments, and what about this job posting appeals to you, to me. (Oh by the way, I’m Jeff Deutsch, Head of Growth. My email address is jeff@contactout.com.)
