Charlie is a business owner, and he frequently needs to hire employees. But posting on job boards, screening applications and interviewing is a long proces that takes his attention away from his business. He needs a quicker way to go from posting a job to making offers.
This is a need for Charlie, and understanding this can help pitch a recruiting product to him.
Context
Amazon advocates for a leadership principle called Customer Obsession, to serves as a constant reminder to put the customer at the center of everything we do. “Working backwards from the customer…” was a commonly used phrase. But fledgeling businesses (like mine) need to overcome an earlier hurdle - who is the customer? Differnet customers have different needs, and serving them needs clear definitions. This is where the term ICP, Ideal Customer Profile, comes in. I have been struggling with identifying my ICP and reading this post by Jason Cohen could help me.
What is the Needs Stack
Jason uses the example of AWS/WPEngine/Substack in his post, to drive home the point that customer needs vary based on outcomes and different products position themselves to serve differnet needs across the stack, without competing with each other.
I will attempt to do the same for the recruiting stack.
Let’s get back to Charlie. He’s now posted jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed. He gets many interested applicants, let’s say 200. He starts looking through resumes, but it quickly gets frustrating. Majority don’t seem qualified, or resume looks AI-generated. A few look like a good fit, so he shortlists them. He manages to get through about 50 resumes, having shortlisted 15 applicants and he decides to interview them before looking at more.
How would I describe what Carlie did here?
🤔 Charlie looked at 25% of resumes he received and 15% of them were shortlisted for interviews.
⭐ But Charlie never wanted to look at 200 resumes. He just wanted to find 5 good candidates.
Charlie can look for help, he can ask his assistant or hire a recruiter to talk to applicants and screen them. That takes away the burden from him but he has to trust their judgement. Even for them - 200 resumes and 30 secs is 100 minutes of work. If they decide to call 50 for 5 minutes each, that’s 250 minutes with an additional 5 minutes for scheduling the calls. So all this adds up to 600 minutes. That’s 10 hours!
🤔 Charlie pays a recruiter for 10 hours of work to screen 200 applicants.
⭐ But Charlie never wanted to pay for 10 hours of time for screening 200 applicants. He just wanted to find 5 good candidates.
Charlie then looks for software products to help him find good candidates. He decides to try out a 1-way video interview product. But he has setup the interviews by recording his questions and has to watch 50 video submissions to shortlist 15 candidates.