Transcript
Maia Morgan Wells:
Welcome to The Marketing Hero Podcast. If you hear the words, content marketing, and immediately glaze over with visions of endless blog copy no one ever reads, then this is the episode for you. Because content is important for SaaS businesses in many, many ways. And we're going to talk more about that right now. Joining us today is Winona Rajamohan, a senior content manager at Hiretual. We're going to talk about Hiretual, an AI powered SaaS solution for the recruiting industry and how content marketing, specifically customer stories, help to build consistent MRR. Winona Rajamohan, welcome to the show.
Winona Rajamohan:
Hi Maia. Thank you for having me. I'm super excited for this.
Maia Morgan Wells:
So let's get started with a question we like to ask all of our guests. What is your favorite part of your job and how did you figure all that out?
Winona Rajamohan:
Yeah, of course. So like you mentioned, Hiretual is an AFR recruitment software. So I really create content in a B2B software setting, which is definitely exciting and unpredictable, and it really requires a pretty detailed understanding of your audience and more specifically, how they want technology and software to add value in their lives. So I come from a media and journalism background, so I'm really all about building a multimedia content strategy that tells a story customers, prospects, readers can engage with and relate with, with all their senses. So that means tying in different forms of content, with words, design, video, audio, events, bringing them together and just helping people get a full picture of a story.
That's really what I like to focus on. And at Hiretual, I really have been able to do that. I've been able to create content, not just through blogs, but I've been hosting virtual events. I run a YouTube series. I take part in the design process as well.
So I've really been able to kind of pull everything together and show people what Hiretual stands for beyond the product. What is our story and how do we really impact lives beyond just a technology perspective?
Maia Morgan Wells:
Good, so it sounds like you like to get deeper into that storytelling aspect of your job.
Winona Rajamohan:
Definitely. Definitely. I think stories are just so important. They're really the center of content marketing in my eyes. And especially when you want to convince someone to buy something it's more than just what a software can do. Like the focusing on the why. That's really what I like to kind of bring up to the plate here.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Good. And I do that as well. Do you read Simon Sinek, Start with Why?
Winona Rajamohan:
Yes. Yes.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Like everybody I know, loves that book. Yeah. So let's see, before we jump into more of the storytelling at Hiretual and how that brings leads in and helps you serve your customers, can you back up and just give us a quick explanation of what Hiretual is and what it is?
Winona Rajamohan:
Of course, of course. So Hiretual is an AI powered recruiting software and it's used by hiring teams across all company sizes. So we have small businesses, individual recruiters, middle-market high-growth companies, and even some of the largest enterprises in the world as well.
And our goal at Hiretual is to make the internet recruiter friendly. To revolutionize how recruiters connect with candidates and build those relationships. And we do that by aggregating public candidate profiles from over 45 open web platforms, which gives us a pool of 750 million plus candidates that recruiters can source from, with AI found all over the internet.
So it's less focused on reaching a candidate through keywords and instead it narrows down on relevance to your ideal candidate persona, just so you can engage with people in a more personal way.
And so to streamline the recruitment process, recruiters also use their platform to automate personalized candidate engagement, to get market insights from the talent pool, to report on team performance, and then to tie it all together. To really streamline everything together, you can integrate Hiretual and all of these functions with existing recruitment technology, like your applicant tracking system and your CRMs and so on.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And what are some of the benefits that your recruiters get or your customers get from using Hiretual in that way?
Winona Rajamohan:
The main benefit that recruiters really get out of this is just when you're using AI sourcing to really connect recruiters with the internet, it really just kind of ties everything together. It saves a whole lot of time. So recruiters, when you're sourcing on the internet, it can take up to like 10, 15 hours a week, just scrolling through LinkedIn, finding all these people that will be relevant to your search.
And when you use a tool like Hiretual, you're basically not just looking at people on LinkedIn, you're looking at candidates on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub, Stack Overflow, all these places in one centralized location. You're able to see their information. You're able to target that to know exactly what your candidate persona is. Rank that according to relevance.
So it's really just a big time-saver. And when you integrate that portion with just the ability to engage with them right away, to plan out your sourcing strategies and get a deeper look at the market, which is exactly what Hiretual can do.
What we do is you turn this really long, drawn out process into something that you can really just automate and knock out in a shorter amount of time without compromising that quality. Without compromising the relationships. Because at the end of the day, it really goes down to those little details. And that's what a software like Hiretual focuses on.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And that's what we want all of our software solutions to do, right? Is save us time, save us energy. Yeah.
Winona Rajamohan:
And not compromise that human element, which is so important in a space like recruitment.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Yeah. I imagine there's nothing that could kill that conversation faster than an AI bot, that doesn't feel human.
Winona Rajamohan:
AI has a pretty negative connotation, especially in this space, but you know what we're doing here is to support recruiters with information. We're supporting you with that data. We're not replacing any aspect of that human process.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Let's talk a little bit more specifically about your role and the content that you oversee. Why is content really even important in this context? I know you were talking about, you want to tell the story behind the product. Is that really the goal? How is content so important for Hiretual?
Winona Rajamohan:
So I think this has a lot to do with our audience really. The talent acquisition space, the recruitment space, it's such a tight knit community of people. Everyone knows each other. Everyone has such real conversations with each other as well, because everyone in this profession, it's such an important profession.
It's so focused on bringing something good into people's lives, helping their career choices. And to do that well and for them to really pick a technology, that's able to support them well, they need to know more than what services a software can offer.
They need to know how a software can really support their mission, support their goals. They need to be able to build a partnership with your technology vendors and not just use a service without any sort of conversation with the people that are producing the service.
And so because of that, content really does a lot of things for Hiretual. It educates, it informs, and it also just builds relationships through our content like Coffee with Hiretual, through our blogs, we're very focused on kind of getting that interaction with our audience, whether it's giving a poll out or getting your questions in to ask our speakers on Coffee with Hiretual.
When we hear this feedback from recruiters, especially during these times, during the pandemic as well, which has impacted recruiters in such a different way, we're able to really just build out a product roadmap that focuses on their needs. That focuses on how the market is changing. How talent is changing. How job seekers are changing.
And so content plays a lot of different roles. It really builds that confidence in our product. And it also just shapes how recruiters use technology in their day-to-day lives as well.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Let's talk a little bit about that Coffee with Hiretual because you mentioned it a couple of times there in your answer. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? That's a video series, right?
Winona Rajamohan:
Yes. The Coffee with Hiretual is a YouTube series that started at the very beginning of the pandemic when everyone at Hiretual started working from home. So if you meet anyone at Hiretual you know that we love our coffee runs. We love going on these long walks, not just with each other, but when recruiters come to our office as well. When we have these conversations with them to talk about how we can improve our product, we always go to the Starbucks across the street and just kind of have a nice little chat.
So when we all went remote, like I really wanted us to be able to do this, even though we were in a virtual setting. And that's how the idea of Coffee with Hiretual started up. Every episode features a recruiter talking about something that means a lot to them, because if there's one thing that the pandemic taught us or taught anyone in the talent acquisition space, it's that when it comes to relationships, it really does have to get back to the basics, just because things are changing so much in employment and in talent.
So Coffee with Hiretual, each episode focuses on specifically a challenge that recruiters are facing. Why it's important to overcome that challenge. And also just ending on a positive note. We also highlight in each episode, why is talent acquisition so important to that recruiter? Just to give some elements of hope to all these recruiters who are being laid off, who are a little unsure of what direction to go to with everything that's going on with the pandemic.
So it really focuses on that story aspect, the story behind our brand, behind the software. It really ties into our tagline, "We're every recruiter's best friend." And we do that by having these really organic, casual conversations to show you what we're all about.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Can you talk a little bit about the specific results that you see from those episodes or even I noticed you have some written customer stories on your site as well. Do your leads engage a lot with those stories, either through the video series or through the website stories? What's the role of those customer stories in the sales process for the Hiretual product?
Winona Rajamohan:
Yeah, it's been really interesting to see how Coffee with Hiretual has influenced the sale process and overall, just influenced how customers and prospects talk about us, how they speak to us, how they engage with us. I think in 2020, we all noticed that there was a big shift towards more video content.
I think the market, especially in talent acquisition, it was just so saturated with a lot of content coming out, not just from companies like us, but from influencers and from other recruiters in the space who wanted to share their tips and tricks as well.
And so with Coffee with Hiretual, having that discussion, away from just what the product can do, really dialing down on these customers, these users, and how they use technology to empower them, how they use software, like Hiretual to empower them.
What it's done is that, sometimes when someone from our sales team engages with a prospect, they'll be like, "Oh, you know what? I've actually seen this episode of Coffee with Hiretual before. And our guest mentioned this specific feature. I actually do want to hear more about that."
We actually won a deal because someone had seen our Coffee with Hiretual episode on security clearance filters, which is something that's really hard to explain in a written format. But, we had a clearance recruiter come on board. She talked about how she really used our tool in a very real setting, in a day-to-day process. How does she use our tool? How does she fit it in there? And to hear it from someone like that, it really makes a lot of difference, especially when they're looking at the camera. When they're talking so enthusiastically about it.
So we've definitely seen a lot of that. Now we're only... I think we just kicked off our third season of the show. Episode one just came out last week of our third season. And over the past two seasons, we've seen our YouTube channel just grow in ways that we didn't expect, just because we never really dabbled in a lot of YouTube videos before this.
Just from the first two seasons, we've had 3,500 views of people just watching these short little bites, these little conversations. And that's garnered website traffic. Whenever people mention Hiretual, whenever people talk to anyone from our team, they're always like, "Oh right. I saw your Coffee with Hiretual episode on LinkedIn." And what it's been able to do is it's helped us really spread our influence, not just from our website, but just through people sharing these episodes on LinkedIn as well.
So it's been really exciting to see how these conversational forms of content has really changed the way people perceive us and the way people kind of... The first things that people think of when they see the name Hiretual.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And it sounds like some of those customer stories really help to put that lead or that potential customer in the shoes of an actual customer. Like you were saying, they can see themselves using it in a similar way, or they can see how it would apply to their day-to-day life.
Winona Rajamohan:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's super interesting. I know we had a couple of episodes where some of these recruiters even shared their screens. And talked about more than just Hiretual. It really brought them through the whole cycle of like, "Here's my inbox. Here's what I do. This is how full my inbox is with all these candidates talking to me. This is what I do when I go into Hiretual as well."
It's just very real. It's almost like you're there with them. And I think that's what customers and prospects want to see, especially right now when there's just so much going on online. There's so many emails going out also. It's a good way to kind of go back to the basics and tie everything all up together.
Maia Morgan Wells:
I can definitely see the importance of that storytelling. Can you share with us, if you can remember, pick out one right now, a success story from when your clients who's used Hiretual to streamline or enhance the recruiting process. Do you have a story in mind that you can share with us? How'd they find out about the app? Did they come to you through Coffee with Hiretual? Do you have a success story in mind that you could share with us?
Winona Rajamohan:
Oh yeah, definitely. And this recruiter, he was actually the guest speaker in our first episode of Coffee with Hiretual for this season. He's in three and he's awesome. His name is Trent Cotton. He's the director of talent acquisition at BB VA. And he basically, him and his team, uses Hiretual to really revolutionize the way they do talent acquisition. Using technology to not just save time, but to really dial down on those little details, like I mentioned.
Using a tool like Hiretual, our market insights, capabilities, to get a snapshot of the market. Where a job seeker is located right now. What schools did they graduate from? What are their average market values? It really helps these teams figure out what's the right job description for me to put out? What's the right budget that I should kind of allocate for this? What's the right campus recruiting strategies that I can allocate for this?
And when this happens, you have this plan. What he's done is from that report that he's built out answering all these major questions, he goes into the sourcing task. When he goes into the sourcing task, he knows exactly what criteria he should put into those fields. How he should narrow down that search.
And what our AI does is we give you a list of people who kind of fit that according to relevancy. We rank that accordingly. You're able to source more and it's sourced from not just LinkedIn. We're pulling it from all over the open web. So you get a good amount of candidates, thousands of candidates. And you're able to narrow that down even further, according to those specific criteria that you've decided on. And how that enhances the recruitment process is that you're able to do just a whole lot more with very limited resources.
And I think that's what every recruiter wants to do. Especially right now, with the pandemic and the budget cuts that some teams are putting on. HR and talent acquisition teams as well. It really helps you focus on like what each recruiter is supposed to do in the process.
Winona Rajamohan:
How many people they should engage with today. How many people they should engage with tomorrow, the next week, the next month. Just so you're able to have a constant flow of candidates in your pipeline.
Winona Rajamohan:
And it's been really amazing to see how he uses a tool like ours, to not just help him out on a single day basis just to save a few hours. It fits into this whole process, this whole step-by-step process, that really stretches out for the rest of the year.
He's able to plan for the rest of the year with his team, with a tool like us. And that's always just so exciting to hear how people are able to just make such significant changes to their infrastructure because of our software.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Yeah. And I was actually noticing on that episode... I did my homework. I was noticing on that, he was talking about Sprint based recruiting, which people who are interested in SaaS and software, we're well steeped in the agile sort of project management methodology. And it was interesting to see him apply that type of thinking, the whole Kanban thing and all of that, into recruiting.
So I noticed in the episode, he was talking about having five candidates in the interview process and five candidates on deck and those types of things at all times for every position. It's really easy to see how a technology like Hiretual can help with that process.
Winona Rajamohan:
You hit it right on the head there. I think that was my favorite part of the episode as well. When he talked about having these five candidates scheduled up, having five of them in your back pocket, having five of them kind of in your pipeline, just in case anything goes wrong.
Like I mentioned, just having a tool, a simple tool, just kind of shape how you engage with people over the next couple weeks, couple months, even over the next year, just with the right planning. I think that's the point of technology. To support how you're able to look at things from an eagle eye perspective and fit all of those puzzle pieces in.
That's definitely going to be the most exciting thing to see in 2021 as well, just because everyone's pretty unsure on how hiring is going to be this year. Is it going to spike up? Is it going to drop down again? We're not sure. And I think all recruiters have learned that trends, all these predictions, just aren't going to exactly come true the way they did in 2020.
So having that tool that gives you agility to plan for unforeseen circumstances, that's really going to be the most important thing in not just 2021, but in the 2020s moving forward.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And it definitely sounds like telling those customer stories and tying that through with a through line is a way that people can understand how this technology can help them in the 2020s.
Winona Rajamohan:
Yep. Definitely. I mean people want to be spoken to like they're people. Like they're friends. They don't always want to be sold to explicitly. And I think that's a big thing that we've learned. I'm sure you can talk to any content marketer in the SaaS space and the way our audience just interacts with content has changed a whole lot in the past year, just because there's so much content to engage with.
And a big thing that I've noticed is that people just want to go back to the basics. They don't need those little empty explanations right now. People don't always have the time. They're busy and they're upset with everything that's going on. So to just approach them like a friend, approach them in a very real, authentic way, that's going to make the biggest difference in this space.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And using video, I think too. Because I know I'm a person that likes to educate and entertain myself with video as I'm working through the workday.
Winona Rajamohan:
Yep, yep.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Don't tell anybody. No, but I'm sure a lot of us do that. A lot of us will have something playing while we build out emails or while we do whatever. And I think that's a really important piece for the content marketers out there to recognize is video allows us to fit into the normal pattern of somebody's day.
Winona Rajamohan:
That's so important and it fits so well into the written stuff like blogs. When you support that with just embedding a video in there, linking back to a video, you just add so much more depth to your content, to those like thousand words that you've just written.
Now you're adding an extra element to it. And I think that's so important. Just having that integrated of different content formats and different types of media. That's going to be super important for any content marketer here.
Maia Morgan Wells:
Yes. And as somebody who is obsessed with SEO and search engine value, I think it's important to note that the text is important for that part because Google has to be able to crawl your actual text.
And then the video is really important for the UX aspect, for the person engaging with the content. I know most of my friends want video. And I know probably you as well. People that are out there, we all want video.
So that's one of my most important marketing predictions for 2021 and beyond is it's almost like do a video first and then write something down that reflects the video rather than vice versa.
Winona Rajamohan:
Yeah. And I mean, it helps so much with generating just new, fresh ideas as well. Sometimes you just end up speaking in a video or someone would say something and you're just like, "You know what? That's a good blog idea. That's a good e-book idea."
That's really the best part about it. You can really work video into so many different aspects. And I think it's just important to support video. It's not just putting a video out there and then you're done. But seeing how that video can fit into other aspects of content marketing in your marketing strategy.
Maia Morgan Wells:
So important. So if anyone is out there wondering about content marketing, I definitely want us to highlight that point because I think what you're saying, if I could summarize is, have a strategy. Have messaging that you want to hit. Have certain features or stories that you want to share and then use the content formats and tools and technologies and platforms that are out there to then accomplish that. Not the other way around.
I hear a lot of people who plan out content based on the platforms. "Oh, so we have to tweet five times this week and we need to do two blogs this month." And I always cringe because I'm thinking, "No, no, no. You want to start with the story and the intention first, and then back up from that to best serve that story." Would you agree with that?
Winona Rajamohan:
Oh, 100%. And I think like what you said, when you focus on the platforms, it really just limits what you can do. It almost gives you like tunnel vision. You're only seeing certain aspects of things because you're so fixed on, "I need to put five things out here. I need to schedule up five things out there."
But when you start with the story, when you start with the why, you just find so much more meaning that spreads across all these different platforms at the same time. You're able to see like, "Okay, for Twitter, I think this part of the content would work well. Maybe I'll do a short little video snippet for that for LinkedIn. Maybe it'll focus a little bit more on the text and the design, just because LinkedIn is just so full of influencers and all these content pieces as well."
You know, it makes such a difference and it really helps you stay agile and flexible in the case that sometimes people don't want to be on social media today and you don't reach those impressions that you're hoping for. You kind of have a backup plan for that.
Maia Morgan Wells:
100%. Well, thank you so much, Winona. It has been such a great conversation. I'm a content marketer too, so I could probably talk to you all day long. If people want to know more about Hiretual or more about you, how can they get in touch?
Winona Rajamohan:
Yeah. So to learn more about Hiretual you can visit our website, hiretual.com. We're also super active on LinkedIn. So you can follow us there as well, just to stay up to date with all our product news and all our content, all our Coffee with Hiretual episodes, of course.
I mean, if you want to get in touch with me, if anyone has any questions as well, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. It's just Winona Rajamohan on LinkedIn.
Maia Morgan Wells:
And we will link that below. Well, Winona thank you so much for being here with us today and we will talk to you soon.
Winona Rajamohan:
Thank you so much, Maia. This was so fun.
Want to Reach Winona Rajamohan?
Find our guest on LinkedIn here.
