Today’s post continues the series on how to get more recruitment tech customers.
I have kindly been joined by Get More HR Clients reader, Patrick Doyle, who co-founded the rapidly growing recruitment tech company, Clinch, which is based in my adopted home of Dublin.
Founded in January 2014, Clinch, through its Recruitment Marketing Platform, brings the best of sales and marketing tools to the recruitment sector – it helps corporate organisations around the world centralise their recruiting and talent pool initiatives.
Clinch connects a company’s careers site, content, recruiter, and candidate in a tightly integrated software solution that’s unlike anything else on the market. The platform combines recruitment marketing, employer branding, and sourcing tools in one end-to-end solution. Features include a career site and landing page builder, social and email integration, robust analytics and more.
The Clinch platform brings together the capability to easily and quickly build best-in-class career and job landing pages, candidate attraction and engagement tools, global job distribution, social recruiting, CRM, marketing automation, fully optimised mobile sites with actionable analytics & insights captured at every stage of the process.
How To Get More TA Tech Customers – Q&A With Patrick Doyle
Here’s what I asked Patrick about his Talent Acquisition Tech company:
- What does your business do?
- Do you focus on a niche within the market or do you serve all businesses?
- What are some effective ways you have acquired new clients/customers?
- Any ineffective ways to find new clients? Why didn’t they work so well?
- Can you share some tips to help grow a business faster?
Next: Join my private mailing list now and I’ll send you my four-step strategy to get more clients in the Human Resources industry.
Discover How To Grow Faster & Easier – Get Your HR Industry Business Growth Newsletter & Resources
Make sure you’re receiving my free resources and business growth briefings on growth strategies & tactics, revenue & profitability ideas, templates, guides, and much more.
If you work as a Human Resources consultant in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
Let’s get into it . . .
1. What does your business do?
In its simplest form, Clinch is a smart careers site.
To be more specific, Clinch is a recruitment marketing and CRM platform that leverages machine learning and candidate behaviour analysis to bring you a more intelligent career site and a higher visitor-to-applicant conversion rate.
Clinch allows Talent Acquisition teams for the first time to understand and evaluate what happens at the top of the funnel.
We’re bringing the best of sales and marketing technology to the talent acquisition space and automating it, allowing recruiters to do the thing they’re good at – talking to prospective employees.
2. Do you focus on a niche within TA tech or do you serve all businesses?
We have Fortune 50 clients and start-ups across banking, retail, technology and media.
We’ve built the platform to be sector agnostic as we see clients in the same vertical using our platform in very different ways – it all depends on their focus.
That’s a really interesting learning in itself – irrespective of the size or maturity of the organisation they all have very similar issues. They all want to find great people but “great” is in the eye of the beholder – we have to enable that.
3. What are some effective ways that helped you get more recruitment tech customers?
Referrals, referrals, referrals. You have to deliver a product that solves the problem your client has and then keep delivering.
If we look at our client list now, 90% comes from existing clients recommending us as a solution.
Referrals, referrals, referrals.
Our customers are our best sales team. The most important thing is to be honest and sincere about what your product can do, make sure you understand what your potential client is looking to solve. If you can’t solve it – tell them that. We’ve told people we can’t solve their issue and they have referred us to others because we were honest and pointed them to other solutions that would help them better. The number one effective way to get clients is to be honest.
Another thing we have found interesting is that clients really enjoy talking to the people that build the product.
Our support teams always have someone from the product engineering team available to talk. Our clients get a much better understanding of why a feature was built, and more importantly for us, the product team are on the front line getting direct feedback from people using the product every day.
We do not build anything on our own initiative – everything we build is customer driven.
We do not build anything on our own initiative – everything we build is customer driven. That has a two-fold advantage, firstly, clients get what they want, secondly, our engineers see the product they make being used immediately.
We pushed a feature into production last week and by the time the engineer had tabbed back to production (3 seconds) she had 200 people using her feature. For us that is invaluable both from a customer acquisition perspective and a talent attraction/retention perspective.
4. Any ineffective ways to find new customers? Why didn’t they work so well?
Loads! What we do is a new way of thinking. A prospective client needs to be thinking about and understand they lose 90%+ of their job/careers site visitors. They need to want to understand the effectiveness of the budget they get and to get more value from it.
I don’t think potential customers want ‘thought leadership’ from tech vendors. They want proof of results, of data security and the ability to deliver a solution that works for their needs – every customer is different.
5. Can you share some tips to help grow a business faster?
Of course but it depends on your interest and where you are in the TA value chain (don’t forget it is a value chain not a cost centre).
If you’d like suggestions for your particular interest, email me at Patrick@clinchtalent.com.
Next Steps
The Clinch team continue to go from strength to strength by offering an innovative yet constantly improving product.
We didn’t go into much detail around their content marketing but they have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into producing lead generation content such as industry guides and case studies (check out this very effective case study by Content & Community Manager, Maura McElhone). They’ve also called upon industry big hitters to produce information that positions the brand as an industry leader. All of this content offers “proof of results, of data security, and of the ability to deliver a solution that works for their needs.”
For example, see Bill Boorman’s (Founder of the #tru conference series) white paper on the changes impacting the day-to-day lives of the key stakeholders in talent acquisition and ways that companies can improve their recruitment marketing effectiveness.
To get a full appreciation of the business and its advanced recruitment and talent engagement platform, visit Clinch.
If you want to get in touch with Patrick, you can find him here: Patrick on LinkedIn.
Next: Join my private mailing list now and I’ll send you my four-step strategy to get more clients in the Human Resources industry.
Discover How To Grow Faster & Easier – Get Your HR Industry Business Growth Newsletter & Resources
Make sure you’re receiving my free resources and business growth briefings on growth strategies & tactics, revenue & profitability ideas, templates, guides, and much more.
If you work as a Human Resources consultant in recruitment, training & development, employee engagement, HR consulting, employment law, employee outplacement – my HR marketing update will help.
