Recruit exceptional people by showing them a promised land.

a 🧵

1/ A recruitment strategy should be indistinguishable from a marketing strategy.
2/ Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time understanding the market, talking to customers & customizing marketing messages to customer segments.

However, they often fail to realize that recruiting people to work for you is no different from recruiting customers to use your product.
3/ It’s true that the key difference is that you’re asking for money from customers while you’re offering to pay money to prospective employees.

However, for exceptional people, money offered is a commodity because many other companies are offering them the same or higher money.
4/ Exceptional people never look for jobs; jobs look for them.
5/ If you feel people will work for you because of the salary you’re offering, you’ll end up attracting only those kinds of people who want a safe, stress-free job that pays a regular salary.

There’s nothing wrong with that but then that should be an explicit decision.
6/ People who can add higher-than-average value to your company require a higher-than-average treatment during recruitment.

In all likelihood, they’re not looking for just another gig.
7/ To attract such people, you need to understand what’s frustrating them in their current job and what they want out of an ideal professional stint.

Is it a lot more money? Is it less interference from the manager? Is it coaching? Is it working on a new challenge?
8/ Just like different customer segments have different needs, different talent segments have different drives.

Your recruitment pitch has to be customized to those drives.
9/ If you keep harping on about how great your product is while the star employee that you’re chasing is looking for freedom from micromanagement, your message is going to fall flat.
10/ Similarly, if you keep talking about how much freedom your culture allows to employees while that particular employee wants to make a million dollars through stock options, you’re not going to be successful in hiring that person.
11/ Remember 🧠

treat your recruitment like marketing and prospective talent like prospective customers.
12/ That's it!

I'm posting ~1 new mental model for entrepreneurs every week.

Here's the entire list of 65+ mental models that I'll cover: https://t.co/EJGAAJmPIU

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Great article from @AsheSchow. I lived thru the 'Satanic Panic' of the 1980's/early 1990's asking myself "Has eveyrbody lost their GODDAMN MINDS?!"


The 3 big things that made the 1980's/early 1990's surreal for me.

1) Satanic Panic - satanism in the day cares ahhhh!

2) "Repressed memory" syndrome

3) Facilitated Communication [FC]

All 3 led to massive abuse.

"Therapists" -and I use the term to describe these quacks loosely - would hypnotize people & convince they they were 'reliving' past memories of Mom & Dad killing babies in Satanic rituals in the basement while they were growing up.

Other 'therapists' would badger kids until they invented stories about watching alligators eat babies dropped into a lake from a hot air balloon. Kids would deny anything happened for hours until the therapist 'broke through' and 'found' the 'truth'.

FC was a movement that started with the claim severely handicapped individuals were able to 'type' legible sentences & communicate if a 'helper' guided their hands over a keyboard.
And here they are...

THE WINNERS OF THE 24 HOUR STARTUP CHALLENGE

Remember, this money is just fun. If you launched a product (or even attempted a launch) - you did something worth MUCH more than $1,000.

#24hrstartup

The winners 👇

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https://t.co/M75RAirZzs

@frantzfries built a platform where you can see how skipping your morning latte could do for the world.

A great product for a great cause.

Congrats Chris on winning $250!


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Instaland - Create amazing landing pages for your followers.

https://t.co/5KkveJTAsy

A team project! @bpmct and @BaileyPumfleet built a tool for social media influencers to create simple "swipe up" landing pages for followers.

Really impressive for 24 hours. Congrats!


#8

SayHenlo - Chat without distractions

https://t.co/og0B7gmkW6

Built by @DaltonEdwards, it's a platform for combatting conversation overload. This product was also coded exclusively from an iPad 😲

Dalton is a beast. I'm so excited he placed in the top 10.


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CoderStory - Learn to code from developers across the globe!

https://t.co/86Ay6nF4AY

Built by @jesswallaceuk, the project is focused on highlighting the experience of developers and people learning to code.

I wish this existed when I learned to code! Congrats on $250!!