Inbound Marketing Can Save Your Job Hunt: Guest Contributor, Kushaan Shah
#TheGroundFloor is thrilled to welcome guest contributor, Kushaan Shah, for this week’s edition.
Kushaan is currently a growth marketer at a digital health company, Livongo and is based out of San Francisco, California. A University of Maryland graduate, Kushaan has spent most of his career in tech, with experiences spanning consulting, product, and various marketing roles. He has been writing regularly since 2014, with his work having been featured in the Huffington Post, Washington Post, IBM’s Social Business Insights, The Almanac and more - his current interest is at the intersection of marketing, current events, and social psychology, which he writes about at his blog The Marketing Mind Meld. A Boston native, Kushaan is an avid fan of the Celtics and Patriots, and is a big fan of well-made California burritos.
#TheGroundFloor welcomes Kushaan Shah, where he discusses how inbound marketing can salvage your job hunt.
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Kushaan:
I’m very active on Twitter, where Andrew and I first connected around thoughts on Tik-Tok , marketing, and building a Twitter presence. I admire his work, am grateful to be part of his corner of the internet and excited that he invited me to be a guest contributor to the #TheGroundFloor! (Follow us on Twitter: @andrew_exler & @kushaanshan)
Scraping websites for exotic sounding job roles. Laboring over ambiguous prompts for cover letters. Creating elaborate color coding schemes for job trackers. Squirming inside your blanket of imposter syndrome to send that one cold email into the ether.
All the signs of a job hunt in action. Even when it’s planned months in advance or you’re ejected into that search by chance, we can all relate with the apprehension and excitement, the mix of radical hope and paralyzing anxiety.
When you look at tips for the job search, it’s easy to bias towards activities that have clear outputs: How to write a great cover letter. How to create a cool job tracker. How to use Linkedin to find a recruiter.
While most of them are necessary, they tend to be transactional in nature and often put the burden on you, the candidate, to make the right impression. You’re the one reaching out to people, finding out the right framing of the cover letter. In many ways, it’s similar to outbound marketing. You have to sell yourself and figure out if someone else is interested. In most cases, the audience likely hasn’t heard of you.
It was frustration in my last job search that led me to a new realization: I didn’t have to just rely on cold outreach or applications and wait for someone to see my resume to show that I had value. I could somehow bring people to me, build awareness and make noise - in other words, how marketing teams employ inbound marketing.
I refocused my approach: In addition to applying for jobs, I would balance it with some sort of activity that could help someone else or provide a new perspective. Many of these were activities that had no clear interview-related objective or were completely unrelated to jobs - yet, they became essential tools in my job search, helping me get interviews for companies that I otherwise never could have reached through cold applying.
Over time, I refined this into a framework I like to call the Brand Funnel.
The Brand Funnel is similar to a traditional inbound marketing and sales funnel.
In a traditional funnel, you have three components:
TOFU: Content at the top of the funnel that facilitates awareness - makes prospects aware that a problem exists and more context around the pain point
MOFU: Content in the middle of the funnel that facilitates evaluation - makes prospects aware that your solution is highly sought after for the problem and they should consider it
BOFU : Content in the bottom of the funnel that facilitates conversion - makes prospects ready to make an informed purchase decision
Now, of course, in a job search, you’re not selling any software or a particular product. But, you are still generating qualified leads. You’re selling yourself. Just like any other inbound marketing funnel, you want to bring people to that conversion stage - which in this case, is an interview or offer for a job. The leads may not give you thousands of dollars in ARR - but they will give you what you are ultimately seeking.
So how do you take this concept of a funnel and apply it to a job search?
BRAND FUNNEL: TOFU STAGE
Remember, your goal here is simple: make people aware of your existence and professional capabilities. This could involve using Twitter frequently, writing long-form posts on Medium, joining Slack groups, answering questions on Quora or even guest blogging (!) for publications you like. If there is a specific domain or type of role you’re applying for, write a new perspective or different type of outlook on that domain. The key here is that you shouldn’t be expecting any jobs or interviews from your TOFU activities - your baseline shouldn’t be how helpful it is in the course of 24 hours to your job search. Online presence can take time to build.
As an example, I had been applying with limited success to some roles that required some level of Google Ads experience that I just didn’t have on paper - after writing a Medium article on how one could use Google Ads to make decisions, I was able to complement that experience. While it didn’t happen immediately, all it took was a tiny bit of traction to get it into the eyes of product managers and marketers at companies like Uber and Square.
BRAND FUNNEL: MOFU STAGE
Here is where you can start looking at the people who interact with you on Twitter, Slack, and Medium - and slowly start to figure out who works at companies that might interest you or you could be a fit for. Notice that this isn’t the same as cold outreach - by the time you get to this stage, someone should be familiar with you. Maybe they’ve read your writing or they’ve interacted with you on Twitter. Either way, you’ve made a minimal viable impression, one that could definitely catapult you ahead of hundreds of faces without a name.
The standard activity in the MOFU stage is an informational interview or brief chat of sorts. You want to get to know the company and person hiring. You want to give them a chance to evaluate you. It’s not always a real interview, it is purely a consideration stage. While it doesn’t mean much by itself, this stage can be immensely helpful in separating you from the crowd. Unless you are a wunderkind of sorts, just getting someone to know you better becomes a large competitive advantage and often a direct source of internal referrals.
BRAND FUNNEL: BOFU STAGE
This one is both the easiest and hardest stage to convert at - by this point, you have already gotten someone aware that you exist and you have gotten them to consider you to the point where they want to give you a chance. But the standards to meet can vary differently depending on the job. Here is where you must be doing two things well:
Sell your narrative and anecdotal experiences clearly
Understand what risks you bring and mitigate them
Most are familiar with Number 1 - this is why you prepare with stories about your experiences for interviews. For better understanding Number 2, I highly recommend reading this piece by my friend Nick Dewilde, where he talks about the types of risks that hiring managers typically consider. There is really only one way to pass the BOFU stage - and that is crush it in the interview.
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In closing, think back to your previous or current job search - how often did you do any activities that didn’t lead to an immediate interview or application submitted? The mistake many of us make is that we immediately want to get to the bottom of the funnel without realizing how much work others have poured into the top.
If you’re done with the job search for now, keep building the top of your funnel - keep writing, interacting with others online, and building a strong digital footprint. It’s never too early to future proof your next one.
If you have any questions or want to connect, feel free to find me on Twitter here (@kushaanshah) or email at kushaanshah@gmail.com.
Cheers,
Kushaan
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Thank you, Kushaan, for being a guest contributor for #TheGroundFloor!
I am always looking to welcoming guest contributors to #TheGroundFloor! If you are interested in writing or have a specific topic you’d like discussed, please contact me!
- Andrew
