Marketing our way to success - with Chelcie Harry

Welcome to the Value of Recruitment podcast with me, John Brooks. Sponsored by Atlas, the recruitment platform helping you become an AI-powered recruiter. This week my guest is Chelsea Harry, VP of Marketing at Levin, a specialist recruitment group focused on the FinTech, HealthTech and GreenTech sectors. Chelsea talks about how investing in marketing can make business easier even as markets get more competitive, and specifically how building a strong brand can win more inbound clients and upfront fees. We discuss how positioning yourself in the right way can make clients feel they can't not choose us. Chelsea also explains how she is constantly working to understand her clients and what they value from their recruiter. Chelsea applies marketing ideas from other industries to show how we can better understand the power of branding, positioning and communicating value to our clients. Enjoy the show. I hope you find it valuable. Chelsea, thank you for joining us. Hi, Joel, thanks for having me. No, it's a pleasure to have you here. Now, I'm going to kick off with the big question, as always, how valuable is recruitment in your eyes? The big question indeed. Super, super valuable. I think, obviously, from a biased perspective, it's my career, but I think that it holds a real important place in society as well, I think, especially if you look at the troubles that we have across people's society at the moment in terms of trying to find jobs and things like that, I think we play a really valuable part in moving the economy forward and finding people that actually are doing amazing things. We always joke about it in the business, but as a company that works with industries that are very tech forward and doing quite exciting things in the space, while we're not the ones that are changing the world, we're helping the people that are changing the world, get those jobs and get those platforms and build the products and the exciting things that are quite literally changing lives in some industries. Yeah, very biased, but I think it's a super, super valuable space. Yeah, yeah. And changing the world, I mean, it sounds great, it sounds grand, yes, doesn't it? Of course. It's not going to be every role, right? No, but you're in marketing. Your job is to take those stories and tell them, I guess, and get them out there. So how do you do that? Talk us through the type of clients you've got on the stories that are changing the world and how you get them out to more clients for the benefit of the business? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, as you said, as you said there, it's not, it isn't every single role that is doing that. We are, I mean, so we're fortunate because it's obviously a tactical thing that we've gone after. But the markets that we operate in as Levin, we're a multi-brand recruitment business, so we have Storm 2, Storm 3 and Storm 4, and the markets that those businesses operate in our FinTech, HealthTech, and Energy Infrastructure and Mobility, or GreenTech, CleanTech, especially on the HealthTech side of things and on the sort of CleanTech side of things, they are making tangible differences to the world, whether it is quite literally helping solve, or, you know, we work with, then we've got a desk within the AI drugs discovery space, quite literally they are solving some of the world's health issues. So while one of our recruiters can't say that they are pushing forwards with cancer treatments, they have worked with Nobel Priests, Nobel Science Prize winners. They've worked with some of the smartest people in the world that are literally going into work every day, having that fulfillment side of things. So I think it's a really interesting thing from a marketing point of view, because while the client's side of things aren't necessarily wanting to know about who they're competing with clients wise, the candidates, you can sell that, you can sell that as a dream, as an option, because people are motivated by purpose and passion and trying to do that. So it's a really interesting role to be in from a marketing perspective to be able to market people's purpose and giving them those kind of opportunities. I've had a really interesting podcast with the CEO of Eli Lilly, who is the biggest health firm in the world, and of course you and I and everyone listening, we're all focused about people, but so much of what he was saying about drug discovery and growing the business and the life changing stuff that they literally do, so much of his focus was on the people's side of things. So he talked about organization or structure, he talked about how to attract people, and again, recruiters of course play a part in that. So yeah, and sometimes we need to jump up and down and say, that's us, this is what we're doing. Well, that is the other side of it, you know, if you take away the, you know, fun industries that we work in, if you actually just apply this to recruitment in general, ultimately, whenever we're pitching people for jobs, it's not just the job that we're pitching because that's not, that's not really what you're selling. And this is one of the things that we always, that I always try and talk about when we're writing job ads, you know, things like this, it's not actually what the job itself, the day to day, is going to offer you. It's what the freedom of that paycheck offers you, it's what that, you know, it's suddenly being able to offer someone the ability to take their, their child to work in the morning because they've got their more flexibility, it's more PTO for someone. So they're able to, you know, go back home and visit their family if they're, if they're, you know, a broad working abroad or something like that. So jobs in, you know, if you get, if you're getting a bit psychological, philosophical, they are not just what the 95 is, what the, what the job title is or anything like that. They are, is the freedom of what they offer you in terms of your lifestyle and what you want to achieve with it. And I think that is, as I said, from a marketing point of view, and obviously it really applies to job ads, trying to put that into little blurb, but like that is such an interesting place. And I think, as I said, from a, from a recruitment space, what a special thing to be able to, you know, support people on and match people on. And I think that's something that is not, it, where recruiters get that bad rep in, in the wider industry. And that's not focused on, like they don't really focus on all the good stuff. They focus on the bad stuff, that unfortunately is just the case because of the system being quite broken, but they don't focus on this amazing things of those, those friendships and those lifetime relationships that you can have with these candidates because you're able to, you know, get them into a place where they want to be and, and offer them the, the dreams that they had in terms of, you know, what they want to achieve with their, with their careers and, and goals. Yeah. And, you know, in, in the examples you gave earlier, you're offering the status of, and the experience of working with a Nobel Prize winner, for example. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's worth more than money. An incredible experience. Nice. I like it. And so you've got incredible, um, sectors that you specialize in. That's great. But there are other recruitment agencies in. So how do you make sure that Levin stands out? How do clients, how do you make sure clients see you, uh, and understand who Levin is versus your competition? Yeah. I think that's a really interesting one. And I think the competition aspect is something that I think about a lot because, um, it's something that I talk to the team about a lot with this idea of, um, what is our competition, actually. Um, you always think about it as another recruitment firm that is in the same space. And that is partly a competition that is, you know, someone who might offer the same, um, same network or same, uh, kind of service as you do, um, but actually, especially in today's market, your competition is not just another recruiter, um, we're competing with tech that might do the same thing. We're competing with a recruiter license, um, for that in-house person, um, we're competing with not hiring. Like that is, that is a valid competition for, uh, a lot of, you know, senior roles that you're going, going up against, um, the competition sometimes is just, it, you know, we, we, in marketing, we talk about four P's, this is very relevant to this, uh, conversation because, uh, one of those four P's is pricing, um, but the other four P's as well when it talks about promotion and, uh, placement and positioning and, wait, what's the other one? Well, then there's seven P's, that was right, the, the marketing and all, sorry, the, um, the marketing theory went all over, um, so anything you can think of that's a P that's vaguely business related, marketing will like, we'll have that. So I forget what the original four were, um, but all of those are really key and I think that's how you actually, um, compete against anything, um, you make it so that your audience want to work with you, um, you make it so they don't have any other option, um, whether that is because you are the best in terms of price point, like personally, from our business, that is not what we compete against. We're not, we're not the cheapest option in any capacity, um, but we make it so that we're, uh, we're the best, uh, in, in that way, and, and it's a bit of a no brainer, whether it is your candidate pool that you've got or whether it is the brand that you've got. I'm, I'm a big, big believer that brand is a big, uh, positioning difference in terms of, uh, the businesses that you work with, but, um, but yeah, I think, I think nowadays that, that competition angle is probably, it's so much more complicated than it, than it used to be. You, you cannot just say that you're competing against another person in, you know, two streets over on, uh, in the city, uh, another desk because that's not, that's not what competition looks like in, uh, in 2026, for sure. Well, you asked like, why, how do we do it in terms of how do we kind of position ourselves differently? I think our, our focus is a specialism. That's a really, really big, big part of this. We are CEO's, uh, loves, uh, loves a business book and, uh, one of our, uh, our last few years a big focus for us has been talking about this blue ocean mentality, uh, like how do we create this blue ocean, um, and that's obviously a lot about standing out from your competition here and for us, it's, it's on speed service and specialism and we say that our, our kind of position is exact search at speed, um, because we're able to kind of deliver on, you know, if, if you think about recruitment as three categories, you've got exact search, you've got boutique agencies and you've kind of got generalists, the large generalists and they're all good at different things, um, what we like to kind of think of ourselves are, as is, as a 120 person business at the moment, we are sort of the size of these boutique agencies. Um, so we have that specialism focus, not only do storm two only focus within FinTech, but actually the, the teams themselves, the desks, only focus within sales roles within FinTech, some of them only focus within sales roles within payments. Um, they're micro niche specialists. So really their networks, rather than them being, you know, if you think about your total addressable market on the candidate side of things, we're saying that we're in the top 1% of the US market because we're only doing US, US recruitment. So their network is so high per niche that the chances are that they're first or second connections just on LinkedIn with everyone in that market. Um, because that's, that's how we train the teams to be, make yourself invaluable to that network, um, become an expert in it, become a thought leader in it, build those relations within that space so that you know when people are moving, so that you know when, uh, you know, who to, who to speak to at any given time. Um, that leads on to the speed piece because we know ourselves, we're so in, in, ingrained in that market, we're able to be really quick to access that market. So while generalists might be able to do every single roll under the sun, big recruitment businesses, we're able to do it just as fast as they are because they've got access to this big infrastructure but on a more specialist angle. And then we say about the exact search side of things from a service perspective because we turn down a lot of roles, we only work what we do work, we've got a lot of infrastructure built behind it. They've got a marketing team. This is to support them when it comes to pitch decks, when it comes to market mapping, when it comes to a lot of these, um, you know, services and the, the add-ons that traditionally exec search, um, are able to offer because they charge very high prices. We try and offer the same things. Um, hopefully it's slightly cheaper, uh, prices than, uh, exact search, but we're able to get faster. So sometimes it is very much the same prices as a good search. Um, yeah. Well, there's the classic triangle of good, fast and cheap. And you can ever choose to those three. Now you're saying, fast is one of your, your speed is one of your key, uh, positions, fast and good. Good is the other one. Yeah. And, yeah, again, good. Yeah. A lot of recruiters, I think a lot of businesses go out to their market and say, Hey, we're good. We're better than we're the best. That's, that's not to define. Yeah. Whereas you define that really nicely. You like hang on. We are so micro niche, um, that we can show you and the way we talk shows that we are the best. Yeah. It's, it's measurable almost. So you can say, right, yeah, measurably good. We are measurably fast and we justify why? And that leads on to, you know, humans generally understand that triangle and go, well, you can't also be cheap. Yeah. Exactly that. And we do, you know, I say, we're not cheap. We offer options, right? This isn't a, this isn't just a static menu board of, this is what the prices are. Um, it's part of that relationship building of understanding what's working for your customer and being able to offer the different price points, depending on what what they're needing and, you know, depending on what that terms look like as well, what the relationship looks like long term. Um, but it's still, you know, you're paying for what you get with us. We, we're saying that we have the, the most in-depth network, the most relevant network to what you need. We understand your concerns because we only work with businesses like yours. Also, the, the sort of, um, what's it called when you're, when you're trying to compare yourself to your neighbours? What's it? When people, keeping up with the Joneses. Yeah. It's a bit keeping up with the Joneses within these markets because the big players, not even the big players, the startups, anyone like that, they know what the next person's doing. They want, they want that person's product manager. They want that person's finance director because they've already seen it happen in that, uh, capacity, which for me makes it a really interesting marketing thing because you're kind of playing people off each other. You're saying, well, these businesses use us. So why aren't you? Yeah, um, which is a, which is a, yeah, jealousy is not a, is a fun emotion to be. Yeah. Let's label it demand. Let's label it demand, understanding the demand, um, which is, understanding that that is, is really important. I think, um, something you said earlier, I really like, which comes from this clarity that you're talking about, is our clients can't not choose us. I think it's a really nice thing to aim for because you can say, right, it's not just like, oh, can we look good? It's how, you know, how can we force our clients to have to choose this? And, um, I don't know about you, but there's, there's so many parts to that. It's a, it's a career's worth of work. But, yeah, you can have the, the, the executive board level pressure. So this idea of, well, why haven't you bought in love into work with that? Um, it's then the, the individual, the buyer or the person who's team you're recruiting for saying, well, hang on, I don't want to work with a generalist. Yeah. I know someone who, you know, I know they've just had coffee with the person who, yeah, thank you for your pleasure. They were the ones that used us as a candidate and they've had such a good experience with us in that capacity that they know what we work on both sides, how we work on both sides of it. So it's a no brainer that they've got this loyalty. And this, this is really where that brand idea comes into because in every other industry, brand is a pot is such a differentiator as to how loyal you are to something. Do you buy hines or do you buy your, your local brand supermarket ketchup? Like, there's a reason why you stay with something. And it's not just because of, you know, as, as with any, uh, like our service offering, it is effectively putting a bum on a seat, right? In ketchup, you've got four ingredients. You can make your own, what, what's stopping you making your own versus buying hines and spending four or five pounds on a, on a tube that lasts you a couple of months. Um, I don't know, I haven't, I haven't, I don't know, you've got every day. Couple of weeks in our house for a year, couple of weeks. There you go. There's, there's a point like, why is it that you're buying hines? What, what is it about that? There's a feeling that it gives you. And it's a, a sense of something that you'll use throughout your life. You, it's just not something that we really focus on. And I know, I've, I've got theories as to why we don't focus on it on recruitment. But brand is just not, it, it feels like it's only something that the big players kind of focus on, rather than, uh, you know, something that, the, the smaller teams. And I don't actually think this is a marketer's fault. I think this is a, uh, a lot of marketers would believe exactly what I'm saying here. I just think that there's, there's budget constraints. Yeah. So, I mean, the ketchup ones are great example. I don't have the stats off the top of my head. But, um, I think in the UK, more than 50% of sales are for hines. And yet they are two, three times more expensive than the supermarket alternatives that you can get whichever supermarket you go to. So it's so powerful. And from a pricing perspective, of course, it's fastening to me. Really interesting. The price is higher. The ingredients are the same. Mm-hmm. It is the positioning. It's the story. It's the placement is different. No, right? Like they, they pay premium or they allow that they request from the store so that it is in your eye line. So it's the one that you're seeing. You don't have to change your behaviour. You don't have to bend down. You don't have to stretch to get that one. It is immediately in your eye line. And that's such a fascinating thing from my point of view to take, to look at different industries, whether it is the retail industry or whether it is the, the FMCG industry or any of these other industries and apply something from that to how it works in recruitment. Like what does that mean in physical placement for recruitment? Well, that's, that would be, are we appearing where our customers are? Are we actually meeting our customers in their day-to-day lives and disrupting their eye line, their eyesight, whatever it is that they're doing, whether that's on social media, using that platform or whether that is, you know, on the tubes, how they travel into work, whether it's their other media that they, you know, pay attention to sports teams that they're that they're following and how they're spending time at the weekends, the podcast that they're listening to, sponsoring the right ones and making sure that your repetition and the visibility is there so that they, this is now where me saying earlier on jealousy and playing with emotions kind of comes into this. I'm going to use influencing, but like are you influencing their decision-making, which ultimately is what marketing is, right? To see, to make their own decisions, you want them to come or feel like it's an autonomous decision that you are the right answer to their problems. Yeah, but it's, I mean, I studied psychology at university and I think the psychology of sales and the buying psychology is just fascinating and so, so important and not always that understood, but it's, it was used right, which I think we're both in the camp of using this in the right way. It can benefit the consumer, the buyer, the client, the customer, you know, people are not forced to buy high-end sketchup. I agree. They're not forced to pay a premium to work with 11 brand. Yeah. There are other recruitment agencies out there. I think everyone knows that. Yeah. And as you say, that's not the only alternative, but there are thousands of recruitment agencies even in the niches. So it's not forcing, but a buyer gets a warm fuzzy feeling. Yeah. They put value on that. They want to know that they've made the right decision. And I think ultimately we are also heard creatures, right? We want to be what we want to kind of do what everyone, what the status quo is in terms of what that is. And even if the status quo is something that's anarchist or if it's something like maybe that's your brand because there are loads of brands out there that like challenge the status quo and that's part of their brand. But whatever it is, you want to feel like you're part of that community that you associate with, whether it is you're making the smartest decision because this is the best for the network, this is the best for XYZ or whether it is you're making the the leverest decision based on what your your board says or what your, you know, the people, your circle of influence, your sphere of influence. You know, that is such a powerful thing. And you mentioned earlier about like being influenced by those core people and that word of mouthpiece is so, so key. And that is probably the hardest thing to influence as a marketer, because you have no say on whether someone is going to bring up your name in a room that you're not in. But that's where brand comes in. Like that is, that really comes into brand branding is what people say about you when you're not in the room. Yeah. That's really interesting. I mean, you see it even in TV shows where, you know, they they open their laptop and you see the little apple logo on the laptop sometimes. No messaging with it. Sometimes that's product placement, sometimes that's because they want to. It's always worried about brand. Yeah. Yeah. And it makes sense. It being for that character to be, okay, well, they've got an apple map. So they must be creative. They must be using things that they must be freelancing. They must be in that industry of some sort. Like you automatically associate these words with with a brand. Like that's just naturally. And some people might have different, different views of it. Because of how that brand has positioned itself, I always think of like a Nike and Nike sort of business with this sort of stuff because they have a very strong political message sometimes, depending on who they've decided to partner with. And the people and the personal brands. That's a really interesting kind of tangent here. But that is a, is it you, you still associate whether it's the tagline or whether it is premium sportswear or whether it's like whatever it is that you're talking about, you have an association with brands and it's a balancing act of being able to make sure that you as a business, you as the marketing director, marketing, you know, has new owns that brand, the brand voice. What are you saying to put out there that you're owning your narrative versus what is the market saying about you? Like does it match up? Because there's only so much you can do and you obviously as a marketer, I don't, I don't close the deals. I don't, I don't speak to the candidates on a regular basis. I'm not having those conversations and those negotiations with it. So does the service match up to what you're saying is a really key part of it as well. Yeah. And one of the four piece of marketing is product. But yeah, there you go. That was the last one. Recruitment marketers don't, don't lead on the product, which in my view, is not the candidate. It's, it's the service. It's the experience. Um, let's keep running. This is fascinating. We've, we've taken it from the way rightly. I like to do this with pricing models as well. We want to learn from other industries. So you've talked us through, you know, the Nikes, the, the Hines is, let's apply that to two recruitment agencies. So just paint a picture. What would the perfect extreme of an incredible well-branded recruitment agency versus, you know, an average recruitment agency, they haven't done anything on brand. Put ourselves in the client's shoes. Yeah. How, what, what does the client experience differently? What happens there? Hmm. I think, well, I think a client experience, and then obviously what the service offering is, I think the client experience shouldn't differ from what they think it should be. Like, I think that is a really, yeah, that's kind of moving away a little bit. It's not, it's maybe a little bit of an easy out on this. But like, whatever they think they are going to get it, they should get that. If anything, they should be delighted. They should go, oh, it should be above what they expected. We should always sort of exceed and delight the customer. So, um, I always think of my, uh, our, um, head of learning and development. When I first started, I remember him saying, um, who, who he used to sort of run for the first year before I joined the business, he was doing a little bit of dabbling and marketing. And, uh, one of the things that he used to say is, um, if you tell someone you're going to punch them in the face and you punch them in the face, at least they're not surprised. And that always has stuck with me because of how much it applies with this. If you say that you're going to do something, and then you don't do it, there's disappointment already. Whereas if you say, if you don't say anything at all, they're not expecting anything. So, what an experience looks like for a business that is able to charge high price points for, you know, in our world, ideally, it's paid up front. It's something that is, uh, on an exclusive basis, it's a retained, um, or at least a split over, we're paying some partial of it up front. Um, they have a very clear expectation of what they're going to get. We say that we're going to deliver X amount of CVs or interviews by a certain day. And we, if anything, over deliver on that. Um, we, we kind of guarantee the experience. And if they don't get that, they will have additional things that are done in order to make them feel better about it. Again, taking it from a different industry, I would think this as like a Michelin star dining experience. If you're not having the, the steak cooked exactly to your liking, the chef's going to come over and make you feel better about it. That's, that's the experience that we're trying to get, get for people. Because we already know that they're going to be a little bit, uh, painful when they have to pay. It's not, it's not a cheap, uh, line on their budgets. Um, so how are we making, how are we softening that in any capacity? Not only are we delivering what we say we're going to deliver. I'm saying that it's worth what you're actually getting. But you're also going to get, you know, if, if, uh, there's opportunities that we can support you in other areas because we understand the pain points that you're having, not just the hiring pain points, then can we also help with that? Can we also talk about you on our social media and an employer branding capacity? So the roles that we don't actually, we can't help you. Maybe it's going to help boost your, uh, inbound applications so that we can help on that front. Can we advise on, you know, digital transformation through our CTO, bringing our CTO into a conversation with that? Like, are there other ways that we can help and these like add on things that don't cost us any money? Um, but they are adding to the experience of what you're getting. And then obviously there, as I said before, like custom pitch decks, candidate packs, interview guides, the candidates are having the same experience as well with us, as they are with the, with the client, the end client. So we're kind of mediating between the two, but we're also making sure that they experience the storm three storm four storm two brands in the same way so that we're kind of piggybacking off of all of them and everyone's having this shared delightful experience. Yeah, yeah. Um, I remember I went for one of those crazy, um, multi-course tasting menus in very fancy restaurant. And I think it was 12 courses. Yeah. And then they bring you like an amuse bush. So that's not one of the 12. Yeah, yeah. You're like, welcome. They'll give you an extra pallet cleansing. You're like, oh, I've got 14 courses also. Exactly. 14 for the price of 12, which is, yeah, they didn't frame it in a cheesy, like, buy one, get one free. But you think they've gone above and beyond. And yeah, that kind of stuff is incredible. We, me and my partner went a few years ago and, um, we, so I actually was very fortunate. I'd been saving up for this, but I took, me and my partner took my parents to the fat duck. And, uh, it was, it was one of those, I, that was my goal in life to be able to kind of do something for them. Um, and the experience that we had there was incredible. Like the food was great. It was very good. Three Michelin star restaurant, right? But it was the experience that we had. We had, you know, the, the, the matri-de and the, and the waitress, it was just for our table. They got to know us. They actually made it, it was unlike anything else because of that, because of that experience. And there was other little things about it. You know, they, they come with the bill, but then they also give you a little madeline to take home afterwards. So that the last thing you're thinking of in the morning isn't the bill. It's not the last experience. Isn't that painful one? The last experience that you have with them and is, is something that is nice that reminds you of the food that you had and the experience that you had. They brought out a little, a note, uh, with, from, that all of the, all of the kitchen stuff was signed. So I was like, this is such an amazing thing that we can take home with us that kind of is this reminder of it that isn't just the receipt. Yeah. I mean, I always don't, they're reminded of something I always say. I think old school recruitment training was, um, say the price and shut up. As in, don't, don't, don't need what you've just said. But actually, I don't agree with that. It's, say the price and then reiterate your value. Yeah. And then shut up. Yeah. Because you don't, you don't want to leave a silent room with the price echoing round it. Well, you don't want to, yeah. You're, you're waiting. The only thing in their brain, rather than value, they're just thinking about price, which is, uh, which are two separate things, I think. Yeah. Yeah. You're, you're, you're waiter. You've got to know so well. Slaps down the bill and walks off and you're just looking at the numbers. Like that influences your experience. Everyone is talking about AI powered recruiters. But what does that actually looks like? With Atlas as your CRM, it means every interaction with your candidate is automatically captured and searchable. If they mention their salary and an email, it's instantly recorded. Without you having to write anything and behind the scenes, Atlas discovers every company that a candidate has worked for. The industries, those companies operate in as well as things like company size and description. All this means you can do your job much faster and add more value to your clients. To learn more about Atlas, go to recruitwithatlas.com. You mentioned retainers, which, yeah, we're on the same page with this. Having multi-agency recruitment is a real challenge to delivering an incredible service. And part of what you said was actually you turn roll, roll, you turn down rolls on right view. I think that's a big problem. But let's look at specifically marketing's role in solving this challenge. Winning a retainer, winning some kind of paid exclusivity, commitment is the big word. You want clients to commit to you. Financial is the best way of doing that at the start. Everyone has a role in that. But what can marketing do and what do you do within 11 to help win those that commitment? Yeah, look, I think this is one of the things that makes recruitment a bit more unique in not necessarily in a good way. There's, I can't think of another industry that you don't pay up like someone has to do the work before you pay. And we've normalized it. And if anything, we've normalized it and compete on it being cheaper if you do it that way. Which is crazy. The commitment piece, I think, it comes down again to trust. We are asking people to trust us. And for a marketing point of view, I think there are lots of tactical ways of kind of doing that. The reputation building online, whether that is through PR, whether that is through testimonials, case studies, we're a big fan of at the moment. Traditionally, it's all logo blocks and quote cards on websites. That's quite a common thing. We've got case study docs. We've got things like that. What we've tried to flip our understanding of case studies and what we're what we give to the team is focusing on impact that candidates and the placed highest have in those businesses, rather than it just being we gave you XMATCVs. This many interviews were had and then this was our conversion rate and this many offers that we sent out, etc, etc. The numbers are important, right? As individuals, I think that's an important thing for recruiters to know their numbers and their stats. However, end user, as a higher, if I was a hiring manager, what I would want to know is what is the retention of those highest? The ones that you're bringing into other businesses, how long do they say in those businesses? How well have you represented us to the market in order to not waste our time? Like what are the what are the pain points of the hiring managers that we're working with, whether time short, probably like budget lane because that's just the market that we're in right now. But that's the only two kind of things that are hiring related, obviously the higher that they need to make. But the rest of it is all stuff that might be specific to their role, right? The CTO is not spending all day, every day worried about the higher that they're making. They are probably spending a lot more time wondering if their businesses are already or wondering if it is, you know, have they got the right tools in place or do they have the right skill sets to use those tools? And I think that understanding of the bigger picture is a big thing that we make sure that we train our team on. And that builds that trust. So when it comes to having those initial conversations, the feedback that we regularly get is you just get us, you understand our problems. And it's not just because we understand the roles that we're hiring for. Yes, they're all micro-nage specialists, they do understand their roles intrinsically and the highers that they're trying to make and the jobs and what they do. But it's also just the hiring managers' pain points. And that's a really big part of that. That is across our content strategy from a marketing point of view. That is across our social strategy. That's across any of our event strategy. We try and make it about pain points that aren't just, here's how to hire for those roles. Because any other recruitment person can do that. If you're just competing on recruitment understanding, you are literally just one of people look to differentiate you in different ways. So that's how marketing is able to do that by providing those case studies, by providing those documentation, by making us look as credible and authentic and valuable as possible. So that when people are having those initial conversations, when the commercial team, when the client's success team are having those initial conversations, it's a bit of a no-brainer that you're going to pay upfront for the cost because you're going to get a better service. You're going to, you're getting our promise that we will focus on your first, yours first. You're getting our commitment as much as we're getting your commitment. It's very much built on this relationship idea rather than it being transactional, which I think ultimately that is the bottom rung of what a recruiter should be because if it's just transactional, just go on a job board, post your job, that's transactional, right? Yeah, I think that's really interesting. Yes, completely agree. We can't expect commitment from our clients unless we're showing that we're committing to them. So I think partly, the more roles you have on the less committed you sound, the there's so many ways we express commitment or lack of commitment. But you talked about marketing, putting together all these case studies, having these knowing these pain points. All of that is built on the foundation of really understanding your clients. And particularly with you, that you've got these micro niches, therefore you have so many different types of clients. So how do you develop a really good understanding of your clients, which is hard enough for running in one industry in one place? Three brands already as a top. Yeah, you do. So literally what do you do as a marketing team? How do you sit down with clients? Are you listening to them online? Talk us through that. Yeah, all of the above really. I think it's really important for marketing to not sit in silo with our customer base. I think that when you are, it's really easy to think of marketing as a sales support function or to think of it as something that sits in the third party data. We sit in the internet. We sit in this ether rather than actually as part of our customer base. We, and something that I do, but also I encourage it for the team as well. On a quarterly basis, we have to talk to customers. We have to have those conversations, whether it is, because of that, we're part of processes around understanding via personas, understanding our ICPs, building out consumer behaviors as well. And like what I was saying earlier on about meeting your customer where you are, we marketing had a big role in understanding where that customer is. And it's not just based on going into Reddit forums and finding out what they do spend the time doing. It's literally having interviews and conversations with customers. And that's, we've got a really good process within Levin where we've got the marketing team and then we've also got a customer, a client success team. And Kessie who is our SVP of customer success has got a fantastic marketing brain as well, like really understands that long term midterm focus. Because I do think that the way that the market is, and we're very lucky that we're very busy, the team are very busy, but the recruiters do have to think a bit shorter term. They have to think about what's in front of them rather than having to think too far ahead. Obviously some of the more senior ones do think like that. They do think about this long term relationships definitely, but what their next year looks like. But if recruiters are short term and the client's success who are on those account management calls and all of that sort of stuff in the midterm, I always think marketing sits in that long term focus. Like I'm already in 2027 in terms of what we're doing. I'm already in 2030 sometimes. In terms of what that looks like, what does Levin look like, what does Storm 2 look like and who are we talking to and how are the roles adapting? Because we're also in a time where the way that technology is moving, the way that we're the industries that we're working with, that changes a lot. So what worked four years ago, what worked five years ago, six years ago when I joined the business is not the same thing that is working now. There are new platforms, there are new search, look at how search is changing. So things are changing so fast and audience behavior is changing so fast. And that is the key part of this. If you're not understanding how your customers are using AI for search, if you're still doing SEO and all of these other marketing tactics from two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, it's not going to be doing what you want it to be doing anymore. So it's really important to understand, first and foremost, what are your audience doing? So and the only way to do that in my opinion is to ask them. So do you, I think a lot of your audience are in the US, so and you're in London at the moment. Yes. Are you flying out there? Are you sitting down with them? Are you convening the best of them? Teams is great for this. It's a lot cheaper. Yeah. No, look, I am very lucky. I do get to go out to the US a few times a year and we'll absolutely try to have meetings. We're doing a lot of community marketing at the moment as well. So it's quite easy to have these conversations with our audience because it's not just me having to go to other consultants and saying, who's your top customer? Give me their email address. I'm going to organize a call or anything like that. There's sort of a more organic way for me to have these conversations with the people who just happen to be in our network. But yeah, most of the time that is virtual if it needs to be on a regular basis. But yeah, I think it's, I mean, the key thing there is investing it and it's so hard to find the time. And I think marketing is, obviously, is almost always a fraction of a recruitment organization. Oh, absolutely. But if, if there isn't a marketing function, then yeah, people often the leaders find that time to understand the clients. I like that long-term, medium-term, short-term view as well. Again, someone in the business, whoever it is, has to be taking themselves out of the mail and out of the cell because you can't sell to someone and also understand their pain points. Yeah. Because the, no agree. It's buying psychology. Yeah, it's going to be, shields are up. You don't want to give away everything. Yeah. And you think, especially if they're on that call immediately, even though we do get feedback and I do get sent feedback of various calls and call transcriptions and themes and everything like that. But you're absolutely right. If someone knows they're being sold to, they don't want to give away more, more kind of ammunition as to what they get that salesperson can use to turn it into a sales reason. So for sure, that is always taking when a pitch is sold in those capacities. But yeah, we just have quite literally, we'll just sit on a, sit on a 15-minute call with someone sometimes and just say, "What's keeping you up at that time?" We just, we just want to know what you're doing. And again, psychology, people love to be heard. And they just love to speak about themselves. Give people a mic and they're happy to do that. Case in point. Yeah. Yeah, that's why I've run this podcast for so many. No, and yeah, it benefits, the podcast benefits us. Listening to our clients benefits us. And yeah, it's nothing, it's, it's a positive for them as well, as you say. Let's round off with another massive question. What would you, what would you say we need to do differently as an industry? How can recruitment be more, more valued? What do we need to do differently? And maybe what's marketing is rolling that from your perspective? Yeah. I'm biased, but I genuinely think that investing in your marketing function is one of the biggest opportunities that a lot of recruitment businesses have. I think that naturally, I like, I'm not, I've been around the in recruitment now for coming up to a decade. And I understand how budget work. I understand the systems, but that's not going to stop me from being the person that is trying to drive that we can make more of a difference than is being offered in the space. Unfortunately, marketing is one of those functions that you have to spend money to make money. And it's just never really seen in the same instance as head count growth or anything like that, which is crazy to me because, you know, especially with if you're in a grad model and you've got people who might not know that they want to be in recruitment and they're kind of testing the the career ladder of where they want to go for it. This marketing for me feels like a more surefire thing than hiring another grad who may or may not leave without billing within six months. But without that gripe, I think my the biggest opportunity is this brand idea idea in my opinion. The way that consumers are behaving now, the choice is infinite. They have so many options, whether it is other recruitment businesses, whether it is a piece of tech that they can onboard themselves, whether it is investing in their own employer brands, to bring in more inbound. If you are able to invest in brand and make yourself that obvious choice, then it makes, you know, it's so much easier to have an inbound activity. I don't know why everyone hates VD. Why would you want to not just have it always inbound? It's crazy to me that that's just something that people are choosing. Yeah, I think that yeah, I wonder if that ties into what we talked about early with retainers versus contingent. It's almost like, I mean, we have created this situation. The industry as a whole has ended up in this situation where a lot of people believe we have to, the status quo is we have to make the outbound calls. And we're unlikely to get commitment from our clients. And actually, what your message today is, that doesn't have to be the way. I just don't think it does. I think it's such a, I had a really interesting conversation with one of my consultants who I ran personal branding, training session, which, you know, on a, on a miniature level is, um, uh, branding, right? It's just branding a person and putting there that is a very personal way of doing it because it's your personality and your, you know, character that is on the line rather than it being this invisible brand that doesn't have a face to it. Um, he's just had, I ran a sort of masterclass workshop with him last year. Um, and he's just had 30,000 pounds of retainers. So that's upfront costs. That's not even the full fees, but literally this month, 30k of retainers that have already paid upfront. There's already guaranteed that his Q1 is looking very good, purely off the back of his personal branding work. Like it, it's all inbound. Every single part of that is inbound. And he's obviously thrilled because it means that yes, obviously he's still neat. I am absolutely not saying that we should stop the outbound and we should stop the calls and we should stop doing that. Controversially, I think that the outbound stuff, you know, I can't say it was one of my channels, right? They're going out spreading the brown message. Um, don't put that in the board pack, but it absolutely is a marketing message. You know, how the team are presenting the brads and how they're going to market is one of the go to market platforms. One of the one of the channels that we're offering is them going out there and talking about these things and offering all of that that sale stuff. There's, I think sales is incredibly important. It's never not going to be important. It's the foundation of recruitment is. Um, but it doesn't need to be as hard as it is. I don't think we, I think that we could be making everything a lot easier by looking at these, you know, how often do you see a, what's the really expensive guitars? Fenders, is it? Yeah. Fenders salesmen. Three people are coming in and choosing that. Like, unless you're specifically there, there will be Fender salesmen that are probably going to the big businesses that are buying or the big big, you know, studios, music studios that are buying this, the big orchestras, I don't know, whoever it is that buys guitars on bulk. But they're in that space because they need to go and compete against other guitar salesmen because they're the ones that are buying it in bulk. Everyone else as a choice is coming and choosing you instead. So I think, yeah, in my opinion, the opportunity, how do we make recruitment more valuable is spend your money on marketing, spend it on the brand, build that association that you are the person that people need to come and choose. Top of mind, easy to find. Make sure that you're there when you're during that 5% of the time when people are actually buying, but the rest of it, 95% of your audience are not ready to buy right now. That's he should be marketing to you because then in that 5% they're coming to you. Yeah, I really like that. I think one of the messages I took from that as well as marketing will make your life easier at a time when the world is getting harder. There's more choice out there. There's more alternatives, not just competitors. So without marketing, life is just going to get harder and harder. Actually, get your branding right, get your marketing right, understand your market and your life will feel easier, even in spite of those challenges. 100%. Brilliant. I love it. Chelsea, thank you so much for joining us today. We covered so much. They really appreciate your time and your insights there. Thanks, John. Appreciate it. Thanks again to Chelsea for sharing her views and insights on recruitment and marketing. Three things stood out for me. First, positioning 11 so that clients can't not choose us in her words. In a world where there's more competition than ever, Chelsea is focused on putting her brand where her clients are. Second, Chelsea's commitment to understanding her clients, even when that means diving into micro niches and the importance of market knowledge in driving client commitment and inbound business. And third, her approach of taking ideas that work from other industries and implying them to recruitment. Whether it's catch up or sport shoes, there's so much we can learn from the wider world. If you found this show valuable, please leave a review and remember to subscribe or follow the show on your podcast app. You can also get insights and inspiration by signing up to my added value emails on Substacking. You can find the link in the show notes. Now, go create some value. Thank you to Atlas for sponsoring the Value of Recruitment podcast. To learn more about how Atlas is creating an AI platform that helps recruitment agencies generate more placements with less effort, visit RecruitWithAtlas.com