Being Different Is The Path To Success With Cas van Oort

Benjamin Mena [00:00:01]:
Welcome to the Elite Recruiter podcast with your host, Benjamin Menna, where we focus on what it takes to win in the recruiting game. We cover it all from sales, marketing, mindset, money, leadership, and placements. This is going to be a fun episode, but quick announcement before we dive in. Jump into the elite recruiter community. Say hi, leave a message, but also, book of the month. Never split the difference by Chris Voss. Pick it up, read it, and grow. Let's grow together.

Benjamin Mena [00:00:36]:
Keep it up, guys. I'm excited about this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast. The reason is, is because the way technology works nowadays, the way personal branding works, a solo recruiter or a small, tight team can outperform and out produce a 20 to 50 person recruiting team. Technology is changing, times are changing, and I am so excited about sharing how a small team or a solo producer can outperform the big dogs. I have my special guest, Cass van, or, who specializes in not only, like, technology, he also specializes in bringing in leads for companies and just ways that you can use technology to amplify everything that you're doing on the branding side of the house. Amplify everything that you're doing on the sales side of the house and the recruiting side of the house. So welcome to the Elite Recruiter podcast, Cass.

Cas van Oort [00:01:30]:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Benjamin Mena [00:01:32]:
So before we start doing a deep dive into all the fun technology things and the different ways that recruiters can amplify what they're doing, first of all, how did you even get started in the recruiting space?

Cas van Oort [00:01:46]:
Yeah, so I got started like lots of us do. Like, I had no idea what to do after high school. I was an elite sailor for a long time, and then I just wanted to get in sales or get into, like, a commercial environment. So I just went to a recruiter, funnily enough, and he told me, you get bored pretty fast, don't you? I was like, yeah, pretty much. And he was like, you shouldn't be an account manager because an account manager sells the same thing every time. You need to sell people because they're different every time. So you need to do recruiting. So that's how I actually got started there.

Cas van Oort [00:02:14]:
And I got started old fashioned way with a very large recruitment business, Robert Walters. They do finance recruitment. So that is suit and tie. Go to the finance district and start dialing every day, old school stuff.

Benjamin Mena [00:02:25]:
And so you've taken, like, your recruiting experience, and then you've turned it into everything that you're doing now. You want to talk about that real quick?

Cas van Oort [00:02:32]:
Yeah, sure. So, like I said, I started in recruitment eight years ago and funnily enough I did a very old school type of recruitment back then, which is 360 recruitment, dialing and doing your thing. That is actually the opposite of what I really like to do because what I like to do is being creative and trying to think of new ways to do things and trying to get ahead of the competition in that way. So nowadays I actually focus myself on consultancy for recruitment teams and recruitment agencies where I help them implement the newest tools and techniques to make sure that they do more with less. Not meaning that we want to take out the person at all, because I think the human connection always has to be there and it's very relevant in creating a contact and creating a business in the end. But there's so much admin stuff we do, there's so much things we do all day, like looking on job boards that we don't really need to do. We've got tools for that. Right? So you just need to focus yourself on making the connection.

Cas van Oort [00:03:29]:
That's what I help teams out with every day. And partially through consultancy, which I still do, and partially through creating my own software tools like job leads, where we help you scour the market for interesting roles that you can then work on.

Benjamin Mena [00:03:43]:
Okay, perfect. Awesome. So one of the things, we've been having some conversations about the sales game and recruiting is changing. Yes, sales is a foundational skill set that you need to have. You need to put in the work, the KPI's and everything. But now sales is a multi touch, a little bit of a marketing like avenue. How is sales and marketing kind of like evolving within recruiting?

Cas van Oort [00:04:08]:
Interesting questions. So in my mind, we are really sales driven in a sense that we perform an output and then we expect an input, right, meaning or the other way around input, output. Meaning we're going to call 100 clients and then we're going to get three jobs and from those three jobs we're going to place one. And it's more of a time investment thing than a marketing thing because a marketer thinks otherwise. Marketing, a marketer thinks about brand, a marketer thinks about, hey, how much ad money and time do I need to input there in order to get a response from that? So old school wise, we're really sales driven. Like we're just going to pick up the phone and start dialing. But what you see now is that that's hard to scale, right? Because a call is a call. And of course you can use software to call ten people at a time and do that type of thing, but it's just really hard to get to make sure that you got a lot of leverage there.

Cas van Oort [00:04:59]:
With marketing, there's more leverage possible. It's one of the reasons you're doing your podcast. You do this work once and then it's there for life. And then people can listen to it even a year from now rather than just receive this call now. So it's an awesome way to do it. What you see people do nowadays in terms of marketing is that it's not just about, it's not just about trying to push out some organic content, right? Because that's where everybody starts, okay, I need to be posting on LinkedIn, and then everybody posts on LinkedIn, which is great, but it goes back a long way. Like, it goes back even to the core offering that you give your clients. Like, what do you want to offer your clients? Are you a recruitment firm or are you a talent partner to that firm? Okay, let's say you're a talent partner.

Cas van Oort [00:05:42]:
You can help them out in several ways. You might need to give them some advice. That advice can cost something. You can help them create. You can help them recruit a person. That's going to be very expensive. Right? That could be great as well. You could also be running an online community for their specific niche where they can just buy a job slot with you rather than just do recruitment for them.

Cas van Oort [00:06:01]:
So there's tons of ways you can actually help your clients out by, of course, providing them content, but also providing them with varied business models. And in doing that, you can actually help your client out. And that's what we're seeing today nowadays is that you see people move from classic old school dialing to of course, posting on LinkedIn and posting on job boards, which is great anyway, but then also thinking about, hey, what else can I do in order to attract the right type of candidates and the right type of clients in order to grow my business. And the funny thing is marketing, like we said, is a lot more scalable. So that's why you see guys that are by themselves or with three of them all do a million plus in revenue because they do marketing. And if you have top of funnel for both ends, clients and candidates, then you're just making matches. And making matches is sort of, that doesn't take the most time. The most time is getting the people or the points on the board in order to get people into the funnel.

Cas van Oort [00:06:58]:
And that's what really marketing works at nowadays.

Benjamin Mena [00:07:01]:
And I love that there's a few different points that you really hammered on. I know most of us were trained in recruiting and we're trained in sales. Just smile and dial or build out like the Dream 100, dream 200 and just sit there and go to town. But through these conversations on the podcast, like, my eyes have been opened up like multiple times. Like, there's a recruiter that I know that interviewed on the podcast, he literally has a built in community of the exact skillset that he specializes in. That's all he does. And he bills like a million dollars a year because of that. And it's just like, it's these things that you can do to like really set yourself apart via marketing that makes the sales process so much easier.

Cas van Oort [00:07:43]:
Like, I always love working with examples, right? Because just talking about fluff is fun, but that's if people want examples. One company to look at, which is awesome is called we are developers. They are a development focused community over in the Netherlands, I'm sorry, in the EU. And they've got, I'm going to bastardize this, but I think they've got about 100,000 developers in their community and they host events, which is very funny because everybody thinks of a developer, of a guy sitting behind a desk and just typing by himself. But they host the biggest events all throughout Europe and their superstars come to speak there. So like the creator of Java and the creator of.net and all these guys, Steve Wozniak, all these guys come to speak there for free. Every developer goes there from his own money, like from his own paycheck and on the backend. They just sell job board postings in their community to companies at a very cheap rate.

Cas van Oort [00:08:40]:
I think it's a few thousand bucks a year, which is nothing. That's like less than one recruitment fee. And they're essentially a recruitment machine. And all they do is host events. That's all they do. And it's working great. Like they're growing country by country. They just opened in the Netherlands and they're growing hand over fist.

Cas van Oort [00:08:56]:
It's ridiculous. It's a completely different self recruiting, but it still works.

Benjamin Mena [00:09:01]:
And like I said earlier, it's just like this podcast has opened my eyes. And just the amount of different ways that recruiting companies can make money and how some of them are just amplifying the technology and scaling and it just, there are so many ways to, and I need to find another analogy to skin a cat. I love my cats, but it's just, it took me probably about a good decade or maybe even like 15 years to really start looking outside the box and just like, wait, there's more than just the placement fee or more than just the contract. And, you know, ourselves, we've, we do consulting in the DoD space just because there are so many ways that a, you can lose a fee. You know, if a full scope poly clearance doesn't go from the CIA to the NSA, there's something happens and you lose out. You have to start from square one. So we varied our way of how we do business because of the market and to also make sure that we get paid.

Cas van Oort [00:09:56]:
At the end of the day, I think it's great. And I can give you another nice example, and this is one for the blue collar recruiters out there. It's true with blue collar workers, the whole issue is candidate acquisition because it's hard to find candidates. And once you've got them, you can place them in companies and you can get a recruitment fee. But it's a different ballgame to white collar work. So what a guy that I know in the Netherlands does is he created a sort of online community, not really a place where people meet, but just where they share information. So it's more of a website for electricians. What they didn't do is that they share fun things about electricians and then they just have ads on meta and on Instagram and TikTok where they just ask, hey, are you looking for a new job in this specific region? Just give me your demands on what you want in a job and then we'll contact you when we have something.

Cas van Oort [00:10:46]:
What they then do is they make deals with the biggest facility companies in the Netherlands that need tons of electricians. And they just say, okay, rather than us recruiting for you, which is a lot of time, I sell you this lead, this candidate. So I just have, I have 25 people in your area in my email newsletter today, and I will just email them with your specific job. And when they apply to your job, you pay me, I don't know, I guess like €500 or $500 and that's it. And you just have them speak. And in the end, you're still making a lot of money because you might need three or four in order to hire someone. So you're still making 2000, but the cost of it also in terms of time investment is extremely low because you're not spending all of that time speaking to people. It's all done through online forums and asking them what to do.

Cas van Oort [00:11:31]:
So for these types of, these types of solutions work best for these types of clients because they're not going to pay a recruitment fee. Or like, if you're going to put someone on your own payroll, you have to ask a lot more and it's going to annoy people. Why not just give them what they want? And what they want is a person that wants to work there and they can figure it out themselves, you know? And because you make it very efficient at the front, you don't need a lot of money for that. But the business makes tons of money because he's got 1020 of these businesses needing all of these electricians. It's ridiculous. That's a new way. Like there's a. A specific niche or a specific solution for every type of client and you just need to search in what's different because what's everybody already doing is the old passion model, right? So if you're looking for a new type of model, you're going to get a lot of people who say recruiters.

Cas van Oort [00:12:20]:
No, I don't like recruiters or I've been burned by too much recruitment agencies. And then you say, but no, we actually do something different. Right? We're a talent partner. We're helping you find the proper people and then they're like, hey, that could be interesting.

Benjamin Mena [00:12:33]:
So it really is. I've been telling a few people that 2024 is the, the year of community when it comes to recruiting, where it comes to working with your, you know, your niche community. How does one start to build a niche focused community on the skillset that you're recruiting on? I can. Like, where do you start?

Cas van Oort [00:12:55]:
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a hard question. So the honest answer is it's going to be really hard because the ones that I see do it very successfully are people that actually come from the space. So, meaning if you're talking electricians as an example, or developers, it's actually developer that starts the community because they know what they want, they have their friends in the community and they can set something up. Right. So that is the one. So I would always try and pair yourself with someone that comes from the industry and really knows what people want and people need because that would definitely help you out in the beginning.

Cas van Oort [00:13:27]:
And then you can be the recruiter head and someone that will do all of the business earning on the backend and have someone in the front end really be the face of it. So I would do that. And the other thing is start as light as possible. So what I learned from we are developers, if you're looking to follow someone, Rudy Bauer is a great guy. He's one of the founders of it and he always says you have to start really light in a sense that what they do when they launch a country in the community, they just go local and they say, you know what? We're going to find 20 people that want to come to a free event, and then they're going to find two clients that really need to hire developers. And then they're going to say, hey, if you give us a little bit of money to host this event, you can come speak at our event. And then just tell them, tell them, tell all the developers there what you're doing, what the fun stuff is that you're building on, like what are you hacking? Like, what's different to the rest of the market? And that's all they do. And then from that on they send questionnaires to ask them what the developers would like.

Cas van Oort [00:14:22]:
Then they ask the clients, hey, can we help you out with something? And that's how it organically grows. But we always try and launch something that's too big, that that's too big of a brand and start, but just start really, really small. That's what my advice would be.

Benjamin Mena [00:14:36]:
And I think starting with an MVP, something small like in one city, is probably the best thing to do. Don't laugh. This podcast started as an MVP minimum viable product. The recruiting growth summit that we just recently happened, that was, which I thought 25 to 50 people would sign up. It was way more than that. But if you have a dumb idea, go implement it on a small scale.

Cas van Oort [00:15:05]:
It's so cool. I know you guys aren't big on WhatsApp, but in the Netherlands, in Europe, I would say just start a WhatsApp group. That's the easiest thing you can do, right? Just start a WhatsApp group and start messaging people in there. Start getting people together, doing online events. Do a webinar, whatever. It's as easy as that. And if you need proof, I have a nice one. If you need proof why you should be launching these types of communities, I actually had a meeting with a scale up last week that raised $73 million.

Cas van Oort [00:15:34]:
So their growth trajectory is this, or in your case this going up and to the right. And they actually told me, we are not working with recruitment agencies anymore. If you, and this was for a specific community that I'm helping launch. And they said, if you have a community, we will happily sponsor your events. We will pay you for job slots, we will do our thing, but no more recruitment agencies. We're just doing sponsorships of these types of events. So that should be a sign on the wall that, you know, a canary in the coal mine, whatever you want to call it that. You know, things are changing.

Cas van Oort [00:16:04]:
And of course, there will always be a place for an old fashioned recruitment agency because there's always going to be clients that need people now, right? And that aren't sexy enough by themselves to acquire people. There's always going to be a place for that. But if you compare the amount of recruitment agencies we have in the UK compared to the amount of companies in general, like, there are too many recruitment agencies in the UK. Us isn't that bad, but I don't think it will ever get that bad because there's just not enough room. Clients are growing, they know they want to do something else. They don't want to pay 20k. Every time they recruit someone, there's different solutions. Right.

Cas van Oort [00:16:37]:
So now's the time to do it. I mean, we're already seeing it happen.

Benjamin Mena [00:16:40]:
Okay. And flipping gears a little bit, I want to talk about like, you know, the original hook of the podcast. How can a small company, a small team out produce a 20 to 40 person team? Let's talk about that.

Cas van Oort [00:16:54]:
Yeah, so I have a great, I have a great example of that. Like, to be clear, I love the community aspect. I love the doing, for instance, doing a job board in order to do all of your top of funnel acquisition. Right? That's, that is all great when I can talk about. But that's not going to get one person to 1 million in revenue by themselves because that's too many moving parts. You need more people for that. So if we're just talking, we want to be as effective as possible. I've seen a guy in the Netherlands do it and all he does is the inside, outside account management, sales guys, so that hop in the car and have to drive around.

Cas van Oort [00:17:29]:
And it's not the most sexy job alive. And nobody really, there's a specific set of guys that do this. If you're a company that needs to find these guys, they're impossible to find. So what he does is he focuses all his content only on LinkedIn and only on sales, where he just says, okay, I'm the sales guy. I'm the best sales recruiter there is. He posts tips on sales every day, etcetera. And he just has an email list that is growing day by day. And he started small and this year he's doing a million plus.

Cas van Oort [00:18:01]:
Why is. Because all he needs to do is if he has a job from someone, he puts it online on LinkedIn, he has 30 applicants. Well, nobody else can get applicants and clients are coming to him because they say, I saw your content. I saw you have a huge following on LinkedIn. You might know some guys, right? And then he says, yeah, sure. And the funny thing is he's not even asking 20, 30% of yearly salary because he doesn't need to, because it's an easy sort of easy fix for him. So he does so much bulk by himself because he has a personal brand. That's essentially how he does it.

Cas van Oort [00:18:30]:
His stack is really simple. He has a regular, and that's what run of the mill vanilla ats system, almost no automations because he just says, hey, if you want to apply, here's a link client, here's a link to fill your job. And then he just makes the match. It's so easy.

Benjamin Mena [00:18:47]:
But he's still building a community. Okay, so let me take a step back. The podcast that went live this week, and this is going live later on, is Mike Williams, who is, took him two years for him and his small group of team to go to from zero to 2.5 million. Hes huge on LinkedIn branding, LinkedIn telling stories, LinkedIn this. So what youre talking about is this guy has built out a literally an online community on LinkedIn. Hes now added a newsletter. Hes gotten popular and now the companies are coming to him because of the branding that hes done.

Cas van Oort [00:19:23]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:19:24]:
And now hes doing over a million dollars in revenue as a single solo producer.

Cas van Oort [00:19:29]:
Yeah, by himself. And like I'm going to be clear, you can get to a million by yourself by just cold calling. That's fine as well. But like it also has to deal with effort. And he spent his time building when he didn't get a lot of results. And he's gotten up to a point now after almost two years where if he posts a job, like he has a job a week, it's that easy for him. But he just, people come to him all the time because he's the sales guy and everybody comes in. Same thing with the friend, the community that I'm launching, that has been launched or that I devise for recruitment purposes, that is in customer success.

Cas van Oort [00:20:06]:
And people come to him, his name is Mick, because they know, hey, you're the customer success guy. I've seen you post stuff on LinkedIn. He does in person events all throughout Europe. He then gets to speak at different events that are software focused where a lot of customer success is. He posts a picture online of him speaking there that elevates his brand again. And then clients come to him. The funny thing is he does no client acquisition. He's in the beginning of year two and he gets tons of inbound from clients saying, hey, do you also recruit for customer success? And we haven't even set up the recruitment yet.

Benjamin Mena [00:20:39]:
Huh. That is crazy. So where if recruiter that's listening to this podcast, they're hearing all this stuff like how do you even like, where do you start?

Cas van Oort [00:20:49]:
Yeah, the honest answer is niche down. Like everybody, I'm a recruiter myself as well and I always fall into the same trap where I say, okay, I don't really do this specific, it rules. But hey, this is a client of mine, he asked me to do this it rule and I know if I spend 10 hours searching I'm going to find that person for him and that's another 20k in the basket. So that's all fine. So we sort of, we tend to go too broad for ourselves. But the more you niche down, the more people will come to you. So that's point one. That's just scary to do, right? Because if you're going to leave a lot of money on the table to get there, like it's going to be freaking scary.

Cas van Oort [00:21:30]:
That's version one of doing it. If you're building for everyone, you're building for no one, as they say in marketing. And that's also part of the switch from sales to marketing is if we're going to think of it with a marketing mindset in e commerce and in gaming marketing, we all know niche down as far as possible. Niche down the furthest that you can. Because if you niche down, it will then speak to people. That's what works. But it's scary as hell. And that's something, that's what I was talking to you about before we started is that I think that the people that start now, that start fresh with the marketing mindset have a huge advantage to the recruitment agencies that have 10, 20, 30 employees that are built on a sales mindset because it's really hard to change that.

Cas van Oort [00:22:11]:
And hiring a marketing manager is not going to solve that issue. Like, you're going to have to rebuild it with marketing in mind from the get go and you see the guys that have done it from the start that are winning huge. But yeah, it's scary as hell. Like I'm not going to, I'm not going to lie. It's hard.

Benjamin Mena [00:22:28]:
So you're saying it's easier for somebody that's just getting started to just jump in a niche, is it? Because if you've been around the block for a while, well, I give example myself almost two decades do you have to like un, like brand yourself to rebrand yourself again. Like what are some of the blocks?

Cas van Oort [00:22:47]:
Yeah. So what happens is this is, again, so let's say you're, if you, if you've already been around the block, you probably, you will have a bit of a brand, but you're probably most well known with the clients that you already have and with the clients you already have, you've perhaps done a variety of roles. So you started doing marketing, but hey, you knew the sales manager as well, that business, and he had an issue. So you're also doing sales now. You're also doing a bit of finance or you're also doing. So you're just branching out. So within that business you're known for everything, which is fine for that business, but you can't really, although we actually, a lot of recruitment agencies do this. They say, yeah, we're specialized in finance, marketing and sales.

Cas van Oort [00:23:27]:
And I understand that you have 30 consultants. So a consultant consultant could have his own specific specialization. I know how it works. But branding wise, especially if you're small, that doesn't really help because if I see one guy doing sales and just using his personal brand, overshoot anyone in terms of how much he can earn by himself, then that is the way to go. Right. But it's hard to do also what we see time and time again. I've spoken to one of the managing directors of Bulk, which is one of the bigger recruitment marketing agencies in the UK and in the US. What he reaffirmed to me is that the best marketing done nowadays for recruitment agencies is with founder led sales.

Cas van Oort [00:24:10]:
So it's fine if you're a recruitment consultant is sharing stuff online, it's all great. But that's like the 2080. Like 80% of the business is one from the founders, Instagram, LinkedIn, social media accounts. So knowing that there's only so much you can do because as a founder, if you're doing personal branding, Benjamin, then you can't be the expert in finance and in marketing and in sales you are the expert in government contracting. That's who you are and you're doing nothing else. So you sort of have to niche yourself down. And if you're starting by yourself and you're the marketing guy, you know, okay, crap. I have to have to really focus down on one thing specifically and be the best at that.

Cas van Oort [00:24:52]:
Then underneath you, you hire people that complement that. Right? But if you already have 30 consultants and they all have their own specific niche, how are you then going to niche down?

Benjamin Mena [00:25:01]:
You know that makes sense. So I want to switch gears again. I want to talk about like getting like job leads. Like how do you, like, I know you do a good job with this based on technology of figuring out what companies are going to need hiring before they even start going live with their jobs. Like how do you, how do you figure that out? So that way you could be the recruiter that's there to support that client.

Cas van Oort [00:25:25]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:25:25]:
Yeah.

Cas van Oort [00:25:25]:
So I think that is like, that's a nice to have that everybody wants to have. What we see practically in the market is that only now are the early adopter. The early adoption phase is almost over. You see most companies needing to have job data in order to work with. Right. Because a lot of companies still don't use it. So I have job leads which will supply you leads in your specific niche, in your area from different job boards, which is all great that you can use it as a sales feed. But we are only now seeing enterprise clients say, hey, we, we really need to aggregate lots of data because we need to go to the, let's say we need the clients that hire from us.

Cas van Oort [00:26:04]:
We need to know when they have jobs online and we need to know that historically as well. Right? So then we can make predictions. We also need to be looking not just at LinkedIn a bit, but we need to be scraping all of LinkedIn for our relevant jobs in our sector. Because then we can see trends and we can say, hey, we actually see more and more jobs come online in our niche or actually seeing a decline. So we might need to be looking at starting different niches. So using data in general in our decision making process and mapping out our market is only just now starting. And that's something that really needs to happen before you can then start predicting, right? Because you don't have any data yet. So, for instance, at the large global procurement agency, we're just now starting to create a data environment where we pull, where we say, okay, you have your 3000 biggest clients across the globe.

Cas van Oort [00:26:52]:
We scrape their company websites daily so that we know exactly what they're hiring for. And then we can filter that for your specific type of jobs that you want. So then we can sort of map it out over the course of a year or quarterly or monthly what's actually happening in this business. So it might be that their job count is declining so that, you know, okay, my consultant should spend less time here. You need to spend more time on companies that are actually growing in terms of job listings. That's point one then. .2, looking at the LinkedIn data and seeing, hey, who's actually what type of job title is hiring more? I can of course tell you that there are more AI engineer roles open than last year, of course, but everybody can think of that. There are nuggets in there.

Cas van Oort [00:27:37]:
So what type of AI is asked for specifically? What type of machine learning is asked for specifically? Perhaps we can see that it used to be that only enterprise clients were hiring AI engineers. And now you can actually see the company size go down further and further in terms of AI engineers. And if you know that you can go to perhaps the next tranche that hasn't been hit yet with job titles, you say, hey, we see that AI is becoming more and more important in your size of business. So can we please talk about hiring an AI engineer? And then you're sort of working in front of the market. But in order to do that, we really need to get data in first. And people aren't even getting data in. That's what we're building now for a lot of clients.

Benjamin Mena [00:28:20]:
Oh, that's definitely awesome. I think most of the recruiters out there smile, dial emb seeing hey, do you have an opening? But there's now possibilities to use technology to figure out what the hell is going on. So that way you can make more.

Cas van Oort [00:28:41]:
Money, you can use technology, you can make money. And honestly, like, I getting a successful cold call also has its nice feelings, right? Because if you get one, you're like, I created this myself. But to be honest, like, there's nothing more nice than having inbound sales because people call you with an issue and they're like, hey, Benjamin, I know you're that government contractor guy, and I have an issue here. Can you help me out here? That conversation is just 20 times nicer than it is to cold call. So I know people are in different camps and both work, and I would never refrain from cold calling ever because it just, the data shows it works and people make millions of dollars just of cold calling, but it's just a lot nicer way to work the other way around.

Benjamin Mena [00:29:25]:
Awesome. Well, before we go to the next part of the podcast, is there anything else that you want to share with the listeners?

Cas van Oort [00:29:30]:
No, I'm just really, really interested in talking about new business models. I think the last one we haven't even really mentioned yet or elaborated on, which I really like, is building a job board in your specific niche, because it's the easiest thing you can do. Because there are just job board software out there that you can get for as little as $30 a month. Which actually has backfill options. So it means you can fill the jobs on your job board with other jobs. So it's always been filled. And what is nicer than just talking to a client or a cold call and saying, hey, you can also post your job here. Where in a specific niche.

Cas van Oort [00:30:07]:
So let's say you're doing government contracting. You put a specific job board specific for government contracting. You're doing a cold call. And the client says, you know, I don't want recruitment services. You're the 10th guy that call. And you say, that's fine, but I also want a job board. And we get up to 10,000 candidates there every month in your specific niche. Would you mind if I put the job live there? Or perhaps I can just help you out.

Cas van Oort [00:30:30]:
And nobody will say no to that. And then after two weeks, you're going to say, hey, how did you find, did you get any candidates from it? And you might say, yes. You might say no. And then you can say, okay, I can do a paid job board posting for you. That will be $300. And for that, you will also be actively communicated into our newsletter that has 15,000 people on the newsletter. And then they're like, hey, sir, let's do that. And then when that doesn't work, then you've been a talent partner, and then you can tell them, hey, I could also just help you with recruitment services.

Cas van Oort [00:31:00]:
So that just acts as your funnel. And that's both on the candidate side because candidates don't often feel fondly about applying to recruitment agencies. But a job board is something completely else. So you see more and more job boards being launched that way, and that could be regional, that could be job title specific, it could be sector specific, like anything you want. It's just a really nice type of funnel to use. And the funny thing is, I now see job boards swimming the other way around as well, where people that own job boards are like, hey, this has been a good business model, but you're probably not going to get rich off of job titles. So we need to do something else. Or, Richard, it's quite hard to make a living out of job boards, I can tell you.

Cas van Oort [00:31:42]:
So why not do recruitment services? And it actually, it's very complimentary. So I would really urge anyone that's trying to find something new to just think outside the box and think, hey, what can I do in order to be more of a partner to my clients? And if you're interested in talking about that, just hit me up, because I always like discussing new business models doing new things.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:04]:
I feel like I picked up a job board software on appsumo like two years ago. I feel like I need to go dig it up now. After speaking with you cast, it's really.

Cas van Oort [00:32:12]:
A lot of fun. And again with this, it is also the long haul. So it's not going to make you any money in the first six months, it's not going to supply you any clients within six months. But after a while Google will start recognizing you as a job board and people will start getting inbound and it will supply you with data that you would have never gotten otherwise. And it's just, it's good fun, it works.

Benjamin Mena [00:32:33]:
And that goes into like we talk about this on the podcast multiple times and I think I picked this up from DSP but you have like the hunting side of your business and then you have the farming side of your business and the farming side is like you're planting the seeds for next year right? Next like next summer but it still has to be done because if you plant those seeds, you water them, they will come up. And LinkedIn articles has been, dont laugh at this. I just got a call from a potential client right before our trip to France. Theyre like hey I read your LinkedIn article that was posted in 2020. I want to talk to you about your services.

Cas van Oort [00:33:09]:
Thats so cool.

Benjamin Mena [00:33:10]:
But thats like we need help recruiting that's so big.

Cas van Oort [00:33:14]:
And I have the same thing that people just tell me, hey I've been meaning to contact you for six months but I just saw a post from you or in a private group chat. I just saw your post, I was like damn I need to talk to you right now. And it's just, and I know it feels like, it feels fluffy if you do it in the article. So that's why it's really hard to do if you don't really love it. So that's why you're talking to things about things that you really love and I talk about things that I really love, which is business models. That's the only way it'll work because you sort of, you're talking to no one all the time and then, and then sort of something clicks and then you're talking to a great client. Like it's so weird. Like I posted something about job scraping in a, in a private chat group a few weeks ago and I had a meeting with like one of the biggest CEO of like 1000 person recruitment business.

Cas van Oort [00:34:01]:
He's like yeah I saw your post a while ago and you're an interesting guy, let's talk. Normally, I wouldn't never get to talk to someone like that. Right. But it's just when you talk about things you love, that works.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:13]:
Building the brand. That's awesome. Well, let's jump over to the quickfire questions.

Cas van Oort [00:34:17]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:18]:
What advice would you give to a brand new recruiter that's actually just getting started in the recruiting industry this year?

Cas van Oort [00:34:23]:
Personal branding, that's all.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:26]:
Okay.

Cas van Oort [00:34:27]:
It's the worst comment to get because everybody knows, everybody's heard it a thousand times. Right. But if you just start building your personal brand now, you will the benefits four years down the line, you'll destroy everyone that you've, you've come up with. Just personal brand.

Benjamin Mena [00:34:43]:
Lay in those seeds for tomorrow. Yeah, same, same question. But for experienced recruiters, like people that have been around the block for a while, what advice would you give to them to, you know, to see that success, especially since, you know, you've worked with some and, you know, some top billers, you know, million dollar billers that are just doing things different.

Cas van Oort [00:35:02]:
Yeah, that's going to be a hard one, but I think I would go at it completely. This is also a marketing thing. Do something completely different. Like, if everyone in your industry is already cold calling and doing their thing, just make it a thing that you will never cold call someone. Just do it all the other way around. Because you probably come from a specific industry. If you want to stay in that industry, make sure that you know what the rest is doing and then do something completely different. So if everybody's got the a website with blue and regular boring colors, make a website that's yellow.

Cas van Oort [00:35:37]:
Like, I don't, I don't care. But the difference being different really matters in this. If every. And on the other end, let's say, let's fast forward ten years into the future and everybody's doing podcasts and everybody's doing TikTok style videos. Don't ever do that. Like, then do it the other way around and only cold call people. It's like if you do everything the other way around, it will honestly, honest to God it will work. So do that.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:02]:
Watch the masses and kind of run the other direction is what you're saying.

Cas van Oort [00:36:05]:
Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:36:06]:
Has there been a book that has had a huge impact on your career and why?

Cas van Oort [00:36:11]:
Yeah, so I was actually out. I had one paired and you actually did that one in the beginning, which is the voice thing. I really liked the book and never split the difference by Chris Foss. I don't know if you read that one. It's about. How do you call that again?

Benjamin Mena [00:36:26]:
Actually, I'm reading it right now. It's part of the recruiting book club for the month.

Cas van Oort [00:36:30]:
Oh, really? But yeah. Have you got, have you gotten to the DJ voice?

Benjamin Mena [00:36:33]:
Yes, I've gotten to the DJ voice.

Cas van Oort [00:36:36]:
You've got the DJ voice. So that's, that's fun. But what I also really like is anything. If you're doing marketing style, read Seth Godin. If you've never heard of him, he's a big marketer. His name is Seth Godin and he really talks about doing things differently. And he has a great blog where he does long form content on anything that's relevant to marketing. Marketing.

Cas van Oort [00:36:56]:
And he will turn you on the interesting things that you need in order to change up what you're offering.

Benjamin Mena [00:37:05]:
Awesome. And you're very tech focused. What's your thoughts on AI and the future of recruiting?

Cas van Oort [00:37:13]:
Yeah, good one. So are we being politically correct today? Give it to us. There will always be a place for recruiters, there's no doubt, because people want to make meaningful connections. But what you will see is that secondly, AI is fine in adapting a job description and doing a couple of fun things. And you can even build a bot that will test someone based on hard and soft features so you don't have to do the sourcing part of it. Right. So in that sense, part of the process already being automated. But in a few years, you're going to see that based on the data provided by data providers, 95% of the job can be done by an AI.

Cas van Oort [00:37:53]:
And then what happens is someone needs to be the culture check. So there will always be a recruiter that will have to manage the process, manage the hiring manager, manage the candidates, manage expectations. So the human part of the job will never go away. But you will see that a lot of the nitty gritty that will, you know, that makes recruiter, recruiter or the admin stuff is going to leave. So what you're going to find is that I think recruitment teams will become a little bit smaller in the future because you just need less people. Because sourcing, yeah, you don't really have to source that much anymore because it's just you're going to have one person doing all of the ads, one person loading in all of the search queries, and then all of the results come straight back to a recruiter. That's just a process manager.

Benjamin Mena [00:38:34]:
It's going to be fun. It's going to be fun to watch.

Cas van Oort [00:38:38]:
It's going to be definitely fun. It's definitely going to be fun to watch. And I think we're still long ways off it really working like that. Because you see there are already guys out there that have built the digital SDR sales development representative and the digital recruiter and all that stuff. That's all fun and games. But perhaps in 20 years you and I will be fine in doing a job application to a bot. Currently we are still not at that point. So at the moment we still need recruiters.

Cas van Oort [00:39:06]:
But I think there are changes happening and I think it's very important that for recruiters we make sure that we have a varied skill set. Meaning in marketing we call it a t shaped marketer, which means if you're going to look it all up, you are at one point you're technically savvy. So for instance, you can hook up Google Analytics to a website, et cetera. And on the other end you can also do content. So to give you an idea, when I consult with clients, I can do both. Like I can be a marketer for them. So a recruitment marketer and I can be a recruiter. That means I know the entire process.

Cas van Oort [00:39:40]:
From thinking of an ad place to hiring that person and everything in between, I know the whole process and thus I can manage that process. And that's something that even for an AI, is going to be hard to do, I think. So make sure that you have different, you know, different diversified skill set. And the last thing on that is get your personal branding in order. Because one thing that can never leave is that personal branding will get you like, you know, will get you gigs. And even though someone can save money by using an AI bot in ten years to find a person, if I just really like you, Benjamin, I'm going to give you that business because I've seen your videos. I like how you roll. I like your podcast.

Cas van Oort [00:40:22]:
So you know what? Here's a recruitment gig. So personal branding is still coming back in?

Benjamin Mena [00:40:27]:
Absolutely. What's your favorite tech tool at the moment?

Cas van Oort [00:40:34]:
I really like for. Yeah, there are a few out there. I like the usual suspects. So Metaview doing the analysis. I like Karp carve.com. So it's carv.com. They are Carv Metaview competitor and they started in the Netherlands. They're relatively new.

Cas van Oort [00:40:52]:
They do fun stuff as well and they really insert themselves into an ATS system and automate a whole bunch of processes which I really like. I like Wati, but that is Wati but that is one specific for WhatsApp solutions. That's not really for the US crowd, but that's really where you automate specific WhatsApp conversations with candidates. And when I really do, like, which is the last one I'll name, because I can keep doing this for life. But what you see nowadays is that, like I said, it's changing a bit from sales to marketing, right? So that means candidates come in through the regular way of applying for a job and getting hunted for a job. But you can also express interest through online ads, through organic posting, through et cetera. Like, there's a difference between someone that applies and someone that shows interest to a job. But for the whole crowd that shows interest, you still need to validate them.

Cas van Oort [00:41:46]:
Like, do they have the correct background? Can they apply? And you sort of have to pull them in through a funnel in order to get them to apply. And there are nice tools like perspective, which is a mobile first landing page creator that will actually do the nurturing part for you. So you really need to nurture a candidate. After you show an ad to them and they've shown interest by clicking on the ad, you need to nurture them into applying, which could be a video of my head talking about the business. It could be a nice quiz to help them figure out if the job is for them. But you need to host that in a nice online environment that will actually with the chatbot as well as possibility, but will show them the branding and the feel of the business, which is completely different to just an online applying page, and then pull them in. And that is perspective. And that's what I really like for recruitment purposes at the moment, which we build to do a lot of volume recruitment.

Cas van Oort [00:42:40]:
So, friends, for nurses or for electricians or for construction workers. Thanks.

Benjamin Mena [00:42:45]:
Awesome. So, like, you've been a recruiter, like, you've now built a bunch of products for recruiters. You're now advising large recruiting companies. What do you think has been a part of your own personal success? Where's it coming from?

Cas van Oort [00:43:01]:
Yeah, I have very bad adhd, so that is both my blessing and my curse. I always like the new thing, so my thing is shiny object syndrome. So I love to build new things and I love to work on the next thing, which can be annoying because then sometimes I leave the old thing, which works fine. So I'm always a very optimistic guy and I love innovation, so I'm always busy with the next thing. And that means that people sort of trust me to sort of figure out what's next and what things are possible. And then I have the managers that I talk to that are then more realistic and then think of, hey, how can we incorporate this into the business or don't incorporate it? And that together is a successful combination. So that's what makes me tick and I can't really change it. So that's been part of my success for now.

Cas van Oort [00:43:49]:
So you leaned in? Oh, yeah, I definitely leaned in. Leaned in, yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:43:56]:
Well, this kind of goes into the next question, you know, with everything, the conversations you're having now, the companies you're helping, like you actually being a recruiter and then going into the tech side of the house, if you could go back and have a conversation with yourself without, say, like the first or second week of your recruiting career, what advice would you tell yourself in that conversation?

Cas van Oort [00:44:19]:
Um, I would tell myself, I know you're going to hate it, but you're going to spend every hour that you have extra in building your own personal brand. That's it. The funny thing is, if you think about it, let's say you're a starting recruiter and you just want to find your way and see what you want to do. Building a personal brand is great because if you leave your employer and do something else, you will still have that audience and that audience will support you because they like you in anything you do. So as long as you take them on the journey, you don't even need to be an expert in anything. When you're 22 and just starting out working, you just need to document what you're doing and document what you're learning and document your failures and your wins, and then people will start liking you. So then when you go on to a next job, even though it might be in a different sector, your followers will still help you out and they will still like you. I mean, it's like you can do so much things with your audience, but if you like, the later you start working on your audience, the smaller it will be.

Cas van Oort [00:45:19]:
I would have tried to force myself to do it and I don't know if it would have worked because I think for 95% out there, doing personal branding feels cringe. And people are like, I don't want to do it, but there's a way for everyone to do it right. You can do it in your own way, but it will just work.

Benjamin Mena [00:45:36]:
Someone here, I stayed away from personal branding way too long because I thought it was cringe. But what I did find out is by, for the people that hate personal, talking about themselves, talking about other people, like, helped me. Because when you're shining a spotlight on them, the spotlight is automatically shined back on you.

Cas van Oort [00:45:55]:
Definitely. And that's what I enjoy doing like, I love giving examples of people that are running personal branding all the way, all the way up top and they're just doing great. And I think, yeah, it's just always fun to talk about this kind of guys. I think that's a great advice. Just talk about different people, different people that you like, books that you read, you know. Yeah.

Benjamin Mena [00:46:16]:
Well, Cass, how do people follow you?

Cas van Oort [00:46:18]:
Go to my LinkedIn is probably best. Okay. We have a fun offer running at the moment because since three weeks we've cracked the code on scraping all of LinkedIn. So we actually have all LinkedIn jobs that are posted live daily on our platform. So if you want, hit me up on LinkedIn in a DM and then I will send you a link and you can actually get free LinkedIn job scrapes over to you bi weekly. We'll do that indefinitely for every two weeks. And then you can just use that in your business development methods. Just trial it out.

Cas van Oort [00:46:48]:
I mean, using data in your business is always an internal change management program, so it takes a while. So that's why we offer the data for free, so you can sort of train your consultants or train yourself to start using the data on a daily basis. So hit me up on there. I also have a Twitter account, but I don't really do that much with it. So I think LinkedIn is the best way to go.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:09]:
And I'll have your LinkedIn, you know, link in the show notes so people could just click on it, make it easy.

Cas van Oort [00:47:14]:
Cool.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:15]:
Well, cas, before I let you go, is there anything else you want to share with the listeners?

Cas van Oort [00:47:18]:
No. Thanks for doing it. I mean, I love listening to these shows and I love, you know, I love learning from them. So keep up the good work.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:27]:
Thank you. Well, Cass, like I said at the very beginning of this episode, definitely excited. Like, we're. We're in some exciting times. As a recruiter, I know the market's been like, up and down. 2023 has been crazy. It's all depending on industries. But the thing is, like, we've talked about so many different ways that you can use technology, you can use ways to elevate your business, be different out there that I think that recruiters can actually implement some of these things.

Benjamin Mena [00:47:53]:
So I'm so excited. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Elite Recruiter podcast with Benjamin Mena. If you enjoyed, hit subscribe and leave a rating to bring you onto the podcast. And Cass, you know, keep crushing it, buddy. And for the listeners, make 2024 your best year yet. Thank you.