The Recruiter's Go-To-Market Plan

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Now let’s get into Part 3 of the Go To Market series.

In part 1 & 2 we dove into some strategies to both identify and validate a good market. Today we are going into how to position yourself as the best option for your clients and prospects. To do that, we are going to take what we learned from our data and from our conversations to develop our core offering, keystone clients, and optimize our communication channels. These will be the cornerstone pieces for our marketing, messaging and outreach.

Core Offering

After your research, you should have a fairly good idea of what plagues your clients and what they are looking to attain. You should also understand how either your candidates (your inventory of product) and/or your solution (productized services) can help them. This is your core offering.

Your core offering is what you sell that meets 5 criteria:

1. Central to you business identity: It's what the business is best known for and is typically associated with the brand.

2. Main revenue source: A significant portion, if not the majority, of the company's revenue is derived from the core offering.

3. Competitive advantage: The core offering often provides a unique selling point (USP) or differentiator in the marketplace.

4. Reaches desired state: The core offering actively propels customers beyond immediate needs, guiding them towards their envisioned desired state.

5. Scalability: The core offering is structured to accommodate growth and expansion while maintaining the consistent quality that clients expect, even as demands and market conditions evolve.

Alright here is the key… Say it with me now….

“My core offering isn’t for everyone.”

If you know this then it’s your job to now position yourself as the guide for the exact people it is for.

So we need to clarify who your core offering helps and how it can help them get to their aspirations faster and with less headaches.

This is where you start to build what I call, your Keystone Clients.

Keystone Clients

Recruiters will often market themselves by saying some blanket statement like “I help startups build world class engineering teams.” Thats a bunch of fluffy nonsense.

The more specific you get the better your leads get. Yes, the guy who says “niching is killing your business” is saying get specific about who and how you help. What I’m not saying is let this be the only thing you do.

Every good business will have multiple versions of Keystone Clients who have different aspirations and needs but the core offering will still be able to serve them.

An example of a keystone client for one of my candidates may be

• A CTO named Asha at a martech company looking to inject AI into their SaaS platforms.

• They work at a later stage startup with over $20M in recent funding to take on such a venture.

• Asha comes from multiple startups and has built A-player teams before.

• They simply don’t have the experience or connections on the AI front.

• Their goal is to build a product that generates significant revenue through both market capture as well as upselling their freemium customers to a paid tiers.

• This implementation will be crucial to their business and speed to market is top priority.

• If they don’t implement, they risk losing significant market share as new startups entering the space.

• So having my candidate Jon, a seasoned lead engineer coming from Jasper’s core team, is going to help them get there the fastest.

Another keystone client for a solution service might be:

• Executive Tonya who is looking to inject AI into their internal systems to make quicker business decisions.

• They work at a more traditional business like transportation.

• They generate over $50m in revenue a year and have at least 5 people on their technology & internal software teams.

• They outsource some basic coding and QA work to offshore & nearshore companies and they are struggling to decide on if they should hire someone internally for this implementation.

• Tonya’s goal is to implement with little ruckus and disruption to their current process.

• If they don’t implement this, they’ll continue making poorly informed decisions due to the human error in their business analysis costing them millions in lost revenue each year.

• So Tonya would highly benefit from our marketplace that connects her to fractional CTOs who could help craft that strategy and implement.

Do you see how specific that is? I even named them. When you do this it helps find the common issues that your core offerings help solve across multiple types of clients.

Lastly you would craft your positioning statement so folks can quickly understand the value you provide. I personally have found positioning statements that focus on getting to your keystone clients’ common aspiration is what works best.

Here is a quick framework for that statement.

• Who do you serve (your keystone client)?

• Why should they work with you (the aspiration you help get them to)?

• What is an attribute that aligns you with that keystone client (what makes you unique or credible)?

• What action should they take to get started?

I want to see if this is clicking so I’d like you to be the ones who craft this and participate in this exercise with me.

Based on these examples DM me in the BoomLab with what you think the 1 sentence positioning statement should be for either of these examples.

I’ll showcase the best versions exclusively on BoomLab and give you more details on Saturday.

Optimizing Your Communication Channels

Finally, you'll need to optimize your communication channels. This involves aligning your core offering and brand with your keystone clients and meeting them wherever they are. If you did the research properly, you should have determined where these folks get their info, learn and “live”.

For most of you working traditional business roles, your keystone client will be on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn. They may also often read Forbes and listen to business podcasts for example.

But for folks in industries like healthcare staffing, your keystone clients will more likely be on platforms like Tiktok, Facebook and Instagram.

Everyone is on some form of social platform or digital community. But there may be some cases where digital just won’t cut it and you need to be in a physical location. A good friend of mine is a million dollar construction recruiter and he literally gets business by visiting new sites and talking directly to Project Managers.

In any case, its your job to find ways to meet your keystone clients wherever they are. You then optimize that channel with your positioning statements in your description. On LinkedIn this would be your headline. Your description will give context and showcase how you help. On the other social platforms this will be in your bio under your handle. The key to this one is that it needs to be skimmable and bulleted versions of the framework I had above.

If you have a website or digital landing page, then this would be top of fold and literally the first thing people see. By incorporating this into your digital presence, you can clearly communicate your value to your clients.

So to recap where we are so far in the GTM series. We have…

• Identified a market

• Validated demand

• Crafted/defined our core offering

• Defined our keystone client

• Optimized our communication channels

Now its time to start marketing and outreach which is part 4 & 5.

Till then, happy hunting.

If you want a quicker way to learn about this or just want some help in your current process, first join BoomLab and second book a call with me.