Blog

Imagine you’re a hiring manager and put up an ad for a role. After a lengthy process, you hire someone you think is a great fit.
Except, reality sets in a few weeks later when you realize they were a bad hire and you have the start all over again. A robust vetting process would help you avoid this costly mistake.
However, it’s not enough to come up with a process, you have to make sure it’s inclusive, fair, and efficient. Let’s show you how.

Hiring the wrong employee can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. Back in 2016, The U.S. Department of Labor estimated this cost was close to 30% of the former employee’s first-year earnings.
Today, that figure could be even higher.
Undoubtedly, recruiting and hiring candidates is an expensive and time-consuming process. This is on top of figuring out which candidates are most qualified to succeed at your company for the long haul.
A vetting process should include a few critical elements. Let’s cover how to run an effective vetting process that’s efficient and free of bias as possible.
How long does the vetting process take?
The vetting process can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on what your process looks like, the seniority level for the role, and the industry.
For instance, a role at the Federal Bureau of Investigation likely has a much longer vetting process than one at a SaaS company. The FBI likely conducts in-depth background checks beyond a candidate’s criminal background whereas a SaaS company may focus the bulk of its vetting process on technical proficiency.
Over time, your company will start compiling data on how long the process takes based on the factors mentioned above and build its strategy based on that.

1. Write an accurate job description.
Your vetting process will be easier start-to-finish if you take the time to write an accurate and compelling job description.
I spoke to Claire McCarthy, team lead in sales recruiting, who told me the job description can help both you and the candidate ensure a mutually beneficial fit from the start.
“We have pretty comprehensive job descriptions and we want candidates to take the time to read them and ensure the role is a good match for their background and skillset, as well as their long-term goals,” she said.
McCarthy adds that it’s valuable to focus on attributes when creating your job description.
“For instance, for a sales role, we might list ‘customer-first mentality’ as a requirement,” she said.
In addition, craft your description to attract a wide pool of diverse applicants, since diverse teams perform better, and come up with more innovative ideas.
This is important because a Hewlett Packard internal report found that women historically won’t apply for a job unless they meet all the qualifications, while most men will apply if they meet only 60% of them.
However, it doesn’t only affect candidates from a gender perspective. Racism, ableism, and ageism can also impact the hiring process – and it all starts with your job description.
To do so, you can rely on tools like Textio, which help you identify and remove implicit and explicit biased language from your job description.
The goal is to use inclusive language that welcomes and attracts a diverse range of talent.
Take a look at the marketing job descriptions you should recruit and hire to have an all-star team.
2. Leverage software to review candidates’ application materials.
A vetting process should allow you to filter out candidates who don’t have the skills necessary to succeed in the role. To do this, start by vetting the applicant’s resume, cover letter, and other application materials they’ve submitted for review.
Additionally, a vetting process can support your diversity and inclusion initiative by ensuring your HR team remains fair and unbiased when evaluating potential candidates.
For instance, you might implement a blind search system in which resumes are scanned by software, such as Greenhouse.
By ensuring your resumes are automatically sorted based on skill, you’re circumventing some of the unintentional biases that might lead your HR employees to make unfair judgments.
3. Use video interviews prior to phone calls.
There are certain questions you can ask to decipher whether or not a candidate has the correct skills for the role.
You don’t want your recruiters spending valuable time on phone calls when you can just as easily collect that information another way.
At HubSpot, our hiring process includes video interviews, in which candidates must answer a series of questions and submit their recorded responses. The caveat here is that they must answer each question within a minute and they won’t know what the questions are ahead of time.
“We do this for high volume roles, and use the video interview as a qualifier for whether or not the candidate moves forward with a phone interview,” said McCarthy.
Consider using video interviews to limit the amount of phone calls your HR team needs to make each day.
4. Evaluate candidates’ qualifications using additional assessment tools.
To evaluate whether your candidate will succeed in the role, consider offering initial assessments.
As a HubSpot writer, I was asked to write a blog post from scratch using one of HubSpot’s prompt topics before being invited for an interview. This makes sense – why waste your time, and your candidate’s time, if they don’t have the skills you’re looking for?
From the candidate’s perspective, it allows them to get a taste of what the role requires and show off why they’re right for it.
You might consider offering role plays for customer-facing positions, case studies for functional roles, or coding assessments for engineering positions.
5. Trust the process.
The point of having a process is to ensure consistency and promote fairness.
This means across all tools and software you utilize just as much as the steps you follow.
Ultimately, a vetting process is only effective if it’s consistent and replicable.
“A vetting process is about establishing a process at the beginning and sticking to it,” said McCarthy. “Additionally, it’s important to use a vetting process to operationalize how we review candidates and decide which ones are most qualified to move forward to next steps.”
Using these five tactics will mitigate the time and money your HR team spends on recruitment in 2022 while ensuring you hire the best applicants – a win all around.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness. 

When it comes to finding what you need on the internet, most people just do a simple search. But if you want to get as specific as possible, that’s when long-tail keywords come into play.  There’s a lot to take into consideration when tapping into long-tail keywords and using them for your company’s SEO strategy.…
The post Long-Tail Keywords: Definition and How to Leverage Them appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Hey Guys, Can anyone share a good marketing automation course? I’ve been looking for a course but there are too many options. submitted by /u/nazhimel [link] [comments]

No matter how good the content is, design can make or break your newsletter. Here are some email newsletter design tips, and how to optimize for conversion.
Any designer worth their salt will tell you good design is invisible, but that doesn’t mean it’s effortless. Your messaging depends on design to be effective. A good email newsletter design is not just attractive; it markedly complements the words you’ve written.
Email templates are a great tool for most marketers; unless you have hours to spend on design and layout, we recommend using one rather than starting from scratch. Drag-and-drop email builders allow you to customize any template to make it yours. In fact, making the changes is often easier than making them look good. Here’s how to turn a basic template into a customized email your readers will love to receive.
Choose an email newsletter template that fits your content
Have an outline or even your final piece of content ready to go before you search for a template. Otherwise, you may make it through the customization process only to find your template isn’t a good fit. Even templates designed specifically for newsletters aren’t interchangeable.
Your template must-haves will be dictated by the type of email you’re sending. Are you sharing a round-up of popular links? Look for a design with multiple sections and separators. Do you write thought leadership essays? You need a template with a minimalist, text-forward layout.
Design tip: Save templates you’ve used for future newsletters. Consistency makes your marketing campaigns look professional — and you’ll save time by sticking with something that works.
Make it yours by incorporating your branding
A reader should know who an email is from within seconds of opening it. Using brand assets and colors makes your identity clear from the start.
There’s no excuse for sending out an email campaign without your logo or wordmark. Most templates have a section for this at the top; if yours doesn’t, add one. It’s also a good practice to put your logo or wordmark in the email footer.
Your template should also incorporate your brand’s color scheme. Don’t go overboard — there’s no need to include an entire color palette or coordinate every element. When changing text and background colors, maintain legibility by keeping font sizes large and using high-contrast color combos.
Design tip: Double-check your color palette with WebAIM’s Contrast Checker. If your font is a lighter weight than the tool’s default font, you may need to increase contrast to stay within accessibility guidelines.
Chart your reader’s journey with design elements
Design isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s a tool you can use to shape a reader’s experience. Most people scan their email messages, but you can use design to strategically highlight enticing information and earn your reader’s full attention.
Set a hierarchy to highlight key points
Using typography to create a visual hierarchy helps scanners quickly pick out the key message of your email. The size, weight, color, contrast levels, and even shape of your text provide cues that guide a reader’s focus. The longer your email, the more hierarchical elements — like headers and subheads — are necessary to break your content into digestible sections.
Design tip: When creating text styles, don’t go overboard with differentiation. You only need to change one or two elements — for example, weight and size or size and color — to denote hierarchy.
Lead readers through a longer email with eye-catching elements
Your newsletter layout should partner with the visual hierarchy you created earlier to draw eyes from one key element to the next. The inverted pyramid is a great format for short messages with a single CTA; longer newsletters require multiple elements to keep readers engaged all the way through. Try using:

Contrasting or accent colors for your font or background for a look that’s hard to scan past
Borders to separate different sections, so readers who scan through one section know where it ends (and the next one begins)
Text alignment to break the line of your paragraphs and draw the eye to interesting offers, quotes, or arguments

Design tip: If you can’t decide how to best help your readers digest the information you’re sharing, get some design inspiration from these great newsletter examples.
Always highlight CTAs
Your CTAs should be easy to find and interact with, whether your email has one or many. The two most popular CTA locations are above the fold (visible without scrolling) or at the end of your message. Both are natural stopping points in any scanning pattern. No matter the location, your CTA is more likely to see action if it’s a button.
However, buttons aren’t the right choice for every newsletter format. Wrap-ups include multiple links by nature, all of equal importance. Long-form content may have links that support your arguments. In-text links or link collections don’t need to be buttons. They simply need to be formatted in a way that makes them recognizable as links.
Shoot for a simple presentation
The desire to make things too complex is a common design downfall. When you try to draw attention to too many things, readers just get overwhelmed. Including plenty of white space is the best way to make your design pop.
Give your content space to breathe
White space is essential to creating a professional design. It serves multiple purposes: breaking up content into different segments; giving the reader space to absorb what you’re sharing; and balancing out the more eye-catching images, headlines, or CTAs.
Leaving proper spacing and margins between different design and content elements paradoxically brings everything together into a coherent whole. Without sufficient white space, different segments and elements of your email will compete with each other. A tidy-looking email will always look more professional than one where every pixel has been “designed.”
Strike the right balance with image and graphics
The “right” number of images depends on the purpose of your newsletter — a principle that’s true for many tips in this article. The best rule is to only use images when they’re necessary. If your message relies on multiple images or gifs, make sure you follow the best practices for image-heavy emails.
Design tip: There’s no optimal image-to-text ratio. Previous “rules” were based on how spam filters used to work. Senders are no longer penalized for image-heavy emails.
Use graphs, infographics, and other forms of data visualization with caution. These visuals may seem more confusing or overwhelm readers when they’re nested among other content. If you do want a visual to demonstrate your point, use circles, arrows, and other annotations to help your reader understand what they’re looking at.
Don’t forget basic design principles
It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of your design and lose sight of the big picture (or the full email). Your last task before finalizing your email newsletter’s design: Double-check your template against the following rules to make sure you’re adhering to best practices regarding accessibility, legibility, and aesthetics.

Make your email responsive: Any pre-designed template (on Campaign Monitor and most other email tools) comes ready to adapt to mobile devices. If you’re starting from scratch, you’ll need to learn how to make a responsive email.
Stay within the bounds of the template: Stretching a content zone by overfilling it is the easiest way to make your email look messy and unprofessional. If you can’t fit everything, you need a new template or less content.
Add alt text to all functional images: Alt text describes the contents of images for readers who use a screen reader or have images turned off. Any functional image — one that’s essential to communicating the message in your email — should have alt text. When it comes to images that are purely decorative, alt text is optional.
Present key information textually: Since not all readers can view images, keep your important messaging in the email’s text, so no one misses it.
Keep font and color use minimal: Emails have limited real estate, so there’s not enough room for too many styles. You don’t need more than two fonts (one for headers and one for body copy) or three colors (one main color and one or two accents).
Use web (or web-safe) fonts: Devices and email clients are designed with unique presets, which means you have two options to maintain the integrity of your design. You can use a web-safe font like Arial or Times New Roman that comes on every device or use a web font that can be displayed by any device.

Good email newsletter design speaks for itself.
Your messaging is only as strong as its weakest element, and design is one of these elements. Colors can influence mood, and fonts can indicate trustworthiness as effectively as any words. The combination of your choices can make your email look professional and engaging or sloppy and worth nothing more than an unsubscribe.
Design deserves just as much time and focus as content. Those of us who aren’t trained in it may have to work a bit harder to get the desired effect. The lessons of those who have come before us (and the newsletter design tips in this post) can guide you toward a design that’s as powerful as your content.
The post How to Send the Right Message with Your Email Newsletter Design appeared first on Campaign Monitor.

submitted by /u/salesfunnelexpert [link] [comments]

I’m happy to share that we’ve established a long-term goal that salaries at Buffer will not be based on location. We made our first step towards this last year, when we moved from four cost-of-living based location bands for salaries to two bands. We did this by eliminating the lower two location bands.The change we made resulted in salary increases for 55 of 85 team members, with the increase being on average $10,265. When the time is right, we will be eliminating the concept of cost-of-living based location bands entirely, which will lead to a simpler approach to providing generous, fair and transparent salaries at Buffer.In this post I’m sharing my thinking behind this change and our approach to pay overall.Location and SalariesIt’s been interesting to see the conversation about location and salaries unfold both within Buffer and beyond. We’ve heard from many teammates over the years about the pros and cons of the location factor, and of course we’ve watched with interest as this became a regular topic of conversation within the larger remote work community.I’ve had many healthy debates with other remote leaders, and there are arguments for eliminating a location component which I haven’t agreed with. I don’t believe pay differences across locations is unethical, and it has made a lot of sense for us in the past. However, the last few years have seen a lot of change for remote teams. A change like this isn’t to be made lightly, and at our scale comes with considerations.Our Compensation PhilosophyCompensation is always slowly evolving as companies and markets mature and change. We’ve been through several major iterations of our salary formula, and myriad small tweaks throughout the last 8 or so years since we launched the initial version. Part of the fun of having a salary formula is knowing that it’s never going to be “done.” Knowing that the iterations would continue, Caryn, our VP of Finance, and I worked together to establish our compensation philosophy and document our principles on compensation to help us determine what should always be true even as the salary formula changes over time.We arrived at four principles that guide our decisions around compensation. We strive for Buffer’s approach to salary, equity, and benefits to be: TransparentSimpleFairGenerous These are the tenets that have guided us through compensation decisions over the years. After we articulated them as our compensation principles, we were able to look at the location factor of our formula with new clarity. There are a few key considerations that were part of our discussions and my decision to put Buffer on a path towards removing our location factor from salaries that I’ll go into more detail about next. Transparency, Simplicity, and TrustOur salary formula is one of the fundamental reasons that we can share our salaries transparently. Having a spreadsheet of team salaries is a huge step toward transparency, but true transparency is reached when the formula is simple, straightforward, easy to understand, and importantly, easy to use.In one of our earlier versions of the salary formula, we calculated the cost-of-living multiplier for every new location when we made an offer. That was cumbersome, and it meant that a candidate couldn’t truly know their salary range until we calculated that. This was improved greatly when we moved to the concept of “cost-of-living bands.” After that, different cities and towns could more easily be classified into each band. This massively increased the transparency of the formula, and I think it helped create a lot more trust in this system. Anyone could relatively easily understand which band their location fit into, and with that knowledge understand the exact salary they’d receive at Buffer. This type of immediate understanding of the salary formula, and ability to run calculations yourself, is where transparency really gains an extra level of impact and drives trust within and beyond the team.However, with our four cost-of-living bands, there were still decisions to be made around where locations fall, and this has been the topic of much healthy and productive debate over the years. The conversations around locations falling between the Average and High bands is what led us to introduce the Intermediate band. And with four choices of location, it has meant there is some disparity in salaries across the team. With the benefits that come from the powerful combination of transparency and simplicity, alongside the increased trust that is fostered with more parity across the team, I’m choosing to drive Buffer’s salary formula in the direction of eventually having no cost-of-living factor.I’m choosing to drive Buffer’s salary formula in the direction of eventually having no cost-of-living factor. – Joel Gascoigne, Co-founder and CEO of BufferFreedom and FlexibilityWe’ve long taken approaches to work which have been grounded in the ideal of an increased level of freedom and flexibility as a team member. When I started Buffer, I wanted greater freedom and a better quality of life than I felt would be possible by working at a company. That came in various forms, including location freedom, flexibility of working hours, and financial freedom. And as we’ve built the company, I’ve been proud that we’ve built a culture where every single team member can experience an unusual and refreshing level of freedom and flexibility.Since the earliest days, one of our most fondly held values has been to Improve Consistently, and in particular this line: “We choose to be where we are the happiest and most productive”. This is a value that has supported and encouraged teammates to travel and try living in different cities, in search of that “happiest and most productive” place. It has enabled people to find work they love and great co-workers, from a hometown near family where it would be hard to find a local company that can offer that same experience and challenge. It has also enabled people to travel in order to support their partner in an important career change involving a move, something which allows an often stressful change to happen much more smoothly, since you can keep working at Buffer from anywhere in the world.Having a culture that has supported moving freely across the globe has been a powerful level of freedom and flexibility. That freedom has been matched with a salary system which adjusts compensation to accommodate those changes in a fair and appropriate way. However, knowing that your salary will fluctuate and can decrease due to a choice to be somewhere else, does limit that freedom and the ability to make a decision to move.Moving towards a salary formula with parity across all locations, will enable an even greater level of freedom and flexibility. It feels clear to me that choosing to move is a personal or a family decision, and it is ideal if Buffer salaries are structured in a way that honor and support that reality. I’m excited that working towards removing our cost-of-living differences will help significantly reduce the friction involved in making a potentially positively life-changing decision to live in a different city or country.Results, Independence, and RewardAt Buffer, we are not on the typical hyper-growth VC path. This comes with some constraints: we don’t have tens of millions in funding and unlimited capital to deploy in an attempt to find a rapid path to $100m and going public (thankfully, that’s not our goal).This path also means that our experiences as teammates in a variety of ways are directly tied to whether we are successfully serving existing and new customers. For example, the level of benefits, ability to travel (in normal times), and competitiveness of compensation, are very much driven by our revenue growth and profitability. But, this is independence too. The thing we often need to remind ourselves of, is that while we may feel more constrained at times, we have full freedom of what we do with the success we achieve. Making a choice like this is one example of that.It is my intention as founder / CEO that as we succeed together as a company, we all benefit from that success and see adjustments that improve our quality of life and create wealth. We are in a position of profitability which allows us to take a significant step towards removing the cost-of-living factor from our salary framework, which I believe serves those goals. And removing it entirely will be determined by us successfully executing on our strategy and serving customers well.Reducing Cost-of-Living BandsThe way our salary formula works is that we benchmark a teammate’s role based on market data at the 50th percentile for the software industry in San Francisco and then multiply that by the cost-of-living band. So, a Product Marketer benchmark at the 50th percentile of the San Francisco market data is $108,838. Depending on the teammate’s location this would be multiplied by a cost-of-living band (Low, Average, Intermediate or High). For example, if they lived Boulder, Colorado, a city with Average cost-of-living, the benchmark would be multiplied by 0.85 for a salary of $92,512.To best reflect our compensation philosophy, company values, and the path we want for Buffer, we have eliminated the Low and Average cost-of-living bands.What we’ve done is brought all Low (.75 multiplier) and Average (.85 multiplier) salaries up to Intermediate (.9 multiplier), which we now call our Global band. This is what resulted in 55 teammates seeing on average an increase to their salary of $10,265.Our two bands are now Global (.9 multiplier) and High (1.0 multiplier).This change is based on my vision for Buffer and how being a part of this team affects each of us as individually, as well as the direction I believe the world is going. I’m excited about the change first and foremost because it supports our goal of having a transparent, simple, fair, and generous approach to compensation.This is also a move that raised salaries right away for more than half of the team. This point in particular gives me a lot of joy because I want compensation to be one of the incredible parts of working at Buffer. Money isn’t everything, and we all need kind and smart colleagues, a psychologically safe environment, and to work on challenging and interesting problems, in order to be fulfilled at work. Beyond that, however, money really impacts life choices, and that’s ultimately what I want for every Bufferoo; the freedom to choose their own lifestyle and make choices for themselves and their families’ long-term health and happiness. It’s important to me that people who choose to spend their years at Buffer will have the freedom to make their own choices to have a great life. And, for our teammates who live in much lower cost-of-living areas, a Buffer salary could end up being truly life changing. I’m really happy with that outcome.The decision was also impacted by the direction that I believe the world is going (and, the direction we want to help it go). Remote is in full swing, and it’s increasingly breaking down geographical borders. I believe this is a great thing. Looking ahead 10 or even 5 years, it seems to me that we’re going to see a big rebalancing, or correction, that’s going to happen. I believe it’s important to be ahead of these types of shifts, and be proactively choosing the path that’s appropriate and energizing for us.What next?Our plan is to eventually get to one single location band, essentially eliminating the cost-of-living factor from the salary formula altogether. This will be possible once we can afford to make this change and sustain our commitment to profitability. So, this will be driven by the long-term results we create from our hard work, creativity in the market, and commitment to customers. What questions does this spark for you? Send me a tweet with your thoughts.

submitted by /u/notifyvisitors [link] [comments]