Reﬂection- Storytelling

Challenge Faced

I am a ﬁrst year Undergraduate Student, pursing my education in the United Kingdom.  Unfortunately, due to this Pandemic, I have been forced to return to Mumbai, India. To stay on my  toes and practically apply my Marketing Skills which I have developed during High School and  University, i decided to take up an internship at a Digital Marketing Firm, based out of Australia. I  ﬁnished this Module about a week ago, and this is also when I started work as an intern. The  company launched an Online Virtual Recruitment Service with the aim of increasing employee  retention rates across major companies in blue as well as white collar roles.      The Platform is a complex CRM system which helps companies standardise and monitor the  recruitment of these employees by bringing the entire pool of applicants in one place. I was asked  to evaluate the entire product, and provide a competition analysis as well. Instead, i was more  concerned about the entire Recruitment system, which in my opinion, was and is, broken. I  thought to myself, I have tried to apply for blue collar jobs multiple times, but the hiring process is  just not eﬃcient from an applicants point of view.

Selection and Application

It was clear to me that the USP for this product had to be completely out of the box. This also  meant looking at a larger question, but being speciﬁc in what was to be focused on. I used the  concept of Storytelling to present my thoughts to the boss. I told the entire team that the way to  increase employee retention is not just by providing a world-class CRM to the employer, but  rather, to make sure the applicant ﬁnds it easy and convenient to apply. I told them my own story.  About a month into college, I had overshot my monthly budget with almost 6 days left. I was in  trouble and required a job desperately. I applied on multiple job boards, websites and platforms.  But the problem with the recruitment system, is the lack of care employers have towards the time  and eﬀorts of the applicants. I did not receive a response from three-fourths of the companies I  applied to, even though I was promised a ‘call-back’ within a few days. Employers ghost  employees all the time, reducing the morale of applicants.       The team, to whom I was presenting, had a few junior members who agreed with me as they  had felt the wrath of this broken system as well. The Upper management soon realised that the  problem they were dealing with, was not one that was to be solved with state of the art tech  platforms alone, but rather, a revolutionary change in the employment system.

Insights and Approach

I was glad that this storytelling concept helped the upper management understand a real  problem that if solved, could serve as a real USP for the product. B2B marketing is a diﬀerent ball  game as compared to B2C marketing, many times we tend to look at the two as the same and try  to sell to other businesses as if they were consumers. But sometimes, we need to look at a  problem that is prevalent in the design of things. In this case, it was the design of a particular  process that had been the same for years and years and before a solution, it required the ‘What  is?’ question to be addressed and understood by the team. Going by the design thinking route,  following the ‘What if?’ stage, we were able to implement a few features like monitoring the time  that the employer takes to send the mandatory tests and forms to applicants as well as  automated emails which did not leave the candidate waiting forever. i would also like to use the  tool of visualisation in the future as it would compliment the storytelling tool. Visualising will allow  the communication process to be further enhanced and will allow the teams as well the  customers to understand what the concept is trying to convey.      I was able to apply what I learnt in the real business world and for me, as a 19 year old, it was  a game changing moment in the way I perceived human problems, and how Storytelling became  such an important tool in terms of not only B2B and B2C sales, but also in terms of  communicating and giving depth and structure, along with some emotion to an idea.

