Tech Sales Recruiting Campaign


Developing persona-driven messaging and enabling senior leaders for impact

The challenge:
Our tech sales team faced an urgent need to recruit solution architects and a newly established role - Managed OpenShift Black Belts. The latter role was highly niche, requiring a global team to be built rapidly to support a critical business strategy.

The approach:
I built strong relationships with senior stakeholders to understand their challenges, advocate for the project, and align on a phased approach to talent attraction for these roles. By interviewing 180 associates in the tech sales team, I developed a detailed marketing persona to identify what they value in a job, their online behaviors, and their reasons for choosing Red Hat. This directly informed key messaging and focused channel investments, particularly when combined with insights from LinkedIn Talent Insights, market research and our historical hiring data.

A highlight of the project for me was actually learning basic Python! With so much feedback from the 180 interview participants, I needed a way to extract insights from the open-text responses quickly and accurately. I used the spaCy package and several online tutorials to derive top-level themes from the text using NLP, which we then drilled down into for further insight. This approach not only streamlined the analysis but also became a technique I continue to use in my role today.

In terms of marketing assets, I collaborated with MediaNerd on a global remote video shoot, developed associate interviews for the Life at Red Hat blog, ghostwrote an article for our VP of Tech Sales, and personally designed static social icons myself to support the campaign using the Adobe suite. Additionally, I proposed a paid media budget and strategy to the tech sales leadership, including traditional and nontraditional channels to maximize reach, and we built a landing page and drip campaign in our CRM. 

To enable the tech sales team, I built a comprehensive social hiring toolkit containing social assets, copy, key messages, and personal branding advice. I trained the team to use the toolkit effectively, ensuring consistency in messaging and empowering them to amplify the campaign.

Finally, in partnership with senior TA and Tech Sales leadership, we trained the entire Talent Acquisition team on each type of technical sales role, the key messages to use when talking to prospects about that role, and the assets avaialble to them to help with outreach. 





The outcomes:
  • We did not end up needing the paid media budget due to a combination of hiring reprioritization, internal hiring, and effective organic promotion for the roles.
  • The social hiring toolkit remains in active use, supporting recruiter outreach and personal branding among senior leaders and tech sales associates.
  • Senior leaders updated their LinkedIn profiles to align with key hiring messages, which has helped enhance the team's digital presence.
  • The toolkit's materials were leveraged organically across social channels and recruiter outreach, improving the consistency and reach of messaging.
  • Recruiters and hiring teams reported improved engagement with talent due to the persona-driven messaging and content.
  • The project created a replicable framework for future hiring campaigns, including an AI-focused campaign we are working on.
  • I gained an interest in coding!

Further reading and campaign resources: