When you first heard about The Great Resignation, what did you picture?

Was it an army of white-collar workers hurling their monitors out the window, tearing up contracts and trashing their swivel chairs?

Because the reality is a little less cinematic. People are burned out, miserable, and racking up more hours than ever before . For many, resigning was their last resort.

The Great Resignation concept gets some things right, and many things wrong. Workers are quitting in high numbers, but they’re not all leaving their jobs for the same reason.

Healthcare workers are burned out; exhausted by long hours and limited resources amid the ongoing pandemic. Knowledge workers are sick of spying bosses and shitty progression paths — they’re looking for better opportunities elsewhere.

Both situations suck, but they’re hardly comparable. Is a nurse experiencing the same Great Resignation as a marketing exec at a startup ?

Over the course of the pandemic, many of us have restructured our lives, taking advantage of remote working to spend more time with our families, or on our side hustles.

White-collar workers got a taste of what it’s like to be a remote worker. And businesses discovered that work could continue outside the office, something the digital nomads have known for years.

With the perks, came the pitfalls. The toxicity that silently pervaded the office resurfaced remotely. Bosses installed mouse trackers while they lamented the old days of presenteeism. Trust between employers and employees reached an all time low .

So, with worker protections eroded, trust decimated, stagnating wages, and the fear of catching covid ever-present in the workplace, is it really that surprising that people left their jobs?

If The Great Resignation highlighted one thing, it’s this: there’s an overwhelming gap between what employers provide, and what individuals need from work. And bosses need to rethink not just their hiring practices, but their entire company culture to accommodate the transition.

We spoke with two recent cohorts of Techleap’s Rise Programme for fast-growing scaleups to find out more. As experts in the HRTech-recruitment space, they’ve seen the pitfalls and best practices when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent during these uncertain times.

Respect the shift

There are certain benefits workers will want to hold onto post-covid, like flexible hours and remote working. Other parts, like cramming a monitor into their box-sized home office and working 25% longer each week, need to stop.

To close The Great Resignation gap, employers have to respect how work has transformed in the eyes of their teams.

Niels Arntz, cofounder of gig platform Temper , which connects independent workers to shifts in their area, has seen firsthand how both colleagues at HQ and platform users are engaging with the new world of work.

“The years dominated by the pandemic have stimulated awareness,” Niels told me. “People are realizing it’s actually quite nice to have freedom and flexibility during the work week. People had the chance to explore meaningful questions too, like: Is my work important? Does my manager trust me?”

According to a report by McKinsey, 52% of workers want flexible working options post-pandemic. Before the pandemic, only 30% of workers did.

If you want to attract and retain people, you can’t throw down an Uno reverse card and demand that people work the way that they did before. There’s no going back, baby.

Talk to your staff about the parts of pandemic working that work, and the stuff they don’t like so much. Then build your policies and benefits package based on their ideas.

What’s more, you might not even need to hire anyone at all. There are plenty of experienced freelancers (or FreeFlexers, as the Temper team calls them) out there to help you plug the gaps in your team. A roster of reliable independent workers might even be preferential — you won’t need to add anyone to payroll, just pull in a contractor when you need an extra pair of hands.

Capitalize on ‘raw’ talent

Do you really need a world-leading software designer, or is that your ego speaking? Companies struggling to hire would do well to capitalize on raw talent. Instead of pitching for the people everyone else fights for, seek out skilled recruits from parallel industries.

Otto Verhage is chief of operations at TestGorilla, a pre-employment testing platform that champions candidate experience. He sees first-hand how employers unintentionally create obstacles for great candidates.

“Businesses tend to hire purely based on experience. Employers should look to identify talent where others don’t. They’ll have a better chance of finding someone because there’s less competition.”

The strategy is tried and tested (pun intended) at TestGorilla . Otto mentions that employees don’t need industry experience to secure a role at the company.

“We let everyone apply to our jobs, irrespective of their background. Our skill assessments identify promising candidates that we may not consider if we just use CVs. They open our eyes to diverse candidates.”

Niels also emphasises the benefits of a skills-oriented approach. “When I picture the future of work, I imagine a labor market that’s accessible to everyone. Covid has shown us the importance of flexibility. Let’s embrace it, and empower more people with opportunities.”

In which case, maybe it’s time to stop requesting 10 years of experience for a junior developer role. Be real, pal.

Make every day a learning day

In the UK, 43% of adults jumped on the lockdown learning bandwagon . People are continually seeking out opportunities to test their squiggly little skull organ. Employers that are proactive will get one step ahead of the game and start providing these options themselves.

And when businesses deliver on L&D, they can hire less experienced folks and make them brilliant. People are clearly willing to learn. You just need to give them the opportunity.

According to Otto, “when employers seek candidates outside of their usual scope, they have a better chance of hiring someone. But if you want to turn a maths teacher into a data scientist, there’s quite a lot you’ll need to teach them.”

Businesses that make learning and development an integral part of their offering can also boost retention. According to Gallup’s American Upskilling study, 61% of US workers consider upskilling opportunities as an important reason to stay at their job .

If you’re using a platform like Temper to find experienced independent workers, make sure you’re also including them into the learning opportunities you provide for full-timers.

Although they’re growing in number, freelance and flex workers often get forgotten when it comes to company perks, so it makes a huge difference when employers are willing to provide that for them. But keeping these workers engaged and taking the time to train them in how your business operates can ensure you have a skilled pool of temporary workers to call on when needed.

According to Otto, “The speed of technological development and labor market shifts mean people have to learn all the time. The pandemic created the urgency to keep learning to stay relevant.”

Take it back to basic (needs)

In a sea of employee stocks, stationary stipends, and flexible Fridays, basic employee needs get lost.

Sometimes you just want to hear “great presentation!” or “well done for figuring out how to remove the potato filter!” A little bit of praise goes a long way.

Otto identified this with one of TestGorilla’s pre-employment tools. The platform provides candidates and businesses with a motivation test that assesses if the job matches what the candidate is looking for. They also have a separate test to assess culture add which measures value alignment.

“We know for a fact there’s a list of about 10 job characteristics that are incredibly important to candidates. Things like: Do I have enough autonomy in my job? Do I get enough recognition? Can I work on something end to end? Those things are super important.”

Until employers can meet those basic human needs, they probably shouldn’t aim for the bells and whistles anyway. It’s time to get real about what you want and need from candidates.

While you’re at it, don’t fish from the same talent pool as everyone else. Don’t write off raw talent if they have transferable skills. And for crying out loud — do not list Zoom socials as a perk of the job.

7 lead generation lessons we learned by creating a Facebook quiz

Did you know we have an online event about digital marketing coming up? Join the Re:Brand track at TNW2020 to explore the latest brand marketing tech, trends, and challenges. Alex Antolino, the Creative Director at Typeform, will be sharing powerful branding insights and actionable strategies on how to build meaningful brands that lead to business growth.

“Dogfooding.” What’s that all about?

The first time I heard that term was last year when we, the Marketing team, were planning for the quarter. We had a company goal of promoting lead generation through quizzes, a popular use of our product. So to better understand the opportunities and pains of other marketers, we decided to go through the process ourselves. Hence, eating our own dog food.

So we created a quiz on marketing trends in 2020. You can give it a go here:

The lead gen part comes in at the end. The last question asks you to leave your email address if “you’re interested in receiving more quizzes and interactive content.”

After testing it on some colleagues and fellow marketers, we let it out into the world. We promoted the quiz through a Facebook campaign targeting four specific audiences:

People with marketing-related  job titles. Built with Facebooks’s job titles targeting option.

People with marketing-related interests . Things like email marketing, social media marketing, marketing automation, etc.

People interested in marketing-specific brands . Companies like HubSpot, MailChimp, and so on.

A lookalike audience . Facebook finds users who are similar to your existing customers.

Here’s what we learned after running the campaign for three weeks.

1. Ask (for emails) and you shall receive

You know when you go to a party with zero expectations, and those nights turn out to be the best of your life? This kind of happened to us.

We made leaving an email address optional, because hey—we know how annoying it is to take a quiz, only to find out you have to leave personal info to get your results. Since the offer was quite vague—“receive more quizzes and interactive content”—we only expected a 5% response rate.

Boy, were we wrong. Out of the 2,851 users who submitted the quiz, 15% left us their email address. And all we did was ask. Now imagine what might happen if you top our proposition with a stronger offer—like a coupon, free consultation, or really good free content. Could you be looking at a submission rate of 30-40%?

Takeaway: Expose people to a fun and engaging interactive experience, and you’ll spark their interest. They might not be ready to sign up today, but they’ll remember you.

2. Make your quiz easy and beautiful—on all devices

You’re standing in the subway, checking your Facebook newsfeed and you see the perfect distraction: ‘Oh, great, a quiz! I’m going to check it out.’  You open it up only to find a big block of text filling the entire screen. Big turnoff right? I mean, would you be motivated enough to go through 10 of those novel-like questions? Exactly.

Confession: We made the same mistake with our initial version, and shortening our questions definitely helped.

So remember that not all quizzes are created the same. Just putting a quiz out there isn’t the same as offering engaging, interactive content. To be engaging:

Keep the text concise and clear. And make sure it’s in line with your brand’s voice and tone.

Use visuals, like images, photos, illustrations, or GIFs .

Test it on different device views (desktop, mobile, tablet) to make sure everything displays correctly.

Get feedback from friends, family, and colleagues. Pay attention to their reactions. Do they look confused on certain questions? Use those reactions to improve your quiz.

Takeaway: Put yourself in your respondent’s shoes. Question length, tone, humor, format, style, visuals—it all adds up to the end user’s experience. That’s what will entice them to leave their info. And that’s what they’ll remember about you.

3. Ad engagement ≠ conversions

Out of the four audiences mentioned above, the “lookalike” engaged the most with our ads—the highest click through rate and lowest cost per click.

The “marketing job titles” audience were most likely to complete the quiz, with 19% who started the quiz getting to the end. The other audiences had a click-to-quiz-submission ratio of 12%.

Why is that? Of course you can never tell for sure, but chances are high it has to do with this job-title audience being hyper-targeted. Despite its small size (150K), we knew that nearly all of these people actually worked in marketing. I say “nearly all” of these people because Facebook profiles are never 100% accurate.

The lookalike audience was much bigger (3M), so naturally there were many relevant people in that group—people working in sales, product, or other related areas. Relevant enough to be curious and start the quiz, or even leave a comment, but not relevant enough to actually complete the quiz and get their results.

Takeaway: Don’t rely on the Facebook engagement metrics to identify your most successful audience. Instead focus on downstream metrics that really matter to your business.

4. Quiz completion doesn’t mean they’re ready to sign up

Ever been on a first date so great that you blurted out “of course I’ll marry you!”? I’m guessing that one didn’t turn out so well.

Basically, your leads are like your dates. You need to give them time. Don’t try to push them for something they’re not ready for yet.

When we launched this marketing quiz, we asked respondents the following question after completion: “What do you want to do next?” And we gave them two options:

‘Play more quizzes’ or

‘Create a free Typeform account’

Guess what happened? 92% of the first 515 quiz-takers said they’d prefer to “get to know us” better before signing on the dotted line. After seeing the results, we removed the sign-up option altogether.

Takeaway: Take it slow, even when you see indicators of high interest. Resist pushing people down the funnel, or you might ruin your chance of establishing a real relationship and a positive association with your brand.

How is your brand doing? Find our nearly everything you need to know about brand awareness here .

5. Test ad copy to set the right expectations

Have you ever clicked an ad for one thing, only to be whisked away to a landing page containing something completely different? Not an experience you want to leave with people.

To make sure we got it right, we opted for dynamic ads , meaning that Facebook optimizes your spend by pushing the best performing ad combinations. In our testing, we realized the ad that performed the best was the one with clear communication about what the user should expect at the end of the quiz.

In our case, it was a definitive answer to whether or not the respondent was an early adopter vs. late majority, or something else. On average, this ad had a 80% higher CTR and a 40% lower CPC than our other more vague ads.

Curiously, we saw similar results with the headline that contained the word “quiz” and the headline that didn’t.

Takeaway: Make it clear that you’re offering a quiz. Including the word ‘quiz’ in the headline will catch people’s attention and spark curiosity. And be upfront about what people should expect in the quiz results.

6. No lead nurturing flow? Not a problem.

Unless you work in a multi-million-dollar company with a large marketing team, you’ve probably experienced a lack of resources, or colleagues busy with other priorities. We’ve been there too.

After collecting new leads with the quiz, we wanted to connect with them as soon as possible. But our email team was slammed, so the nurturing journey we planned to create just wasn’t possible.

So we took matters into our own hands and built our own experimental lead nurturing flow, consisting of a series of three emails. This way the email team just needed to hop in at the end to connect the distribution list in our email platform. Here’s how it turned out:

Was it the best lead nurturing flow the world has ever seen? Not exactly. But hey, the emails all had an open rate between 15% and 20%, which is good considering the audience wasn’t subscribed to our product yet.

By creating the email journey ourselves, we didn’t have to postpone our campaign or risk missing our quarterly objectives. More importantly, we kept the promise we made at the end of the quiz: to deliver more quizzes and interactive content to those who are interested.

The best part of all this? We were free to experiment with the content we shared! We sent our leads additional quizzes along with a few of our top marketing-related content pieces, plus a selection of typeform templates . We also used our new product, VideoAsk , to introduce our product and show different ways that typeforms are used.

Takeaway: Be nimble and don’t let a lack of resources slow you down. You’ll get your project out of the door faster, and you might get to try on some new hats—like being an email marketer or a social media strategist for a day.

7. Research all the leads you can, even if it’s tedious work

When respondents submit a personal email address, it may limit your breadth of knowledge about the respondent. But with a work email address you can learn a lot about someone.

For the marketer pros out there, you know this can be tedious and the best way to get more from your data is to automate with specific tools. Don’t have access to special enrichment tools, or have lots of leads from smaller companies? Then you’ll have to bite the bullet and do the research manually, with the help of your good old friends: Google and LinkedIn.

Is it fun? No. At least not for me. (Reminded me of my summer holidays in Kazakhstan, where my aunt would give me and my cousins a bucket of currants each, and we had to separate the stems from the currants so she could prepare currant jam.)

Yes, it’s manual, repetitive, and time-consuming. But the reward is worth it.

We, for instance, found out that from the 100 business emails we collected, 15 were part of a company who’s already our customer, and 40 were part of a company who has been our customer at some point. We also learned 82% of our leads corresponded to our ideal customer profile criteria. Nice.

Takeaway: Learning more about your leads isn’t always straightforward—especially if they have one of those anonymous  job titles that tell you absolutely nothing about what department they work in. But if you go through this hassle, you’ll be rewarded with juicy actionable insights.

Now it’s your turn. Pick a topic that your target audience will find interesting, create an engaging quiz , and test it on some guinea pigs. Then set it live, and follow up with relevant content. Happy lead-generating!

Public plea to AWS: Give free credits to startups around the world

I’m writing this public plea to ask AWS CEO Andy Jassy to extend additional credits to startup and scale-up customers at this critical time, even those who have received them in the past.

And why should AWS give out free credit? It’s simple, because everyone will win.

Like many, my business was fortunate to receive credits from AWS. Functioning much like cash, these credits are commonly awarded to companies in their infancy, applied to AWS business accounts as a bonus, offsettable against Amazon products and services consumed.

This March, Amazon announced they were committing $20 million worth of credits to companies and teams working on a response to COVID-19, an initiative I of course applaud and support.

However many startups and scale-ups are fighting for their survival too and I believe Amazon is uniquely placed to make a dramatic impact on the global tech community with one swift, easy to implement gesture. And others agree.

I corralled over 200 founders of startups and scale-ups in Europe, North America and India within 24 hours, all AWS customers, to join me in asking Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon’s AWS, for his help. I also created a petition in case you’d like to lend your support too.

Here’s why it’s a win:win for us all.

1. Demonstrate serious commitment to startups

Giving out AWS credit is a quick, easy, and impactful way Amazon can show its customers across the world how important our business is to them.

2. Relieve our cash flows

Many companies need urgent support and suppliers are extending any hand they can to aid cash preservation, runway extension, and for many, survival. Credits will immediately provide some welcome relief to our cash flows.

3. Our survival is critical to AWS’s business

There’s a symbiotic relationship between AWS and its customers. Survival of the startup ecosystem is critical not just to global economic recovery but to Amazon too. In helping its startup and scale-up customers survive, Amazon thereby ensure customers continue to need to consume their services.

4. Win loyalty, market share, and new customers

AWS’s business already has millions of customers but this is a once in a lifetime opportunity to cement customer loyalty and potentially increase market share.

Generously offering additional credits will resonate not only with existing customers and build unprecedented brand loyalty but will also demonstrate to companies thinking of moving providers, that AWS is the supplier of choice.

There are thousands of founders across the globe conceiving tomorrow’s startups, contemplating whose services and products to consume. What better advert and what more compelling reason can AWS offer a potential customer than this show of support? And what more authentic reason could AWS give existing customers to stay loyal than by supporting them now?

5. It’s quick and easy

Amazon has all our information. They know what we spend on an ongoing basis. The USA’s COVID financial subsidies such as the Payroll Protection Program and Economic Disaster Loans under the Cares Act, the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme in the UK and Government backed initiatives all over the world require huge amounts of information to be submitted and validated. AWS has all the data on startups they need at hand.

I am asking AWS to offer us all additional credits based on the last 12 month’s spend. Help us … based on how much business we do with you.

Reward your loyal customers. Offering us all, say, the equivalent of one quarter’s standard usage based on the last 12 months of consumption would be a spectacular way you can help us through this difficult time.

Founders and CTOs, please help demonstrate that this initiative is vital to you too by joining hundreds of others and signing my letter to Andy here on changerg .

And Andy if you’re reading this, I know you need to secure your own business, have many demands on your time and are already helping COVID initiatives – but we the startup and scale-up community need your help too.