Ronan Mooney built the recruitment team behind one of the world’s largest tech conferences, and he’s here to share how pitching a company is a lot like promoting events for over 100,000 annual attendees.

Web Summit is an organization of more than 200 individuals focused on disrupting the conference industry with technology and data science, running a series of international gatherings across the world, with the flagship annual event held in Lisbon, Portugal. Assembling the workforce to power a global enterprise isn’t accomplished in a day, but for Ronan Mooney, Chief of Staff & Head of HR at Web Summit, this mammoth endeavor took under a year.

Mooney joined WS in spring of 2017, and since then he’s doubled the company’s headcount, hiring extensively for remote positions across the globe, helping Web Summit open offices in Lisbon, Hong Kong, and Toronto. But what goes into organizing tech conferences that attract Fortune 500 companies as well as the most innovative startups? We sat with Ronan Mooney to discuss how to pitch your company to candidates, the current state of recruiter marketing, and what motivates top-quality talent in today’s job market.

How do you pitch Web Summit to a global audience?

We don’t run our business like an events company. We run it like a tech company using a data-driven approach to make informed decisions, building our own technology to plan and execute events. When recruiting, we tell candidates about the challenges we face and how we’d like them to help provide the solutions.

What were some of the challenges in organizing Web Summit?

We are only ever as good as our last event. We have gone from running one event in Dublin to running four events around the world in fewer than five years. The 100,000 attendees we have come to our events because of the high quality we provide, and managing this is a constant moving dial, as new challenges evolve alongside amazing opportunities. We continue improving our planning and execution processes to our highest standards.

What advice can you give to other organizations when pitching their company?

Don’t ‘sell’ your company or role to prospective candidates. If you do, stop. Candidates have never been more informed about what our businesses are like to work in thanks to the internet, so set expectations and be transparent.

Run your TA strategy like you’re in a startup, by keeping a critical eye on your hiring rates and your salary levels. Make the hard choices on what your hiring focus is and how it impacts on your hiring plan. Focus on the consistent traits and values every hire should share, and get the buy-in from your internal stakeholders (not just the hiring managers) on the sourcing, screening, and closing process.

What is true today about pitching a company/event that wasn’t true a few years ago?


Talent has never had more choice on where and how they work. Companies don’t just compete to attract talent, but countries and even cities are factors as well. This is driving up the costs of talent acquisition, and requires employers to think beyond just increasing salaries and looking to areas such as career pathing, internal mobility, and work/life balance.

When pitching an event, attendees want to know that they will hear quality content, real thought leadership, real debate; that they will make meaningful connections. That’s the similarity between our events and our hiring strategy—we want to make a real connection based on shared views and interests with our candidate, to understand their views delivering quality and innovation.

How has recruiter marketing changed during your career?

People are finding jobs using their phones—uploading their CV to Indeed or signaling they are open to new opportunities on LinkedIn, and cherry-picking top opportunities. It has made candidates reactive rather than proactive in their search and we have to be smarter in how we market our roles to them, whether that’s in the job titles we use or where we choose to invest our marketing budgets.

The ‘passive candidate’ is a myth—all of us are on a spectrum of being actively open to new opportunities. There is zero evidence to support the idea that any of us are loyal to our employers to the point that we would not be open to a conversation with another company.

This fact should hearten and terrify us.

The candidate experience is traditionally split into pre and post application, but does that really makes sense for how TA leaders work in the real world?

Today, there are tech solutions to enable every workflow under the sun, and most likely not just one – many! Want to track vacation days, plan work trips, onboard new employees, or even organize a gift exchange? There’s an app for that. In fact, the Human Capital Management market as a whole was valued at 14.50 billion last year, and it’s projected to grow by nearly 30 percent by 2022 to $21.51 billion.

This is great news in terms of innovation, but for talent acquisition leaders already trying to stretch 24 hours into 25, it means a deluge of SaaS decisions. That’s why we are answering one of the most pressing questions – ‘When do I go with a blanket solution and when do I specialize?’ and applying it to candidate relationship management (CRM).

CRM has become an imperative consideration in the current climate of talent scarcity. Unemployment in the US is at a 17-year low of 3.9 percent in May of this year, there is a predicted worker shortage of 8.2 million people from 2017-2027, with an increasing number of employers already reporting a lack of qualified candidates across multiple industries. Organizations with their sights set on growth will need to distinguish themselves as A+ employers at every point of contact.

Think of CRM as “keeping in touch at scale”. One of the top candidate complaints in the hiring process is a lack of communication, which is where CRM solutions step in. Without getting too technical, CRM helps nurture potential candidates, including passive ones, so that an organization has ready access to top-talent ahead of demand. That means resurfacing formerly rejected candidates as well as finding new connections. With the right system in place, recruiters become recruitment marketers thanks to features like branded landing pages, targeted email campaigns, messaging templates, and custom reporting and analytics.

Learn the difference between ATS and CRM here!

Back to our original question: when it comes to CRM, is it better to bundle your CRM with an ATS for an all-in-one solution,  or to specialize with a third-party CRM?

The argument in favor of native CRM solutions is rooted in data quality and ease of use while specialization makes sense if the solution will significantly increase the quality of experience and work produced.

The deciding factor between native and non-native CRM is whether the candidate journey should be split up into pre and post application or not. Which makes for a better experience?

A non-native CRM breaks the candidate flow into two distinct parts— pre-application and post-application while the non-native CRM covers the pre-application phase through a nurturing system. Once the candidate has applied, their data is transferred to the ATS and funneled through the recruiting process.

This workflow would make sense if the candidate journey was linear. Unfortunately, that typically isn’t the case. Let’s say a sourcer nurtures a candidate in the CRM, processes them through the ATS, but doesn’t make the candidate an offer. Does the relationship end there? It shouldn’t. At this point, the candidate’s information must be transferred back to the third-party CRM.

Anytime there is more than one software solution as part of a recruiting workflow there must be an exchange of data, which can lead to data duplication or misplacement. This effort is worthwhile if you are siloing distinct workflows while providing a better candidate experience, but in this case, the cost outweighs the benefits.

In a general context, when and where a company decides to split the systems has to reflect the workflow or the candidate journey. This is where non-native CRM becomes problematic. The reality is that separating the nurturing process from the application process is a huge headache for recruiters and sourcers, not to mention for candidates as well.

Larger companies may have sourcers working with a CRM and recruiters/hiring managers working with an  ATS, which means sourcers may not know what has happened with candidates that pass into the ATS, causing them to neglect rejected applicants when the demand for future hires arises. For smaller companies, sourcers and recruiters are required to constantly toggle between systems,  and be unable to provide a consistent flow for the candidates as they move through the hiring process.

With native CRM is fully integrated with the applicant tracking system so there is one data flow. That means candidates have a universal profile as they move through the candidate lifecycle, which makes for consistent, updated candidate data for all parties. In addition, sourcers and recruiters can use the marketing tools of the CRM like branded landing pages in the latter half of the hiring process, for great brand consistency.

For recruiters, a quality CRM solution balances effective functionality with strong design that delivers impactful communication and consistent employer branding. While there are multiple third-party CRM solutions available on the market, a native CRM offers seamless integration with your existing workflows that doesn’t compromise candidate experience.

Learn more about SmartCRM with our VP of Product, Rebecca Carr.

Quality candidates know what they want from employers, and companies who don’t define and market their value risk losing them to competitors.

It’s no secret that top-quality candidates are more savvy than ever before, and with the majority being passive candidates, companies are realizing the value in communicating through advertising and targeted social media campaigns to vocalize why candidates want to work there. This has led many companies to reevaluate the criteria that attracts quality talent to the workplace. Spoiler: it’s more than just a great paycheck.

Today’s job candidates stress the importance of company culture, social initiative, and work-life balance more than previous generations, motivating companies to double-down on their candidate-facing strategies, namely their Employer Branding and Employee Value Proposition (EVP). Where Employer Branding speaks to the company’s reputation as an employer, the function of an EVP is to make a company or role more attractive, unique, and meaningful to candidates. Both concepts revolve around the qualities that make a company a great place to work, as well as the benefits, career growth opportunities, work-life balance, and company culture that attract top talent.

The Basic Elements of a Strong EVP

How can companies demonstrate their value as employers? Candidates who are open to new opportunities want to see the measurable value of another company, and according to the Corporate Executive Board Company, the criteria candidates find most important are:

Rewards: Salary, benefits, and vacation

Work: Job-interest alignment and work-life balance

Organization: Market position, product/service quality, and social responsibility

Opportunity: Career growth opportunities, development and training opportunities, and organization growth rate

People: Company culture, Manager and coworker quality, senior leadership reputation, and camaraderie

Employee Value Propositions are particularly important in today’s job market, as a majority of candidates heavily evaluate companies before they even consider applying for open positions. Knowing what makes a strong EVP and why it matters in recruiter marketing tactics such as job advertising is crucial to attracting and hiring great employees.

It might be tempting for organizations to list off job features and perks, slap an EVP sticker on it and call it done, but a truly successful value proposition tells candidates what an organization stands for, and the reasons employees are motivated to work there. But defining these criteria are only useful if they can be communicated to candidates through intelligent marketing efforts.

Job Advertising Gets the Message to the Right Place and the Right Time
Recruiter marketing campaigns are designed to attract candidates before they even apply, and methods like paid media advertising are ideal for appealing to passive job seekers. Candidates value transparency, so showing a look at what a day in the life of that particular role looks like is one of the easiest ways to highlight the work experience.

Job ads are many candidates’ first impression of a company, making them an ideal opportunity to communicate an organization’s EVP. While it’s all too common that companies copy-paste the same, boring job descriptions, including an accurate and compelling Employee Value Proposition can make a job ad stand out, and is far more likely to attract candidates than a template.

Alternatively, an increasing number of companies are turning to video. According to Hubspot, over half of all marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI, with one digital marketing expert claiming that one minute of video equals 1.8 million words. Video content typically holds viewer attention longer than text alone, and with social video generating 1200% more shares than text and images combined, companies need no other excuse to tap into the internet’s preferred medium of consumption.

When EVPs Fail to Attract

Even with the most airtight marketing strategies, a poorly-constructed employee value proposition can break the hiring process. Some of the ways EVPs fall short are when they don’t differentiate from competitors, the wrong attributes, or fail to deliver on their promise to employees. Before prominently featuring a company’s Employee Value Proposition in recruiter marketing efforts, it’s imperative that companies spend time researching, designing, and implementing an EVP that accurately represents the company’s value to employees.

Research, Design, Implement, Hire

Modern recruiting strategies have adapted to pace the changes in today’s job market, and with the rise of social recruiting, larger skill gaps among tech workers, and unemployment at a record low, companies require new strategies. Additionally, candidates have resources like Glassdoor to find out what employees think of an organization. Successful companies know what candidates care about, build a culture around it, and publicize it. Defining an authentic EVP is an important step to bringing that talent to the company’s doorstep; knowing how to sell it to candidates ensures that they choose your company over a competitor.