
Auditing the hiring system rather than blaming the market
The indicators worth tracking
What a candidate journey map is
What the funnel actually tells you once you draw it
How to analyse a funnel stage by stage
Attraction techniques borrowed from sales: FAB, AIDA, SPIN
Finding the bottleneck rather than optimising everything
Turning a one-way funnel into something self-reinforcing
Why copywriting decides the top of the funnel
Writing an advert that raises conversion rather than reach
Writing to people who are not looking
The role of emotion, and why people drop out before the interview
Building a conversation rather than a status update
Why feedback changes the outcome even when the answer is no
Analysing every phase of contact
Building persuasion into each of them
A strategy for low-paying roles
A strategy for genuinely difficult ones
A strategy when nobody has heard of the company
Handling public negativity, and what to do when the people do not exist
The power of a personal brand in outreach
How many messages before you stop, and which ones to send
Automating writing and tracking sequences
Writing in messengers, and handling a flat refusal you cannot accept
Managing the marketing side of hiring as a function
Launching a career site
Gamification in attraction
Building a talent community, with the Wargaming case
Internal platforms and channels
Building an employee referral programme
Applicant tracking systems and what they change
Chatbots, and the Google case
Email as a channel rather than a notification
Content and video marketing aimed at an audience you want to hire
SEO for a career site
Writing text and choosing images, with the iDeals case
Google Ads for a hiring campaign
Google Analytics, and what to actually look at
Remarketing and its formats
Launching a first campaign, with cases
Paid advertising across social platforms
What works on each of the major networks
Video platforms as a hiring channel
Setting up company pages properly, with cases
The analytics behind this kind of marketing
Cost of attraction, and time to fill
Source quality, not just source volume
Building the report that keeps the budget
Setting up properly, and why the profile decides your reach
Why a strong profile matters for the person doing the searching too
Choosing the photo
Recognising fake profiles, and what they exist for
Growing a network deliberately
Groups, and adding the people who viewed you
What to post so the right people see you
Adding contacts properly, and writing the first message
The standard set of search operators
The limitations of platform search
Working around those limits
Typical queries, and searching by current company and title
Finding former employees of a specific company
Searching by language, certification and group membership
Finding people open to moving, and people recently started
Searching by uploaded content
What a paid account changes
Using a custom search engine to go around the platform
Tools for finding contact details
Tools for outreach campaigns
Verification tools, and extraction tools
Query generators and writing aids
Why automate this part at all
What tools exist and what each class does
What scraping, parsing and outreach actually mean
The difference between automating the process and automating the search
Which problems these tools solve
An overview of what is available
What you gain, and where the limits are
Which problems these solve
An overview of the market
Standalone tools against tools built into a platform
What they are and where to get them
How they work
How to use them day to day
An overview of the platforms
Their functions and what they actually cover
Choosing between them
What exists for technical skills
What exists for behavioural assessment
Talent and personality-type tools, and what they are worth
The stages of a sale, and AIDA and SPIN inside them
Understanding motive rather than stated requirement
FAB, and building a value proposition
Building trust, mirroring, and working with references
The acquisition channels, online and offline
Building an audience persona
Cold outreach: BANT, and the five-touch method
Social selling, targeted advertising and the elevator pitch
The ladder of persuasion
Active listening and open questions
Presenting through story rather than specification
Objections via LAER and Feel-Felt-Found, and two ways to close
Planning a day built around outreach
Goals and how progress is monitored
Prioritisation and time blocking
Automating the process, and avoiding burnout in a role built on rejection
The current technology in this space
What a customer system is for and how it is used
Automation and analysis inside it
Cases, and where the trends point
The indicators: acquisition cost, lifetime value, conversion
Funnel analysis
Building an improvement plan on the analysis
Collecting feedback and using it
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
A hiring funnel is a sales funnel where the product is a job and the buyer is someone who already has one. Most companies run it as if demand were guaranteed.
What that looks like in practice
An advert goes up, describing the role from the company's point of view. Applications arrive from people who were already looking. The ones you actually want never see it, because nobody was marketing to them. And when the role does not fill, the conclusion is that the market is tight — not that the entire top of the funnel consisted of one job posting. I have run hiring like that, and the fix was not working harder on interviews. It was accepting that attracting people is a marketing problem with marketing methods.
What this course actually covers
Six blocks. First, the funnel itself: auditing it, finding where it leaks, writing copy that converts, and handling roles nobody responds to. Second, the marketing infrastructure — career site, referral programme, talent community, email and content, SEO, paid advertising, analytics and five social platforms. Third, active search: profile setup, network growth, Boolean and X-ray search, and searching by group, certification or willingness to relocate. Fourth, automation: scraping, parsing, outreach sequences, bookmarklets, platforms and assessment tools. Fifth, the persuasion craft — AIDA, SPIN, FAB, BANT, objection handling with LAER and Feel-Felt-Found, and closing. Sixth, ten lessons of analytics: segmentation, lifetime value, funnel and journey analysis, correlation, regression, forecasting and experiments with a control group.
A note on scope and on tools
This is marketing pointed at candidates rather than customers, and the title says so on purpose. Three of the six blocks — advertising, selling and analytics — are method-neutral and transfer directly to any audience. One caution: the automation block is a tools overview, and tools in this space change fast. Treat the specific names as examples of a category and check what is current when you get there.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike Pritula. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, including the entire attraction side, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 40 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the funnel audit, the journey map, search operators and X-ray queries, outreach sequences, AIDA, SPIN, FAB, BANT, regression and experiment design
Real cases including Wargaming, Google and iDeals
Where to start
Take your hardest open role and work out how many of the people you actually want ever saw the advert. If the honest answer is close to none, the first two blocks of this course are the whole fix. Enrol now and start today.