


Once more I fell short at the final hurdle, narrowly missing out on fulfilling one of my lifelong ambitions and becoming a Dragon. Once more I made it to a final screentest as I sat alongside Deborah Meadon as we assessed whether we would invest in a prospective business. A couple of years ago the Dragon’s Den producers were looking for new Dragons and I found myself on the final shortlist. They deemed Martin & myself not investment worthy.īased on the latest BrewDog valuation the Dragon's missed out on by far the best deal in Den history.īut our Dragon’s Den story does not end quite there. In 2008 we applied to Dragon's Den & got as far as the final screen test and we pitched our hearts out before the producers rejected us. Some of you may be familiar with the ill-fated story of BrewDog and Dragon's Den. So, whilst adverts are great to cast the net wide and far, if you need specialist skills you need to use a specialist to help secure their interest! Increasing the chances of engaging them in your process exponentially. So, instead you could engage a specialist recruiter who already has a relationship with those 67 people, whose name and number is in their phone and they will likely take the call and listen to the pitch. If they are not actively looking the likelihood is they won't. You can inmail them on LinkedIn if you buy the credits. Instead you need to proactively contact those 67 people. Me: The reality is that if you are in a niche business area, need a qualified, specialist for the role and there is a geographical requirement unless you have 3 or 4 competitors locally then your chances of getting ad response is low.

Him: I had not considered this, I assumed there would be a lot of people for this role! You didn’t list salary so when they understand this, they could be qualified out. Your absolute best case scenario is 2 relevant, qualified applications!! Lets say 10% of those happened to be on LinkedIn and saw your advert. If 20% of the market is actively looking (this is high) you've got an active talent pool of 20 people. Let's say there are another 33 I don’t know so 100 in total. Me: In all I can quickly identify 67 qualified people who live within a commutable distance. Whilst he was doing this I inputted all the requirements in to Bullhorn and LinkedIn and pulled out 67 relevant candidates who met the requirements. He told me they advertised the role but had zero relevant people apply. He described what he was looking for and defined his 'must have' experience/skills and where they needed to based (Its not a major population centre) He's looking to hire a Chief Marketing Officer to help them gain traction in the market for what is a super cool, disruptive new therapy. Spoke to a CEO of fast growth Biotech this week.
