Remove Candidates from Marketo

[Anonymous]

We have our Marketo instance synced with Salesforce, which is used not only by our sales team, but also by recruiting. As a result, We have over 50k candidates in Marketo, who we can't market so since they have never opted in. Besides, they are not exactly our target audience.

Does anyone have a recommendation for how to deal with this long term? I am blacklisting the leads now, but they are adding to our total database number which costs us money. I am considering deleting them and seeing if there is a way to block all of them from entering via Salesforce, but Marketo says NEVER EVER EVER delete leads.

I feel like this is an exception to that rule. Any thoughts?

**These leads are identified by company name = Candidates.

[Kim_Allen]

Do you use Marketo for candidate facing stuff (forms, etc)? We try to keep ours client facing to avoid candidates. We also try to make is really clear on the website or form -- job seekers vs employers. But if they do sneak into our database, we do keep them in there. They're marked with a certain status.

[Anonymous]

What we do is in Salesforce we limit the flow of contacts over using permissions in the Marketo sync user.    Then they do not sync over and are not counted in your number.

You can also use segmentation to define sales leads and recruitment leads (I'm assuming these are recruitment leads?)

[Anonymous]

Great to know you can limit the flow from SFDC to Marketo. Yes, these are candidates. We don't market to them.

Do you guys see any hard in deleting them? I was thinking that if I deleted them and they somehow wound up back in our database through organic measure (not through recruiting) we wouldn't want to have them blacklisted. They could end up working for a potential client of ours.

[Valerie_Armstro]

Dawn,

You could use the Delete Lead filter to delete them from your Marketo instance, but be sure to keep Remove from CRM = False, since you don't want to remove them from Salesforce.  You will lose information about any visits to your website or landing pages in Marketo, but if that isn't important to your recruiting team or company, it shouldn't be a problem.

Also, this should only be set up after the permissions for your Salesforce sync have been changed to no longer sync over those candidate records.  Otherwise, those records will just come back in Marketo during the next sync.  

[Anonymous]

We keep our recruitment leads and use Marketo to nurture them via emails and even have a custom recruitment score that is determined by their visits to our career page, opening of recruitment emails, etc.  Of course we have an aggressive growth plan in place at my company so recuiting is a big part of our marketing.

Might think about just segmenting them via a feild in Salesforce and creating some programs to gain their interest in your company.

[Anonymous]

On the flipside, you have 50K people who know about you and are in some ways engaged... Have you thought about making them useful, i.e. in some way involving them in the marketing process? Could they advance your cause in some way? We don't do that and I do not know of anyone who does, but if you try and succeed, you will be famous for sure. You will get to speak at marketing conferences and may even write a successful book on the subject. You will become a princess of PR! Think about it!