A couple of weeks ago, we examined the decision-making process behind keeping the job board spend flexible and avoiding a long-term contract. In that blog post, there are a number of reasons to avoid the long-term commitment.
One of those reasons in restricting the reach of your job postings. What do I mean by restricting the reach? Let’s dive in.
Comfort Makes It Easier
It’s easy to stick with what’s comfortable. That doesn’t just apply to recruitment marketing and talent acquisition. It applies to purchasing cars, clothing, work commutes and anything we have made decisions about in the past. You may love to purchase a certain brand of cars and have just upgraded models for the past 20 years. It’s hard to shift to an entirely different brand.
That principle applies to job advertising as well. If we have a source that is delivering candidates, why not keep going back to that well? And I agree, that can be a great argument, especially if it’s consistently delivering quality.
There are two arguments I would make to re-consider that source.
1. Lack of Candidates Is Hurting Everyone
Maybe that source is still your best place to get candidates, but it’s just not as good as it has been in previous months or years. The ROI is 10 percent lower or maybe 20 percent lower. Yes, we could chalk that up to the low unemployment numbers and being a candidate market. But there very easily could be more to that lower ROI.
Maybe that source isn’t as good now as it was two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago. People aren’t spending as much time on that source as they were in 2015 or 2010. We need to expand our reach. We need to look at other sources to get candidates. We need to go where people are spending their time.
2. Technology Changes
How do we get to those places? We use the improvements to technology.
We are in an exciting time. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping us make better decisions. Not only that, AI can make decisions faster than humans, which provides better ROI. It frees us up to focus on other areas and become more efficient on those tasks.
We don’t have to stick to the classified ads. We don’t have to rely on just one or two main job boards. We don’t have to hope the phone rings or candidates walk in the front door looking to get a job. We can utilize artificial intelligence to distribute our jobs to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of websites.
Taking advantage of the technology changes allows us to be more efficient and get an advantage over competitors. That’s what programmatic job advertising does.
Programmatic Job Advertising Supports These Two Arguments
Programmatic advertising is a technological advancement that increases the reach of our job postings.
How does it work?
Programmatic software will distribute jobs to a wider network of websites. Some are job sites, some are websites where people spend a lot of time and come across enticing job postings. The software will then look at the data and determine which websites are producing the best results.
Using that data, the software will show your job postings on the websites getting the best engagement and delivering applications. Instead of having to look at spreadsheets and make the decisions manually, the artificial intelligence makes those decisions in fractions of a second to provide better ROI.
Let’s Look at An Example
Most staffing agencies and companies only focus on one or two national job boards. I’m not saying to ignore them and stop spending with them, but let’s think about an example.
Maybe there are other websites that would deliver better results. We could know about those websites or we might not know about them at all. As a healthcare staffing agency, there could be websites that deliver a cheaper cost per application for nurses. As a light industrial staffing agency, there could be better options to lower the cost per application for machine operators.
What could be an effective tactic? Taking a percentage of that job board spend from your current sources and trying it on programmatic technology. Let the data play out and see how it affects 20-30 percent of your current spend. The AI will send the jobs out to a wider network and determine what brings the best results – much faster than any human can.
Maybe Indeed and ZipRecruiter still deliver the best results. Then we have to adjust our strategy and use programmatic technology to take a rules-based approach to get us the most applications. (That’s next week’s topic.)
Maybe the new sources deliver better results. We take more money from our current sources and put it to the new sources. There’s no reason to stop our testing after one attempt if it’s working well.
Eventually, we want to find the right balance. Looking at the cost per application data, we want to determine which websites are delivering the right CPA to meet our business goals. It will probably be a combination of the national sites and the hundreds and thousands of other websites.
Expand the Reach of Your Job Postings to Reach More Candidates
Comfort is easy. I get it. I eat the same lunch every day here at the Haley Marketing Group.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something new – either to a process or with one of our tactics.
Reach a wider group of job candidates through programmatic technology. Stay ahead of the competition and overcome this challenging candidate market.
