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How Do You Know If You Need Help Managing Your Job Board Spend? These Five Areas Will Give You the Answer

job-board-management
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With the importance of job boards in delivering applications and candidates to your team of recruiters, having control of all aspects of your job board spend is vital. What are the areas that your staffing agency needs to have control of to effectively spend your recruitment budget AND make data-driven decisions?

Let’s look at five different areas for your staffing agency to consider and think about when looking at the management of your job board spend.

Logging In to 10 Locations to See Your Job Board Data

Posting jobs across various websites means data in several locations. It becomes challenging to make effective decisions when you have to log in and analyze data in five, 10, 20 different locations. (Not too mention remembering all the passwords.)

By using a dashboard that gathers all your data in one location, it’s much easier to make data-driven decisions. What do I mean?

Let’s say you want to look at the data of your jobs appearing on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, CareerBuilder, Monster, Talroo, and other websites. If I could tell you that using one login gets you all of that data on one screen, would you be excited?

Now you don’t have to log in to six websites to get that data. You can jump into one dashboard, analyze your data and make better decisions by comparing the results from those different job board sources.

Posting Jobs on Only 1 or 2 Job Boards

This analogy came from Elan Masliyah at TMP Worldwide about diversification of your job postings. I absolutely love it.

Consider a financial portfolio. Most financial advisors will educate their clients to have a diverse portfolio. We don’t want to invest in just one stock or in just one industry. We want to have investments in different areas. We want to spread out the risk so we can minimize a loss when a downturn happens in one area. If you only invest in tech stocks, what happens if the tech industry spirals downward quickly? If you are only investing domestically, what happens if the U.S. economy tanks? And what happens if you don’t have any foreign investments and the worldwide economy increases? We need to mitigate that risk.

That’s what we want to do with job postings. We want to get our job postings in more than one or two spots because we could be missing out on an audience. Your audience might not be frequenting the one job board where you have a paid subscription.

They could be viewing a local jobs website. They could be viewing a niche industry website. They could be on a website that you haven’t heard of. Are your jobs on there

Couple that thought with the stat that job seekers view jobs on a range of 7-20 websites. Are your jobs appearing on that many websites? Can you get your jobs on that many websites easily?

I know you want to, but you don’t want to post them manually on double-digit websites just to reach a wider audience and increase your reach. Find the right technology that posts your jobs to dozens, hundreds or thousands of websites and then makes decisions instantly to bring more traffic where you are getting the most applications.

No Flexibility in Your Recruitment Spend

My team member Brad Bialy gets credit for this analogy. When you go on vacation, do you keep spending money on groceries for that week? (you don’t need milk in the fridge at home if no one is there to drink it)

Do you traditionally spend $2,500/month on your recruitment? That’s great. What happens when your job order decreases? Can you drop that spend for a short period of time or are you stuck in that monthly budget? Now you’re wasting money and overspending on jobs you don’t have.

Or the opposite – what happens when a job order increases? Are you able to increase that budget in the short term to take advantage of this opportunity? Or are you required to commit to a long-term increase, which puts pressure on the business that you don’t want or even need?

Look at your flexibility. Think about how much flexibility you want and how much you need.

Runaway Jobs… Or Worse Yet, Under-Performing Jobs

Three questions to keep in mind:

  1. Do you have jobs that receive a lot of applications? More than you need for that open job?
  2. Do you have jobs that receive minimal or zero applications?
  3. Are you frustrated by the answers to those questions?

If the answer was yes to any of those questions, then we need to adjust the tactic.

49 percent of jobs receive 2 percent of the applications. Six percent of jobs receive 36 percent of the applications. That doesn’t seem very efficient. It also seems incredibly frustrating.

What if you knew for every open position that you could hit the STOP button when you reached your goal? For that open position where you need 25 applications, as soon as we reach that number, we stop spending on that job.

What if your job isn’t getting the applications you want. After two weeks, we have one application and need 24 more to reach our goal of 25. Can you shift spend over to those jobs? Do you have to manually increase it? Or can you set a rule at the beginning of the campaign to have software increase that spending as time progresses and results aren’t what you need them to be?

This tactic allows staffing agencies to create pre-established rules and then let software make instantaneous decisions based on the results of real-time data.

We don’t have to manually look at the data and constantly refresh to see when we reach our magic threshold of 25 applications. We can tell software to do exactly that.

You Don’t Know Your Cost Per Application

For each of your open jobs (or at least for each industry or different management level), do you know what the cost per application is for attracting a candidate? Do you know how to get that data? Can you get that data?

Getting that data from software helps make better decisions in the future:

  • We can tell what the market rate is for an application for your registered nurse job or your CNC machinist job
  • We can tell what it will cost to get 25 applications for your open position, helping us set a budget for that job
  • By combining the budget for each job, we can create a data-driven monthly budget
  • We can look at the cost per application for each source and know that Glassdoor delivers better candidates for one position while Indeed is better for a second position and ZipRecruiter is better for a third position.

Having data (and knowing what to do with it) is important. It helps us make better decisions. That makes an impact with the executives and leaders in your organization.

Wrapping Up

Your staffing agency doesn’t need to fall short in all these areas to consider making a change in its tactics. Honestly, it could only be in one of the areas where you need to make improvement to consider a change in your job board or recruitment spend.

One change would come in managing job board spend through a technique called programmatic. By programmatic, (which is a word from the dictionary, not staffing related), we mean using computers to make split-second decisions on your recruitment spend, not humans.

That’s it. It’s not more complex than that.

We set some rules. The data comes in. The software makes decisions faster than you can snap your fingers.

Your recruitment spend becomes more efficient. Your team becomes happier because you are receiving more applications and they are a better quality of applications.

Take a step back and look at these five areas. Consider if you need to make improvements in these areas.

If you need help, contact the Haley Marketing Group (or stop by our booth at Staffing World in Washington D.C.!) and we are ready to help with managing your job board spend and creating the right plan to deliver the right results at the right time.

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