The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing Group dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Social Recruiting, Content Marketing, and Employer Branding. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] Social Media Can’t Fix Your Broken Candidate Experience
Brad Bialy: Matt, let’s dig into the 2019 Appcast Recruitment Media Benchmark Report and, being the Director of Recruitment Marketing at Haley Marketing Group, I’m really going to turn this over to you. I want you to share your biggest takeaways from the report and then we’ll chat about any key takeaways and key findings from, again, the Appcast Recruitment Media Benchmark report that we will link to in the show notes.
Matt Lozar: Brad, in talking about mobile and we spent that whole second segment on mobile, and one of the biggest takeaways from this report, and what this report does is it looks at the candidate, essentially behavior, in applying for jobs and looking at some other factors that may influence it. And there’s four big ones I think I’m going to focus on today, and the first one’s mobile. Mobile clicks on jobs from all devices were up about 24% last year. Applications for mobiles is up 55%. If somebody can’t apply to your job on a mobile device, you’re missing out on their applications, and this is probably more on the HR side than the staffing side. And we know, I think from our own job board, mobile was 52% last quarter.
Brad Bialy: Yeah, it was 52% in May and it was 50% last August. I know that data specifically.
Matt Lozar: Yeah, so we’re seeing a majority of our people going to, our client’s job boards are coming from mobile, so check out that mobile application process for you. Some of the other things that could factor in are job title length, which I think staffing agencies generally do a pretty good job of. Applications that … or excuse me, job titles of one to seven words are getting an application rate around 5 1/2%. If you go longer than that, you’re about under 4%.
Brad Bialy: Really?
Utilize Short Job Titles
Matt Lozar: Yeah. So people want short, succinct job titles. They want “Warehouse Worker”, they don’t want a 10-word job title.
Brad Bialy: That’s interesting because at least my thought would be that the more catchy you can make that title, you might get more response. So that actually contradicts what I would think.
Matt Lozar: It is contradicting. I think they’re a little bit different. Like in healthcare there’s a lot of like travel nursing people will want to see the location of the job in the titles. So like if you’re going to Odessa, Texas or Pullman, Washington, those are different areas.
Improve Your Glassdoor Rating
Matt Lozar: Then this other one, the Glassdoor rating, which was I think, big last year, but if your Glassdoor rating is three stars or above, your application rate’s around 6%. If it’s less than that, it’s under 4%. And what these last two are really important to me is with these big differences in application rates, let’s say, let’s use this last one from Glassdoor. If you have a 100 clicks on your job, and your Glassdoor rating is strong, you’re getting six applications. If your Glassdoor rating is poor, for those 100 clicks, you’re getting four applications.
Matt Lozar: That’s lost money. That’s fewer applications because you’re paying every time somebody clicks on the job. So that’s where that’s really important.
Brad Bialy: And reviews are rather easy to generate. Think about all the candidates and individuals that you have out on assignment right now. How easy would it be for you to reach out to one individual and say, “Hey Brad, I know you’re having a great experience in this current role. Would you mind leaving us some feedback on Glassdoor? We’d really appreciate it.”.
Brad Bialy: Think about how you can reach out one to one to different individuals and ask for that feedback. The majority of people, I believe it’s 80%, 80%, we’ve talked about this on InSights before. People will leave you feedback if prompted to do so. It’s a high number. All you need to do is first ask for that.
Matt Lozar: The prompt needs to come from the positive. We don’t need prompts for negative reviews.
Related Content: How can we gather more online positive online reviews on sites like Glassdoor, Google, or Facebook?
Post Available Jobs on Sunday Night
Matt Lozar: So the last kind of really interesting set I found, and I’ll recap these here in a little bit, is people apply for jobs on Monday and Tuesday. It’s about 36% of applications come at the beginning of the week and about 18% are coming in on the weekends. So your takeaway is getting your jobs up Sunday night or Monday morning so you’re not wasting time or your spend on the weekends. Get your jobs up, so first thing Monday morning, apparently, when people hate their jobs, they’re going to apply for new ones.
Brad Bialy: That’s actually surprising to me as well. You would think that people are home on the weekends, and even if they’re busy, they still have the time to apply. But like you said, they’re frustrated. Maybe they had a bad meeting and now they’re lashing out immediately and looking for that next opportunity right away.
Matt Lozar: Yeah, by just total random takeaway would be if you come home from work on Friday, the last thing you want to do is come home and apply for a job. You want to enjoy your weekend.
Brad Bialy: Sure do.
Matt Lozar: So my four real takeaways:
- Look at your job titles. Focus on under seven words or less.
- Look at your Glassdoor rating and other ones, Indeed, Yelp, Google, Facebook. And if you’re not above three stars, work to find more ways to get positive reviews.
- Get your jobs posted Monday morning. They gotta be at the top of the list to make sure your jobs are available for when people are applying for jobs.
- Apply for your jobs on mobile, because people are going to mobile. Mobile applications are 55% in the last year. That’s an enormous jump and it’s not going down.
Matt Lozar: We’re going to apply for more jobs on mobile. We’re gonna get more clicks on mobile, and if someone goes to your job application and can’t apply on mobile, or it takes them 15 minutes, or it requires their social security number or any of the other bad practices we see from any companies around the country, they’re going to go to your competitor and you’re going to lose revenue.
Brad Bialy: It has to be in line with the candidate experience. All of this really comes back to what’s in it for the candidate.
Matt Lozar: Correct.
Brad Bialy: They want to apply for a job on their terms and they want it to be easy for them. Don’t create a bottleneck because of your application process. Especially with unemployment so low, we can’t afford to have a bottleneck in the process.
Matt Lozar: And think about it. It’s when do they want to apply for a job? Monday or Tuesday. They want to know what’s in the job title, easily. They don’t want to have to guess. They want to work for a good company, the Glassdoor rating. And they want to do it on their mobile device. It really makes a lot of sense. And then the data is there to back it up. Kind of what Brad said earlier, what are your recruiters seeing? What does the data show? This is exactly it.
Brad Bialy: Always come back to the data, always trust the data, and always look at what’s working and continue to exploit what is working in your overall strategy. That’s a common theme on InSights. As we’re sharing these tips and best practices, it always comes back to the numbers. It comes back to the goals and what we’re trying to achieve, and then how we can deploy various tactics to ultimately reach those goals, but it always has to come back to are we reaching our main organizational goals of more applications and more job orders?