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Are you stuck in an annual job board contract?

Annual Job Board Contract
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The following transcript was taken from InSights, a staffing and recruiting podcast from Haley Marketing dedicated to providing quick-hitting takeaways on Digital Marketing and Recruitment Marketing. To listen to the episode, click play on the player above or visit the episode page [InSights] When Will Google Stop Breaking Our Hearts?

 

Brad Bialy: Are you stuck in an annual job board contract? Matt, first off, explain to us what an annual job board contract is. And then I know you want to get into what a flexible monthly budget might look like. Candidly, I didn’t even know you could do that. So walk me through what an annual budget looks like. And then why don’t you walk me through and educate me on what a flexible monthly budget would look like? Because this all sounds incredibly important to me. You just, you caught me off guard with this monthly budget. So I’d love to know more about it.

Matt Lozar: The annual contract is, I think, more old school traditional in the recruitment job board world, the staffing agency world, to where you sign a contract with a website for 12 months, that you’re going to get, typical could be 20 job slots to resume seats and maybe something else. And this is your price every month for the next 12 months, which has pluses and minuses, right? There are strengths and weaknesses to everything you can do with your job advertisement budget decisions. With the annual contract, with job slots, you know what you’re paying for the next 12 months, which is great. Some people really like budgets. Some people, if you locked in that price in October 2020, the price in September 2021 might be higher. So you’ve locked in a good rate. The challenge with the annual contract is what if things change? And 2020 is the prototypical answer to that question because of your contract in February, most people probably had many different feelings about it in April 2020. And that’s where having flexibility in a monthly contract benefits you, and you want to keep control of the recruitment budget on your side.

Brad Bialy: So how do I get out of an annual budget then? So if I’m already locked in, I’m locked in, right? Like I’m locked into my cable bill right now.

Matt Lozar: Read your contract terms would probably be step one.

Matt Lozar: And if you don’t have any outs like Brad’s cable bill, then you just have to expire it.

Matt Lozar: Or you can try to talk to your representative at the company and say, “Hey, is there anything we can do to convert to flexible?” They may, they may not. Not going to speak for them. Honestly have no idea, but my recommendation is really to try to get out of that would be, as I said, there are pluses and minuses to both, but we really coach clients. I even say this to companies we talked within the prospecting phase, if there’s nothing you take out of this call, stay as flexible as you can.

Matt Lozar: Avoid the long-term contracts. And here’s why. The here’s why is, maybe in November you get a huge surge of holiday job orders and you need to ramp up your budget by 50%. In February, maybe business goes down. You want to get back to normal or scale down, you can really easily. So you’re keeping that flexibility on your side to meet the recruitment needs. And I think a lot of the job boards, the Indeeds, the ZipRecruiter’s, have more flexible budgets. That’s how their models work now. The CareerBuilders, Monsters of the world are usually more longer-term contract terms. So the industry is evolving, but it just, it pains me at time to see and to hear companies in contracts, and then they regret them six and eight months in. And to answer Brad’s question, they’re kind of stuck.

Brad Bialy: Man, what a sad episode, man. You’re you’re pained by the annual contract. I’m pained by position zero. LinkedIn’s algorithms bumming me out this supposed to be a happy episode, dude. It’s my birthday today.

Matt Lozar: You’re turning 30. So I guess it … No, I’m just kidding. Yeah. I think that the big … We had some positivity each of those segments.

Brad Bialy: Sure. Of course.

Matt Lozar: But anyway, I think with this segment, it’s find a way to move forward to a flexible monthly budget and really think about how that can help and benefit your staffing agency to meet your variable job order and job rec needs because they change. Every company knows you might have 50 job orders in November and a hundred in January and 20 in July, or pick your number. Make sure you have that flexibility to meet your needs. And more than likely, you’re going to see better results and be happier with your budget terms.

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