Interested in programmatic advertising – but concerned about giving up control of your recruitment strategy?
In our latest Snack Time video, Matt Lozar, Director of Recruitment Marketing, answers the 4 questions about outsourcing job advertising that staffing agencies ask us most frequently:
We hear this pain from clients all the time:
They’re posting their jobs and they’re praying.
They’re praying that qualified candidates find, click on and apply to their jobs.
All of that posting and praying leads to this: frustration.
…wanting to bang your head on your desk and cry for help. Thankfully, there is a better way to manage that recruitment budget. One of the best ways to do that is to outsource it to another company and work with them in a partnership, which leads us to the first question:
Question 1: Why would we give up control of our recruitment strategy?
I’m going to answer that question with a question of my own: Why do companies outsource their hiring to you? Why do your clients come to your staffing agency to work with you?
And the answers are:
- Because you’re the expert.
- Because they hate hiring.
- Because it’s more efficient for them to outsource staffing and recruiting to your staffing agency.
These are exactly the same reasons why your staffing agency should trust a recruitment marketing partner with your recruitment strategy – find that right partner, because you hate manually posting, monitoring and taking down jobs across multiple job boards.
There has to be a better answer, a better automation answer. Your team needs that time back, right?
Right now it feels like you’re doing twice the work for half the results. When that happens, when budgets are tight, when every expense is being counted, it’s vital to find the automation and the technology that’s going to give you more time to deliver results and fill all of your open job orders.
Similar to why companies outsource to staffing agencies, it’s more efficient to partner with a company that has the expertise, the technology, the processes, the knowledge in place to deliver the results.
And really, you’re not giving up control.
You’re working together. The correct partner is going to want to work with you to meet your recruitment goals. You’re not turning the keys to your company over and letting them run everything. You’re not just fully relinquishing control to software; you’re working together to use those tools the right way to help you meet your recruitment goals.
Question 2: Will I lose my applications?
Absolutely not. I don’t like to make a lot of guarantees, but we’ve never seen applications just go away. Candidate applications are the pipeline, the lifeblood, of any staffing agency. Understandably, you want to be cautious about stepping into the unknown. You’re changing the way you’re spending your money; you’re changing the way that applications are coming in, but they’re not going to go away.
We’re just changing the way that money is spent.
You’re still posting on a lot of the same job boards; it could be exactly the same job boards. We’re just trying to get more efficiency out of that budget.
Let’s take a look at a couple of case studies.
The first one, this comes from the first client for whom we managed recruitment spend. You know, the last month they kept this internally on their own, 62 of their 92 sponsored jobs received 0 applications. When I’ve said that stat before to potential clients, I’ve heard audible groans on the phone because they feel the pain. They understand what’s happening there, and it’s great to see there is a better way.
In the first month our team managed this company’s recruitment budget and their strategy, only 2 of the 66 jobs had no applications. Extend that out to the entire year, and just 10 of their 282 jobs received 0 applications. We were able to create a strategy to program the software to get more applications across more jobs.
Another case study for an industrial client we work with in Ohio, they were only advertising on Indeed – and that’s the correct platform for them to meet their goal of getting as many applications as possible. We created a strategy, however, to lower that cost per application and maximize their budget, gettin more applications out of their current job spend budget. Did their overall cost increase? Of course slightly, but their applications went up by 60% – and overall costs only increased by 7%. That’s an enormous increase on the application count. More applications came to their team; they were able to lower their cost per application and get more ROI out of that budget.
Question 3: How much does it cost to outsource job advertising?
Here’s how to calculate the cost of outsourcing your job advertising to a recruitment marketing partner:
- Ad spend. The biggest part of the budget is going to be what you’re spending with the job boards directly. The goal is always to reduce that, or if it stays the same, to get more out of it. Instead of spending that money directly with the job boards, it goes to the company that you’re partnering with in this recruitment strategy.
- Software fee. We license software from a company called Appcast to manage the budgets, to work with the automation, and to put the technology in place to increase efficiency and get more ROI.
- Management fee. Think back to how, when companies come to you when they outsource their hiring, there’s a big difference between the pay rate and the bill rate. The same applies here. You know that’s how your company makes money. You know the company you’re partnering with does have a management fee to cover the time and expertise to manage your budget: working with you on that plan to get the most out of your budget and deliver as many applications as possible.
One more case study with a client in California who staffs non-clinical and clinical jobs with health care facilities:
The last month they handled internally, they had 379 applications on Indeed. When they outsourced job advertising management to Haley Marketing, they saw a 131% increase in applications! We created a strategy to get their jobs to five different job boards, and then we continued to analyze that data to make sure their money was being spent in the appropriate place.
Question 4: Which staffing companies are the most successful when outsourcing their job advertising spend management?
I want to flip that to: Which companies don’t find success? It’s the ones that are looking for the purple unicorns. There isn’t a hidden treasure trove of candidates; there isn’t a silver bullet here.
Is using programmatic software to manage your job spend going to deliver better results? Of course. Is it going to solve all your recruitment problems overnight? It is not. You have to be willing to work together with your recruitment partner to trust the data and make sure you’re using that data to meet your recruitment goals.
Another thing we’ve seen that doesn’t work really well is when you have a long, tedious application process in place. If it’s hard to track candidate source with technology, if your application process really doesn’t work well on desktop or mobile, or if you’re driving candidates to applications that are long and hard to fill out, you’re going to face challenges.
So which companies are the most successful? Which ones find that success when outsourcing the recruitment budget, when partnering with a company on that recruitment strategy to get the most ROI?
- The most successful staffing agencies embrace the technology and automation. Know that it’s going to help you; it’s not going to take it away from you. Embrace those new changes. You have to be willing and open to moving money around with flexibility and trusting the data to help you make future decisions. For example, let’s say you invested 50% of your budget on job board A and 50% on job board B. When you have the right technology and automation in place, you can see which of the job boards are helping you meet your goals. It could be the lowest cost per application; it could be the lowest cost per quality application; or which job boards are bringing us the most physical placements in ROI. Then, we shift that money around.
- The most successful clients have a quick and clean application process, where it’s easy to track. It’s easy to know if candidates applied from Indeed or ZipRecruiter or Appcast or any of the job boards that you’re sponsoring on. Then they can analyze the data quickly and make the best decisions for their company.
- Lastly, the staffing agencies that are most successful have a strong working relationship with their recruitment marketing partner. If you tell us what your recruitment goals are and trust our expertise, we can help you put the right strategy in place to optimize your job advertising budget and results.
Ready to learn more about recruitment marketing?
We’ve created dozens of free webinars, eBooks, case studies and blog posts on this page, to help you understand what recruitment marketing can do for you. And if you’re ready to chat with one of our recruitment marketing experts, please reach out.
