Job Boards have been the mainstay of recruitment marketing for nearly 20 years now. In the last few years though there has been an unprecedented disruption in the job board market and with the current global roll out of Google For Jobs this disruption is intensifying.
So what’s the future for job boards, what new models are emerging and how should employers be using them? To help answer these questions, my guest this week is Richard Collins, Co-Founder of ClickIQ. Richard is an extremely knowledgeable commentator on the job board industry, and I know you’ll enjoy listening to his insights.
• In the interview we discuss:
• The current state of the job board market
• The shift to pay per click
• Reduction of advertising risk via real-time data
• The advantages of using technology to automate job board planning and buying
• The likely future of job boards
Richard also shares his advice on what employers should be doing to get the most value out of their job board strategies.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ’s groundbreaking automated talent attraction technology enables recruiters to spend less time looking for applicants and more time hiring great people by managing and optimizing their recruitment advertising. ClickIQ’s platform advertises roles across the largest network of PPC, job boards and social media to reach the best active and passive candidates in the most cost effective way. Using the latest AI and programmatic technology, ClickIQ ensures that jobs are always advertised in the right place at the right time and for the right amount of money, saving recruiters both time and budget. To find out how ClickIQ can help automate, manage and optimize your talent attraction Strategy, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.uk.
Matt Alder [00:01:22]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome. Episode 138 of the recruiting Future podcast. Job boards have been the mainstay of recruitment marketing for nearly 20 years now. In the last few years though, there’s been unprecedented disruption in the job board market. And with the current global rollout of Google for jobs, this disruption is intensifying. So what’s the future for job boards? What new models are emerging and, and how should employers be using them? To answer these questions, my guest this week is Richard Collins, the co founder of ClickIQ. Richard is an extremely knowledgeable commentator on the job board industry and I know you’ll enjoy listening to his insights. Hello Richard and welcome to the podcast.
Richard Collins [00:02:14]:
Thanks Matt, really nice to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:16]:
A pleasure to have you on the show. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Richard Collins [00:02:20]:
Yeah, sure. My name is Richard Collins, I am the co founder of ClickIQ. For those people who aren’t familiar with ClickIQ, we are an automated talent attraction platform that basically uses all the good buzzwords, AI, programmatic, all that kind of stuff effectively to help clients manage and optimize their recruitment advertising. And that’s kind of what we do now.
Matt Alder [00:02:47]:
We’ll kind of get into talking about programmatic and AI and all that, you know, all that, all that good stuff. A little bit, a little bit later. But, but where I wanted to start from in this conversation is job boards. Now, you know your system kind of works extensively with job boards. I know it’s something that you’ve got huge amounts of experience with. Could you tell us a little bit about what the job board market actually looks like these days? Because I think that lots of people listening may not have, you know, be fully up to speed some of the changes that are taking place.
Richard Collins [00:03:20]:
Sure. Okay. Well, I mean by way of background, I mean my, my first experience of job board was back in 1996 and I moved from working for a recruitment consultancy and took a job as MD of job site. And what was interesting is at the time all that happened was these job words are popping up and they that the whole model was replicating what was happening in the, you know, in the paper press at the time. Except now with on the Internet you could, obviously it’s much easier to apply more jobs going into the database. But the commercial model was broadly the same and you know, a long time went by and not really a great deal happened in that particular space. But then along comes indeed and I think probably they’re the biggest catalyst for all the changes that we’re now seeing within the marketplace. And indeed took a very simple premise. They copied effectively what Google had done to the digital advertising world and launched a pay per click job board and within 10 years were by far the largest job board in the world. Revenues in excess of 2 billion. And really fundamentally changed how people were starting to buy their equipment advertising. So moving away from this traditional duration based model to a pay per click model. Now this originally took off within the US to start with. However, indeed are now I believe in over 60 countries and I think they are number one or number two in 27 of those countries. So they’ve really sort of come in and changed significantly how clients are sourcing their talent and there’s some significant advantages which is why they’ve been successful so quickly in buying your advertising on a per click basis. I think then there’s been another stage where having had that success, the other players who people like Google, Facebook, where you’ve got these really huge media companies have suddenly started looking at the, that indeed has had within the recruitment market and started saying well you know what, actually this is something that we’d quite like to play in as well. So more recently we’ve had the announcements of Google for jobs being launched initially in the US and now rolling out across the world. And also Facebook jobs where Facebook have launched a job specific category. So if you go into Facebook you can actually see jobs that are supposedly relevant to you within locations. So we’ve seen those big players sort of come into the market in reaction I think probably to indeed success. And what we also can’t forget in all of this is LinkedIn having been acquired by Microsoft and Microsoft more recently also bought GitHub as well. What we’re seeing is these massive media companies coming into the space and really disrupting the way that people go about buying their recruitment advertising. And what is interesting is that all of them have the similar business model, I.e. they all can take and work on a per click basis. Not the only model they have, but they can all work on that basis. But effectively. So we’ve got this disruption happening and this disruption is being caused by these big players moving into the market. And I think the rest of the job boards are having to react to this because they’ve seen what has happened, particularly in the US of how quickly indeed came in and dominated. We’re therefore seeing that the traditional job boards trying to react, how do they compete with these changes going on? Because the same way as traditional media somehow had to figure out, how do we cope with, you know, selling classified advertising in the back of our magazines with this Internet thing? The job boards have the same problem. That is, how do we go from our existing duration based model and how do we move to a pay per click type model that everybody is obviously so keen on without killing our business in the process. So you know, the whole throwing the baby out with a bathwater sort of situation and the number of things are occurring across those traditional posts, duration based job boards across the world. And some of the things that we’re beginning to see is first of all, again, similar things happened within the digital advertising space. Lots of job boards starting to group together and effectively create networks. So what I mean by a network is a single buying point being able to distribute a job ad across multiple job boards. This obviously allows you to then compete with the bigger players because obviously you then get the reach of the likes of Google indeed and Facebook where they have this huge reach. If by coming together as multiple job boards in one buying point, you get a similar kind of reach situation. And we’ve seen networks such as ZipRecruiter, Job Gates, Resource Generation, where what they’re doing is they are effectively going out to some of those niche boards, more than just niche boards actually. They’re going out to these job boards and they’re saying, do you know what? We can embed advertising in your job board, your jobs by email, or backfilling the results. And actually we can sell that on your behalf, usually as a cost per click, and that in turn will generate you revenues that you’re not currently getting access to. And from a client perspective, the ability to sort of plug into, distribute again your job ads far and Wide, there are distinct advantages for doing that. So we’re seeing this kind of network situation occurring and people like Stepstone, where they already have a network of job boards, are increasingly blending those job boards together. More recently we saw total and job sites being merged together so that when you bought over one, you bought over the two. So effectively you’ve got the start of a network situation, but within a single company. And I think what we’ll see is considerably more consolidation across those traditional job boards, whether that is them acquiring each other, merging with each other, or just using third party network sale houses to effectively sell across a whole load of them from one point. I think we’ll see more of that continuing in the future because without that it’s going to be very difficult if you’re a small job board to compete with the likes of The Google, indeed, LinkedIn and Facebook going forward for sure.
Matt Alder [00:10:38]:
So what are the implications for the people who are buying space on job boards? So employers or agencies, you know, in the past, you know, going, going back to the, the dawn of job board time, I used to work in an ad agency and we did kind of, you know, media planning across job boards for, you know, for our clients. What does that look like now? Where’s the, is there, is there more power to the, to the, to the buyer? Where’s the flexibility in this model?
Richard Collins [00:11:07]:
So I think the big changes is, as you rightly said, in terms of how you plan and buy, because the traditional role of deciding which job boards to advertise on, putting the jobs on those job boards and then sort of hoping for the best, I think that model is effectively dying very rapidly. And the reason for that is, first of all, you’re taking significant media risk because you’re not guaranteeing any results from your media buying. So if you’ve got a hard to fill role, you obviously need to spread that job as far and wide as you can to increase the chances of reaching the best candidates that are available in the market. The further you spread that job, that is the more job boards you advertise on, the more it’s going to cost you without the guarantee of results. So one of the beautiful things about paying per click is that actually you can plug into a whole network of pay per click job boards spread your job far and wide and there’s no media risk because you only pay when somebody clicks on it. So therefore the challenge is not so much about how do you plan and buy, but how do you actually optimize that advertising because what you then are having to do Is you need to be able to track where your results are coming from. You need to start making decisions of how much do you want to pay per click. You want to be thinking about response rates and all that kind of stuff. To do that, you need the technology to do some heavy lifting here because the more you pay that the more responses you are going to get. But equally, do you necessarily want more responses? So this whole idea of doing real time analytics and then optimizing based on response rates where, which job boards are producing what, on what jobs, and the quality of those clicks, turning into applications, turning into interviews, turning into hires. So the whole world is changing, I think, and as a media buyer, whether you’re an agency or in house, you’re having the same issue. How do I manage and optimize that spend? Because as I say, simple planning and buying when it had its place is very rapidly being replaced with this continual optimization based on the actual results that you’re seeing, rather than perhaps historic data that may or may not be relevant anymore.
Matt Alder [00:13:28]:
Now, obviously that is brilliant in terms of controlled insights, but throws up an issue in terms of resource. The obvious answer is that you can use software to do this and your company has software that does this kind of thing. What are you seeing from the clients you’re working with? What are the advantages of taking this approach but then using technology to automate it?
Richard Collins [00:13:58]:
Yeah, I think the biggest saving is time and wastage. And I think that if pay per click advertising on job boards isn’t perfect and the technology can take away some of those imperfections. The most obvious imperfection is how do you make sure that your money is going on the right jobs? Because if you’re paying per click, a very high responding job will cost you a lot of money because it generates a lot of clicks if you advertise equally across all your jobs effectively, the role of technology is one of making sure that the spend is going on the right jobs, that is those harder to fill roles. Some of the new tools that we have using machine learning to analyze what has happened before on jobs effectively, you get to this point of predictive analytics, of knowing, okay, here comes a job. How easy or difficult is it for me to generate responses? Therefore, how do I build a campaign that generates me what I need from this particular job? So if a job comes in and the system analyzes it and it decides actually it predicts very high response rates, then that job really only has to then sit within the organic listings of indeed and Google on the client’s career page, whatever it is and it will generate lots of responses and it doesn’t cost you a penny and that’s brilliant. On the other hand, then you get these much more hard to fill roles and the harder it is to fill, the more stuff you need to do with that particular job. So job boards will get you so far, but what about how you going to attract passive job seekers into that type of role? Could you start to use retargeting so that you reduce the drop off from click to application? All of these kind of techniques that the systems should be able to look as I say what’s coming in and then create in real time, dynamically create campaigns on the fly to suit the job as it comes in. I think the technology to try and do that stuff manually is incredibly difficult. It’s certainly very time consuming when it comes to actual spend and budget. We see a significant uplift in terms of response and performance and efficiencies when you start to use this technology because obviously at no what it needs to do in any particular jobs and it makes sure that that money is going to the right places on the right time, so you get more bang for your buck.
Matt Alder [00:16:33]:
And it makes perfect sense to me as well because this is how advertising is bought and sold in any other industry on the Internet. And I think for the job boards to kind of, you know, fall into line and offer this the kind of the flexibility you can drive through technology, I think it’s a, you know, I think it’s a very, a very good thing, I suppose. My next question, you know, sporadically and there was one sort of that was, that was sparked in the last few days, but sporadically online you see people writing about the death of job boards. And this time next year or this time in three years time, there’ll be no such thing as a job board. And you know, I can see where people come from, but I’m not sure I necessarily agree. I know that you won’t agree, but what I’m interested in is what’s the future for job boards? How do you think they’re going to evolve in a very, very changing landscape?
Richard Collins [00:17:29]:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you said, I was talking at a conference last week and this is one of the things that came out of it I personally do believe, and I really hope that they will continue to exist job boards going forward. And one of the reasons I think the job board will continue to exist going forward is that you are able to reach people at the point that they have their CV in hand ready to apply for jobs very Activ engaged job seekers. And as a result when you compare all of these other channels versus job boards, particularly if you are paying per click, but regardless they are very cost efficient ways of reaching applicants. So I think that they will always exist and I do think however that they have issues. And one of their issues is first of all sort of commoditization of listings. And if you look globally, globally the average cost for the listing on a job board over the last how many years has decreased. But what is interesting is when you look at job boards that are charging per click, the cost of those clicks across job boards has increased and quite significantly. So we’re seeing this move away from a commoditized sort of duration based boards and revenues falling for those people and an increase in the per click and the total spend across the pay per click job boards. And that partly, you know, you only have to look at indeed to see what they’ve done. What is really interesting, and I think this comes back to how the job boards, those traditional duration based job boards need to adapt to this kind of new reality is that actually pay per click is not a threat for them. It is, it’s a threat to their existing business. But actually it’s an opportunity in terms of increasing revenue situation. So if for example we have clients who recruit nurses, nurses are one of the most expensive people to attract certainly in the UK market and you’re paying sort of two pound fifty a click for those guys and you know, that is a significant revenue source. So if I was a traditional job board, instead of selling the ads on my job board and then not necessarily getting my clients a response to them, I would be thinking about moving to that kind of pay per click model. But what people fail to understand and don’t really think that is you can do both. There’s no reason why you can’t. The two things can’t coexist for a period of time. You can sell, talk to your clients, find out what works for them. And I think the job board should be offering both a duration based if that’s their traditional business because they don’t want to kill their business overnight and start to offer a pay per click version going forward as well. And then the obvious question, well, how much do we charge per click? Well, take your total revenue divided by how many clicks you generate. That’s a good start. You know, so it’s, you know, I think it’s about that evolution but I also think that if they don’t evolve then they’re going to have a problem Going forward, an interesting discussion point is if all these pay per click job boards and just pay per click advertising, generally, one of the things that we saw within the world of digital is that it starts off very low. People come into the market, they start bidding against each other, that cost per click gradually increases. The winner of this particular game is the person that is managing those is a media owner who has the most clients competing with the highest cost per click. Because let’s say I’m Google and this is what happened in digital advertising. If I’m Google and I’m generating four pound per click, there’s going to be a point that another media owner, rather than selling their own advertising directly, is going to be able to make more money on an affiliate basis from Google than they are selling their own CPCs. And this is where it gets really interesting. So imagine if I am a job board, rather than selling my own inventory, I’m actually plugging in whether it’s Google indeed, whoever it might be though might be a harder sell for indeed given the history between the two types of job boards. But imagine, you know, taking their feed of their specific jobs with a very high cost per click and you no longer having to manage your own sales team. You become effectively affiliate board and then you are able to focus on what you should be focusing, which is your candidates, those niche markets generating specific content and engaging with them. There’s some really great niche boards that do that very well. Only marketing jobs, being a client of ours, and a really good example of it where they have on and offline events and they’re able to really engage with that audience. But, but I do think from a commercial model there has to be a gradual switch from what has been before and is increasingly not working to what is coming in the future. And how do you manage that sort of change over through time. But ultimately they always have to remember who are my audience, what is it that I have done so well to get here and make sure those people are still engaged with them.
Matt Alder [00:23:04]:
So following on from that, and as a final question, obviously we’re looking at a job board industry that’s kind of in flux at the moment, but is still an important source of active candidates for employers all around the world. What would your advice be to employers? How should they be thinking about and buying job boards at this point in time?
Richard Collins [00:23:31]:
Yeah, I think ultimately we have to remember what we are trying to achieve and that is you want to attract the best talent to your organization and how do you go about that? I think that if you are Talking if you are an employer with a very large brand, you are going to be generating huge amounts of traffic organically and it is something that we see through our own system. Therefore, you need to make sure your spend is being focused on those harder to fill roles. I think that now buying advertising on a pay per click basis is far more efficient on harder to fill roles than it is using traditional duration based niche boards for certain. That said, you want to make sure that your message is spread as far as you possibly can to increase the chances of that. And if you are doing that, you’re going to have to find some way of using the technology to automate some of this stuff because doing it by hand is just not feasible. And then I think you have to think about going beyond just the job board. So, you know, can you reach those passive candidates, you know, using Facebook targeting within the newsfeed, which is some really cool stuff and we do stuff with as well. So making sure that if, you know, as we, as we move up that sort of pyramid of difficulty of recruiting, you’re adding more and more interesting and, you know, innovative ways of reaching those applicants. There will always be a point where you still have to actively source people. And you know, I imagine you’ve got a podcast for another day talking about how you automate sourcing and people often agree or disagree whether that’s ever going to be possible or even should be possible. But I do think that, you know, as we, as we look at the picture as a whole, it’s ultimately about how do you find the right talent for your organization? How do you then approach those job boards and use them as a network to spread that message of the fact that you’re hiring? And then how do you make sure that the technology manages that stuff for you so that you a don’t have to waste your time continually adjusting things and you’re only spending what you need to spend at the time you need to spend it.
Matt Alder [00:25:48]:
Richard, thank you very much for talking to me.
Richard Collins [00:25:50]:
My pleasure. Thank you very much, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:25:52]:
My thanks to Richard Collins. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app which you can find by searching for recruiting future in your app Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more more about Working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week, and I hope you’ll join me.
