As I said at the start of the last episode reinventing recruitment marketing is a big topic for talent acquisition this year. Long term listeners to the podcast will also know about my deep-held belief that careers sites are the critical element of recruitment marketing that remains very much underutilised.
Many forward-thinking employers are now turning to careers site systems to maximise the recruitment marketing benefits of careers site and minimise their development pain points.
So what happens when we start thinking about careers sites as sophisticated software solutions rather than one-off creative projects?
My guest this week is James Saunders, CEO of Attrax. Over the last few years, James has been one of the pioneers of careers site systems and has a massive amount of knowledge and experience to share.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ What is a careers site system?
▪ The focal point of employer branding
▪ Strategic positioning
▪ Why employers should invest in their own asset
▪ The dreaded “log in to apply.”
▪ The core elements of sophisticated careers sites
▪ Optimising the candidate experience
▪ Personalisation and AI
▪ Unique stats and analytics
▪ Learning from eCommerce
▪ Future innovations
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:12]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 332 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As I said at the start of the last episode, reinventing recruitment marketing is a big topic for talent acquisition this year. Long term listeners to the podcast will also know about my deep held belief that careers sites are a critical element of recruitment marketing that remain very much underutilized. Many forward thinking employers are now turning to careersite systems to maximize the recruitment marketing benefits of careersites and minimize their development pain points. So what happens when we start thinking about career sites as sophisticated software solutions rather than one off creative projects? My guest this week is James Saunders, CEO of Attrax. Over the last few years James has been one of the pioneers of CareerSight systems and has a massive amount of knowledge and experience to share. Hi James and welcome to the podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
James Saunders [00:01:31]:
Thanks Matt. Well, it’s a pleasure to be here. So I’m James Saunders, I’m the CEO of Attrax. I’ve been working in the recruitment industry for about 20 years now. Attrax in its previous incarnation was called Format and we were very much specialist in in the UK in high end recruitment websites for the staffing companies. So I actually bought the company, did a management buyout in 2010 and we always had the plan then to move into CareerSight systems. So we picked up our first few in house recruitment clients in 2013, 2014. We then rebuilt our system from the ground up as SaaS, cloud based, called it a tracks, won a few clients and we decided actually that the rebrand was so successful a year ago that we rebranded as Atrax because it made sense for us to do that. So that’s a potted, potted 20 year history in the recruitment industry.
Matt Alder [00:02:23]:
Fantastic stuff. And just to give everyone a little bit of context, talk us through some of the employers that you work with.
James Saunders [00:02:28]:
So we work with lots of larger employers in the UK and beyond in lots of different market sectors. So many of these are names you’ve heard of people like Admiral Insurance Group, SNC Lab in the engineering firm. The Atkins brand is the main brand in the uk. We work with Harrods, we work with Vision Express. So lots and lots of different companies and the key thing that unites them is that they’re all pretty serious about their career site and they’re all on the ATTRAK’s career site system.
Matt Alder [00:03:02]:
I’ve been personally interested in career sites for a really long time and I don’t think that they are talked about enough in the industry. It’s something that I’m sort of been trying to put right with the podcast by having people come and talk about career sites every so often. I really want to kind of amp that up year because I think career sites are more important than ever. Why do you think that career sites are so neglected?
James Saunders [00:03:28]:
I think first and foremost there you talk about career sites being more important than ever and I think in a post Covid world they genuinely are. So your career site is your focal point for your employer brand. Gone are the days when candidates would come into the Office for a 45 minute interview and be able to see, hear, taste, speak to their future colleagues. It’s all on the careers site. So that’s why it’s so important. Why have they been neglected? Well, I guess for me a number of different stakeholders are sort of part of the careersite process if you like. So for a little, certainly quite a long time now, Applicant tracking systems atss have tried to do a career site module. If you speak to most ATs, they will have a career site module. But actually career sites are specialist technology. It’s got a specialist user, the candidate, it’s not the recruiter. And therefore most of these companies actually fail in doing that particularly well. They’re almost like an add on, a bit of an afterthought if you like. And then you look at the creative agencies and you know, these sort of companies, these recruitment communications companies and the like, they go back many decades really. And of course in the 2000s, the noughties, they developed in house digital capabilities. But fundamentally these were still creative companies. So whilst they were very creative led, and there’s no disputing the quality of the creative that many of them, many of them create, they were lacking in the technical capability. So our message is really clear. Our message is around career science being a specialist piece of HR technology. They’re not just a creative project. And that development, that mindset, is a massive problem because if you went to a bespoke development house for your ATS and said, right, here’s a specification for our new ats, this is what we want. You went to several of those, went out to tender, maybe got the tenders in, then they built it for you from scratch. It would take a year to build, possibly two, and they’d launch it maybe 80 months, two years after the initial requirement was gathered and already it would be out of date. Now you just wouldn’t do that. You go to a specialist software company that has a SaaS or cloud based offering that and you buy into their roadmap longer term. Okay, but that’s completely the opposite to how career sites are generally bought these days. Even still, they’re viewed as a creative project. They’re viewed as something that you go to an agency and sort of relay your requirement as if it’s particularly unique to anybody else’s requirements within the industry. They then respond, they build something. Yes, it might be on an open source platform that has some SaaS capability such as WordPress and stuff, but it’s unique and bespoke to that company and it’s not surprising that a year, 18 months of it going live, it’s suddenly out of date. That’s why career site projects are kind of the bane of talent acquisition professionals lives. They have to recreate them. Every 18 months, they have to do a new one. And even if they’re using the same organization or same vendor, they still have to do it again and again and again. This sort of sisyphean rolling the rock up the hill. And it needn’t be that way.
Matt Alder [00:06:54]:
I suppose one of the things that holds career sites back, which is something that I think is going to change as we move forward into 2021, is really understanding where they fit strategically into talent acquisition. I think they’re seen as a sort of a necessary evil or part of recruitment marketing or something to do with employer branding. I don’t think that there’s a clear strategic idea of where they actually fit in and how they’re part of the strategy to really help people sort of think about this and contextualize this properly. Talk about the type of recruitment challenges that career sites can help solve.
James Saunders [00:07:36]:
Okay, well I’ve always already mentioned that in a post Covid world, the career site is the focal point of your talent acquisition strategy. It’s your number one asset. Why when lots of companies invest in, you know, many hundreds of thousands of pounds in advertising, they don’t still have a fantastic asset of their own. That really surprises me. And yet some big companies do exactly that. They spend money with other people and direct candidates to a focal point, a career site that is pretty poor. So really it’s the beating heart of your recruitment strategy. Some of the challenges, well, you know, if you do this well over a period of time, that focal point can become a very, very effective tool in itself. People talk about organic search as your best free advertising source and it can be. So whilst companies spend an awful lot of money on pay per click and programmatic advertising, they often neglect their own career site from an organic perspective. So if over time your career site is really well optimized for Google and the like, it can actually generate free traffic for you. Obviously it should be the focal point of all applications. That candidate experience that you’re selling in terms of your EVP should be focused on that experience on the career site. And if it isn’t, then there’s going to be a mismatch there. If you’re, you know, talking big picture ideas and yet the practicality of applying for a job is really poor, then really there’s a mismatch and a very negative perception of your brand. Also, from a practical perspective, a lot of career sites aren’t very good. I know Baz van den Hart mentioned this when he came on your podcast last month, I think it was. He talked about the integrations with ats and we call that here at Attract. We call that the dreaded login to apply. And we’ve already always seen that, you know, you get to the point where you’ve actually selected the vacancy, you’ve said, I want to apply for this and then you get this sort of ATS screen login to apply. And of course that puts off a lot of candidates. And yes, of course there are different types of candidate, there are hard to find and easy to find candidates, but we know that in the instance of one particular attracts client, that you can get a 50% improvement on applications if you have a nice slick process into the ATS. So, you know, effectively, you know, you get 50% more candidates coming through and you’d be losing them. So really it’s not just a matter of what benefit it gains you, but it also looks at, you know, what are you losing out on? You know, these are candidates you’re working so hard to snare and you’ll and they’ll go straight to your competitors if it’s not working properly. So there’s a number of challenges there. Another big challenge post Covid as well is the fact that generally speaking, recruitment marketers working within the talent acquisition team don’t have control over their career site. And that’s either because it’s built on very bad tech, that is it’s not very controllable, or quite possibly it’s owned as an asset by the domain of marketing, or it’s seen as a career page on the main corporate site, which again is owned by marketing or they have to put a change request into information systems or IT to get anything done. So a big challenge a good career site system solves is the agility, the ability for recruiters to have control over their own content. Be that video, be that social, be that jobs content, and be able to update that career site into a sort of living thing in a way that lots of companies still can’t at the moment.
Matt Alder [00:11:23]:
Digging into this a little bit deeper, talk us through. What are the elements of a really sophisticated career site? What would you expect to see? What is it that employers need to have to make sure that they’re really making the most of what’s available?
James Saunders [00:11:39]:
Okay, so first things first. And this is our core idea. When you’re looking for a career site system vendor, it’s not about what it delivers now, but it’s just as much about what the system will deliver in the future. So we need to really get away from this idea that talent acquisition departments put in a long specification or RFP full of features and then get various creative agencies or other bespoke vendors to come back and quote for that. That wouldn’t happen with an ats. It just wouldn’t happen. Or certainly if it did happen, it would be around a basic feature set. So it shouldn’t happen. With a career site system, you need to go to a vendor, a supplier that is SaaS based and you buy into their technology now, but also their vision for the future based on their technological roadmap. For me, there’s two levels here. There are hygiene factors and then there’s innovation. And all companies should have those hygiene factors covered. What do I mean by hygiene factors? Well, I’m talking about a very, very strong organic SEO. I’m talking about a really good conversion into the ats, irrespective of the ATS that they’re using. So effectively a candidate experience that doesn’t look like the ATS at all. Okay, so it doesn’t say Teleo anywhere or it doesn’t say successfactors. It’s a seamless candidate experience. There’s no dreaded login to apply. But those, those two are just so important. There’s a hygiene factor around accessibility as well. You know, there should be a basic level of accessibility for a site that’s hard to achieve because of the very nature of career site systems are a bit like E commerce sites, aren’t they? That’s another factor that’s really important. Those are kind of hygiene factors, if you like. That should be apparent. Sorry, one more. Mobile building mobile. First from the ground out upwards is really, really important as well. And again, it’s really interesting for Bazaar, he mentioned that he spoke to 50 or 60 or reviewed 50 or 60 sites in the Netherlands and there was still very poor mobile first type approach. And that just, you know, that for me isn’t an aspiration, it’s a hygiene factor. Okay, so all those things mixed together are things like where you should be. I guess the innovation then comes to around things like algorithms and the use of personalization and artificial intelligence to drive that candidate experience. Okay, so to give a good example, we liken the CareerSight system to a retail e commerce system. So if you’re trying to be Amazon or ebay, you know a lot about the behavior of your candidates before they’ve even applied for a job. Okay? So you need to be tracking everything that happens on that site. You need to think about the algorithms you’re going to use to personalize that candidate experience based on the preferences of the candidate. Now that might be really easy if they apply for a job because, you know, your name’s Matt and you’re applying for a job in E commerce. Well, we can assume that, you know, there are some various things about the e commerce job that are relevant to your, you know, who you are and what you do. But actually it’s that behavior far before that. So we’re talking about how did they get there, where did they come from, what content did they read? All content on the career site should be tagged based on relevance. And we can actually build a very complex profile up of the candidates even when they’re quite passive, even before they’ve actually applied for a job. What we can do with that is then customize that candidate experience based on their needs. So that could be location, it could be region, it could be a set of hard skills, it could be a set of soft skills. Could even be how passive or active a job seeker they are. You know, are they looking at jobs mainly or they’re not looking at jobs at all? We can then using an algorithm, we can work out their relative passivity because there’s nothing worse than an ultra passive candidate being presented and sold jobs all the time. So, you know, that’s, that’s what we mean by, you know, the more innovative stuff. You know, most large brands should have a chatbot as well. For me, a chatbot is not a gimmick. Chatbot’s not really a bolt on. It’s something that should be there to help the candidate and to improve the candidate experience. So, you know, it’s not sort of, oh, right, we need to go out and buy chatbot now. I mean, some companies may need to do that, but actually it is a feature within the career site. And I’ve seen lots of companies with really good chatbots but really terrible career sites. And I’m thinking, you know, yes, they’ve gone and made a business case there to buy a chatbot. Actually, they’ve forgotten about the platform upon which the chatbot sits. So, you know, I think the bottom line is, Matt, that career sites are just seen as quite simple things and they’re not sort of as a technology solution. They’re sort of thought of as something that you win a rad award for. And I’m not against winning rad awards. We won one two years ago for the Vodafone career site. But, but actually it’s a technological solution, it’s a piece of technology. It’s not something that gets rebuilt every couple of years based on an open source platform.
Matt Alder [00:17:03]:
There’s probably a number of people listening to this who are unhappy about their career site or are looking at other types of talent acquisition technology and wondering how they’re going to interface with their, with their career site. What would your advice be to people listening in terms of how they should start building a sort of a future proof strategy for their career site?
James Saunders [00:17:25]:
Okay, well, I mean, first things first. Just touching on the ATS integration. There’s always a way, okay? It doesn’t matter how old your ATS is, there’s always a way of doing that. We know that there are hundreds, potentially thousands of companies on Taleo and we have a quick, simple, easy and pleasing from a candidate experience perspective, integration with Teleo, as we do with SuccessFactors, as we do with, you know, all the other major brands out there. So you shouldn’t see if you’re working with the right supplier, that ATS integration shouldn’t be seen as a big headache. I guess my number one piece of advice is to try not to do this in a piecemeal way. Now that might be quite easy to do because a lot of companies are on these sort of either open source or, you know, sort of, as I mentioned, snapshot in Time style Creative project systems which have been designed for stuff to be bolted on in a kind of quite haphazard piecemeal way. So that might seem the right thing to do, I. E. Oh, we haven’t got a bot. Well, we need to bolt on a bottom, you know, so that for me isn’t the way of doing things the way of Doing things is to work with a vendor and work with a selective platform that’s going to give you that roadmap, that future proofing over the next few years. So you don’t, in 18 months time, have to go back and buy and build a brand new technical solution. And unfortunately that can take a little bit of time. You know, it’s all about putting the roadmap together. It’s funny, I guess career sites are kind of a bit like maybe EVPs were in the 90s. They’re kind of this kind of thing that like not everybody used to get. So based on my experience, you know, you got people, I mean, for example, you had Nick Thompson on the podcast quite recently, didn’t you? And he totally gets the value of the career site. He understands it’s a piece of technology, he understands where it sits in the tech stack, he understands the ATS stuff is possible. But for every Nick Thompson, there are probably three others who, a bit scared of this, have never done it before because it’s quite innovative stuff. So for me, it’s about building the business case first. It’s about making the case internally and getting the buy in from different stakeholders, because there are a number of different stakeholders always, you know, you always have to get a tick in the box from it, from information systems. You would do if you’re buying an ats. Of course you would do if you’re building a career site system or you’re buying a career site system. You need to get that tick in the box from internal comms or marketing as well. Rightly so. They’re quite particular about who’s using the brand and possibly they view a separate career site system as a bit of a threat rather than complimenting whatever corporate website that they have up. So again, there’s some advice and some courtship to do around that which enables this to get done. But the bottom line, you know, has to be in the roi. Your career site system should be able to give you analytics and stats that you won’t get in your ATS and you won’t get from your any other sort of recruitment marketing platform that you have. So, you know, you should be able to back up whatever assertions you make by cold, hard facts. And it does come down to the fact that, you know, people just miss this completely. They want to build an evp, they want to spend a lot of money on marketing, they want the very best ats, they want a social strategy. And yet the focal point of everything, everything is the career site. And people just miss that. Increasingly, they’re not, but historically they have and that’s the case you need to make via the business final question.
Matt Alder [00:21:15]:
We’ve talked about future proofing, we’ve talked about buying into an innovative vision of the where’s this going next? Where’s AI going to take us? What are the career sites of 2 years time going to look like and going to be able to do So?
James Saunders [00:21:32]:
I think one of the benefits, I mean there are always benefits for economic downturn and crises, aren’t there? One of the benefits that’s come out of the pandemic is the fact that whilst if you’d asked anybody two years ago about the purpose of a career site, it’s always about trying to ensnare hard to find highly passive candidates that were probably applying to your competitors. So it’s all about a candidate driven market. Now it’s far less so. And actually people are now addressing the concerns of volume hire through the career site and the way the career sites can do that from a practical perspective. They can use bot technology to interact with the candidate prior to application to work out their suitability for the job. But also you can actually change, once you have got a good algorithm on the front end, you can actually change the application process. You can change your employer brand a little bit depending on the job they’re applying for or the skill set that they have. So effectively your career site can be really good not just for snaring hard to find candidates, but also allow and facilitate the selection process for easier to find candidates as well. There’s a lot of really interesting stuff that we’re doing at the moment around things like push notifications and stuff like that, so that effectively, you know, real time information is provided to candidates so they can make real time decisions. So, you know, that’s quite an interesting one as well. I think also some of the other stuff that we’ve been looking at recently, if you look at things like booking.com and these other sort of big retail engines, they use things like scarcity an awful lot. So what I mean by scarcity is that there are calls to action for the buyer to help them make a quicker decision on buying, whether it’s a holiday or a hotel room or whatever. And you can actually transpose a number of those things within a recruitment context as well. So again, that’s another thing, another example of where we can use retail and actually transpose the retail experience within a recruitment experience, basically. So, you know, I know for a fact that CareerSight is gaining traction as the most important asset that brands have within their recruitment marketing arsenal, if you like. There’s, you know, we’ve only achieved a fraction of the outcome there, and there’s certainly a great future for career sites, without a doubt.
Matt Alder [00:24:05]:
James, thank you very much for talking to me.
James Saunders [00:24:07]:
Thanks for having me, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:24:09]:
My thanks to James Saunders. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time, and I hope you’ll join me.
