Back in April, I ran a live podcast conference on the future of talent acquisition in partnership with the team at TA Tech. We had ten excellent speakers across five topic sessions, and I’m delighted to now be able to bring you the content to you as a series of podcasts. I’m releasing these every Friday for the next few weeks, so if you don’t want to miss them, make sure you have subscribed to the show.
Following on from the Recruitment Marketing session last week, this week’s release is the panel debate on Recruitment Advertising. My highly knowledgeable guests were Ellie Harte, Recruitment Partner Talent Attraction from Atkins and KJ, CEO of Joveo.
We are at a real inflection point with recruitment advertising now, and this discussion will give you some clear insights into the strategies and technologies that will shape the future.
In the conversation, we discuss:
▪ The current state of the market
▪ Shortening attention spans and changing media consumption habits
▪ The imbalance between supply and demand
▪ How can employers stand out
▪ Outcome-based advertising
▪ Data and predictive analytics
▪ Understanding target audience and segmentation
▪ Testing messaging
▪ The power of authentic content
▪ Automation
▪ What future shifts can we expect to see?
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to this special bonus edition of the Recruiting Future podcast. Back in April, I ran a live podcast conference on the future of talent acquisition in partnership with a team at TA Tech. We had 10 excellent speakers across five topic sessions and I’m delighted to now be able to bring you the content as a series of podcasts. I’m releasing these every Friday for the next few weeks, so if you don’t want to miss them, make sure you’ve subscribed to the show. Following on from the recruitment marketing session last week, this week’s release is the panel debate on recruitment advertising. My highly knowledgeable guests were Ellie Hart, recruitment partner, talent attraction from Atkins, and KJ, CEO of Joveo. We’re at a real inflection point with recruitment advertising at the moment and this discussion will give you some clear insights into the strategies and technologies that will shape the future.
Matt Alder [00:01:17]:
The best thing to do to start with is to, I suppose really set the scene in terms of where we are with recruitment advertising at the moment. It’s been a, it’s been a very, very disrupt 12 months. I don’t have to tell anyone that and I’m just kind of interested to get your perspectives on the challenges that we’re sort of seeing in the market at the moment. So I mean, Ellie, talk us through the sort of the recruiting challenges that you have currently.
Ellie Harte [00:01:44]:
Yeah, so I mean within engineering it’s difficult anyway. I think pre pandemic we’re working in a market where less young individuals are choosing to join or study STEM and come into the engineering realm. And a lot of our knowledge base, it sits with the older population, disappears as people get older and retire. So it’s always been a really difficult market for us to find candidates in any way. But you’re absolutely right that the pandemic has had a real knock on effect for us. I think one of the key things is we’re finding that people are a lot more reluctant or more nervous to move at the moment, which provides some huge challenges. I think there’s a big piece around people wanting job security, which when you’re in an already in a short skill, short market, makes it very difficult. I guess the other thing is we’re finding that a lot of the advertising we do or a lot of how we get people’s attention is through social media. And the result of the pandemic is that people are at home and they’re on their mobile platforms a lot more and spending a lot more time on social media. However, the negative to that is we have a lot more digital noise that we have to try and cut through at the moment. So getting our voice heard becomes really challenging. And naturally as well, with that human behaviour changing, our attention spans are getting incredibly shorter as well. So we are having to rethink our strategy around how we advertise ourselves to make sure that we are grabbing attention and standing out. So there are a couple of our key challenges, I guess, at the moment.
Matt Alder [00:03:17]:
No, I think that. I think that. I think that makes a lot of sense and it kind of really reflects what I’m hearing from lots of people. It’s just the challenges just seem to get. Seem to get harder and harder. So I’m moving, moving that over to KJ. I mean, tell us a little bit about this sort of. You’re coming at this from a. Probably a slightly different angle, but, you know, tell us a bit about the challenges that you’re seeing in the market. What, what challenges are your clients having? What are you, what are you sort of working on? What’s the, what’s the environment at the moment?
KJ [00:03:44]:
So I think what he said and what I’m seeing is pretty much the two sides of the same coin. And what I would say is people are very reluctant to come back to the job force. The workforce now you call it as, because of the stimulus checks in the us, where a lot of people do not want to rejoin the workforce and it’s disproportionately more burdensome or in terms of difficult for women who have now two jobs to take care of versus one job they were taking care of earlier. So it’s even harder for them to join the workforce. And what we are also seeing is many people at the start of this pandemic already scaled out to another type of a job because they needed jobs. So people who were there had now gone to another job. If you are a fitness equipment company which has a lot of gyms, those people have already taken jobs as drivers and various workers. Now you don’t even have them. Or people who are in the haircutting business. We did some analysis on that and we realized that they’ve already taken some jobs and they’re not willing to come back. So even finding workers are going to be difficult. So I would say demand is high, right? It’s because the business are coming back. Supply is a bit up, but nowhere near the demand. I would call it as the, in this whole times, which is where the great Rehire is happening, we are seeing the great divide in that sense. It’s very interesting. I think it’s one of the craziest social experiments the world would have done at a global scale.
Matt Alder [00:05:23]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m guessing we’d all rather wish we hadn’t. We hadn’t done it, but we are. We kind of are where we are now. I’m going to sort of stick with, with, with KJ to sort of answer the next question first, which is. Which is about the, the kind of. The evolution of recruitment advertising. Personally speaking, I’ve been working sort of in recruitment advertising now for, for over 20. For over 20 years. And it’s always, it’s always been interesting because it always looks like it’s changed. But actually the, the fundamentals, the fundamen. However, I think over the last couple of years as technology, there’s been innovations in technology in different ways of thinking. I think we are seeing some change now. So give me your perspective on how recruitment advertising’s evolved in the last couple of years and what impact the technology is having.
KJ [00:06:14]:
So I think historically what has happened is we have always looked back and tried to see what worked and what didn’t work. Right. It’s been more like a wait and watch mode. Right. Spend the dollars and we’ll see what results came out and kind of go from there. And it was okay to wait, right. Because you had time and there was a cycle of hiring and staffing going on. Now the need of the hour is more of on demand. Right. I need to staff that location. I need to get these people. I need to do it now. Right. And therefore there’s a lot of palpable nervousness and urgency out there in terms of having to. To change the model from towards more for pay for performance. I want to drive towards outcome. I want to hire people now. It’s getting a little bit more in that sense. I think another thing that has changed is the world has started looking at job ads a little differently. It’s not about just a job ad, it’s about is it inclusive? Are we actually doing it right? I think the world has changed in last year and a half, not just because of what happened in Pandemic, but if you look at the whole world, it is a lot more diverse and a lot more sensitized to equality. And people are just not only looking for a good fit, they’re looking for good jobs. How do I say Covid has kind of done a reset for all of Us and all the things that has happened in the world. So I believe that the advertising is going to get evolved to drive more towards the outcome and to drive content more differently than it was in the past.
Matt Alder [00:07:56]:
Absolutely. And Ellie, I mean could you sort of pick up on that? Your strategy to recruitment advertising sort of evolved over the last couple of years. Are you using more technology? What have you been seeing?
Ellie Harte [00:08:07]:
Yeah, I think completely alludes to what you were saying at the beginning. I joined Atkins as a sourcer, gosh, over 13 years ago now. And if I think about the landscape then, it’s so different than it is now. I think going back then we were using journals so we were doing paper advertising. Job boards were very much kink back then and then you’d expect people to land on your career site. So I think we’ve seen a huge shift in the platforms that we use as a result of technology, but also in how we go out on those platforms and how we market ourselves as well. So one of our key routes to market at the moment, we don’t use job boards. We made a conscious decision other than those that sort of scrape our sites, I won’t name them and give them any free publicity. But other than those key ones, we don’t do any paid contracts any longer with job boards because we just weren’t seeing the results. So social media is one of our key routes to market. But that’s been a bit of a journey for us as well because we started off advertising jobs on social and very quickly realized that that wasn’t going to work. People don’t use social media, particularly if you think about channels like Facebook and Instagram, to sit there and look at job descriptions. So for us it’s more about how we create eye catching collateral that promotes USPs instead what stands us out amongst our competitors and we hook people in and then make sure we’ve got the right call to action to take them back to the right places. But even across social I’m seeing technology and what works change. But also, yeah, video is king. Like I said about attention spans, it needs to be short video, it needs to be filmed in the right way that it’s appropriate for Instagram stories, for example. And I think at the moment, and it alludes back to what we were just talking about, you have to be on top of the current trends. It’s not always looking back at what did work, it’s looking at for your early careers, populations, things like TikTok, Instagram Reels. There’s new functionality coming with LinkedIn creating their own story functionality as well. So I think that’s it for us with technology. It’s making sure that your marketing and your recruitment strategy moves with technology and you don’t get left behind.
Matt Alder [00:10:20]:
Absolutely. That makes perfect sense. And it kind of makes perfect sense because you are looking for such a very sort of specific audience of people and also an audience that I think you probably know very, very well in terms of where they and what they’re, what they’re, what they’re doing. Just sort of moving back to KJ, you talked about looking forward and outcome based recruitment, recruitment, advertising. Let’s talk a little bit more about that. I mean how should people be using, you know, how should people be using data? What’s possible in the future? Are we in a position where we can predict hiring outcomes or will we be in that position in before too long?
KJ [00:11:01]:
Yeah, I think I’d like to deconstruct this so called very what everybody believes to be a complex problem. It’s not as complex. Talent acquisitions, since I remember it, have always known that how many hires do they make on applies? Matt, you said one thing that it hasn’t really changed. Back in the day when job boards came into the picture, they were being judged on the number of hires they delivered. Now you can keep on changing the model of paper posting slots, paper performance, proactive, reactive, passive, active, dormant, all of it. But at the end of the day it’s still the hiring outcome or what that outcome is defined as. And I believe that having always known apply to hire the job ad tech platforms, they’ve always known what is the click to apply ratios. They’ve always known how many clicks can happen. Right. When I say clicks I mean, you know, there is a job right job for everyone in the world. There’s no, no wrong quality applicant. It’s just not a relevant applicant. I fail to believe. I think it’s demeaning to say somebody’s not a quality applicant. It is in your eyes, not a quality applicant. So if you are putting the right job in front of the right person, right. You can predict how many clicks to applies would happen. And applies to hires is already known. So I don’t think predicting is a difficult thing. In fact we have a prediction engine. Think of it as more like your campaign planner or your data analyst who can predict the clicks to hires and you can give that goal and you kind of get that out of the box. It’s on demand, real time. But I think what’s more important is when you have to drive to outcomes is how you control what you do, how you constantly optimize. What is going to be important is you have less staff than you had earlier. So are you really optimizing on lesser applies to hires because that’s an important metric that’s going to become an important part of the future planning. And more targeted sources, newer sources, better fit places. If you have to hire diverse candidates, you have to put it in a diversity sites and we have a very relevant message and a call to action. As Elise said, this all has to come together. So that is what is going to improvise. I won’t say improvise. That’s what you got to improvise to optimize to your outcomes.
Matt Alder [00:13:37]:
Absolutely. And I mean do you see just as a quick sort of follow up to you, do you see that happening at the moment? Are there clients that you’re working with who are thinking that way?
KJ [00:13:45]:
Yes, some of the most sophisticated customers in the world who think like marketers are the large customers like etiquette and run start. Right. Because their life is this. So they’re already there, they’re already talking about protection. They already move the needle to that part of it. Right. So I think the key mantra is do not get fooled by spending more. Right. Spend wisely, watch closely and analyze regularly and become better every day.
Matt Alder [00:14:14]:
Ellie, I know that your strategy as it’s evolved over the years is kind of more and more sort of data centric and you kind of really track what’s going on and make those kinds. I mean talk us through how you use data, where you’re heading with it and what might be possible in the future.
Ellie Harte [00:14:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. So we use the general types of looking back at sources I think KJ had mentioned there and seeing what’s worked in the past to inform what we do or don’t do moving forward. But I think there’s other data sets that are really important to us that we consider at the moment. I think one of the things that’s key is data on the market data. So knowing who our competitors are, what they’re advertising, how they’re advertising, all that data helps us define what I mentioned earlier around our usp. Without that we’re not making intelligent decisions around how we’re going to market. Like I said, analytics around what’s worked in the past, where we’ve hired from because what worked three years ago is not necessarily going to be right for now. Talking about technology evolving data around our careers site is really important for us. How people land on our careers site, what Sources refer them there. Mapping our candidate journeys, the bounce rate across job descriptions, understanding what our audience want to see and being able to personalise that towards them is also really, really important. And I think moving forward we’re going to see that continue to evolve. I’ve no doubt that technology will exist that’s going to support that data collection where we’ll be able to predict the outcome, outcome of a campaign timescales to recruit more accurately. But I think what’s also really interesting is that as market trends evolve, how we as humans behave changes so frequently as well. So you’ve got to be set up as an organization to constantly evolve with the market and data.
Matt Alder [00:16:12]:
Absolutely. I mean, I couldn’t agree more with that. I think that, yeah, everyone’s media consumption habits are changing all the time and they’re going to change again. As we come out of, come out of the situation we’re in now and people start commuting and some people start going back to the office, things are going to change again. I just want to talk a bit about target audiences and segmentation and targeting, because one of the things that I find whenever I’m talking to anyone about recruitment marketing and recruitment advertising and how to do it, understanding your target audience just seems to come up time and time again, sort of sticking with Ali, because, you know, I know you know a lot about your target audience. I mean, how, how have you got to that position with, with understanding what they do and what would you like to be able to do in terms of targeting in the future, if you could, if you could sort of wave a magic wand and do anything?
Ellie Harte [00:17:10]:
Yeah, I think having a steady stream of recruiting for similar disciplines helps with that. And that’s what’s helped us build an understanding and knowledge of our audience. And it is so important to be able to target your messaging in the right way to meet the right people. One of the things we do quite a lot of is paid advertising across platforms like LinkedIn and that allows us to be able to segment demographically, but also so we can look at occupation, but also to look at people geographically. And I think the analytics that come off the back of that, where we can see how many people are viewing our advert, how many people are clicking them, which organisations are engaging with our content allows us then to be able to segment. Right. These are the type of people that are interested. If the type of people we want to recruit aren’t interested in the collateral we’re sharing, it shows us something fundamentally wrong in the messaging that we’re putting out externally. So it does, at the beginning of anything like this, it’s always a little bit of trial and error. And we’ve gone to market with campaigns that haven’t worked and haven’t attracted the type of people that we want to either. But it’s also, and I don’t want to keep going back to market trends and things changing, but you also have to look at some of what’s important to those individuals outside of the fundamentals of the jobs and the skills. So if I think psychographic, for example, one of the things we’re focusing on this year is net zero, for example, and we know for our early careers population how important it is for them to work for an organisation that’s sustainable. It’s got social value, it’s got this commitment to being carbon neutral as well. So we think about how we promote what we do within an organization to that external audience to hook them in, in that way. But it’s really important to be able to segment your audience because you can be so much more strategic as well and a CRM. So candidate relationship management tools help massively with that as well. When you can sort current and future talent into pipelines and pools and you can tailor your messaging and the recruitment marketing that goes out to the. And again, use the analytics to measure that, that helps you understand your audience.
Matt Alder [00:19:23]:
So, KJ, moving that question over to you, you’re obviously working in a different landscape with lots of different clients who are targeting often multiple audiences and all those sort of things. Traditionally, recruitment advertising, regardless of what it said, hasn’t been very targeted. I mean, how’s that changing? How do you work with your clients on targeting and segmentation and, and what’s likely to be possible in the future?
KJ [00:19:51]:
So I think there are two types of segmentation. One is a job segmentation and second is a publisher segmentation or the source segmentation. So the job segmentation, we don’t rely on what we get in the jobs we get, right? We don’t rely on the recruiters at large out there and how they’re segmenting jobs. I’ve seen campaigns where an accountant and a nurse and a driver were in the same campaign, right? You can’t, you can’t run that campaign, right? So, so what we do is we ground up with our technology to kind of make sense of those job titles and which category they belong to, to kind of put the right jobs together in the right job groups or ad groups. So that is sophistication on the job segmenting. And then we have known Over a period of time which specific title works best for which job. So now if a new job comes in, not only are we segmenting it, right? But we also know that this job title works best and this next job title has about 90% relevance to that. And this is how it’s going to play out. So we kind of automatically populate the jobs and allow for the A B testing to happen, right? Like oh, this title works better than this title and in this market and so on and so forth. I can give you hundreds of examples right now. But we have even learn from our customers who have done things like a guaranteed bonus for delivery drivers would be something that will improve your conversion rate overnight to 30, 40%. Whereas talking about how great your driving seat is going to be when you’re a truck driver and you’re looking at a job, that’s when the person spends 90% of his time could again be a game changer in terms of messaging. So that’s a job segmenting and job messaging part of it. The second is the publisher segmentation. Now, consumer advertising is maybe very sophisticated and job advertising is not, but that doesn’t mean that the sophistication cannot come in how we work on it. So maybe the sophistication is as simple as looking to all the sources next to each other, whether it is slots, paid postings, display advertising, proactive reach, whatever that is, into one place and seeing the results and making a business case why something works and accordingly, spend your money wisely. So I think the segmentation has to happen on both ends and I would say the last thing, which is we all have higher data, we all have data of relevant applications and you can go back in your history and see 10 years and see which are those applicants, use a live ramp kind of technology, upload that data, anonymize it and find lookalike audiences. And there’s so many out there. Right. Two thirds of the world population are not in the job search ecosystem, they are not on the job board ecosystem. Just look at the math of how much indeed LinkedIn has has out there. And you’re only playing in your fishing in that small little pond. So learn from your own data, put this out there. And that’s why what we do is we try to always suggest to our customers that the display advertising, the right content kind of makes a lot of difference. The right messaging, the right outreach makes a world of difference.
Matt Alder [00:22:59]:
Absolutely. I think that’s so interesting about what’s the thing that makes the difference? Is it talking about the seat or talking about the bonus. And I think that maybe we learn from the past here because if we go back 20, 30 years when we’re advertising jobs in newspapers, you had a limited amount of space, so you had to really think about what were the benefits that were going to flip people. And now theoretically, you’ve got infinite space in a job ad and maybe that art form is lost. And I think if we add that into the data of knowing what it is that tips, that’s. I think that’s really interesting. So, yeah, sorry, I’ll just stick with you. I mean, just in terms of that sort of that content and that messaging. Give us a few more thoughts and then I’ll kind of ask Ali the same question.
KJ [00:23:50]:
I think back in the day, Matt, when you talk about 20, 30 years back, and trust me, I’m not that old, working a little, I think it was more of a recruitment marketing function then than it is today. Right. When you had to put an ad out there, you have to really think about messaging. You have to think about what resonates with the user. And you are putting a lot of dollars that you cannot come back, that you cannot optimize for. So to kind of what Ali was saying, right that time, visual was the key again, guys, the video is the key, right? Are you able to see the right message? Are you able to be in front of the right person when the person is willing to listen to your message? Don’t put a message in front of a person at a time when the person is not interested in looking at the mess anyway. There’s a whole Pandora’s box I can open on it, so I’ll just stay away from that.
Matt Alder [00:24:33]:
No, fair enough. Ellie, coming back to you and sort of asking that same question about content and storytelling. What are your thoughts on it? I know you kind of alluded to it a little bit already.
Ellie Harte [00:24:42]:
Yeah, I think the storytelling and how that links back to your employee brand is so important. Last year really taught us the importance of showcasing and building your employee brand, regardless of external influences. In the pandemic, we maintained our brand despite having no vacancies that we were advertising. We showcased how employees were dealing with the new situation, working from home, how they’re supporting each other, the different measures we put in place. So I think content now, if you’re going to grab your audience’s attention in the right way, needs to feel real and authentic. And I think that’s the key. Not just shouting about what you do, but the people that do it, the internal members of staff who can tell that story for you as well. We’ve got an LVP we created last year, which was created by our staff at all levels across the business. And it genuinely showcases what it’s like to work here and our culture and all the content we then share externally across social and all different channels then links into those cultural elements that we showcase there. So it’s about not taking ourselves too seriously with our content, whether it’s our film collateral or we let a lot of our staff take over our Instagram stories, for example, so they can tell in a really authentic manner what is a day in a life like. We’re also in the process of thinking about pulling together an ambassador program so our staff can really become the voice of our organization because I think they sell it an awful lot better than a corporate projecty, feely type post that we could put out there.
Matt Alder [00:26:25]:
Absolutely. So we are, we are almost out of time, which is unbelievable, but is a testament to the quality of discussion that’s going on here. I’m going to, I’m going to ask one final question and Ellie, I’ll ask you, I’ll ask you first, which is what is the. What does the future look like? So specifically from, from where you’re sitting within Atkins, what in terms of your recruitment advertising, what is, what is an sort of couple of years look like for you?
Ellie Harte [00:26:48]:
Yeah, I think for us, and I’ve mentioned this already, we’re about to implement a CRM and I think the automated nature of some of the recruitment marketing that we can do through that CRM will make a massive difference to how we build relationships with external talent. Because you’re not just talking about people that are already engaged with us. You’re talking about building pipelines of talent that might not be interested right now for the future. So that’s a big one for us. Think the whole EDI message and inclusivity is going to be so important with how we position ourselves moving forward. So it’s not just on social. One of our big things at the moment is making sure that everything is inclusive and accessible to everybody. So our social posts all have the correct alt tags. We’ve got a really nice partnership with an organization called Recite Me, who have a tool on our career site, which means that regardless of whether it’s visible or a hidden disability, everybody has equal access to all of our content. And I think that’s going to be so important moving forward if you’re going to have equality in your recruitment process and attraction process.
Matt Alder [00:27:58]:
Thank you, KJ, Your Final thoughts. What does the future of recruitment advertising look like from where you’re standing?
KJ [00:28:05]:
I’ll pick up from where Ellie left and then kind of add my few cents to it, I think. And actually I would change it. I believe that removing gender biases, making your content more inclusive is something that everybody has to go to. We have that built into our technology. We allow that to happen. And I think everybody will move from nice to have to a must have requirement as far as that is concerned. The number two is that I think employers or hiring managers or staffing agencies will have to go deeper now, right? They will get to live in the data. They will have to live in the data because, because the needle is going to move to outcome driven solutions and expectations. So just that is going to become very, very interesting because you are going to, when you go deeper in the data, you’re going to demand transparency. No more opaque blind networks. You’re going to want to see which work, what does not work. Right. And I would say last but not least, I think the difference between the technology platform and the services will become clearer. Right, right now it’s all muffled up, right where there is a consulting shops, right? Like how Deloitte existed in the world for SAP as a technology. I think that’s what is going to evolve in this industry. This is what I kind of see is happening. And the implementation consulting shops will become experts and technology will become experts in what they do.
Matt Alder [00:29:32]:
Fantastic stuff. Thank you so much, both of you, so much for your, for your insights there. For everyone listening, this is a, this is a, this is the kind of theme we’re going to carry on in our next panel in about 15 minutes time, which is on the future of recruitment marketing. But in the meantime, Ellie, KJ, thank you so much for joining us. If you could turn your mics and your screens off and I will invite Peter back to the Zoom stage to take us through the next thing.
Ellie Harte [00:30:02]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:30:03]:
My thanks to Ellie and KJ and also all of the team at TA Tech. 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.
