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 the content to you as a series of podcasts. I’ll be releasing these every Friday for the next five weeks, so if you don’t want to miss them, make sure you have subscribed to the show.
First up is our session on the future recruitment marketing featuring Allyn Bailey from Intel and Chris Forman from Appcast. This was a really lively debate with a big focus on the current inversion we are seeing in the talent market and the transformative effect it is likely to have on recruitment marketing.
In the conversation, we discuss:
▪ The inverted job market and the change it might drive in recruitment marketing.
▪ What is driving the change in job seeker behaviour?
▪ A critical need to think differently
▪ Precision targeting and segmentation
▪ Recruitment marketers need to be technology wizards.
▪ The rise of the dedicated recruitment marketing function
▪ Autonomous matching
▪ What recruitment marketing will look like in two years
Listen to this podcast on Apple Podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:17]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to a 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 the team at tech. We had 10 amazing speakers across five topic sessions, and I’m delighted to now be able to bring you the content as a series of podcasts. I’ll be releasing these every Friday for the next five weeks, so if you don’t want to miss them, make sure you’ve subscribed to the show. First up is our session on the future of recruitment marketing, featuring Allyn Bailey from Intel and Chris Forman from appcast. This was a really lively debate with a big focus on the current inversion we’re seeing in the talent market and the transformative effect it’s likely to have on recruitment marketing.
Matt Alder [00:01:09]:
So I just want to start by setting the scene and talking about some of the challenges that we’re. That we’re seeing, that we’re seeing in the market. So I’ll start with Allyn. Tell us about the challenges that you’re seeing from where you’re sitting at intel at the moment when it comes to sort of recruitment, marketing and recruiting.
Allyn Bailey [00:01:29]:
Yeah. So I think one of the number one challenges that we’re seeing is that there is this middle wasteland that I’m starting to call it. That is the differentiation between what’s happening from an advertising perspective and making people visible and aware of opportunities that exist. I think that we’ve all kind of figured out how to do that and that’s happening at some level, and then understanding how we actually get people placed into opportunities and there’s this middle wasteland that’s kind of in the middle. We tried to use CRM technology to solve that problem. Now AI technology is coming into that space. But I think from a recruitment marketing perspective, our biggest challenge is trying to figure out how do we take this promise that we’re selling to people about this opportunity and the ability to help connect them to opportunity and et cetera, and actually make it a reality in a way that isn’t just a bunch of fluff. How do we actually make that happen? I think we’re getting to the point now where there’s an expectation that in the recruitment marketing space that people are seeing through all the stuff we’ve told them for years. Everybody’s a little bit cynical, maybe in today’s day and age, and so it’s up to us to start to fulfill the promise that lives that we’re putting out there around how we’re able to connect people to opportunity. And I think that’s the biggest challenge that we’ve got.
Matt Alder [00:02:50]:
Absolutely. And Chris, you’ve obviously got access to a huge amount of data in terms of what you do and what your company does. Tell us what challenges you’re sort of seeing in the market generally.
Chris Forman [00:03:02]:
Yeah. So first off, apologies. Our bullpen in here is all of a sudden getting loud. So if, if. Matt, feel free to blow a whistle and I’ll try and go find something quieter. But if you guys. Has anyone gone and seen the. Oh goodness, Hamilton the musical? They’ve got. They’ve got a song in there called the Day the World Turned Upside down about, you know, the battle of Yorktown and when all of a sudden we theoretically won our independence. The last four weeks, everybody, that song should have been playing in all recruitment marketing leaders heads because the data in terms of what’s going on with job seeker behavior has done something I have not seen in my 20 years of doing this. It literally inverted. And so I have. Because a bunch of this is geeky. I pulled together a few slides, Adam, just to show this. Can I these slides quickly? Because I think fundamentally what we are all going to be dealing with for the if our time horizon is the next three to five years, I think we’ve just entered a 12 to 18 month period where everything that we knew and understood about how people look for work and how they engage with job ads is inverted. I think that that’s going to drive a really radical shift in terms of how people are thinking about what recruitment marketing is. Candidly, I think we’re going to get really down to basics really, really quickly just to try and increase the flow rate of people that we’ve got coming on in. And some of the razzle dazzle may actually kind of fall to the side as we focus on airways breathing and circulation. So can I show you just two slides?
Matt Alder [00:04:55]:
Yeah, sure, if the tech works. Yeah, we’re open for anything in this show. Cool.
Chris Forman [00:05:03]:
All right. Can you see it?
Matt Alder [00:05:04]:
Yeah.
Chris Forman [00:05:05]:
All right, so our friends at Indeed have a great blog called Hiring Lab. And so if no one has seen it, you should go look at it. This is not an absolute measure of jobs, but it’s indexed to a zero point back in February 1st in 2020. And you can see what happened during the pandemic. And now if you blur your eyes, what you are seeing here is that postings on a relative basis in the United States are up by 20% compared to where they were a year ago. Pre pandemic vector is demand is materially higher, not just a little bit higher, but materially higher than it was pre pandemic. Okay, so that’s something that I think we all kind of fundamentally understand. But the other thing I think that we fundamentally understand is that we still have more supply in terms of talent generalized, at least in North America. But this is true based on the data that we’re seeing in Europe as well than pre pandemic. So if you take a look, either by unemployment rate, we’re at 6% now, we were at 4%, 50% higher. So theoretically half as many people are still on the sidelines. Or if you look at employed, what you’re finding is there’s about 11 million people that still are underemployed in the United States. What should be happening and what has happened in every other downturn that I’ve ever seen is you come out of a downturn, demand goes up, and all of a sudden you start to see people moving, being off the sidelines, doing more searches, engaging more with job ads, and applying at a higher rate. Check this out. Google searches for the word job. All of a sudden, if you compare Q1 to 2018, 2019, even 2020 before it went a little bit south in 2021, Seeker intent is off by half the number of clicks. This is internal app cast data. This is again like the indeed thing. It’s normalized, it’s not actual clicks. Is it the lowest point we’ve measured going back three years? So not only are people searching less, people are clicking on jobs less. And then this is the other thing. Apply rates have cratered. And so across the board in the United States, we’re finding apply rates on jobs are down by at least 20% across the board by function. So what does that mean for recruitment marketers in like the future is. I don’t think that we’re in a spot right now where we can be thinking about, oh, gee whiz, what’s the next big idea that we’re going to go solve for? I think we’re going to be finding over the next 12 months because of the economic growth rate that is spiking. I mean, Goldman Sachs says it’s going to be 8% growth this year in the United States for the last 15 or going. The last time we even got close TO that was 1983 with Reagan. After the Reagan tax cuts, it was 6% we’re looking at the biggest economic growth that we’ve ever had and we’re going to be holding on with our fingernails, just trying to find ways to increase conversion rates. And some of the razzle dazzle, I think is going to be left to the side. I don’t mean to sound like the sky is falling, but I think this guy may be falling just a little bit.
Matt Alder [00:08:32]:
There we are. That’s, I mean, that’s, that’s fascinating data and it really does resonate with stories that I’m hearing from around the industry and the challenges that people have. Moving, moving back to Lynn, is this, does this kind of correlate with, with, with your experience? And how do you think the sort of the future of recruitment marketing needs to, needs to map out from, from here? And what are the, what are the sort of the key drivers for you?
Allyn Bailey [00:09:00]:
I do think it correlates. I was very interested by the data, so the geek of me wants to go so deep in that and explore that some more detail. So I’m trying to kind of think through that as I’m talking here. But my immediate instinct would be, I think I would caution us about making preconceived notions about why we think that is happening. And I think some of it may be, and I’m just throwing this out there as a hypothesis I’d like to test out. But I think some of this may be that job seeker behavior is changing not just because of maybe our preconceived ideas around their lack of interest or their lack of desire. Like there are a million things that could be kind of driving that piece, but it could be that they’ve kind of, it kind of goes to my first point. They may have been, they may have figured this out. Right? You know, we have, we’ve been spending all this time basically running our recruitment operations organizations the same way for decades. The candidates, I think, have been smarter and more in tune to this. And I’m wondering if this data is reflective of the fact that they woke up and they’re not going to play anymore the same way. And so they’re looking to approach this from a different lens. And I think what that means to us is that we need to take a step back and say, well, we’ve been preparing for this moment for a long time. Right now is the time that we need to start really thinking about this differently. I often tell people that this idea that there are active and passive candidates has been a misnomer forever. I just don’t think that that’s A true statement. I think that there are people who are actively looking and those are the people who are driving your apply rates up because they’re like there’s some driver that says they have to go out there. And then for the most others, they fall in this lens I call opportunity harvesters. Right. So we used to call those passive, but they’re not passive. What they’ve done is they figured out this ecosystem and the way it operates. They put their information out there, it’s on LinkedIn, it’s in other sources, they’re building their own personal brands, they’ve made themselves available and the expectation is now becoming just like in the consumer setting, that you know who I am, I know you have my data or you can access my data and I expect you to come to me. I think what we’re seeing is this mindset shift towards opportunity should come to me to a certain level. What does that mean for recruitment marketing? I think what that means is that we’ve got to start switching our game from saying please come apply in mass volumes. Let me drive you, drive you, drive you to my apply conversion. And instead start thinking about how do we leverage this wealth of data that exists out there and that we’ve been collecting about people for years and use it to help target most effectively at them at the right moment, at the right time to connect them to opportunities. That means we have to start shooting with very specific arrows and less with these big kind of mass flashes out there. Just hoping that we catch somebody in the net.
Matt Alder [00:12:16]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:12:16]:
I really want to dig into that in a second because I think it’s kind of a fascinating area and so important. Before I do, just sort of coming back to Chris, I mean, what’s your perspective on why this might be happening and give us a little bit more on what you think the implications are for the future of recruitment marketing.
Chris Forman [00:12:39]:
So let me pick up on the why. And this is going to sound super weird for me to start this way, but it’s going to make sense in a minute. I’m a Democrat, I voted for Joe Biden. I believe government solves problems. Okay, so put that in a box. If you take a look at the data, there’s three conventional wisdom things that basically would explain not a gradual degradation in seeker experience, which is something that I would argue would be more along the lines of what we’d expect if they just stopped wanting to play our game. That’s kind of a gradual change. This was a precipitous drop. Okay, so it started candidly in the middle of February. And there’s three reasons why economists and our internal experts here at appcast think that this would happen. Number one is you have people staying on the sidelines because they’ve got kids at home that they need to educate. Number two is you’ve got people staying on the sidelines because of the fact that they are not vaccinated and they are concerned about their safety. And number three is monetary policy from the United States government in terms of the recent Covid recovery bill that was passed. What’s interesting is if you look at unemployment, just unemployment, and you break that down, unemployment is getting better with a whole series of categories. You’ve got folks that have been unemployed a small amount of time, going down, a medium amount of time going down, a relatively long amount of time going down a super long amount of time. Before COVID we had about 1.2 million long term unemployed. During COVID it’s about 4.2 million. It went up 300,000 last month and we’re at about 4.4 million right now. So what’s interesting is that if you take a look at the two things outside of economic stimulus that would necessarily kind of explain why people wouldn’t be coming off the sidelines. Home education and vaccines. For that group of people which has stayed relatively static for 10 to 12 months, vaccines in the United States are going up and to the right hard. So you’d expect it not to be getting worse. You’d expect to stay the same. The other thing is, is that you have half as many schools being fully remote and three times as many schools going back to in person instruction in the United States. So those two things would, would probably not explain a precipitous drop in seeker engagement. Right, because they’re getting better, not worse. So even if we just said they stayed the same, it probably removes them as a reason. And if you look at the data, ZipRecruiter has got a great blog as well, where they basically broke down the new public kind of monetary policy, not monetary government supports for unemployment in the United States and turned it into what the hourly rate was in all the different states. When you take state unemployment and federal unemployment, if you go and you look at what those, those salaries are compared to what’s being advertised for a lot of jobs, it’s close. It’s close. So we’re not going to know for six to nine months what’s going on here, but there’s a possibility that’s what it was once you normalize everything out. Now what does that mean? You Know, kind of going back to my thing about like if I’m a recruitment marketer and I’m working in any organization that specifically has low or middle wage workers, but even on the high end, like we’re seeing this across the board, my ad agency friends call me and say they’re seeing exactly the same thing across the board. White collar, you know, blue collar, middle collar. What do we got to do? I agree, Alan, that there’s a narrow casting and better targeting and better communicating with candidates is something that is a middle term response. But, but the short term response needs to be almost kind of emergent airways breathing circulation. Number one is we need to get our reduce the friction for our application flows instantly. If in fact what we’re finding is we have fewer people clicking on our jobs and we have a lower apply rate, we need to throw conventional wisdom about what we ask and when we ask it out the window. Otherwise we are going to see fill rates on our jobs go through the floorboards. And so like pulling out assessments, pulling out all the extra questions, moving to a simple opt in utilizing the type of, let’s say third party apply technologies indeed, apply, LinkedIn, apply, you know, the ATSI product that our parent company at Stepstone has all that super important. The other thing is that we need to tell this story to corporate leadership. Here’s the bottom line, guys. It’s going to get materially more expensive. You’re seeing, as measured by what you pay for a click, that cost is going up 15 to 20%. Conversion rates are going down by 20%. Which means if you set your budget based on the idea that you are getting this many clicks and this many applies from a job ad that had this fill rate, basically divide that by 0.4 and that’s what you’re going to have to start looking at in terms of, I’m sorry, 0.6. That’s what your budget’s going to be. It’s going to be materially higher. And so candidly, we need to start putting more money to work if we want to maintain the applicant flows that we’ve historically done to get hires. And lastly is we need to get our recruiters focused on this reality that we are not, no matter what they read in the journal, this is not a employer favorable environment. Okay, we need to make every applicant count. After we get those things going, then you can go do a bunch of the razzle dazzle, fun stuff. Yes. You know, we need to be better at telling messages. Yes. We need to have better, you know, kind of ad Comms. Yes. We need to be more automated. I don’t think we’re going to be at that stage of thinking about that for six to eight months. I think we’re going to be kind of with red lights flashing for a bit of time.
Matt Alder [00:19:03]:
And I think there is a challenge there that they’re could well be perception. With unemployment still still at record levels in lots of countries around the world, the perception could be amongst corporate leadership that actually is very easy to recruit, very easy to recruit people at the moment. That that’s not a, that’s not a problem. So yeah, I think that’s a really, that’s a really interesting point. Ellen, coming back to your point about first of all be interested in, in your thoughts on what Chris has. Chris has just said but also maybe extend expanding a bit more in terms of, of the targeting and segmentation that you were talking about.
Allyn Bailey [00:19:39]:
Yeah, I think actually I think both pieces are connected. So I agree actually wholeheartedly agree with what Chris said. I think there is a misperception that we’re gonna be walking into an employer’s market or that we’re sitting in an employer’s market that everybody’s just clamoring out there to apply for your jobs and conversion is gonna be difficult. It already is. I mean I think that’s the. I think I don’t know a recruiter today who doesn’t feel that, who isn’t seeing that and isn’t reacting to it. I think. And this is where it connects this idea around segmentation and targeting. I think I just caution us, here’s, here’s my caution. I caution us that sometimes our approach to dealing with those situations is to push as much as possible the volume game and think that that’s going to solve our problem. Push volume of applies. Push volume of big. I am a firm believer that I think that we’re pushing a stone uphill and it’s going to keep falling down on us and keep kind of coming down and coming down and coming down. If we don’t figure out this question around how do we target more effectively and actually get the applying to the right jobs and really focus on that match piece, we’re going to only exacerbate the problem. Right. I think the idea of friction around apply is a huge issue and it’s related to this. Right. If I’m not sure that I’m match or not a match and I don’t really know if this is going to work or not work and I’m not 100% committed to applying and et cetera, any sort of friction, I reach into the apply process. Chris is absolutely right. I’m going to drop. Why would I do that? Right. I’ve talked to applicants recently who are looking at me saying, listen, I’ve been out there applying. I’m desperate. I need to find a job. Now I’m out there looking for work and I’m clicking buttons and listen, if it doesn’t have an easy apply on it, an easy apply button, I don’t even go that far anymore. Right. People get that, and I think that’s the way they’re operating. To me, that pushes us more towards this idea that we have to be much, much better at targeting and getting the right people to apply. Because if you don’t feel a vested interest in the value of why I should apply and go through this hassle to. Even, even in our best case scenario, it’s a hassle to have to tell people who you are and what you’re about. Right. I’m not going to invest in that. In this market, in this way and in this space, we know people aren’t going to do it. So just trying to push volume into it isn’t going to solve the problem. We’ve got to go in there and. And target and get specific about who we want and then bring them into the process in different ways. I think that’s what this is pointing to us, an opportunity to flip the script and to do this differently. If we use our same tactics and same techniques, I don’t think it’s going to solve the problem.
Chris Forman [00:22:36]:
So this is turning into Crossfire. I’m so excited about this. So, Matt, can I dig in here for a minute?
Matt Alder [00:22:43]:
You can dig in. You’ve got one minute to dig in. Then I’m going to ask a final question.
Chris Forman [00:22:46]:
So here’s. Here’s the counterargument to the sysphonian kind of issue of volume that you pointed out. So Mike Hennessy, founder of Brass Ring, a decade ago, he and I were having coffee and Brass Ring at the time was maybe it was more than a decade ago, like a major ats. They had massive amounts of data. And he’s like, Chris, you know what’s super funny? We started to boil the ocean, and what we realized was a hiring manager put a requisition in. And do you know how many times the recruiting team had to go source for that requisite? On average, that requisition? 1.9 times. That means 90% of the requisitions. When we went out and got candidates the first time were wrong. And I’m like, huh? Why is that, Mike? And he’s like, it’s because the hiring managers have no idea what they want. And it isn’t until they look at an applicant that they actually get a clue. And so one of the challenges that I’ve got, because I am. I’m going to argue that volume, no matter what your mother told you, volume does solve problems in recruiting. And so is that all of this, you know, kind of nuanced recruitment marketing presupposes that we know what we want before we get a slate of people in front of us. And I, you know, I still don’t believe necessarily that the world has gotten better from a hiring manager standpoint in the last decade in terms of figuring out what we actually want to hire until we actually get a group of applicants in front of us. So I think I used my minute so we can, we can, we can have another throwdown. We can have. Matt can have us back in a month and we can. I know that we’ve got more questions.
Allyn Bailey [00:24:36]:
We’ll leave that. We’ll stop that for another moment. But I agree with you.
Matt Alder [00:24:40]:
Could you give us, Give us. You’ve got 10 seconds before I ask the last question.
Allyn Bailey [00:24:44]:
I totally agree with you, Chris. People don’t know what they want until they see something in front of them and they can bounce off of and against it. I’m going to tell you where they need to see that is through a slate that you get off of your managed pipeline before you go into the apply process. And the problem today is, is that we’re using that first slate based on the apply process. And that is what is causing our businesses and our recruiters have to spend so much time and effort managing candidates. Right. So we, I think we’re in the same, I think we’re saying the same thing. I just think that it happens pre.
Chris Forman [00:25:20]:
Apply to solve it. Right. I agree with you. If we could, if we could do that magic wand, that would be fantastic. Rainbows and unicorns.
Allyn Bailey [00:25:28]:
I believe in rainbows and unicorns. I think we can do it.
Matt Alder [00:25:30]:
Absolutely. Well, you know, I could, we could run for another hour. This is, this is a fascinating, A fascinating conversation. And I knew that you two would, you know, would have a really interesting, interesting debate. And that hasn’t, I haven’t been disappointed. I want to sort of finish with, with one minute each because we’re coming up to time, so let’s sort of take ourselves away. I mean, very difficult to think about anything other than the next week or the next six months at the moment, just because it has been such a stressful time and there is so much going on. But if we kind of rise above that and think a couple of years into the future, give me your sort of best idea. Tell me what. Actually don’t do that. Tell me what you’d like to see in terms of what recruitment marketing should look like in two years time. So Elyn, you can go first.
Allyn Bailey [00:26:17]:
So I’m going to throw my controversial statement out there. I think what’s happening in the sourcing and recruiting space where we’re starting to automate those capabilities at a much bigger scale, I think that that’s what needs to happen in the recruitment marketing space. I think that we have a misperception that it’s not a misperception. I think that we have a desire to believe that it takes this, you know, great marketing mind and focus and effort and a real specialty to be able to figure out how to target people and to get the right applicants and to push all of those pieces and to do the right messaging. I think that this is one of those jobs and spaces where technology and systems may be better at this than our ability to get humans to do it effectively and at scale. So I think recruitment marketing becomes more and more automated and I think that we start using technology to a greater scale. And recruitment marketers need to become technology wizards. They need to understand how to use it and leverage it.
Matt Alder [00:27:21]:
Absolutely. Chris, your thoughts?
Chris Forman [00:27:24]:
Three legs to the stool. First off, I do believe that we’re seeing a secular shift in large company TA organizations to have a dedicated recruitment marketing function that in and of itself is going to lead to an acceleration of changes both in process and technology. That is where we’re going to be looking at funnels and pipelines more effectively and bringing more tools to bear. So the old adage that if you throw people at it, change occurs. I think we’re going to see more people in this specialization and perhaps profession. And so that’s Vector one. Vector two is. I actually think a bunch of stuff that we currently do is going to be thrown off the rails as a result of the Privacy first web that’s coming out. I can’t tell you how nervous the ad tech and martech world is right now with everything that’s going on with Safari and Chrome, the third party cookies and the ability to re engage based on data sets that are more private. The web is never going to be private, but more private. And that is going to put business models, tools and techniques that we consider to be relatively straightforward forward today and throw them out of whack, and there’s going to be a whole new bunch of things that are going to be coming in. So, like, that, I think, is another webinar. And so I don’t necessarily know how that’s going to play out. The third thing, though, is within, we’re going to have more specialists looking at this issue. We’re going to have a big new issue coming to the fore that we have to deal with with regards to privacy. First Web. The third thing is this is something that my boss and business partner, Sebastian Detmers, at stepst about a lot. It’s autonomous matching. The idea that there is demand on one side and there is supply on the other, and there’s too much friction right now, not just on the apply process, but in terms of both sides being able to kind of constantly be operating and matching. So when you talked about the false construct of passive and active candidates that underpins this concept of autonomous match, no one is really active and, well, there are. People are active, but no one is truly passive. Because just to be clear, Sebastian, if you’re listening to this, I would quit today if President Biden made me an ambassador to any country in the world. So I’m a passive candidate. I just happen to, you know, it’s. I’m not going to get that call. So anyway, there we go. Okay, I got the long stick, but those are my thoughts.
Matt Alder [00:30:17]:
Absolutely.
Matt Alder [00:30:17]:
Well, thank you so much. That was an absolutely tremendous conversation. Sorry we have to cut it short, but we will. We will continue it at some point in the future. So thank you so much. If you could just turn your cameras and mics off. I’m going to invite Peter back to the Zoom stage to take us to the next. The next bit.
Matt Alder [00:30:37]:
My thanks to Allyn and Chris. 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.
Matt Alder [00:31:03]:
Thanks very much for listening.
Matt Alder [00:31:05]:
I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
