I’m absolutely convinced that the employers who can properly harness the current advances in advertising and marketing technology into their talent attraction strategies, will be the ones who are best able to attract the talent they need in the future.
One key area with vast potential for recruitment marketing is programmatic advertising. Unfortunately, with all the spin and theorizing in our industry, it can be difficult to get a clear understanding of how programmatic advertising works and what its considerably benefits are for recruiting.
My guest this week is Louis Halton-Davies, Digital Advertising Consultant at Crunch Simply Digital. Louis is a hands on practitioner of programmatic for recruiting and offers some highly practical insights into how it works and why you should be using it.
In the interview we discuss:
• How programmatic works
• Why is it such an effective tool for recruitment marketing
• The gold mine of data on corporate career sites
• The Connect, Consider, Convert methodology
• Activating the passive audience
• Effective content formats
• The impact of tailoring the apply process to individual audience
Louis also talks us through a recent case study of programmatic success and offer his advice on how to get started with programmatic.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Lever. Providing a modern take on the applicant tracking system. Lever combines ATS and CRM functionality into a single, powerful platform to help you source, nurture, and manage your candidates all in one place. What’s more, Lever’s deceptively simple interface means that hiring managers and applicants love it too. To find out how Lever can help you both accelerate and humanize hiring, visit www.lever.co recruit. That’s www.lever.co recruit and Lever is spelt L E V E R Lever. Where ATS meets CRM, there’s been more of scientific discovery, more of technical advancement and material, material progress in your lifetime and mine and in all the ages of history. Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 99 of the Recruiting Future podcast. I’m absolutely convinced that the employers who can properly harness for recruiting the advances we’re seeing in advertising and marketing technology will be the ones who are able to attract the talent they need in the future. One key area with vast potential for recruitment marketing is programmatic advertising. Unfortunately, with all the spin and theorizing that takes place in our industry, it can be difficult to get a clear understanding of how Programmatic works and what its considerable benefits are for recruiting. My guest this week is Louis Halton-Davies, Digital Advertising Consultant at Crunch Simple Simply Digital. Louis is a hands on practitioner of Programmatic for recruiting and offers some highly practical insights into how it works and why you should be using it. Hi Louis and welcome to the podcast.
Louis Halton-Davies [00:02:11]:
Hi, thanks a lot for having me on. Matt, Pleasure to be here.
Matt Alder [00:02:14]:
My absolute pleasure. Could you introduce yourself and tell everyone a bit about what you do?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:02:20]:
Yeah, no problem. So I’m Louis. I’m a consultant at Crunch Simply Digital. So basically my story in a nutshell is that I started out as a graphic designer about nine years ago and kind of was drawn more to the insight side rather than the kind of creative subjective side. And that kind of led me down the route of becoming a digital marketer and then a website consultant and then an advertising consultant. So I’ve got a bit of a 360 interest when it comes to online advertising and engaging with people in meaningful ways. So for Crunch, what we do is we translate recruitment problems into online advertising solutions. I see myself much more as even though I am a bit of a tech nerd, I’d rather consider myself as someone that can take a real life recruitment problem and turn it into a solution that makes sense from a strategy perspective. And that typically happens through having just general good conversations figuring out who the Audience are what the role is, any previous history of what worked well, what didn’t work well, and how people like to apply for a job. Once objectives are then laid out, then we’ll go away and research their online behavior patterns and come back then with a strategy to say, look, this is how we need to engage with them in these places via these, these media. And this is how we plan to kind of nurture them towards making an application.
Matt Alder [00:03:55]:
Now one of the things that you guys are very well known for is the way that you use programmatic advertising technology for recruitment marketing. Could you just tell us, you know, what, what is programmatic advertising?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:04:10]:
Yeah, absolutely fine. So, so programmatic is to us it’s kind of like a technical term. So for example, programmatic to what we would prefer to say as programmable media is the same as CPC is to social or Google. So let me just kind of dig into that a little bit. So for example, when we’re talking about ppc, we’re talking about pay in per click. But actually what’s most important is the environment that people are behaving in that we’re talking about. So for example, if someone’s searching for something, they’re actively in the mindset of going out to find it. And if someone’s on social, then they’re much more in a discovery mode. And it’s the same then for programmatic, it’s the industry defined term, which is why it’s so widely used. But when we refer to it as programmable media, what we’re talking about is a way to find and engage with people online and deliver advertising campaigns in ways that is reaching people at the right time, in the right place and saying the right thing. In a nutshell, it’s a real time technology. It basically looks at the whole of the Internet outside of search and social and gives us an opportunity to reach people in those spaces.
Matt Alder [00:05:32]:
Could you give us an example? We’ll talk how it can be used in recruitment marketing in a second. But just so people can kind of really understand what this is and what this means and how they may have experienced or how they experience it every, every day on the Internet. Can you, can you give us an example from sort of another industry? What, what kind of advertising might I see on a daily basis that that works to this methodology?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:05:55]:
Sure. So, so a good example that we like to talk about is, you know, typically, you know, shopping, depending on your, your kind of shopping interests, you might see certain products that, that might follow you around the Internet. So for example, we hear a lot about shoes, particular types of shoes that people looked at, following them around the Internet until they’ve been bought. For myself, it’s probably different types of software and advertising techniques. To explain a little more, it’s almost like the difference between booking specific advertising in specific places. So rather than go into, you know, websites, which we’ll cover in a minute, go into websites direct and saying, can I book an advert with you? It’s more about going to the people first and we know the audience profile and we can say we’re trying to reach this type of person, whether they’re reading news or whether they’re looking at a recipe to cook or in whichever environment they’re in.
Matt Alder [00:06:56]:
Okay, that’s interesting. I think people will sort of recognize when that sort of thing’s happening, that sort of thing’s happening to them. Why is this good for recruitment marketing? What is it about this way of advertising that you think works really well for recruitment marketing?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:07:13]:
So the way I see it working so well is, and I really enjoy your podcast, Matt. That’s why one of the reasons I’m so pleased to be on and speaking with you and a lot of the episodes that I listen to are all about making recruitment more effective. And so this is, you know, so whether, whether it’s, you know, talking about AI or careers websites or data driven recruitment, it’s all about making that activity more effective. And to me, this is where Programmatic comes in on a couple of, on a couple of levels. And I’d like to talk about two of them. One of them is that your careers website is basically a goldmine of information. If we think about the way that people engage with these careers websites, when they’re visiting specific pages, they’re telling us about the kind of mindset or the phase of decision making that they’re in. So let’s say, for example, they are looking at lifestyle pages, they are looking at company culture, they’re looking at achievements that have happened, they’re looking at blog pages. This would tell us very much that they’re right at the beginning of the decision making journey. They haven’t actually started looking at specific jobs and they need a little bit more nurturing. So one of the ways that Programmatic can make that more effective is that. And I’ll give you a little stat now. So let’s say on average, a conversion rate on a careers website, let’s say 10% is the average. I’m just putting a figure out there. Let’s say 10% is the average number of people that visit a careers website, then convert into an application. That means that 90% of people that have visited that website haven’t applied. And one way that Programmatic can offer that effectiveness is by reaching back out to people that haven’t applied and then delivering them the information that’s going to kind of nurture them down the decision making process. Whether that’s more information that they haven’t read about the employer brand, or whether that’s actually identifying that they’re on the cusp of making a decision and delivering them specific jobs. So that’s example one. Example two is that if all this work is being done to make the recruitment activity more effective, what we actually start to need is a bit of fuel, more traffic, more people to go through this process. And that’s where Programmatic becomes so powerful. It’s effectively infinitely scalable to within your audience universe, obviously. But the different ways that we have to reach people means that once we are starting to see efficiencies in the way that people are going through the application process, this is how we can reach the right audience and add more people into the beginning of the process.
Matt Alder [00:10:12]:
Could you give us a few more details or maybe an example about how that would work?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:10:16]:
Yeah. The way we look at things is that if you look at LinkedIn’s figures, they say that around 12% of your overall audience is actively searching for a job, which leaves 88% that are passive, they fit the bill, but they’re not actually in a frame of mind where they’re looking for a job. Now the way that we tend to look at things is that we like to map out a journey towards an application. And that journey consists of three different phases. And this is basically, this is a way that we can start to either loop people in at the right stage or take someone in who is cold, who is a passive audience that is the right person for the job, but isn’t currently thinking about applying. And we call this Connect, Consider and Convert. So I’ll run through each of them individually. Connect is a passive audience who are unengaged. They’re not thinking about applying for a job, but they are the right person to engage with. We need to engage them and we need to warm them up. We need to put the employer brand on the table in a way that’s going to really kind of light their eyes up and make them want to hear more. And that gives us then the opportunity to re engage them with the consider phase. The consider phase is like I was giving the example of earlier, where if people are looking at lifestyle or culture or pages like this on the website, they’re in the consider phase, they’re considering the brand, they’re slightly warm to it and they just need a little bit more nurturing. So this is about reaching back out to those people that have either entered via the connect phase or have looked at more pages that are more distant from the application page on your website. And this is about pointing them to those pages, the lifestyle pages, the blog posts and so forth. When people are considering, this is the point that we know that they are well nurtured and actually what we need to do now is go out and directly give jobs for them to consider. We know their audience profile, we know that they’ve engaged, we know that they’ve spent a good amount of time on the website considering the employer brand. And so now this is where we go about. Go out and say, this is where these are the opportunities that we think are relevant for you. So now you’re ready to go and apply.
Matt Alder [00:12:46]:
That’s interesting and that certainly makes sense as a methodology. Just to sort of dig a little bit further. I think when people think about recruitment marketing, they tend to sort of default to thinking about, you know, job adverts and job listings and all this kind of stuff. I suppose I sort of, you know, I want to sort of get into how companies are successful using this type of approach to advertising. So I suppose there’s kind of two bits to this. There’s. I think it would help to understand a little bit more about how you sort of track people around the web and how you distinguish between those audiences. But also it would be good to know about the, you know, the approach and perhaps the sort of content that works.
Louis Halton-Davies [00:13:31]:
Yeah, no, absolutely. Happy to kind of go into that for you. So the way that I would like to put it forward is that, you know, your candidates are attending a networking event for hours every day and that that is basically the Internet. So 92% of the UK population have access to the Internet. And as a population, we spend more than five hours online every day. And this is the real kind of. This is the real reason that it’s the. It’s the most widespread, it’s the biggest, most expansive place to engage with people. And the stages that I talked about earlier that connect, consider and convert, these all have very specific requirements of content and we can kind of, the way that we like to approach everything is a more integrated approach. So, for example, I’ll go through the way to think about it, but not tied down to programmatics. Specifically, but with it as part of this universe that we actually like to call an applicant engine. And the applicant engine describes a way to take someone, a cold prospect to a converted applicant. So the connect phase, as we mentioned, it’s about putting the employer brand on the table with a bang. This is where we want to click our fingers and have people pay attention. Now, the best medium, hands down for the connect phase is a video. And if we think about, you know, well, actually if we think about video for a second, we know that people don’t like bad adverts, but actually people don’t have a problem with online adverts in general. And if we think about online adverts, there are a couple that people will actively go out of their way and watch just because they enjoyed the advert so much. And this is exactly what we’re getting at with the connect face video. It’s something shareable that we can put on the table and say, this is the employer brand, this is why you need to pay attention. Also, when someone watches a video, according to Wordstream, people are far more likely to pay attention to video than text. I think it’s around 90% of content is retained via video as opposed to 10% via text ads. So this really makes us enter into that sphere of thought in a meaningful way. The consider phase is more benefits driven. It’s more about culture, it’s more about helping the person on the receiving end think about what it would be like to work for this company. And we do think banners, we do think online audio, we do think like Facebook carousel ads where you can see different, look at the different perks, look at the lifestyle, look at the achievements, look at these case study. It’s all about building that idea and helping someone to asking questions for people before they’ve answered themselves. Now the convert phase is about providing jobs, providing job opportunities. And typically this is best done via banners, but also via search and obviously where the job boards come in as well. We typically see it taken about six weeks or up to six weeks to activate the passive audience, which is who we’re effectively targeting. But when they’re activated, they will predominantly apply by using search or job boards or via the career site. So the role of programmatic is to nurture that passive audience and make them know that the brand that we’re working with has the opportunity that’s right for them.
Matt Alder [00:17:25]:
Could you give us some examples of campaigns that you’ve run and how they’ve worked?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:17:30]:
Yeah, sure. So one example that is close in memory was recruiting franchisees now we work with all kinds of brands on all kinds of levels, from customer service level to senior attorneys. But this example I think is really nice to share because it’s a great scenario where we work with the Connect Consider convert framework and can show the results. So basically we were looking for, for candidates that had either already enjoyed the pinnacle of their career or they were very entrepreneurial minded and they were looking for potentially interested in starting a franchise and the benefits that went with it. So we were talking with the client who was reed commercial and it started off with just really great insights around, you know, the kinds of conversations that they were having internally from people who, you know, had or hadn’t visited the website and had or hadn’t visited certain pages on the website. Now on their website they did have a really great section which was dedicated to educating prospective franchisees about what it was like and that was how to get started, the legal and financing side of things, how to choose a franchise, all of this really great content. And after that conversation we went away and we had a look, had a deep trawl through their Google Analytics to try and find the most popular pages for people that had converted and sent through an inquiry. And typically these were people that had gone through that education phase. So what happened next was that we had a follow up conversation where we were talking about these different user intents and we came out, we came out the end with three different strategies for the connect, consider and convert phase. The connect phase was what we called lifestyle. Now lifestyle was all about displaying the kind of lifestyle that can come with being a franchisee, the laptop lifestyle, not being tied to nine to five office hours, being remote and all of the benefits that came with it from that side. As I said, the connect phase is about putting the brand on the table from a candidate’s perspective with a bang. And this is how we were piquing their attention. The consider phase was what we called get started. Get started was all about looping people into these education pages to try and get them through that education process so they could take it on their own backs to educate them about being a franchisee, to lead us into the convert phase, which was franchise search. When people had hit the connect phase, they were intrigued by the lifestyle and the potential benefits of becoming a franchisee. They’d gone through that education process. We knew that they were ready now to start looking at franchises to inquire about. This was about guiding them to franchise search pages where they could configure searches and choose a franchise that was right for them. And actually we saw through doing this, the results were fantastic. Over a three month period, we delivered over 1700 leads and that was at a return on investment of over 320% purely by following that decision making journey and overlaying a campaign that took people along that user journey.
Matt Alder [00:21:09]:
Okay, I mean that’s a great case study and there’s obviously clearly a lot of value in this kind of approach from a recruitment perspective. Obviously, I suppose the difference between, you know, recruitment, marketing and something like E commerce is you’re pushing people into this application. Application process. Does the type of application process have an effect on the sort of levels of response that you get from this methodology?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:21:41]:
I think it’s safe to say that it can 100%. It just all depends on the type of role that you’re looking for. For example, if we’re looking at graduates, graduates are coming out of university and they are hungry to apply for a job, they know the hoops they’re going to have to jump through to apply and they’re more than ready to do it. The challenge with graduates obviously is the competition that are also looking for these same candidates. But on the flip side, we have, for example, let’s say vehicle technicians and also let’s say social workers. So two different scenarios, but two things that you have to put in place to engage with these audiences are that vehicle technicians are actually quite afraid of the application process. They’re still kind of an audience that are more like a job for lifer. They wouldn’t typically have an application to hand and putting one together is a little bit alien and not really something they want to do on the whole. Obviously this is a crude example. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions, but let’s just work with this crude example. The solution to this is that actually what we want to do is offer up opportunities to request a callback or give softer ways to engage. As we know, the formal application process is likely going to scare them off. So we need to take the impetus to generate things from our side. And it’s the same with social workers. They are on the road a lot. So again, callback requests are perfect there because we’re able to then say the team will call you back at a time that’s suitable for you, so we’ll fit around your schedule rather than sending a potential applicant to a landing page where nine times out of 10 they’re not going to have the time they need to fill in that application. There is a real difference from role to role as to how people Go about the applications on that decision making journey. And the real secrets always lie in the resourcing team. They know their candidates, they know the roles, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked in the past. And the most important thing that can happen with a campaign is that that information is factored in when building the creative and when building that user journey.
Matt Alder [00:24:16]:
That makes a lot of sense. And I think it’s probably something that a lot of employers might be missing when they’re looking at various different forms, forms of recruitment marketing and recruitment advertising. On that note, what would be your advice for an employer who kind of wanted to use this approach to advertising for the first time? What do they need to think about? What do they need to do?
Louis Halton-Davies [00:24:40]:
So I think the one thing to remember is that it can take up to six weeks to convert a passive audience into an active audience. But as always, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t an active audience available. Which is why we prefer always the integrated approach. Because with there being a 12% ratio of active audience members, we need to obviously go out to that active audience. But then we also need a solution which would be programmatic along with social, to activate more of the passive audience for when that 12% is starting to run thin. So up to six weeks I would allow to activate the passive audience. But more important again is having that journey planned, that user journey. So thinking about what do people really care about working for the brand? What does it mean to them? What opportunities does it bring? What ambitions has it unlocked? What’s really inspiring or engaging or, you know, emotionally connecting about the brand? And that’s where you have the framework for your connect phase campaign. Why do people want to work with us? The benefits or the culture or the achievements or the pay package or whatever it is. These need to be factored in for the consider phase. And then the roles that are available make up the convert phase, which is then added into the mix as well. And it’s worth mentioning as well that programmatic does not need to be rolled out on a campaign by campaign, specific start and specific end date basis. I mentioned the applicant engine before. That is an always on approach. It’s basically ensuring that the potential audience bases are kept up to date, they’re kept warm. But that doesn’t mean that we need to deliver them job adverts all the time. We can just loop them in and deliver them engaging and meaningful content. We can add them to talent networks, encourage them to sign up to talent networks to receive job alerts. We can drive Facebook page likes or Twitter followers or other types of connection to make sure they’re receiving blog posts and other engaging content. And what we’re doing is we’re basically building this ecosystem that starts to nurture these warm audiences so that when we’re ready to reach out to them with a job advert, they’re there and primed and ready to apply. They know the brand is right for them, and they know that when the job opportunity comes about, if it’s the right time for them, they’re much more likely to apply.
Matt Alder [00:27:27]:
Louis, thank you very much for talking to me.
Louis Halton-Davies [00:27:29]:
You’re very welcome. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:27:32]:
My thanks to Louis. You can subscribe to this podcast in itunes on Stitcher, or download the show app on your smartphone. Just search for recruiting Future in your app store. You can listen to all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back soon with 100th episode of the show and I guarantee you won’t want to miss it.
