Next month I will have been working in digital recruitment marketing for 20 years, and yes that does make me feel old! Over those two decades, there has been a tremendous amount of change. Despite this though the simplest unit of recruitment advertising, the job posting, has remained stubbornly the same for most of this time.
However, things are finally changing as new technologies, and media platforms enter the market. To get us up to speed with everything that is going on, my guest this week is Richard Collins from programmatic job advertising platform ClickIQ.
In the interview we discuss:
• Why the shift in this marketing is suddenly accelerating
• What happens when job boards don’t deliver
• How are Google and Facebook developing their recruitment advertising offerings
• How to make job advertising work in social media and search engines
• Converting more passive job seekers
• The role of Chatbots
• Which metrics do you optimise against?
Richard also shares the results he is seeing from implementing this approach and gives us his view on the future.
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from ClickIQ. ClickIQ is an automated job advertising platform that uses the latest AI and programmatic technology to manage, track and optimize the performance of your recruitment advertising in real time. Spend is focused where it’s needed the most to reach both active and passive job seekers across indeed, Google, Facebook and an extensive network of job boards. To find out more about ClickIQ, please visit www.clickiq.co.uk. that’s www.clickiq.co.UK.
Matt Alder [00:01:01]:
This is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 169 of the Recruiting Future podcast. Next month I will have been working in digital recruitment marketing for 20 years and yes, that does make me feel quite old. In that time there’s been a huge amount of change. Despite this, though, the simplest unit of recruitment advertising, the job posting, has remained stubbornly the same for most of this time. However, things are finally changing for job postings as new technologies and new players enter the market to get us up to speed with everything that’s happening. My guest this week is Richard Collins from programmatic job advertising platform ClickIQ. Enjoy the interview.
Matt Alder [00:01:52]:
Hi Richard and welcome back to the podcast.
Richard Collins [00:01:55]:
Thanks Matt. It’s very nice to be back. Thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:01:58]:
So for those of you who don’t know you, could you quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Richard Collins [00:02:04]:
Sure. I am Richard Collins, I am the co founder of ClickIQ ClickIQ. For those that don’t know us, we are an automated job advertising platform. So effectively we are using all the kind of latest AI, programmat type tech and effectively what we do is we work with large enterprise clients and our system manages and optimizes their job advertising in real time. So kind of it takes ads from clients, ats, distributes it out over lots of job boards, tracks the whole thing and then moves the money into the jobs that need it most so that you advertise in the most efficient way possible. So that’s kind of the platform. In terms of my background, I’d been in recruitment advertising, originally agency side in 1995, then ran a job site in 1997 I think it was, and then ad agencies and all that kind of stuff since so fairly varied but all focused on recruitment advertising and Internet stuff.
Matt Alder [00:03:14]:
Now the last time you’re on the show we were talking about the future of job boards, pay per click, models, performance models, and how the industry was, albeit slowly, reinventing itself in the light of the technologies and the capability that are currently out there, I suppose what it would be interesting to talk about this time are some of the sort of new players in the market. Now these aren’t companies that are new, but they’re certainly what they’re doing in the job market is new. So I’m thinking of people like Google and Facebook and other platforms that are coming into this sort of traditional job board recruitment, advertising market. Where are you seeing these channels sort of fitting into the mix?
Richard Collins [00:04:07]:
Yeah, I think there is. That kind of evolution is still happening, but it’s really sort of that momentum is even more gaining traction, I would say. So as we talked about last time, this shift to kind of the pay per click side of things and since, since we spoke last time, we’ve just seen indeed’s dominance get even greater, frankly looking at sort of some latest data that I was looking at this morning. But the thing I think that’s kind of the slight fly in the ointment is we had in July last year, Google for jobs came along and then they sort of rolled out across the uk. We had Facebook for jobs launch. I think it was beginning of the fourth quarter and the third quarter, that kind of time of year. And as a result that landscape has changed again, I guess since our last conversation. In terms of where these things sit, I think at the moment the historical approach has always been one of you post your job on a job board, you hope for the best was the original approach. You may have picked several job boards. Then the shift as it becomes more performance based to actively managing those ads across a network of job boards. But I think you still have a situation where there is a point and you advertise your job and you’re unable to hire from it, what do you do next? And it’s quite a big leap because if you compare how much you might pay for some job advertising to what is the next step? Well, do we sort of start a proper sourcing campaign and get our NINJA sources on the case or do we call our recruitment agencies? There’s a big cost kind of implication when you make that leap up in terms of the amount of activity that you’re doing. My personal view in all of this is that Google and Facebook are a really interesting proposition to fill the gap between those two things. Yes, you want to be making sure you do the basics in terms of advertising across job boards, but rather than say leap to going into full kind of sourcing mode, looking at how you could use Google, Facebook and general Internet advertising to reach the kind of people that you’re not reaching through the job boards, but you know, you’re not really prepared to spend the big monies in terms of sourcing and finding the candidates that way.
Matt Alder [00:06:38]:
So I think that there’s probably still a fair amount of confusion out there about how exactly Google and Facebook can be used for recruitment advertising. Obviously there’s some ways that they’ve been used traditionally, whether that’s through Google AdWords or Facebook pages or Facebook advertising. What’s changed with their job platforms and what kind of mix of options is available to employers?
Richard Collins [00:07:13]:
Yeah, I mean if we start with Google, because Google’s a good example. Obviously Google for jobs came along and effectively all that they’ve done is they’ve taken all their jobs content and organized it in such a way that you’re not seeing huge amounts of duplication of the same job in lots of different places at the moment. As long as your jobs are coded correctly on your website to fit in with Google schema, then you can be indexed by Google and your jobs will appear within there. I think the reality so far has been that actually the people who have been quick to get on the back of that have been traditional job boards particularly, whereas the employers and ATS career sites have been slower in reality. So you’re still getting a situation where if you go onto Google and you do a search, you actually you’re searching for somewhere, you’re searching for a website that has the jobs rather than the jobs themselves at the moment. I think in time, you know, Google have stated that they want to change, that they want to send job seekers directly to the job rather than via a third party website. So I think we’ll see changes occurring with that. But at the moment, you know, your options are make sure that your Google Ads ready. Google for jobs ready. Sorry. You obviously want to be, if possible, appearing within the organic results of Google. But that’s no easy thing because then you’re competing with the job boards who have huge amounts of content. The other way is through Google Ads, which is what Google AdWords used to be. And Google Ads effectively allows you to pay to appear towards the top of the listing of Google. So there’s actually two options you have within Google Ads. You have their search option and you have display advertising across their network. So the search option is when somebody does a search for a certain keyword and you’re your job, your advert appears and they click on it and then it goes through to your website, wherever you want to send them. And that’s a sort of lineage text ad. The other option with the display is the sort of traditional Internet advertising banner ad type approach. And that goes across a whole network of websites that Google have brought together. And again, you pay on a performance basis. Someone sees an advert, they like what it says, click on it, you pay per click to kind of take you off to your job ideally. So those are the kind of options. I think traditionally the problem has been how you do this because if you think about job ads, you know they don’t, they’re not there for very long. Somebody resigns, you need to fill a position, you have a matter of weeks to do it and you know that’s continually changing and you’ve got high volumes of ads going through companies, career sites, all that kind. So trying to create Google Ads off the back of those jobs has always been really quite difficult. And traditionally it’s been the larger companies with their ad agencies. Maybe it’s very campaign based. Graduate programs is one that you often hear about. And they build this huge campaign, there’s a big amount of money involved, lots of creative goes into it, et cetera, et cetera. And that’s great as a one off but it doesn’t really help the kind of day to day roles as they come into your organization and what you’re going to do to fill them. One of the things that we’ve recently launched is the ability to automatically create Google Ads directly from your jobs, from your ats. So effectively what our system is now doing is we are able to kind of merge would take the various bits of information that we need from a job description and we merge it with some creative and effectively create dynamically a Google Ad that then goes out to the target audience of people that we’re trying to reach and that hopefully is allowing people to kind of start doing this stuff on a job level rather than these big fancy campaigns and just allocate smaller amounts of money per job rather than say investing so heavily as they would have done historically.
Matt Alder [00:11:48]:
And what about the impact of the changes on Facebook? Because I suspect they’re probably the least understood in terms of what’s been going on in the space.
Richard Collins [00:12:02]:
Yeah, I mean Facebook is really interesting because for me Google is about how do you reach people at the start of their journey. You always hear statistics of X percentage of people start their job search at Google, though that percentage does seem to be dropping somewhat. Facebook on the other hand is more about how can you target certain types of people who are probably not actively job seeking in terms of Advertising on Facebook. Again, there’s several options, but ultimately you can advertise in Facebook jobs, but it is terrible. And if you just go onto it and have a look for yourself of what sort of jobs it is suggesting, they’re completely untargeted, they’re not relevant at all and it just not working at the moment. I imagine what they will do is they’ll start to aggregate third party job data and start to make it much more targeted to people, but at the moment it’s not doing that. On the other hand, you can also advertise across the newsfeed of the target people that you’re after. And Facebook has this amazing set of data that you can specify all kinds of stuff. So if you were looking for, I don’t know, a Java developer that went to Lancaster University, studied computer science and lives in Blackpool, you can do that through Facebook and you can reach those people, which obviously allows you to get to those that are perhaps less active on job board. So techies is one example, nurses might be another. But on the downside it’s how do you then take that person from seeing that ad? Because they’re not going to click on an apply button because at the end of the day they’re not ready to apply. So it’s how do you take that person on the journey from seeing an ad that could be of interest to helping them find out more and then getting to them to apply? And the other issue you face with is if you’re on Facebook, how many people are sat on Facebook on their phone and they haven’t got a CV to hand? So you have to think about how do you then do that conversion piece from seeing something that’s interesting to how do you get this person to give their details so that you can then process them through your application process?
Matt Alder [00:14:21]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, do you have any advice on bridging that gap? What are you seeing people do that seems to be working?
Richard Collins [00:14:30]:
I mean, the reality is it’s about using technology to make these decisions. There’s no way you can manage even relatively small volume of ads where you are continually monitoring how well they’re doing and then making a decision of do you want to then broaden out the reach to whether it’s Google or Facebook or whatever else it might be? Because what you don’t want to do is advertise a job at the end of the process, not fill it, and then figure out how on earth. Right, what do we do next? Let’s readvertise it the same places or let’s now stick it on Google. Let’s try Facebook. The technology is now there, allows you to, in real time see how well those ads are performing. And if an ad is not generating the kind of responses that you want it to do, to automatically escalate that and start using those more expensive but greater reach areas, websites like Google and Facebook, to get to those people who are where there is less numbers of them actively job seeking on job boards.
Matt Alder [00:15:35]:
So that’s really interesting and I can see that automation is obviously the key here for efficiency and for people to get the results that they need. How do you manage that automation though? Because as you said, the platforms are very different. So a job that’s been created to appear on a very specific job board, how does that translate into say, Facebook, where people can’t submit their job CVs or they’re in a very different state of mind. How do you bridge those kind of gaps?
Richard Collins [00:16:11]:
Yeah, I mean the reality is that it does require a different type of advert. It’s very much short form and what you don’t want to be doing is building new adverts every single time. So again, the automation technology can automate that particular part of the process. The other element of course then is how you then go from somebody seeing an ad to applying and the last thing you want to be doing is pushing it through to a traditional ATS that’s probably not even mobile optimized. Your drop off rate is so huge that you can never produce any kind of roi. We typically, as much as possible try and push people to use tools like chatbots. And chatbots are a really great way of getting information from candidates where maybe they’re not quite ready to do a full application process or they just want to register their interest, they want find out more, find out about the company, all that kind of stuff. And you can have, you know, they can have that conversation through the chatbot before they make the decision of whether they’re actually ready to apply or not. It also means that if they haven’t got a CV stored, they can do a, you know, a short form application process to get that person’s data there quickly. So, you know, if it’s a nurse, social care, whatever it might be, 3:00 in the morning, they’ve just finished a shift on the mobile, there’s no way they’re going through a traditional CV application process. So using a chatbot is a great way of doing that. And the other thing that the benefit you get is that once they’ve started that process, even if it’s on their phone then, because as soon as they log into Facebook on any other device, it follows them around so that they can then complete that application, whether it is at home or in whatever manner they want to do. They get to choose and they get control over the process a lot more. So it tends to produce a much, much greater return on investment when you, when you do it that way.
Matt Alder [00:18:10]:
So I want to ask you about the kind of results that you’re seeing from this, this kind of recruitment marketing automation. Before I do though, what kind of metrics are absolutely key here? What should people be looking for when they’re trying to sort of measure success and optimize what’s going on?
Richard Collins [00:18:30]:
Yeah, I mean the reality is that the metrics of success are not as good as we would like them to be yet. And the reason for that is trying to connect the front end to the back end without any issues. So for example, I mean the metrics that we see for everything, we obviously track on a job level. Every job, every click, every application, where it came from, how much that particular application then cost, whether that’s Google, Facebook. Indeed. And then the system moves the money to what is working best. But I think in time, and we built the system very much with this in mind, is where you start getting real value is what about things like quality of application is the next step. Again, you can get some quality metrics so you can use killer questions, or you can use a chatbot to do some pre screening and then you can make sure that you’re getting some cost per quality application. It’s quite a nice one. The thing that people always talk about is what we want, cost per hire. The problem with cost per hire is the delay from an advert going live to that person being hired and also having enough volume for it to be statistically relevant. So if you stick an ad wherever you advertise and then three months later you hire someone to then pass that data back to a real time system is a nonsense. A better way of doing it is if you’re using relevancy scoring, matching type technology and then you can actually pass in real time those applications scored data. So you can see not just from where that job is advertised, clicks, applies, conversion rate, but you can actually see a score metric on how well they match the job that they’ve applied for. Mixing that with killer questions, etc. Etc. You can actually get some really good data. I think perhaps in time, in certain circumstances you could work backwards from the higher data, but in Reality, it’s quite difficult to close the gap in terms of time and say in terms of having enough volume for it to be statistically relevant.
Matt Alder [00:20:50]:
What kind of results are you seeing from customers who are working in this way?
Richard Collins [00:20:57]:
We did a campaign for a retail client and they told me they hired 5,000 people off the back of the campaign and the average cost per hire was three pounds. We do. So that’s one end. The other end of the spectrum is we’ve done campaigns for nurses. The reason I come back to nurses, by the way, one, we have an awful lot of social care nursing clients, but partly because they are the most expensive clicks that you can buy on any job board. So they are so rare and obviously the whole Brexit thing has meant that that shortage has become even more so. We also have some cost per hire data on that and the average cost per hire data we have shows about the average being about 120 pounds per hire for nurses, which is pretty super efficient as well. I mean we have sort of ballpark figures across different industries and on our website we always have all kinds of sector studies showing all the kind metrics that people might need, whether it’s graduates, it, healthcare, retail, all kinds of stuff. So there is stuff on the website if people were interested in following that up to get some benchmarking data.
Matt Alder [00:22:16]:
And final question, where’s it all going next? So if you come back on the show again in a year’s time, what we’re going to be talking about then.
Richard Collins [00:22:27]:
I think the path is pretty clear in terms of we’re increasingly seeing, starting with the job board, we’re seeing more of them offering both pay per click and duration. I can absolutely see that happening. In the next 12 months we are seeing more success of the network, so third parties selling advertising across multiple sites, automation will without doubt dominate all of this stuff. And then I think we’ll see a movement up the. We kind of have this pyramid that as you move up the pyramid, the jobs get harder and harder to fill and you have to do different activity to, you know, to fill those jobs and it gets more expensive as you move up it as obviously they get harder to fill. I can see a lot more technology being used towards the top end of that pyramid. So for example, automated sourcing, you know, where you post a job and, and that job then automatically searches a bunch of databases. Google Cloud talent is using that kind of stuff within talent pools already. So I can see a lot of the sourcing bit becoming automated as well. So the whole thing becomes much faster, much quicker, much more efficient. And I think that will mean that in terms of recruiting and what the in house and even agency recruiters are doing, they will need to look very strongly at where they’re adding the value and the value is not in administrating or shifting through CVs. The technology will do that much better, it will match, it will score, etc. Etc. But we still have to go to work for however many hours a day and we work opposite an individual, an actual human being. And I don’t think the robots will ever do that last bit because I think that last bit is about that human piece, the selling in your organization, actually being around people that you want to spend time with and so on and so forth. So, so I think the technology will do a lot of the process and if you’re thinking about the recruitment funnel all the way from the top, all the way down to the interviewing stage, I think will be completely automated. But I then think actual people will need to get involved towards the end of the process to bring people into their organizations.
Matt Alder [00:24:45]:
Richard, thank you very much for talking to me.
Richard Collins [00:24:47]:
My pleasure, Matt. Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:24:49]:
My thanks to Richard Collins. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. The show also has its own dedicated app, which you can find by searching for Recruiting Future in your App Store. If you’re a Spotify user, you can also find the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.rfpodcast.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
