3 Recruiting Success Stories

Every so often on this blog I like to highlight some of the companies that we work with that are doing some interesting things in their recruiting. I highlight these companies as they are leveraging data and Talent Networks to drive innovation in their recruitment marketing strategies in a way that I believe can help other organizations potentially improve their recruiting processes.

Here are a few examples of companies that are utilizing their internal recruiting metrics and processes in a very interesting way:

Geo-location: A Fortune 1000 company recruits for many of it’s positions within specific geographic locales. For most of these positions, they would like to hire candidates that would not have to relocate for the position. So fittingly on their job ads they placed locations within the subject heading and in the appropriate locales on job boards such as Craigslist.

As they were posting their jobs and looking at the geo-location they collected (for each applicant), something stood out to them. In an area where they recruit heavily, the majority of applicants were coming from an area that wasn’t the one they were targeting. As a test, they published a job ad to this specific location for the same position.

The Result: They received TWICE the number of qualified candidates as before. Now they look at the geo-location data of every job distribution campaign they have and have seen considerable success in the number of qualified candidates they are capturing.

Are job boards equal?: A energy and power company distributed their jobs through the same recruiting channels for every job they posted. The recruiting mix consisted of a major job board (with yearly contract), job search engine Indeed and a few niche job boards. After collecting 6 months of data, they saw a major problem in their strategy. They were paying $70,000 a year for inventory to a major job board but it wasn’t in the top 2 recruiting channels in terms of performance for their organization. Indeed and the niche boards were performing three times as good for 1/20 of the price they were paying the major job board.

Come time to re-negotiate with the major job board, they didn’t continue the partnership instead opting to do Sponsored Listings on Indeed.

The Result: They are now receiving more qualified candidates for 1/8 the cost of what they were spending before.

Building a Talent Network: A large financial organization wanted to build a large database of candidates in a short period of time. To do so, they did a few things. First, they decided to make their job ads serve a dual purpose. Not only did they want them to drive applicants into their ATS but they wanted to also collect qualified candidates that weren’t ready to apply quite yet. With a quick opt-in form in the apply process they were able to capture 50% more candidates than they had previously in these campaigns.

Second, they put opt-in forms on their other recruiting hubs including their Career Site and social recruiting channels.

The Result: Through these initiatives, they’ve been able to build over 20,000 contacts in less than 4 months and are beginning to utilize these contacts to fill their current open job positions.

There are a lot of great stories out there of recruiting organizations doing innovate things to increase the ROI of their recruitment marketing campaigns. I encourage you to listen to these stories, find ones that you think would work for your organization and most importantly try them out. Success stories from other organizations may or may not work for your organization but once you find strategies that work they can be a major catalyst for your recruiting strategy.

Comment by Melanie Ditore on August 4, 2011 at 11:43am: Chris,

This was a great article. I have a question on the paragraph about building a talent network. What exactly is an opt-in form that you refer to? We are looking to build our talent pipeline through our ATS and thought this would be a great feature to add.

Melanie Ditore

Recruitment Manager

Greeley and Hansen

Chicago

Comment by Irina G. on August 4, 2011 at 11:48am: Thank you for sharing these stories, Chris. I liked the second story because I was actually thinking to do the same. It is good to hear that somebody succeeded in this approach: saved money and achieved their goals. The recruiting environment is changing and we definitely have more options in terms of placing ads. I agree that major job boards inventory can be up to 50K and sponsoring jobs on Indeed is definitely cheaper and flexible: you pay per click, you can set your own monthly budget, you control how many jobs you want to sponsor, you can stop advertising any time and resume later.

Comment by Chris Brablc on August 4, 2011 at 12:24pm: Melanie - Thanks for the comment! The opt-in form that we've helped them implement is through our job distribution solution and is linked to a database that is outside of their ATS. You could pull these contacts into your ATS if you wanted to, however, they've been sending emails to these contacts through the CRM database.

Basically how it works, is this. A job is distributed to job boards and on the job ad is the link or button to apply. Once a candidate clicks to apply they are taken to a simple to fill out contact form (that they can fill out or skip) and then are taken to the application.

An example of the opt-in form can be seen via one of the jobs we've posted for our organization: http://www.indeed.com/q-Smashfly-l-Stow,-MA-jobs.html (Just click on the Integration Support Technician page for the example)

It's important to capture candidate info before the application as a good amount of candidates will drop off before they click submit. From the data we've collected, we've seen anywhere from 20% to 65% of candidates that start the apply process don't finish it. Obviously differs by job and organization.

As far as using an opt-in form on your career site, there's definitely some low cost options. All you need is a simple contact form tool (you could probably use Google Docs) that enables candidates to provide you with their info. The process would be a more manual but the process is the same and the price will be lower.

Comment by Chris Brablc on August 4, 2011 at 12:32pm: Irina, Thanks for the Comment!

I'm glad the example was helpful! As one caveat, however, the example was one to highlight the need and importance of having metrics on your recruiting channels and not Indeed over Major Job Boards (although I highly recommend posting to Indeed since it's free and gets very good traffic. Some clients have had success with their sponsored listings as well). Major Job Boards can be costly in some cases but we have had some clients that have a lot success with them over other channels as well.

I really encourage every organization to make sure they can track and report on the channels they use, so that they can really see where their money is going. As you said there are more options than ever in placing ads so it is important to know what type of ROI and value you are getting for your money for every job ad you distribute. Now is not the time for loyalty to specific channels (unless they are performing well for you.)

Thanks,

Chris

Comment by Irina G. on August 4, 2011 at 1:19pm: Chris, I agree with you that it all starts with metrics, otherwise how would you know what is working and what not. That story resonated with me and I just went a bit more in details about job advertising sources, skipping "the metrics part" :) I think there should be another article on major job boards VS indeed.

I also wanted to ask you what your opinion on SmashFly Technologies and Jobs2Web. It looks like that both of these companies have similar product. Also would you recommend them for Small Businesses?

Last, but not least, I really liked the idea of "Opt-In" form.

Thank you,

Irina

Comment by Chris Brablc on August 4, 2011 at 5:54pm

Thanks for the feedback Irina! For full disclosure, I work for SmashFly Technologies if you were not already aware.

Saying that, here's my honest feedback on our two solutions from what I know about our platform and what I've seen and heard of Jobs2Web.

First and foremost, both solutions are aiming to provide one central solution to recruiting organizations that integrates seamlessly with your ATS. Both platforms include some combination of job distribution, recruitment metrics, Recruitment CRM, Resume Sourcing, SEO and other recruiting technologies and will be cheaper than buying these technologies separately.

As far as the differences, here are a few to note:

Technology: SmashFly's WildFire Platform is entirely built in house and homegrown so all our technology easily integrates with one another. Jobs2Web is mostly homegrown, however, they do have some partnerships with other technology vendors and need to work with them if bugs arise. I believe they use BroadBean for job distribution.
SEO: Jobs2Web was a Recruitment SEO company and has built their platform from that base. Their SEO product and dashboards are very good. At SmashFly, we've added Recruitment SEO product to our service this year that is similar to Jobs2Web. If you are buying solely for SEO reasons, you would probably go with Jobs2Web.
Recruitment CRM: The SmashFly CRM is a full service CRM solution that enables you full control over your contacts and enables several ways to source candidates into your database. Jobs2Web has what they call a Talent Community, however, it is not a full service CRM solution like SmashFly, Avatar or AIRS Sourcepoint.
Talent Network: The SmashFly Talent Network opt-in features (which integrate with the CRM) are similar to what Jobs2Web does with its Talent Community. Candidates can opt-in, are grouped by job positions and keywords and can be sent customized emails or automatic job related emails.
Dashboards and Metrics: The metrics that are captured and the reporting functions are similar for both platforms. SmashFly has recently added the ability to display ATS applicant data within our metrics dashboards so you can see recruitment marketing metrics (views, apply clicks, applicants) and ATS data (qualified candidates, hires) within the same view on our dashboard. I'm not sure if this is possible with Jobs2Web currently.
Pricing: As far as pricing, both solutions will differ depending on the size of the organization and what features you are looking to utilize. This is conjecture but we've been told the SmashFly base product price is usually cheaper than Jobs2Web.

That's a quick (and rather long) run-down which I hope is helpful.

As far as Small Businesses, I'd need to know what you mean by Small Business. Obviously the sweet spot for these Platforms are larger companies that are hiring a lot of people. On the smaller side, we work with companies that are hiring 100 or more employees a year.

Let me know if you have any further questions. I've included my email if you would like to reach out to me directly.

Thanks,

Chris
chris@smashfly.com

Comment by Irina G. on August 11, 2011 at 11:44am: Chris,

Thank you very much for explaining the differences between the two platforms. It was very helpful! I will be in touch if I have additional questions.

Best,

Irina