TargetRecruit’s Executive Vice President Bill Inman has a metrics filled discussion with Jason Hayes, the VP of Employer Sales & Customer Success at iHire (14 minute total discussion)

Mr. Hayes has been with iHire for over 12 years, working his way up from account management to Vice President in that time. This experience has provided him unique insight into both active and passive job seekers and the strategies they use to find their next job. In his role at iHire Mr. Hayes vigorously stays up on market changes, trends, and technology in order to maintain the company’s high level of value to it’s clients. iHire is a leading career-oriented platform powering over 50 talent-rich (niche) communities across select industries, helping professionals and businesses thrive. Learn more about iHire here

Key Points:

• Considering the mobile usage of candidates when recruiting online is critical
• Industrial, blue collar and hourly workers do have resumes and they store them in the cloud
• Mobile is used mainly for job research and many candidates finish the application process on their PC
• Video is being used successfully by companies to share corporate culture during the application process
• Cost-per-click job models are less effective and more costly as mobile usage rises
• There are two key metrics to track when using job boards

FRICTIONLESS MOBILE JOB SEARCH FOR CANDIDATES (2:30)

60% of logins [on iHire] are coming from mobile and that is growing quarter over quarter. Its critical [to have] an environment [to apply] that has as little friction as possible… Its critical that we give an environment that has as little friction as possible to be able to understand the role and the company and to see if they know if they want to apply… On the phone you don’t have word documents on your phone you have them on google drive or Dropbox… give jobseekers the ability to access their resumes [on one of these cloud services]. (3:55) Google Drive [resumes] are about 2 times as popular as Dropbox. (4:36) Uploading documents has become more popular.

INDUSTRIAL CANDIDATES DO HAVE RESUMES (4:00)

[Some] Clients say ‘I only hire construction workers and they don’t have these phones’, our data suggest the opposite. The four top industry site that [iHire] has that upload resumes on their mobile device are administrative, construction, nursing, logistics. So there is a perception out there that if it isn’t a software developer then they don’t use Google Drive or Dropbox and that is pretty far from the truth.

MOBILE DEVICES USED FOR JOB RESEARCH, EMAIL AS A JOB DATABASE (7:00)

What we see on mobile is a lot of ‘window shoppers’ where they are not actually going with an intent to apply, they are using their mobile device to do more research… We give all mobile job seekers the ability to email the job to themselves, we do that on desktop computers as well but 93% of those emails come from mobile. Its a way for [job seekers] to save the job, email it to themselves so they have it in their email… So when they get back to their computer they can easily apply to that job.

VIDEO AS A RECRUITING TREND (9:00)

Companies like

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to supplement the job posting so it may be cultural… can show behind the scenes to see what the [location] looks like… More and more we see job seekers interested in the culture.

COST-PER-CLICK JOB MODEL CONSIDERATIONS – (10:09)

[With this] you are obviously paying a fee every time someone clicks on your ad. With mobile we see the percentage of mobile increasing and the conversion rate (job view to apply) is challenging… More mobile [job seekers] are not applying at the same rate as desktop. [Some companies] are paying a lot of money for traffic when it is more ‘window shopping’. Job boards in a cost-per-click model are paid to drive traffic as opposed to targeted traffic. The cost isn’t necessarily what you are spending on CPC the cost is the opportunity cost, [the Clients], you are having your staff spend so much time going through these [unqualified] resumes, what other value-add activities could they be doing?

METRICS TO LOOK FOR IN JOB BOARD SUCCESS

(13:18) I think it comes down to two metrics to use because they kind of play together. One, is your visit to application ratio… and after that it is the cost per qualified applicant. A qualified applicant can be whatever you deem it to be. We have clients that have a phone screen as a qualified applicant or maybe it is an interview with a hiring manager… as long as you are consistent on that [metric] is all that matters… these give you a full picture of the value you are getting. 

Watch Video Here – Youtube / TargetRecruit Site

TargetRecruit’s Executive Vice President Bill Inman has an insightful discussion with Jim Janesky, Managing Director at Corporate Fuel, discuss current staffing industry trends (Q2 2017), public staffing company valuations and valuation in the staffing mid-market – Link