Yesterday, I was in a client meeting and it was great. The client, which is a Fortune 200 company, is the perfect client because they get it. They get our product and the great value we provide in our recruitment metrics. The client loves these metrics not only because it provides them with valuable information to make key recruiting decisions but mainly because it has already saved them money.

In the meeting, the client shared with us how they were able to utilize their recruitment metrics (which they accumulated for a year through our system & their ATS) to gain the bargaining power necessary to negotiate a great deal with one of the major job boards on job postings that saved them over $20,000 a year. How you may ask? Here’s the story:

The deal that our client had with the job board was up in a month and when the account representative called to re-up them, he was told that they were not going to. The client along with their recruiting agency, explained to the job board that even though they had provided them with the most candidates and applicants of the job boards they used, these applicants didn’t translate into enough hires. The job board had only led to 19 overall hires during the year and when compared to niche job boards and free services like job search engines (which brought in 12 hires), these 19 hires didn’t justify the expensive yearly fee they were paying the job board. They had calculated the ROI, and the job board was near the bottom in terms of value for their recruiting dollars. Unless they could get more value from the job board, they would have to walk away from the relationship.

To the job board’s credit, they stepped up to the plate big-time! After looking at the metrics, the job board was convinced that they could provide more value for the client and wanted to prove it. So they negotiated a new contract for the client with their recruiting agency that was not only less expensive but included more benefits than the client had before. Here are some of the key differences in the two packages (numbers are ballpark and are not exact):

1. Price - The clients original deal with the job board was for around $76,000. They were able to reduce it to around $55,000 in their new deal. A savings of around $20,000.
2. # of Postings – The client’s deal went from around 250 postings a year to about 600 postings a year. An increase of around 140%.
3. Reach – In the new deal, the client not only received more job postings but every job posting now lasts longer in the job board system. In addition, their jobs are shown to a larger network of the job board’s sites.

(So far in this new deal, the client is very satisfied with the job board and there is a much better possibility that they will re-up next year. For those reading at home, this is how you keep clients with your business.)

The main lesson to learn from this is that the client was able to secure a great deal because they collected and were able to show recruitment metrics and the overall performance of their ads to the job board. Without it, there would have been no such deal.

Remember, this data is important! If you can collect this data, you can easily identify the job boards and recruiting sources that are under-performing. This gives you a tremendous amount of power when re-negotiating deals not only with the big job boards but any place that you are spending money to post jobs (whether it’s Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Indeed, SimplyHired, niche boards, ad banners, etc.).

Start measuring your recruitment marketing campaigns and control these negotiations!

About SmashFly: Through our Recruitment Marketing Platform, WildFire, we enable companies to easily post jobs and more importantly measure the performance of these job ads anywhere on the web. We provide companies with the crucial recruitment metrics to make important recruiting decisions as well as provide transparency into their top performing sources for candidates.