Category Archives: Association of Talent Acquisition Professionals

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Job_Adx Smarter Programmatic Job Ad Spend

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Today on The Weekly Dose I review the programmatic job ad platform JobAdx. JobAdx is one of a handful of new platforms on the market that talent acquisition teams can utilize to run their own digital job advertising.

So, first I probably need to explain a little about what the heck is ‘programmatic’ advertising.“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders. It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

Traditionally, you probably did very little with your own job advertising. You might have actually did some old school newspaper advertising, posted your jobs on job boards, or more than likely you used an agency, who charges a fee/premium, who would advertise your ads on various sites.

JobAdX is an advanced digital advertising technology with Pay Per Applicant model. Instead of running ads where you pay-per-click (each time someone clicks on your ad), this new programmatic technology actually only charges you for those who apply. So, ultimately, this pay-per-applicant will be more expensive than pay-per-click on a per event basis, but cheaper overall because you’re only paying for what you want, applicants.

So, what the heck does it really do? 

That’s really the big question, isn’t it! Basically, a programmatic ad platform puts your job ad in front of candidates where they are all over the internet. Traditionally, you would put one ad on one site (a professional association site, let’s say). Some potential candidates might go to that site, but many would not. But, almost all potential candidates are somewhere on the internet searching and doing things.

The programmatic ad technology finds the individuals you are looking for and puts the ad, in real-time, in front of them at whatever site they happen to be at. A great example is buying shoes. I love shoes. I bought 3 pairs of shoes this week! So, I go to a site to look at shoes. I find a pair I like, but I know my wife will kill me if I buy one more pair of shoes!

So, I leave that site and go to another site like Facebook. And what do you know there is an ad for those same stupid shoes on Facebook! How did Facebook know!?! Facebook didn’t know, the programmatic ad engine did know! Welcome to the future of job advertising!

A nurse has certain behaviors when searching online that will tell the technology, most likely this person in a nurse, which then allows the programmatic job ad platform (JobAdx) to put your nurse job opening in front of this person multiple times, across multiple sites, not just traditional job search sites.

What I like about JobAdx:

– Programmatic job advertising should be used by every TA shop, regardless of your number of hires, especially if you’re struggling to get results via traditional means. The JobAdx platform is simple to use and allows you to control your spend and budget with an “auto-pilot” feature to make it somewhat idiot-proof (which I definitely need!).

– The JobAdx platform has a great dashboard for you to actually see which jobs are performing really well, and which ones are not performing, so you can increase your spend on those you need, and decrease or stop completely on the jobs you no longer need traffic on.

– Advanced technology within JobAdx will ensure that once a candidate applies that candidate will stop seeing your job ads, which is a much better candidate experience.

– There is frequency capping within JobAdx as well, which is basically an automatic set of rules which will stop showing your job ad to a person after so many times. The theory is once someone sees your ad, let’s say six times, they’ve shown you they aren’t interested, so let’s not show them that same ad again, but go show it to others.

The goal of the JobAdx is to empower employers to advertise jobs more dynamically using the power of Real-Time Job Delivery. I’m completely enthralled by the technology and I truly believe every TA shop should be testing programmatic in their own shops. Go check out JobAdx and get a demo, then put a few hundred or thousand dollars you spend on traditional advertising and try it using programmatic.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

I’m in Indeed Jail! Help me!!! #FreeTimSackett

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Do you remember when getting stuck in LinkedIn Jail was all the rage!? I do! It was awful! There you were stuck on the outside looking in not being able to use a valuable tool you used every day to help you do your job.

I’m in Indeed Jail!

It’s somewhat like being in LinkedIn Jail, but different. When you got put into LinkedIn Jail, LinkedIn decided that that right thing to do was to let us know why we were in jail, and then, specifically, how do you get yourself out of LinkedIn Jail. Seems like a good business strategy.

How does Indeed get you all of those great candidates?

The Indeed model built a decade ago was freaking brilliant! Basically, the idea was scrap all the jobs from all the career sites so candidates will have one place to go to search for jobs. No one understood Google SEO at the time, so they scraped the jobs, then bought all the SEO and owned the space.

So, any candidate who was searching for a job on Google the first thing that would come up, always, was an Indeed link. They trained entire generations to search for jobs by going to Indeed. Brilliant!

Now, Google came along eventually and woke up to this and said, “Hey, wait, candidates are searching on Google for things like “Jobs near me” and we are sending them to Indeed for things that aren’t even what they are truly looking for. We can do this better!” Hello, Google for Jobs!

Google for Jobs decided “candidates are the most important thing”. Your Indeed sales rep will tell you this as well, although, they didn’t ever say this until Google for Jobs came along! So, Google changes the game, stops indexing Indeed (which is like a death sentence to companies that rely on Google search traffic), and says we can deliver a better job search for candidates.

So, Indeed is basically a dead man walking, but they have this window of time when we still have the entire world trained to go to Indeed and not Google. So, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon? INDEED JAIL!!! Cut off the non-suspecting companies of their free traffic and charge them money before they realize they don’t really need to do this because Google will give them the traffic they need.

So, what’s Indeed Jail?

Indeed Jail is when Indeed makes the decision to stop scrapping your career site and posting your jobs on Indeed. Almost every company at some point in the past decade has enjoyed a lot of free, organic traffic from having their job posting on Indeed. It was an AWESOME business strategy. It basically followed LinkedIn’s strategy, who followed basic drug dealing strategy.

Get people hooked on your product, then take it away and make them pay if they want it. I don’t say that to be mean! It freaking works really, really well! LinkedIn is a multi-Billion dollar company that got bought by Microsoft.

Indeed Jail is when Indeed stops giving you those free hits! Now, they just don’t take it away for no reason. My reason to be cut off, I was told, was because of a magical, mythical division within Indeed called “Search Quality”. My Indeed Rep didn’t shut me off, no! It was “Search Quality” who shut me off, and my Indeed Rep has absolutely nothing to do with Search Quality. In fact, they run almost as a separate company, locked away in an undisclosed, secret location!

My “Search Quality” issue was I’m a staffing company. An example of my issue is we work with a major employer to fill contract positions, not a position they would hire direct. The company gave us a job description for the contract position, which was basically the exact same JD they use to hire direct. Because the direct employer has priority at Indeed, and my posting was ‘too similar” my ‘search quality’ was bad.

Okay, I’m in Jail, Ouch, that hurts! Help me fix it! 

Let me say, I’m paying and have paid money to Indeed for various products, so it’s not like I’m not a customer. So, when you ask someone you’re paying for help, you expect help. But Indeed has no interest in helping you fix your search quality issue because that would mean you would get the product for free again!

I would love to tell you this is a staffing industry only issue, but it’s not. Little by little, and I have specific examples, corporate Talent Acquisition is also getting hit with ‘search quality’ issues and losing their free traffic from Indeed.

How can that be!?

Believe me, the corporate TA leaders I’m talking to are wondering the same thing. In one example, an Ohio-based employer is hiring hundreds of sales-related positions per year. They don’t use any staffing or RPO vendors, all the work is done in-house for direct positions. They have a big growth initiative so they went from maybe 50 openings to 200 openings, and Indeed cut them off! Because of ‘search quality’, and again, their rep would/could not help them.

I have a feeling this isn’t going to end well for Indeed. Right now they’re flying high! Going to hire thousands of more employees, which makes complete sense, because if you shut everyone off of free traffic, you’ll have a lot of TA pros panicking and buying Indeed products. At least until they discover it continues to cost more for less and less traffic as Google no longer indexes Indeed.

I’ve sent emails to the highest reaches of Indeed, pleading for help, and the only response I got back was from my rep offering to sell me more products!

I explained that I want this to be positive! Show me how to fix me, and I’ll show others how to fix themselves! Along the way, it’s a win/win since the more we understand about the Indeed products and services and feel like a vendor is truly helping us, we (as an industry) will support them!

Crickets!!! Crickets, I say, Chris Hyams!!!

So, what should you do to NOT get yourself in Indeed Jail?  

1. Never pay one dime to Indeed!!!

  • So one thing that has been pretty consistent with everyone I’ve spoken to that got put into Indeed Jail is that they were all (100%) paying customers of Indeed. Almost, like Indeed knew we were willing to pay for traffic, so they put us into jail on purpose! Up until the point of becoming a paid Indeed customer, none of the people I spoke ever had issues with being put in Indeed Jail!

2. Make sure you understand what is ‘bad’ search quality for Indeed. Good luck with this!

3. Enjoy the free traffic while you have it because eventually everyone will be shut off. Drug dealing works because we get addicted. You’re currently addicted to free Indeed traffic. That isn’t a sustainable model for a business.

So, what do you do if you’re already in Indeed Jail? 

1. Understand you’re not alone.

2. Understand that your true reality is you can live without Indeed traffic, and slowly but surely the traffic you get from Google will be greater. So, focus on ensuring your ATS and Jobs are as aligned as possible with the Google Job Schema – it’s super important!

3. Understand if you want more Indeed hits, you better get ready to pay for them from Indeed.

4. Understand Indeed has no vested interested in helping you fix your search quality issue, even if you’re a paid customer because it costs them money.

5. Look at Programmatic Job Advertising tools like: JobAdX, Talroo, Appcast, etc. Increase your posting strategy with sites like ZipRecruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, LinkedIn, etc.  Invest in your own database with some talent rediscovery tools, use CRM technology, build and nurture your pipelines of talent.

My Offer Still Stands!

Chris Hyams, the President of Indeed, get your team to help fix my stuff and I’ll be your biggest fan in advocating and teaching others how to do right by candidates and by Indeed to make the world a better place. That’s all I ever wanted, for you to just help me. Help a paying customer fix their stuff. But you refused.

#FreeTimSackett

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @TextRecruit Drip Campaigns Really Work!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I review TextRecruit‘s new Drip Campaign feature that my team is actually really using!

So, I don’t talk a lot about my tech stack, because I think it’s a real differentiator when it comes to running a staffing company. In fact, I’m fairly cocky about telling clients I know for a fact, my tech stack is better than theirs, which is why my team can find and attract talent faster than theirs can!

We use TextRecruit.

Why?

Because being able to text candidates, more than one at a time, is critical for recruiting success. Plus, I need a way for my recruiting team to manage multiple text conversations at a time, and a platform that will capture all of those conversations.

So, we have been using TextRecruit with a high rate of success when it comes to getting more reply rates than we could with email, InMail, and phone calls.

So, what are Drip Campaigns using TextRecruit?

Drip Campaigns are a series of automated text messages built to drive deeper engagement with candidates. They help you automate text messages based on whether your candidates respond, and engage them with the right message at the right time.

They work like this:

  • Create the different messages you want to send to your candidates and decide how much time you want between them
  • Once you start your campaign, candidates that respond will stop receiving messages while unresponsive candidates move to the next drip message
  • After the campaign, you can check your analytics to see your response rates

We do a lot of message testing so it might look something like this:

Message #1 – “Hey ‘Candidate name’ it’s Tim from HRU. I’ve got this awesome position we need to talk about. Let me know when you’re available.”

No response.

Message #2 – “”Candidate Name”, it’s Tim again! Here’s the link to that position I texted you about. Contact me back and I can give you more details!” 

Still no response.

Message #3 – “It’s Tim! I’m stalking you! No, really, I really do think you’ll like this position. Just let me know “Yes” or “No” and I’ll stop bugging you about this position.” 

What!? Still no response. Remember, even a response of “No, I’m not interested” is a good response, because now you at least know something about that candidate, and you can respond back with “Okay! Is there something you would be interested in and I’ll make sure I put that note on your profile?”

Message #4 – “Last Chance! I don’t want to assume you’re not interested until I really hear from you. Here’s the link again. Just text me back!” 

We set up the messages. The candidate sees it as a personal text to them, with their name embedded, if you have that as part of the message, and the TextRecruit technology does the rest! Easy to set up and use.

So, what’s the response rate? 

70%! (this is my team’s response rate when using the drip campaign method – I can’t guarantee your results will be the same)

That’s an unreal number for recruiting response! You can send out 4 emails to 100 candidates in a drip campaign and you might get a 15-20% response rate. The cool thing is the technology is running the interactions and letting your recruiters respond to those who are interested.

TA pros and leaders ask me constantly how they can get more candidates. One thing that I know that works, is you need to start communicating with candidates in a mode they will respond to.

Editor’s note: I pay to use TextRecruit as part of my tech stack. Many will assume this is a paid commercial and I don’t pay for the tech. I do. 

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

Your Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @LinkedIn Makes Some Changes to Help Candidates Apply Easier!

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Today on the Weekly Dose I take a look at some recent changes LinkedIn has made to their platform to make it easier for candidates. Here is the announcement from LinkedIn on two of the new enhancements that were made:

  • How You Match on job postings shows members how they stack up to the experience needed for a role based on the skills on their profile and recruiters can save time when reviewing candidates by immediately seeing how an applicant fits a specific role, within LinkedIn’s job management page.
  • 1-Click Apply gives job-seekers the option to save basic information, including a resume,  to apply for a job with a single click (desktop) or tap (mobile).

While these two features were made with candidates in mind, with record low unemployment in so many functions and markets, employers will also take advantages of these two additions.

LinkedIn has enormous amounts of data and the “How You Match” feature demonstrates a little psychology behind the data. On the surface, I think most TA pros would look at this and think “it won’t matter! Candidates don’t care if they match a job or not, they just apply, regardless.”

From a psychological standpoint, though, I think most employers will actually see an uptick in quality from this change. When LinkedIn’s matching technology tells you that you don’t match very well, most sensible people, won’t apply to that job.

When I first heard of the 1-Click Apply feature, I got scared that this was a recipe for mass applies from non-qualified candidates. That was my initial reaction, but I think LI brilliantly put these two features together to control this behavior.

Candidates want less friction when it comes to applying for jobs (that’s what Google’s data taught us with Google for Job’s algorithm). So, LinkedIn’s 1-Click Apply is the Holy Grail of an application process! We should all be striving to get to 1-Click Apply!

The truth is, in most ATS environments, today, it’s almost impossible to get to a one-click apply process, so kudos for LI for making this happen on their platform. While many will say they have one-click apply, most of those are based on you using your LI profile to make this happen, which usually takes an additional click or two.

The time is right for 1-Click Apply from an employer’s standpoint as well. Right now, most of us in TA are begging for more applications, so anything to make it easier for candidates to apply is welcome! The key is ensuring you get good quality with those additional applies, and I think LI did a good job trying to help out employers as well by launching the matching feature at the same time.

Acting like the candidate is the most important thing has become very vogue as of late for TA tech companies. Google started it with GFJ. Indeed is now trying to act like candidates matter, for the first time in their history. Now, LinkedIn joins the welcome wagon in letting candidates know they matter, and based on demographics and economic conditions, it looks like candidates will matter for a long while!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

How Long Should It Take a Candidate to Make a Decision on a Job Offer?

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When you make a candidate an offer, how long do you give them to tell you they want the job or not? 24 hours? 3 days? 1 week? Immediately?

For two decades I’ve been in the camp of a candidate should be able to tell you ‘yes’ or ‘no’ immediately, or you (the recruiter and hiring manager) did something wrong in closing! But, I think I’ve changed my stance on this, if “fit” is really important for the position, your culture, etc.

Here’s the deal, if job and/or company fit is really important to your organization. The candidate should take as long as they need to, to make sure that your organization is the one for them. That might mean they need to finish up other interviews, do more research, go through counter-offers, etc.

So, if that takes two or three weeks, so be it. The fit is critical for you and you actually want the candidate to take their time with this decision.

I feel so strongly about this, I think you should actually make candidates wait 72 hours after you offer them the job, to give you an answer! Yes! You won’t accept an acceptance from them until they’ve taken 72 hours to really think about the job, the new boss, the organization, everything!

Why wait 72 hours if they already know!? 

A ‘cooling down’ period will give them some time to get through the infatuation period of getting the offer! It will give them some time to really think about your job, their current job, other jobs they might be considering. This time is important because too often, too many people get that offer and at that moment everything feels so awesome!

After a couple of days they come down from the high of being desired by you and start to think clearly, and all of sudden you’re not as pretty as you looked two days ago, or you’re even more pretty by playing hard to get.

But what if a candidate gets cold feet by this technique? 

That’s a real concern especially with historic unemployment in many markets and fields. If you force a candidate to wait 72 hours there is a good chance someone else might come in an offer them a job!

Yep! That actually would be awesome if that happened, because then you would really know! Do they love you, or did they just fall in love with someone else!? Remember, this isn’t for every organization. This is only for organizations where fit is critical to your organizational culture.

If a candidate gets cold feet by another offer or by waiting 3 days, they don’t really believe your organization is the one for them. They don’t believe what you have is their dream job or organization. Also, if you get cold feet by having them wait, you don’t really believe fit is important!

So, how long should it take a candidate to decide if your job offer is right for them? 

There is not one right answer. Each of us has our own internal clock to make those decisions. If you force a candidate to decide immediately upon offer, that speaks to your culture. If you let candidates decide on their timeline, that also speaks to your culture.

In a perfect world, I still believe if the process works as designed, and everyone pre-closed like they should, both you and a candidate should be able to make a decision when the offer is placed on the table. But, honestly, how often does our process work perfectly?

Hit me in the comments with what you believe is the proper amount of time you should give a candidate to decide whether or not they’ll accept your job offer?

Does This Sweater Make Me Look Fat?

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I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I love buying new clothes, jackets, and shoes. You see, I’m kind of built like a fire hydrant. Picture a fire hydrant in your mind right now. Not very sexy is it!

So, I compensate, not by eating a great diet and working out constantly! Hell, no! That’s really hard work. I compensate by buying more clothes that I think will make me look skinnier than I really am!

Do you do this?

We do this in HR and Talent Acquisition all the time!

Just replace ‘clothes’ with ‘technology’. Yeah, we suck at HR, so instead of going out and fixing our foundational issues, let’s go buy a new pretty technology to cover up all of this fat, err incompetence!

Yeah, baby, with this new shiny technology no one will ever suspect we really suck as bad as we do!

The new stuff we buy screws with our heads. Every new shirt and sports coat I buy, I look at myself, and go “oh yeah! you’re going to look so awesome when you wear this!” Then I get on stage and someone tags me in a picture and I want to starve myself for a year!

Buying new stuff to make us look better than we are is the biggest lie we tell ourselves, ever.

So, before you go buy that new technology to fix all of your problems of why you suck at HR or TA, you have to know one truth. That truth is technology doesn’t fix why you suck. If you suck, great technology will make you suck faster. Bad technology will still make you suck, you just won’t be as fast as sucking!

Just like clothes won’t make me skinnier, new technology won’t make your function perform better.

 

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The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: CareerBuilder Partners with Google Cloud Job Discovery

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The week on The Weekly Dose I dig into CareerBuilder’s partnership with Google Cloud Job Discovery and let you know what it means to you as a Recruiting Pro and Leader!

CareerBuilder was one of the early partners with Google in a number of fronts. When Google for Jobs launched, CB was the first TA technology company to work directly with Googles team to build out their job schema and make sure that CB users who were posting jobs on CB would have those jobs show up high on GFJs search results.

CareerBuilder is pushing the relationship even farther with Google and they recently released a case study showing the advantages CB clients are receiving since CB started using Google Cloud’s Job Discovery A.I. and Machine Learning technology. Google wrote a great piece on this relationship and the advances CB users are seeing, check it out! 

What does all of this mean to us (Employers posting jobs on CB or employers thinking of using CB)? 

– Google knows what and how candidates want to search for jobs, so they built a tool to make this a better experience for candidates. CareerBuilder has also been in the game of wanting to deliver a great search experience for candidates coming to their site to look for jobs as well. When they both came together, it was pretty apparent that CB’s job seekers could benefit from Google’s Job Discovery search.

– CB started testing out Google’s Job Discovery as the backbone of their job search and some amazing things started happening:

  • 40% more views of jobs on CB’s Talent Networks
  • Candidate application quality increased by 18%
  • 41% increase on actions by candidates on their saved job search results

Why!? 

The A.I. and machine learning component of Google’s Job Discovery that is being used by CareerBuilder candidates actually improves the job search for candidates. Less false positives, the technology learns which jobs candidates are clicking on and applying for and then automatically will put more jobs that are closer to the ones you want in front of them.

What you see is less bad volume of candidates, but an increase in qualified candidates for your jobs. So, the partnership of CB and Google has reduced the amount of work it takes a recruiter on any given job by lowering the number of candidates who don’t fit your job and increasing the number that actually does.

One other driving factor around increased quality and relevance is CB’s and Google’s focus on mobile first location search. Most people want to be able to search for jobs based on commutable distance. Prior to Google’s Job Discovery search, this wasn’t as specific as most of us would want, but now people can easily search by very exact distances and times it takes to get to work.

CareerBuilder has been beaten up recently in the media with some moves they’ve made to focus themselves on the future and how things were handled, but in the end, it’s not show-friends, it’s show business, and CB is making the right business moves to ensure their clients are getting what they need.

Go read the Google Case Study, it’s a fascinating piece on why you might want to start looking at investing some of your job posting dollars away from Indeed and test out the Google Job Discovery tech that CareerBuilder is using!

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.

London/UK Friends! I’m Coming to You in June!! Let’s meet up! #sosuuk

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I have something to confess, I’ve never been to Europe! Never! So, a few months ago I put that fact out into my little social world and something amazing came back to me! The Sourcing Summit UK reached out and ask me to come speak at their event in June! And, they made a little video to help promote it:

I can’t wait to come to London and speak at this event! All Americans love British accents, and I’m no different! The accent makes us believe you’re truly brilliant, even if you’re not! Such a recruiting strength! I’ve often said I could start a recruiting company in the states with just recruiters with British accents and we would own the U.S. market!

The other thing I love is building a worldwide network of recruiting and sourcing pros that love what I love!

As I’ve traveled all over the world what I’ve found is that no matter where I go when I’m with people who are passionate about our profession, that is always a good time! We get to nerd out together and learn from each other, and it brings this giant community down to size and makes it very personal!

So, let’s do this! Come see me and all the other great speakers at the Sourcing Summit UK on June 20th and 21st

Can’t wait to meet you in person!

How Hard is it for Candidates to Find Your Jobs on your Career Site?

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The other day I got contacted by a large enterprise level TA leader. She had a major problem about to hit them. They had to hire thousands of people and she was hoping I could tell her which chatbot to use to help them.

Sweet! I love TA Tech, let’s talk about some of my favorites!

I pulled up their corporate site because I wanted to see what ATS they used and just check out the career site.

This is where I found her first problem! The first problem was I had to search to find out how to find their jobs! Like four clicks deep into the corporate website before I could even begin a job search, let alone apply.

There is only one right place for candidates to find jobs on your corporate website. It’s at the top of the page, the same exact place where you find things like: Home, Company, Products, Search, etc. If you’re making candidates scroll down to the bottom of your site, you don’t care about talent. If you’re making candidates search to find “Careers” on your site, you don’t care about talent.

You know who you are. “Well, Tim, we put “careers” under the “About” tab because we want our products front and center!” Nice! So, those candidates you desperately need now have to go on a snipe hunt to find out how to apply for your jobs!? How’s that working out for you? Or you make the scroll down fourteen feet to the bottom where you put things like “investor relations”, “contact information”, “press inquiries”, “Legal Notices”, etc.

The most innovative companies in talent acquisition have ‘finding’ their jobs down to one click. You pull up their page and it says something like “Jobs!” or “Apply Now” or “Careers” in the top right corner of the website. Sometimes there is even a button along in the corner to make it even easier for candidates to spot.

When a candidate clicks on that top of the page, right corner link they are instantly taken to a page that allows them to search. No more clicking around, no more searching for how the hell they can find which jobs you have open. It’s right there. One click.

It’s pretty common for me to visit a large brand corporate homepage and it will take me 4-7 clicks before I can actually search their jobs. If you ever want to know where TA falls in the order of importance in your organization, just count the clicks. The more you click, the less influence TA has in your organization. It’s fairly unscientific, but I find this little measure almost always works out.

So, my new TA friend was looking for a chatbot but didn’t really need a chatbot. Well, at least not yet. Foundational blocking and tackling of TA can do wonders for helping you hire. If it takes me four or five clicks to find your jobs, you’re in trouble. If you make me search around your site on how the hell I apply, I leave and go someplace else.

I know that 90% of know this,  but almost 50% of organizations can’t figure this out. Why? Because we as TA leaders aren’t going to our executive team and telling them, “Hey, idiots! We are losing 67% of our candidate traffic because some moron in marketing doesn’t like how “Jobs” looks on our corporate website in the righthand upper corner! Can we stop being stupid and do the right thing?”

I know selling our stuff is important, but if we can’t fill jobs, we won’t have stuff to sell. I know putting our employment brand out front is important, but why are we creating a search game for candidates to solve to just apply for our jobs?

Simple Tip to Share with Your Executive Team: Hiding how a candidate can apply for our jobs, doesn’t actually help us fill jobs! 

So, where do candidates find your jobs on your corporate homepage?

The Weekly Dose of HR Tech: @Candidate_ID – The Talent Pipelining Platform

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This week on the Weekly Dose I review the talent pipelining platform Candidate.ID. Candidate.ID’s Talent Pipeline Platform provides one central, unified SaaS solution that manages and optimizes every tactic used to find, attract, engage and nurture candidates.

So, what does it really do?

Candidate.ID calls itself a talent pipeline platform which makes it this awesome cross between CRM, ATS, email marketing, and screening tech. Candidate.ID’s unique scoring algorithm identifies with laser focus, exactly which candidates within your talent pipeline are ready for a hiring conversation.

How does this work?

Think of it like this, you have candidates at all levels within your pipeline, some are just at the awareness level, some are learning more about you, others are considering applying, and others have already applied. Candidate.ID’s system figures out at which level a candidate is at and then automatically nurtures them based on the level they are.

Personalization is critical to candidate experience and candidate close. The only way you can do this is by measuring the level of interaction, and Candidate.ID’s algorithm has proven effective in getting each level to the finish line.

What I like about Candidate.ID:

– The platform measures ROI of pipeline effectiveness and shows you which candidates to prioritize for your team, so they know who to go after in the moment based on which candidates are ready to make the final step.

– Candidate.ID uses multiple levels of tracking that include cookie tracking, IP recognition, and fingerprint tracking across devices. This allows you to track candidates through content, social media click tracking, text message click tracking, career and corporate websites, etc.

– A dashboard of real-time candidate traffic that shows you the entire journey of a candidate’s interaction with you. You see everything a candidate does in engaging with your employment brand.

– Not only do you see this with new candidates coming in, but one of Candidate.ID’s most powerful functions is being able to nurture your entire ATS database, and show your team which candidates are ready and when the right fit is close.

Candidate.ID is an enterprise-level tool. It works best when you’re hiring roughly 15+ of the same kind of position per year at a minimum. A great example is a client that had 3,000 design engineers in their database. They put them into Candidate.ID and started nurturing them and within 8 weeks they were able to make 18 hires and 25 others in final conversations, 500 that were being warmed up for the future.

Candidate.ID is a sophisticated recruiting tool that can be used by corporate TA, staffing and RPO alike, given you have the volume to make it worth the investment. It’s powerful, and it will put your team at a competitive advantage for talent. Definitely a tool you should demo if you’re in the enterprise space and hiring mid to senior level talent (probably $40k – $150k+). This would not be something for high volume hourly hiring.

The Weekly Dose – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on The Weekly Dose – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Want help with your HR & TA Tech company – send me a message about my HR Tech Advisory Board experience.