After starting its inception back in the 1700s, classified job advertising reached its peak about 20 years ago or so. Sort of hard to fathom now, but plenty of employers happily paid the $15 to $100 dollars to get their job listed as they waited for candidates to call in.
Sounds like a nice little side hustle of the newspaper industry, right? Well, that side hustle turned out to be a whopping $19.6 billion dollar industry in the year 2000. But as we all know from our lack of newspaper subscriptions today, that number has dropped more than 75%.
Obviously there is still value in job placements. But where did all of that money go?
Well this little thing called the internet — job marketplaces like LinkedIn, Indeed, and Glassdoor. You may have heard of them.
For TA leaders, it sounds like heaven: Unlimited virtual real estate to conquer with your job advertisements, competing for candidates' eyes and clicks. But that’s exactly where the problem begins. There are too many jobs, too many websites, and too much money flowing around competing for a decreasing number of candidates; it’s impossible to be fully optimized in every direction.
Unless, of course, you have a way to see exactly how many candidates are coming in from each direction, and how much you are spending.
Now that is actually heaven. And it’s here.
Too many job marketplaces and not enough candidates.
When TA teams rely on one or two individual channels to source most of their candidates and spend their job advertising dollars, you may not be receiving an overwhelming amount of candidates, but it should be easy to track.
When TA teams are using close to a dozen channels, the candidate pool just got a lot bigger. But wait, how are they keeping track of where candidates are coming from? Or where dollars are being fully optimized? This saturation makes it much more difficult to decide where to put most of your spend.
As a (former) job seeker, it’s hard to feel either fully positive or negative about the current state of job boards and websites.
- On one hand: It’s pretty cool that applicants have nearly unlimited options to choose from on where to look and apply for specific roles.
- On the other: It feels like there is way too much going on. If I (as a candidate) am having trouble keeping tabs on X website where I applied for Y job, then how can I expect employers to be fully optimized on the site that I end up finding them on.
Follow the money (and the candidates).
With Paradox’s new source tracking product, you can now make informed decisions by monitoring top converting traffic sources. Assume most of your candidate pipeline is coming from Indeed? You can now quickly check, read through the insights, and make a more informed decision on where you should continue to focus your budget per specific channels.
“What we did with Source Tracking, is provided visibility for the first time into seeing how you are advertising, and where your spend is best utilized, not only is this by total traffic but where the traffic is in your recruiting pipeline. So that you can make decisions ultimately about where to spend more or less with your advertising spend,” said Paradox Product Director, Andrew Chaifetz.
Here’s an example:
Say you have had over 200,000 candidates come through your system over the last year. First off, congratulations because you are getting a ton of candidate coverage. Second, how do you know where you are getting the most coverage from? In this scenario on the right, it looks like you have a slight skew towards LinkedIn.
The obvious decision is to take some of our spend from a channel like ZipRecruiter, which clearly is lagging behind in top of the funnel candidate conversion, and add it to our LinkedIn spend next year.
I get it — I’m sure “all” channels are providing quality candidates to you, but this tool is finally going to show you who (which website) is bringing you the best of the best and who is taking your precious budget and running. When looking down the hiring journey, we can clearly see how a channel performs as the candidates move closer towards “hired”. In this case, Indeed may seem like an effective channel when we look at the volume of applications and screenings, but if the percentage distribution drops drastically towards offer and hire, the candidate pool may be lacking quality from that channel.
If you aren’t fully optimized, your competition probably is.
So why is it so powerful to be tracking and making decisions based off of candidate-conversion sources?
Well with how challenging the current labor market is, it’s not just a competition to which employer can convert the best candidates and turn them into the best employees, it’s also a competition to see which TA function can return the most impact (yes, cash) back into the business.
At Paradox, we’ve been lucky enough to see our clients bring some incredible business impact back into their organizations following this same practice. Southern Rock Restaurants, a McAlister’s Deli franchisee with over 150 locations, was able to save 840k annually by optimizing their job advertising spend. Not only are they returning huge savings to the organization, Southern Rock’s Director of Digital Recruitment, Courtney Dempsey, has cracked the code to reach fully staffed restaurants.
“You have to take advantage of the analytics and pull data on hiring trends. So with pinpoint accuracy, I can determine what day is the most effective to post a job advertisement. You can see through the data analytics chart how we can maintain a hundred percent status, so we went from 80%, not even two months ago, to fully staffed a hundred percent,” Dempsey shared.
