Don’t confuse biggest for best
Monday, 26 May 2008
By Sue Barrett
Just like sales, in today’s market you need a combination of “push and pull” contact strategies for finding the right candidates for your business. Advertising alone is not likely to yield the candidates you seek.
When you decide to recruit externally, the following methods are available to select from:
- Advertising (on-line job boards [MyCareer, SEEK, CareerOne, etc] newspapers; magazines; radio and television).
- Recruitment agencies.
- Executive search firms.
- Viral marketing email campaigns.
- University job boards.
- In-store advertising (shop window).
- Family and friends.
- Your own website.
- Information seminars.
- Search (direct contact).
- Networks.
- On-line network groups (MySpace; Link Me; LinkedIn).
With the advent of online job boards, many people can DIY their own recruitment more easily, and at much cheaper rates than ever before. Pretty much everyone realises nowadays that online job boards are part of our front line recruitment strategy and not just a nice-to-have.
In fact they are very rapidly replacing the traditional newspaper advertising medium, if not already. But you have to know how to use them wisely and well. Putting up recruitment ads willy nilly isn’t going to work. You really need to think about who you are writing the ad for and where they are likely to look. Content, placement and maintaining visibility are some of the key things to consider when using online job boards.
Yet many people assess the credibility, usability and value of online job boards by the volume of candidates they receive without really assessing what those numbers mean.
Getting a whole lot of international applicants who are not qualified to work here and no local candidates is tough. As an ex recruiter (pre the online job board days) it was quality that counted, not volume. My clients wanted the right sales person for the job, not a whole lot of bums on seats.
I don’t know about you but I don’t have the time to wade through email after email of irrelevant resumes. If I am advertising I want to attract good quality people that can do the job even if it means I only get two or three to choose from. If I cannot find the right person I need to have other strategies in place.
My advice is don’t get caught up the hype in the about volume/traffic measurements or the brand of the job board alone without investigating the quality of candidates you get from it. Because quantity doesn’t always equal quality and the biggest doesn’t always mean the best.
I am speaking from experience, not just as an ex recruiter, but through my current experiences and observations of the recruitment market and, in particular, online jobs boards and their effectiveness.
Over the last year, as part of our work, we have been assisting a number of our clients with the recruitment of sales and service people and managers. Now we are not working as a traditional recruiter, more like a quasi HR team working alongside, advising our clients on what to do in this space. We have helped a number of clients in various ways from building and/or supplying them with end-to-end structured competency based recruitment kits, to assisting with candidate screening and interview support.
As part of our support we also advise them on how to write a candidate-attractive ad and where to advertise on the main online job boards, which categories to place the ads under, etc.
Some of our clients have placed their own ads on the big online job boards in the past and achieved very poor results. This was mainly due in part to the type of ad they wrote. Once ad quality was rectified we helped them place the new ads on the two main online job boards (you know which ones I mean).
Here is what we have found so far:
1. With one large online job board we can only get one selection area to place our ads in, and within a few minutes of getting posted each job ad was not on the front page any more. The ads had slipped down due to the huge volume of ads they competed with for space and visibility.
Within a day each ad was so far down the list that most people couldn’t be bothered looking past the first few pages. (Just think Google searches and you know what I mean). It’s almost as if we need SEO for job ads here.
Then there are the responses; sadly the quality of applicants from this online job board has slipped markedly over the last year – too many people just sending out applications and not even bothering to read the ad. Don’t get me wrong, there are occasionally a few good ones, but only a few.
2. Now the other online job board is producing quite a different result. Admittedly we are paying a slightly higher fee per ad, but only slightly, and what we are getting is; three job listing locations for the ad, the ad is refreshed every week over four weeks (which means that the ad goes back up to the top of the page and appears as a new ad again every week for the life of the ad), and the overall quality of the candidates has been vastly superior, resulting in hires coming from this job board 90% of the time to date.
I know the candidates are local and/or qualified or work here. In short, the second online job board outperformed the first in every way with the exception of traffic volume.
Now I know you can pay top dollar for big online display ads and get prime position, but most SMEs do not have the volume of advertising to get the better ad rates that you get if you are a recruitment agency or big corporate. So as SMEs we have to use a range of tactics, and that means using online job boards smarter too.
My advice, if you are speaking with the sales people from any online job board company, ask them about how their job board really performs. Ask them about:
- Their demographics – are their percentage of unique browers international or local traffic hits? (you can easily inflate the “value” of an online job board site by including international hits).
- How do they attract local candidates to their site?
- What percentage of unique browsers are from your own country?
- What do their real numbers mean?
If all you get is “volume traffic talk” with no real substance, then make sure you have other options available to you. See above.
Sue Barrett is Managing Director of BARRETT Pty Ltd. Sue is an experienced consultant and trained coach and facilitator. Sue and her team are best known for their work in creating High Performing Sales Teams. Key to their success is working with the whole person and integrating emotional intelligence, skill, knowledge, behaviour, process and strategy via effective training and coaching programs. For more information please go to www.barrett.com.au
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Comments
Barry Sheales writes: My first "port of call" when looking for new staff is my current staff, clients and suppliers, including my banker,advertising agent, accountant and insurers.Results are usually excellent when looking for real quality.
Carey Eaton from SEEK writes: Thanks Sue for your article, which I absolutely agree with. Smart employment advertisers really measure the value they are getting from their various sources of applications or placements/hires.
There are a number of increasingly accessible tools or software applications out there that can assist with this task. While SEEK and other job boards do provide ad performance reporting on our sites for individual advertisers, I would also recommend independent measurement to advertisers using multiple channels, since many job boards define the various measures differently.
I might on behalf of SEEK just explain why we don't offer either multi-categorisation or free refreshing.
Refreshing is the subject on which we receive the most complaints, from both job seekers and advertisers.
Job seekers tend to scan through the list of jobs until they see a job they've seen before. A refreshed ad simply means that job seekers miss out on seeing other jobs further down the list that may be of great relevance to them. Our other advertisers also miss out on very good candidates as a result. Refreshing is a behaviour on SEEK that we'd like to reduce.
We will never be able to eradicate it altogether because there are genuine sitations in the real world where employers or recruiters have to re-advertise a position.
There is also no durable technical means of detecting a refreshed ad versus a new ad; any technical block will mean that advertisers simply change the content a little more than our technical block and continue the behaviour. It is also impossible for technology to define what is a meaningless-refreshed ad versus a genuine need to re-advertise one or a multiple of positions.
There are therefore only three ways we can reduce refreshing behaviour on SEEK – penalising inappropriate behaviour through a price lever, fundamentally reducing the overall value of refreshed ads and providing alternative products that perform better than refreshed ads in crowded sectors for an attractive price.
Presently, we try to discourage refreshing behaviour through charging the same rate for refreshed ads as we do for new ads even though the performance of a refreshed ad is lower.
Over the longer term we are investing in continuing improvements to search and classification/salary/location/work-type data structures in order to reduce crowding on the site in more competitive areas.
Reducing crowding in certain areas by increasing the volume of ways that people can access relevant jobs is the best long term method for ensuring ad performance, great job seeker experience and a reduction in the value of refreshing behaviour or necessity for advertisers.
We've also introduced “prominence” products to help advertisers stand out or stay at the top of the list if they want, some priced at a fraction of the price of a refreshed ad.
Recent and forthcoming changes to how the search works will deliver significant steps towards that aim in the very near future.
The reason we do not allow free refreshing or multi-categorisation is that such a decision would greatly increase this problem for both job seekers and advertisers.
We currently have 215,000 ads on the site. If we were to allow multi-categorisation in the same way our competitor allows it, that would increase the volume to 645,000 ads.
This would lead to a much faster decay of job ads down the list, driving up refreshing activity dramatically and massively reduce the visibility of our advertisers’ jobs.
It would also massively increase the irrelevance of advertisements to job seekers, and also increase the irrelevance of applications to those ads. This would be a terrible experience for job seekers, advertisers and SEEK as a whole!
So while many ask us to give away refreshing, and allow multi-categorisation, it’s fundamentally not in anyone's interest.
Our competitor is only able to offer free refreshing and multi-categorisation due to the much smaller volume of jobs they offer to their job seekers.
As for your key questions, I'm happy to provide SEEK's answers to them:
"Are their percentage of unique browers international or local traffic hits?"
This data is measured for all job boards independently by Neilsen Netratings and only applies to domestic Australian traffic. SEEK currently attracts around 2.8 million unique Australian browsers. We attract around 10% more than that in international traffic, the vast majority of which is from the UK and New Zealand. We do measure other international traffic, suffice to say that this represents less than 5% of our additional traffic. We never quote traffic figures that include those additional international visitors.
“How do they attract local candidates to their site?”
The short answer is that we spend more on marketing, alliances and distribution than any of our competitors, on more channels, in more ways, more frequently.
We have an independently measured unaided brand awareness approaching 50% in the Australian market. More people in Australia put the work “SEEK” into Google than the word “jobs”.
“What percentage of unique browsers are from your own country?”
100% of the quoted Neilsen numbers – this is true for all Australian job boards. There are a couple of Australian job boards who refuse to reveal their independent measurement from Neilsen but I'm not aware of any Australian job board who is inflating their numbers based on international traffic.
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