Table of Contents

• How Some Recruiters Have Cracked the Job Ad Code
• Aha Moment: What If SmartRecruiters Could Democratize Job Ad Optimization for All Enterprises?
• Simplifying Vendor Management
• Stay Agile, But Still be Able to Take a Lunch Break
• Collect Data for Future Optimization
• The Bottom Line is a Raised Bar

Throughout my 15 years in the TA tech space, people have been making excuses for job boards and job ad performance in general. The bar seems to have lowered with time.

“Well, we do get lots of applications…”

“At least with PPC we are only paying when someone clicks!”

“Job posts are really just for branding”

As noted by SHRM and elsewhere, job boards never top the list of quality sources (they don’t come near internal mobility or referrals), yet companies spend billions on posting credits, slots, and PPC. At SmartRecruiters, we followed up on a hunch that some recruiters were cracking the code on generating consistently high-quality applicant flow. You’ll want to take a look at what we found.

How Some Recruiters Have Cracked the Job Ad Code

When SmartRecruiters analyzed the habits for tens of thousands of recruiters, across 4,000 customers, we found three core strategies that best predict job advertising success:

1. Have a backup plan for every job

Savvy recruiters appear to use multiple sources per job, staggering advertisements vs. putting all their spend in one basket, all at once. For example, they may start with free aggregators, then switch to LinkedIn slots, and finally try Indeed PPC or programmatic.

Why? Because there is always an element of timing and luck in advertising. Changing the channel on ads that aren’t attracting the right people at a given moment is one way to shake things up and improve the odds of finding right-fitting applicants.

2. Set pipeline “rules” and reminders

How long is too long to wait for ten candidates to pass assessments or three candidates to be scheduled for interviews? Savvy recruiters are taking a disciplined approach to setting specific, time bound goals for filling their pipelines. These types of rules appear to be foundational for making the agile optimizations mentioned above.

3. Careful planning and budgeting based on applicant quality

This pattern was harder to detect from raw ATS data itself, but it bubbled up via surveys and hundreds of quarterly business reviews with customers. Recruiters making the most hires via job ads work at companies that analyze the historical quality and conversion of candidates, rather than just focusing on clicks and costs per click. These employers in turn used these analyses to reshape hiring budgets and increase investments in quality sources.

Yes – All of These Strategies are Easier Said Than Done, Manually

Recruiters are not accountants or marketers and most of them don’t have the spare time to wear those hats. Only a small fraction of SmartRecruiters customers can devote partial, let alone full-time headcount to the analysis, manual optimization, and experimentation outlined in this post.

Aha Moment: What If SmartRecruiters Could Democratize Job Ad Optimization for All Enterprises?

The solution came to us in the form of SmartJobs, a “Smart, Managed Advertising” service that would sit inside the SmartRecruiters Talent Acquisition Suite and use the company’s own data to automate all of the strategies mentioned above, and more. Think of SmartJobs as a lean, data-driven, recruitment advertising agency.

Nonetheless, this isn’t all big data and automation. Behind the tech is our expert recruitment marketing team–including a media planner, media operations specialist, and account director–who helps TA teams create a tailored plan to deliver against their unique hiring goals.

Simplifying Vendor Management

Vendor management and performance comparison all in one spot, no more manual spreadsheets to manage. With SmartJobs you can..

• Manage and negotiate contracts
• Purchase and renew ad space
• Manage user credentials and ad credits
• Track performance by job or channel

Stay Agile, But Still be Able to Take a Lunch Break

You know how to manage your candidate pipeline and adjust according to incoming data, but you don’t have 100 hours in the day just to spend on job advertising. Let SmartJobs do some of the legwork.

• SmartJobs automates spending adjustments based on the changes in your talent pipeline
• Pause ads for jobs that have a full pipeline
• Boosts traffic to jobs that need more volume
• Switch sources when the quality is poor

Collect Data for Future Optimization

It’s hard to make meaningful changes to your strategy without strong data insights. That’s why SmartJobs has data collection and delivery built-in. ATS data is combined with sourcing analytics to give you a complete end-to-end view of your advertising performance.

• Receive detailed monthly reports
• See candidate journey with post-to-interview and post-to-hire analytics
• Compare all your sources side by side
• ROI analysis of your advertising strategy 

The Bottom Line is a Raised Bar

When it comes to making sensible investments in job advertising, costs are critical to the equation. In a world where job advertising doesn’t yield great results, the variables that matter most are cost per post, click, applicant, etc.

But in a world where job advertising attracts consistently high quality candidates, the bottom line must be reconsidered alongside all line items in a sourcing budget, and beyond. 

In other words, what if you could make 3x the number of hires from set-it-and-forget-it ads, while reducing costs of manual sourcing and external agencies, speeding up start times, and giving hundreds of hours back to recruiters? With SmartJobs, we are going back to the future of job advertising to help companies do just that. 

In this chapter of TA Tech history, who would have thought job boards and job ad networks would be having the last laugh? If this all leads to a leaner, more powerful way to connect talent to jobs at scale, we are happy to laugh heartily, together.

Want to learn more? Download the SmartJobs Product Sheet

It’s more sad than funny, really, especially if you’re a recruiter that happens to use software to coordinate a hiring process involving other people.  You know – like candidates, and the managers that want to hire them. Those guys.

Turns out that any software development team can gather requirements and whiteboard an idea for a product. But from my eight years in the business, I can tell you that designing a product that people can and actually want to use is really, really hard.

Which brings me back to those pesky candidates and hiring managers.

The truth is that recruiting software was simply not designed for them. Period.

It’s a stunning fact: Product managers at ATS vendors are not and have never been experts in the consumer user experience, or even on the workflow requirements of non-recruiter end users. This represents the biggest untold problem in recruiting technology, and the reason that the ATS product category as a whole is going away.

According to my friends who are recruiters, the ATS exacerbates at least two of their biggest problems overall:

#1 – MY HIRING MANAGERS WON’T PARTNER WITH ME

“Hiring managers are typically unrealistic with their expectations. They get frustrated when I don’t deliver exactly what they want. Then in their frustration, they are slow to give feedback on candidates. It’s a downward spiral… God forbid they log into the ATS to participate in the process. They won’t touch the thing.”

…If only my hiring managers had easy access to the data, they could see the sourcing analytics and candidate pipeline,” one recruiter recently said. “They would see that I’ve been thorough in my sourcing strategy, that I know my stuff, and I’ve been working hard. Maybe they’d get more realistic about their requirements, and maybe even help source…”

#2 ITS HARD TO SELL CANDIDATES ON A HARD-TO-SELL JOB
“A recruiter has only so much control over the candidate’s decision,” another friend said. “I’m stuck selling my employer’s reputation for better or for worse. And not every job description is a sexy one. It’s hard to get candidates to look past a dull description, let alone make it through a cumbersome [ATS] apply process.”

It’s clear from listening to recruiters’ top problems that in order to be successful, they must leverage a recruiting platform designed not just for themselves, but for the needs of candidates and hiring managers.

Only through empowering everyone else in the process can a recruiter conduct the symphony of engagement and cooperation that leads to hiring success. On the flip side, a system that doesn’t work for the whole hiring team is a system that doesn’t really work at all.

There is only one product in the world designed from the bottom up for EVERY user that takes part in recruiting – the first product truly designed to drive Hiring Success.

See it to believe it: Get a demo, today.

Enterprise sales reps are hard to hire. I’m going to give a sample of the job interview questions SmartRecruiters asks it enterprise sales reps so you can apply them to your own hiring process.

1. This position is about wreaking competitive havoc in an industry that is in flux; where customers are miserable and desperate for change. How would you see yourself adding to the fire and passion of our team, which is on a quest to disrupt a market while making hiring dramatically easier for everyone – including candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters?

2. We aim to replace the 1st generation of entrenched applicant tracking vendors while “leap-frogging” 2nd-generation vendors that represent only slightly cleaned up versions of the traditional ATS.  How would you approach educating prospective customers on how SmartRecruiters is unique and better than other solutions?

3. Sometimes our customers come to us with a set of ATS requirements (e.g., an ATS RFP), but need help re-imagining their needs in light of new capabilities offered by a “Post-ATS,” next-generation platform like SmartRecruiters. How would you gain enough trust with a prospect such that she or he would feel comfortable partnering to reshape their requirements?

4. Why will you, given your background, experience, personality, etc., be successful in partnering with recruitment and human resources professionals?

5. What types of tangible success and value would you help create for your SmartRecruiters customers in HR and recruitment? What type of value and ROI do you think SmartRecruiters yields?

6.  I’ve been imagining, building, marketing, and selling recruitment technology for 8 years and have consistently achieved success for my customers and for the companies I’ve worked for. Tell me about your track record of excellence and about key wins in your career.

7. How will you approach your first 30 days on the job?

8. How do you measure personal success in a sales role?

9. What do you need from your managers and colleagues to be successful in a sales role?

10. In your own words, tell me why you are awesome.

Bring your whole heart, your whole head, and your whole winning history to the conversation. Be yourself, and we’ll figure out together if we are each others’ kind of awesome.

We Are Now Hiring Sales Reps. 

Chances are, the top talent that you’d like to recruit is “allergic” to your candidate experience. Over time, this missing talent has cost you a fortune in lost creativity and performance.

Why? Because many current applicant tracking systems are outdated, and they don’t address the issues and content that the best candidates require. So it’s important to look for ways to refresh your hiring experience—and focus on the things that today’s top people want.

You can learn more by listening to our recent webinar, “The Candidates Are Coming: Hide Your ATS.”
Here are three ideas to improve your recruiting process:

1. Start With Creative Content

Too much recruiting content is dry, legal—and very off-putting to a candidate that can choose where he or she wants to go. You can increase your recruiting effectiveness by changing up your content.

“It starts with a little storytelling,” notes Careerealism CEO J.T. O’Donnell. “Once upon a time a company with a great corporate culture was growing fast and needed to find more talented people. The only way to get the attention of the talent they needed was to share just how great the company was.”

2. Renovate Your ATS-Powered Experience

What’s the point of spending all this money on recruitment marketing if you career page and job ads don’t convert the visitors into candidates? Give good candidates the information they need (job details, company details, comployee ment perks, visual assets, etc.) to express interest. Don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Make it easy for them by attaching modern tools to your ATS. Add LinkedIn as a way to apply. Integrate your ATS with social employee referrals and recruitment advertising. Good people are busy, and they don’t have time for lengthy input. If you make it simple for them to express interest, you have the opportunity to start a recruiting conversation.

3. Consider Whether You Should “Bulldoze” Your Current ATS

Is your current ATS system bringing in the people you need? Are you getting the numbers you have to have? If not, the best fix may be starting over with a new system.

SmartRecruiters has created a hiring platform that address all the issues that companies and candidates need today. Our people are veterans of older ATS platforms, and they have lived with their limitations—and found ways to overcome them. SmartRecruiters was created to provide companies large and small with smarter ways to bring in the best employment candidates.

Refreshing your ATS can refresh much more—your enthusiasm, your current employees’ ability to recruit, even how your customers view your company. View the Webinar recording: “The Candidates Are Coming: Hide Your ATS.”

Jerome Ternynck presented iRecruit Expo’s keynote, “RE:Invent Recruiting.” Over 700 talent management business leaders and executives gathered in Amsterdam, listening to the SmartRecruiters CEO explain the pulse of the recruitment industry.

“Recruiting is a competitive sales process. Hiring teams must be deeply involved to close the best candidates,” said Jerome Ternynck.

It’s hard to think of a better way to kick off my tenure at SmartRecruiters. In my 8 years in recruiting tech space, there has been a lot of hype about reinventing recruiting, but so much of it has been incremental innovation built on top of an outdated core.

“Is recruiting really about tracking?” Jerome Ternynck asked the crowd. “The ATS as we know it has to go. Tracking is a feature, not a purpose. The purpose of recruiting is to hire great people.”

“Preach it, brother,” said Chris Hoyt, talent engagement and marketing leader at PepsiCo.

The reality is: recruiting is not supply chain management; recruiting is really about relationship management.  For too long, hiring managers, departmental staffing heads, and corporate heads of Talent Acquisition have been undermined by an ATS industrial complex that has lost sight of what recruiting really is; a people-centric function where good people are a magnet for other good people, where people provide the best referrals and leads, and where people (not matching algorithms) do the best vetting and screening, collaboratively.

So is there an opportunity for a player to shake up the space? For a smart team to storm the market with a clean, flexible, open platform that is unwed to the bulky, slow, expensive HCM Suite strategy? A team that is also smart enough to envision and build the social hiring machinery of the future?

I am proud to be a part of this team.

Jim Milton is the Senior Director, Enterprise Strategy. He spent four years leading enterprise product strategy at SelectMinds, which Oracle acquired in 2013. After the acquisition, Milton owned product strategy for Oracle’s Taleo Social Sourcing Cloud Service line. Prior to SelectMinds and Oracle, Milton held positions at LinkedIn, TheLadders.com and Apex Systems in product, sales and marketing functions. Check out the iRecruit Keynote slides below: