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Port a Potties and Recruiting

Port-a-Potty Recruiting – What’s behind Door #2 will shock you!

What’s behind Door #2 will shock every recruiter!

Over the summer, I was taking my high school daughter to band camp (@WilliamTincup – no comment), and found one of the best recruitment marketing ads I’ve seen in a very long time.

So, what do Port-a-Potties have to do with Recruitment Marketing and Employer Branding?
You’ll be surprised!

With US unemployment at a 50 year low, job seekers have lots of options, and talent acquisition leaders have to get creative and learn from their marketing colleagues.

What this means to the employers, of course, is that what worked last year and the year before, might not be working anymore. If you’re still having the same hiring problems you’ve had for the last 5 years, it might be time to start thinking creatively, or looking at new solutions.

And to do that, you have to think and act like your ideal candidates.

So back to the Port-a-Potties.

Well, after a long, yet beautiful drive in the Redwoods of the San Francisco Bay Area, I needed a bio break when we got there.

So, I headed over to the port-a-potty, and my wife tells me…

You won’t believe what’s in the port-a-potty!

Of course, I’m intrigued.

USS Ad

When I open that flimsy plastic door, and take a seat (if you dare), and then look up… I see this…

It’s a glorious “Now Hiring” sticker on the inside door of the door.

At first, I don’t know what to think.

“Holy Crap” (right?), that’s the weirdest thing ever. I’m kind of shocked.
I’m trying to make sense of it. Is this a good thing? Does it work? Is this good branding? Who are they trying to hire? What’s their target market?

And since I’m in the Thinker pose, sitting on the plastic throne, I start wondering about the campaign.

Thinker

Who is United Site Services trying to hire?
Drivers, hourly workers, equipment technicians… the same people who are working at construction sites or delivering materials to construction sites. The same people who would be frequenting a port-a-potty! Bingo!

It’s Highly Targeted Recruitment Marketing Ad! 

United Site Services is one of the largest construction services companies in the US. They rent and deliver construction equipment, including port-a-potties.

Placing stickers, on the inside of their hundreds of thousands of port-a-potties is cost-effective, highly-targeted, campaign.  Additionally, their target market is probably sitting down, and has a moment to read! (Just saying…)

Kudos to the United Site Services team

They’ve done a great job of targeting their potential workforce. When you’re going to do something different, there will always be risk, and this was definitely a risky move.

Now, just because I think the target marketing is great, it doesn’t mean the entire campaign is great, though.

For a campaign to be great, it’s got to work. It’s got to generate qualified candidates to be a success.

This is a really important point for all talent acquisition leaders, recruitment marketers, recruitment ad agencies, recruiters, and employer branding individuals and team members.

In a tight employment economy, Rule #1 = Make it easy for candidates to apply!

Take a look at the ad again. It’s great!

It has a picture of someone doing the job. Check!
The “Now Hiring” text really stands out. Check!
They include benefits, in simple text. Check!
They highlight “Full Time/ Permanent Positions” (job security is probably really important for their workforce). Check!

But, what about the call-to-action?

Look way down at the bottom right-hand corner of the ad… in the smallest font on the entire ad:

USS call to action

Here’s a great, attractive ad, highly targeted, uniquely placed, but the call to action isn’t highlighted, and unfortunately, I don’t think it works.

It’s time to check the Candidate Experience and journey.

So, now, I pretend I’m a job seeker and follow the call to action.

I take out my phone and start typing away, while sitting on the plastic throne, trying to get to the career site.

Remember it’s also really small print, so I have to look up at the sticker, and then back to my phone. And then up to the sticker and down to my phone. I have to do this a couple of times, and finally, since I’ve know the brand “United Rentals”, I give up looking up and down, and simply start typing.

I type “careers.unitedrentals.com” Fail #1.

Ugh. After squinting and looking really hard because it’s one big run-on string of 30+ characters with no capitalization, I notice… Oh, it’s not “UnitedRentals” it’s “UnitedSiteServices”. They were probably one company and split into two brands, but I didn’t know that.

I type “careers.unitedsitesedvices.com” Fail #2.

What? Ugh!!! Damn it… I typed the letter “d” instead of “r”… start over again.

Remember, Rule #1 is Make it Easy for Candidates to Apply.

It’s the candidate experience that counts. If you don’t make it easy for the candidates to apply, they won’t. To understand the candidate journey you have to test it as exactly as possible. We can assume candidates aren’t going to the port-a-potty with their laptops, so we need to test the call to action on a mobile phone.

A little frustrated, I took a picture of the ad, and went back to the car.

I failed 5 times until I finally got to the career site.

By then, I was pretty frustrated. I can’t imagine what a job seeker would have though, but it’s probably not good.

Typing 30 characters in exact order, on a mobile phone is NOT easy.

As a result, instead of getting candidates excited about opportunities, my guess is many candidates got frustrated and never make it to the career site at all. And, if they did make it to the site, they were frustrated.

Once I do navigate to the career site. It’s great. It’s mobile-friendly, lots of info, and probably cost $100,000 or more to build and maintain.

TIP: Follow the actual candidate journey, as a candidate would. No short-cuts.

If your workforce is “mobile-first”, you have to give them an easy to use, mobile-first experience. A 30 character career site url isn’t easy for the mobile workforce. Neither is a 20 character url, or even 15 character url.

Another Super Important Fact:

91% of career site visitors leave without completing an application!

Think about that for a minute. Since the evolution of applicant tracking career sites, about 20 years ago, the “default candidate journey” has been to send candidates to your corporate career site.

At the time, that made a lot of sense. Candidates were plentiful. The ATS helped with compliance and workflow process for the recruiters. Employers could add videos and other content to encourage the right candidates to apply.

But, less than 1 in 10 visitors complete an application. (The average visitor to application conversion rate was 8.52%, per Jobvite and Appcast application surveys).

If you’re wondering how you can generate more qualified candidates, without increasing your recruitment marketing spend, this “90% Applicant Drop-off” is a great place to start looking.

If you’re sending candidates to your corporate career site, you’ll want to track your “Visitor to Application” rate. (The total numbers of unique visitors to your career site, divided by the number of unique completed applications? Google Analytics is free and most ATS or career site or CRM should support this.)

A lot of large companies spend $100,000+ on their “career site”, or “talent network”, making them look really pretty and engaging, but if you don’t know if more candidates are applying, and if your attracting the right candidates, ie (qualified applicants), maybe what you have isn’t working.

So, What can you do differently? Use a chat bot!

Instead of losing 91% of prospective candidates, what if you captured 90% of those mobile visitors?

What if you could captured their name, phone number, location, email address, as well as some pre-screening and qualification questions?

That could be transformational, not just another “tool”.

You could massively increase your candidate experience and engagement, while increasing the number of qualified applicants.

Well… You can!

And you can do it today, through an automated text messaging conversation or recruitment chatbot!

Would that generate more qualified candidates for recruiters and hiring managers? Absolutely!

It’s called an Apply-by-Text chatbot.

And, with the candidates in your chatbot, you can add recruitment automation, by automatically scheduling interviews for candidates that meet your qualifications, saving your recruiters and hiring managers from the multiple back and forth emails and phone calls, while adding those candidates to your existing ATS via an integration.

Instead of trying to recruit with a call-to-action that isn’t easy, and and a candidate journey that sends candidates to your career site, that fails to convert job seekers to applicants, 90% of the time, you could try something like the below.

Apply By Text example

 

Which campaign do you think would more qualified applicants?

The 30 character alphanumeric career site URL, or a simple and easy-to-use text messaging application?

So, while I think the United Site Services targeting and ad copy was amazing, unfortunately, like so many candidate journeys, the call-to-action and applicant tracking system apply process often kills what could have been a great campaign.

For more information about recruitment marketing, recruiting automation, chatbots, for career sites, or Apply-by-Text, please contact us, or request a demo.

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Ira and JD Recruiting Automation LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live – “Text Apply” – the new job application – With Ira Wolfe and GoHire CEO Jonathan Duarte

Ira and JD Recruiting Automation LinkedIn Live

The job application process isn’t working very well.

Consider that 90% of career site visitors don’t complete an application and 90% of candidates that do complete an application, never hear back from the employer, can we really say it’s working?

Ira Wolfe, long time Candidate Experience Architect, and Assessment Expert, GoHire CEO, Jonathan Duarte, discuss the job application process and how Apply by Text is the future of job applications.

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DriveThruHR podcast
Wheres-The-AI-OneFrame

Where’s the AI in “Recruiting AI” and “HR AI”?

Where’s the AI in “Recruiting AI” and “HR AI”?

The Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Recruiting AI, and AI in HR echo-chamber is alive and well in every HR Tech vendor’s pitch.

But “Where’s the AI?”

This is going to be a Live event with QA, with lot’s of in-depth info about the status of AI in Human Resources and Recruiting today.
We’ll discuss:
  • “Recruiting Automation” and workflow process automation vs “AI”
  • What is AI? and What isn’t.
  • The currecnt state of Recruiting and HR AI today, without a lot of technical gibberish.
  • The future state of Recruiting and HR AI
  • AI use cases, and how those might affect your recruiting and HR problems and opportunities.

Who should attend?
Anyone interested in AI in recruiting and HR.
If you’re a VP of HR, VP of Talent Acquisition, Director, Recruiter, or HR leader, you’ll definitely get something from the webinar.
Why should you attend?
If you’re having problems hiring, or looking at solutions for next year, you’re probably hearing a lot of “AI” from vendors.
Unfortunately, the sales teams aren’t always the best technical resources to describe what the “AI” is in the product, and what value it bring to you and your organization. We’ll get into what AI is and where it is working and where it isn’t, and if it really matters to your use cases.
About the speaker:
Jonathan Duarte is a 20 year veteran of the recruiting technology space. He’s built 3 companies in HR Tech, over the last 23 years, starting with one of the first Internet job boards, GoJobs.com, back in 1996, and the first US recruiting chatbot on Facebook Messenger in 2016. He’s lead technology integrations between ATS’, job boards, job aggregators, and background screening companies.
Jonathan has also lead and consulted enterprise artificial intelligence chatbot teams at some of the largest companies in the world; including Wells Fargo and EY.

Sep 5, 2019 12:00 PM in Pacific Time (US and Canada)

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Text Apply is radically transforming hourly recruiting. Here’s Why.

1You’ve seen the “Now Hiring” signs… they’re everywhere today.


2These signs, banners, and window slicks are showing up on nearly every retailer, quick service restaurant, or small businesses store front. 

WorldMarket Hiring Now Signs

3But… do they work?

 

4The US unemployment rate is at a 50 year low, and job seekers have lots of options. So, it’s no doubt that employers and hiring managers need to be creative and start branding to their own customers, local foot traffic, and even passers-by. But just copying what your competitors are doing doesn’t mean it’s going to work.

 

Here’s a couple of reasons I think Directors of Talent Acquisition, HR and Hiring Managers, and their ad agencies, might want to think about other options, like Apply By Text.

 

The Problem

 

Most of these signs send candidates to the corporate career site to apply, like:

 

      Apply online at our career site at homedepot.com/careers.

 

Problem #1. Disrupted Candidate Journey.

If you’re a job seeker, standing in front of Home Depot, looking for a job, you’d have to type 22 characters into a mobile browser, just to get to the career site.

 

That’s a hassle, but possible.

 

(Lowe’s solves this problem by including a QR code on their signage, that pops open the career site web page. It’s pretty cool, but I don’t know how many part-time, hourly workers know how to use a QR code.)

 

Problem #2. Poor Career site Conversion Rates and Poor Candidate Experience

If the candidate actually gets to the career site, they then have to find the job search, enter keywords and location, click on results, and then, if they’re lucky, and the career site is mobile optimized, apply via a mobile phone.

 

That’s a conversion nightmare.

 

While this candidate journey is an admirable attempt by the corporate talent acquisition team to help local hiring managers, my guess is that doesn’t work very well.

 

Here’s why – Over 90% of Career site visitors leave without providing any contact info!

 

The average career site Visitor to Apply rate is less than 10%, based on tracking over 2.5 million clicks and applies via Appcast and Jobvite.

 

That means that 90% of career site visitors LEAVE a career site, without applying or providing any contact information to join a talent network, or for recruiting or hiring managers to reach them again. That’s understandable if you followed the candidate journey above.

 

Problem #3. It’s not Trackable

While the intent is to help the local hiring managers to recruit workers, this type of recruitment marketing provides no feedback or tracking! And while hiring managers probably applaud the help with the signage, does the signage actually work well?

 

It’s great to have a sign in the store as a point of reference, but without some sort of tracking, there’s no way to know if the campaign is working, or where candidates are coming from.

 

I think there’s a real opportunity here:

It’s a broken candidate experience, because they came with an intent, but left, unfulfilled.

It’s a broken recruiting experience because any traffic to your career site is probably from paid ads or other marketing campaigns and 90% of your visitors leave unfulfilled.

Recruiters or hiring managers never get leads, and candidates probably aren’t coming back.

 

It’s a HUGE problem and only getting worse as the economy continues to grow to full employment in many regions.

 

I think there’s a simple and effective solution that, Apply by Text

 

What is Apply by Text?

Apply by Text is pretty much what it sounds like… providing a text number that allows job seekers, and often your existing customers, or local foot traffic, the ability to engage the store manager, with their contact info, some pre-screening questions, and even create an appointment for a walk-in.

 

What kind of results are employers seeing?

* Captures 9X more candidate profile information.

* Increases candidate apply rates by over 500%.

* Speeds and automated the recruiting process, because it’s Real-Time & Mobile Optimized.

* With Pre-screening for Qualifications, Interests, and Availabilities, hiring managers get more candidates faster.

* Engages and Informs candidates of the process and their eligibility.

* Works locally and nationally.

* Can be implemented with or without an ATS Integration

* Tracks every candidate and interaction.

* Can help schedule candidate interviews.

* Flexible and Scalable for different recruiting workflows.

 

The Solution:

Change the retail signage with a Text Messaging Chatbot Call To Action.

 

Inline image 1

 

Who’s using text apply?

 

How much does it cost?

Automating Part-Time & Hourly Recruiting with Text Messaging and Chatbots

 

Recruitment Marketing for  Local / In-Store recruiting channels

 

Another channel is In-Store or On-Site “Hiring Now” signage.

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Recruiting Chatbot News

The Original Source of Hire Protocol!

Sometimes HR Tech can take a long time to evolve.
I found this old “Source of Hire Protocol” that I published back in January 2004.
14 years later, and we’re still talking about the same things… “How do you track the inbound source of candidates?”

Fortunately, we’ve moved forward, but it surprises me sometimes that even some of the largest volume hiring entities in the world, still have no real valid data on their “Source of Hires” or “Source of Applicants”.

**** Original Source of Hire protocol and article listed below ****

Source of Hire Protocol
Originally released January 4th, 2004
By Jonathan Duarte, Founder, GoJobs.com

“Source of Hire” reporting is becoming critical for any company utilizing metrics to efficiently recruit.

More and more employers are electing to push job seekers to their corporate career websites, to apply for open positions. Unfortunately, these same employers are learning that while the “recruiting process” might have been become more efficient, the ability to accurately track the inbound “source” of the job seekers is being lost.

Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler, of CareerXRoads, recently released their “2003 Source of Hires” report. In the report, Mark and Gerry conclude that “source of hire” information is not being tracked as efficiently and effectively as it can be.

Why do we need a “Source of Hire” protocol?

The definition of a protocol is “a standard procedure for regulating data transmission between computers”. By creating an industry standard protocol for transmitting “source of hire” data, the Internet recruitment industry as a whole will benefit; including, job boards, applicant tracking companies, ad agencies, and employers.

The “Source of Hire” protocol that GO Jobs has released is inexpensive to adopt, non-proprietary, and can be used by any entity.

Of course, the real value of a “standardized protocol” is when it is recognized as a “standard”. For this to happen, ATS vendors, job boards, and third-party entities must adopt and maintain the standard.

A call to ATS vendors to adopt the protocol:

At this time, very few applicant tracking companies have implemented a tracking solution. Employers are quickly realizing the fact that their current “source of hire” data is inaccurate, or otherwise, “suspect”. By offering an automated, accurate “source of hire” your clients would have accurate reporting and place a greater value on the data being retrieved from your software.
For any ATS, considering a tracking solution, GO Jobs recommends recognizing the following protocol.

A call to job boards to adopt the protocol:

Currently, most job boards do not send “referral” or “source” information to the Apply Online URL provided by the employer. By appending the protocol fields below, any company website or ATS that adopts the protocol, will start recognizing job board source information immediately.
Most Fortune 1,000 company career centers are hosted by third-party applicant tracking companies. If the applicant tracking companies adopt the protocol, their clients will immediately gain from having accurate reporting.

If ATS vendors do not conform to a standard protocol, the job boards will suffer the greatest, as the job boards will lose the ability to justify their “value”. If each ATS vendor creates their own query strings and protocols, it will be unbearable for niche and smaller job boards to adopt to the standards of each ATS.

There are over 10,000 active job boards. By quickly adopting the below protocol, the job boards themselves stand to gain significant leverage, by moving together as a group.
Job boards that adopt the protocol, can start providing “source of hire” information to their clients with a nominal development expense.

Source of Hire Protocol:

(The protocol information provided below is intended for a technical audience who has an intermediate or above knowledge of website development tools.)

The “protocol” is made up of three query string values that can be passed to an employer’s website. If the company career site is compliant with the protocol, and therefore recognizes the query strings and the associated values, the employer will automatically and efficiently retain accurate “source of hire” data.

The protocol query string values:

Value
Definition
SourceID
A numeric value representing the job board where the job seeker found the job listing
SourceName
The name associated with SourceID
RoutedBy
A string representing an intermediate, or third party, such as GOJobs

Example:

Let’s say a recruiter wants a job seeker to visit their corporate website, to apply to a specific job.
The Apply Online URL the recruiter wants the candidate to link to is as follows:
http://www.companywebsite.com/jobdetail.asp?Jobnum=40241
When the job is posted on a job board, such as DICE, the recruiter adds the Apply Online URL above to the specific field on CareerBuilder.

Currently, when a job seeker finds a job on a job board, he or she, clicks on the “Apply Online” button, or link, and the jobseeker is redirected to specific URL on the company website.

In this example, both DICE and the employer loose valuable tracking data. DICE can no longer track the job seeker, and the employer has virtually no way to automatically track that this specific candidate came from DICE. As a result, both the job board and the employer lose.

If Applicant Tracking Companies (ATS), job boards, employer career center development teams, and other web design companies, utilize the above querystrings, everyone wins.
The employer receives accurate “Source of Hire” information. Job boards are recognized as the inbound source. Recruiters don’t have to maintain another “list of sources”.

Any job board, can utilize this query string protocol directly.
For instance, if DICE chooses to implement the protocol, instead of submitting the job seeker to the “Apply Online URL” provided by the recruiter, above, during job entry, DICE can Append the “Source of Hire” querystrings and the values related to DICE, to the clients Apply Online URL.
By appending the following string, DICE would automatically be recognized by the company website as the “Source of Hire”.
“SourceID=1&SourceName=DICE&RoutedBy=DICE”

The complete URL would look like the following:
http://ww.companywebsite.com/jobdetail.asp?jobnum=40241?”SourceID=1&SourceName=DICE&RoutedBy=DICE

The case for a centralized list of SourceNames and SourceIDS:
The are many reason for maintaining a centralized list of job board “SourceIDS” and “SourceName”s:

  • ATS companies, or web developers, can query a centralized, maintained list of job boards to receive updates to the “SoureIDS” and “SourceName”. By querying a centralized list, neither ATS vendors, or their employer clients need to maintain a “list of sources”.
  • Job boards can add themselves to the list at any time.
  • The list is publicly available.
  • A maintained, centralized list, will eliminate duplicate or outdated job board names and therefore SourceNames and SourceIDS.
  • There is no cost to retrieve the list of job board “SourceIDs” and “SourceName”.
  • As a job distribution service, and an Internet Recruitment Ad Agency, GO Jobs already maintains this information.

For more information, please contact:
Jonathan Duarte

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HR Examiner & GoHire with John Sumser

Recruiting AI, Chatbots, Text Messaging & John Sumser

I first met John Sumser, the Principal Analyst at HR Examiner, and one of the most sought after HR technology analysts, some 20 years ago, back in 1998, or so. HRExaminer

That year, John hosted a cocktail party at his home in Milly Valley, CA for a small group of HR technology founders who where attending the SHRM conference in San Francisco. It was a pretty small group back then.

I’m not sure how it all came together, but the party started winding down, and typical to any great conversation with John, questions about the future of recruiting, technology, and the market continued to deepen.  At the time, there were only a handful of ATS systems and job boards. Most ATS systems were customized resume scanning systems that took paper and fax resumes, digitized them, and made them searchable.

The conversations continued late into the evening, concluding with conversations of mergers and acquisitions, while enjoying John’s hot tub. A memorable night for sure.

I recently had the honor of speaking with John on the HR Examiner Podcast series, where we talked about Recruiting AI, chatbots, text messaging, and loads of other technologies entering the recruiting and HR markets.

Over the years, I’ve had numerous memorable conversations with John, an wanted to share a couple of my favorite “Sumser Quotes”. (they’re paraphrased.)

A Social Network for unemployed people?

“Who would ever want to join a social network of other unemployed people? That makes no common sense. Who wants to hang out with bunch of equally depressed unemployed people?”

… John’s response to my question; “What do you think about Jobster?” at the Jobster launch party at ERE in San Diego 2004? Well we know how that story ended. Meanwhile, another little company had yet to surface publicly in the recruiting space, a social network for professionals… LinkedIn.

Diversity in the workforce:

“Here’s the problem with solving diversity in the workforce.

Say your company has been successful for years, and the one thing that’s unique about your culture is that everyone wears a clown suit.

As business continues to grow, you need to bring on more people.

So you interview some great people and hire who you think will be a great employee.

Then, on the new recruits first day of work, they show up bright and early… wearing lederhosen!

Now what do you do?

Do you make them change to a clown suit? Do you make everyone else wear Lederhosen? Do you find a way to embrace clown suits and lederhosen?”

If you ever get a chance to sit down and have some deep conversations with John, I’d highly recommend it.

Beware; Be prepared to think! Bring an open mind! And, Good Ideas and Data, go a long way!

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Now Hiring Signs that work

Which Now Hiring Sign Engages more Candidates?

Now Hiring Signs that work

Retail and Hospitality recruiting is getting harder and harder.

“Now Hiring” signs and “We’re Hiring” signs are a great way to get the attention of your existing customers and local foot traffic. But, sending potential applicants to a career site, that requires them to type in 20 characters, on a mobile phone, and then try to apply via a non-mobile optimized web site, is a recipe for failure.

Per Jobvite’s annual “Recruitment Marketing Funnels” report, as well as Appcast’s Cost Per Applicant annual survey, the average Career “Visitor to Apply” converstion (ie. of all the people who visit your career site, the percentage of those visitors who complete an application), was 8.52% in 2016, per Jobvite, and even lower per AppCast.

That means that 9 out of 10, or more, of your organic and paid job seekers who visit your career site, are leaving without you knowing much about them.

That also means that 90% of your recruitment marketing budget was WASTED!

How do you solve that problem?

Find alternative solutions for your prospective workforce. If you’re hiring a non-desktop workforce (ie. a workforce that is probably “Messaging First and Email Second” you might consider a Text Messaging Chatbot, that engages candidates, stores their contact information, etc.

 

Doing the same thing as your competitors will only get you the same results.

You Choose, leave a comment below.

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GlassDoor was acquire for it's SEO value

The Glassdoor buyout by Recruit… it’s an SEO play for Indeed!

Indeed is in an all out war to keep it’s job seeker traffic alive.

The acquisition of Glassdoor, by Recruit, Indeed’s parent company, for $1.2 Billion, should not be considered an acquisition of Glassdoor as a company and business model, but as a lifeline for free job seeker traffic for Indeed.

Glassdoor, like Indeed, has been profiting from free, job seeker traffic from Google for years.
GlassDoor was acquire for it's SEO value

With the Recruit acquisition of Glassdoor, Indeed will benefit from all the free job seeker traffic that Glassdoor is getting from Google. SEMRush.com suggests that’s 27 million FREE visitors per month.

For over a decade, Google Search has been the first place job seekers go to look for a job. Over that same period, Indeed has been the primary recipient of that organic job search traffic.

Last year, Google launched Google For Jobs. Stating they were going to change how results were being displayed in the US search results, for “job related” terms. Meaning, that instead of showing normal search results, they would show aggregated job content directly from employers, applicant tracking systems, and multiple job boards. Essentially killing a significant percentage of Indeed’s free job seeker traffic.

The solution is simple and levels the playing field for anyone who wants to get their job listed in Google Search.

Indeed is faced with several problems:

  1. Candidate Acquisition Costs are going up and will never be free again. Their cost to acquire job seekers continues to rise, as they have to pay more and more to acquire the same number of visitor they had last month.
  2. With low unemployment, there are fewer and fewer active job seekers, making even harder to maintain their traffic.
  3. Google For Jobs is expanding Internationally, meaning, Indeed is going to lose their free job seeker traffic in nearly all their international markets. Recruit bought Workopolis in Canada a couple weeks back, and within a couple days, shutdown the entire website and operations. We can only assume this was a defensive strategy to once again maintain job seeker visits, knowing that Google For Jobs is going to be launched in Canada soon.
  4. Indeed was once known for generating lots of low-cost, if not free, job seeker traffic for companies. That brand and promise is quickly dying, as they are raising prices, and delivering fewer results.

The Impact on Employers:

  1. The cost for Job Seeker traffic is going up. For most employers, the cost to recruit candidates will continue to go up. From several first-hand conversations with VPs of Talent Acquisition, and industry insiders, Indeed’s traffic to customer’s jobs has been consistently dropping, while sales people are calling requesting more money, for less traffic.
  2. Free and low-cost Indeed traffic is dying. Indeed  is now selectively eliminating scraping jobs from company websites and removing those jobs from it’s search engine.  This process has been nick-named the “Indeed Jail”. The fact is, the days of free Indeed organic traffic are coming to an end.
  3. Employers can’t generate qualified candidates with a “Post N Pray” strategy. From the early days of the Internet job board business, and applicant tracking systems, employers have relied heavily on their job being “found” using aggregators like Indeed and SimplyHired, who could drive lots of inexpensive job seeker traffic to their career sites. With static budgets and rising costs, this strategy doesn’t work anymore.
  4. Talent Acquisition leaders need to investigate alternative solutions.  Over the last decade, the primary recruitment marketing strategy has been post jobs to job boards, like Indeed, redirect candidates to the corporate career site, and hopefully about 10% of those visitors will apply. That used to work, especially when the economy was hurting and there were lots of people looking for jobs. But now, with unemployment at record lows, job seekers aren’t visiting job boards in the same numbers, and the candidates who are visiting, have multiple opportunities.

What can employers do today! 

Do SOMETHING! This problem isn’t going to go away, ever!

Increase the Visitor to Apply ratio of visitors on your career site.  If you have an existing constraint, ie recruitment market budget, and can only afford to spend $X dollars, your going to need to generate more qualified applicants for that same dollar.

Audit your candidate apply journey. Physically walk through the job seeker process of finding your company jobs on a job board, like Indeed, and then follow the path that a job seeker would take to apply for a job. Chances are your apply process, career site, candidate assessments, and the rest of your process has at least a couple of big issues that can be fixed quickly, with little effort. But you need to know what they are. (Actually, it’s better to have someone who has never been on your career site do this, because they “have a fresh set of eyes”.)

  • Document, every web page in the process.
  • Document how long it takes.
  • Screen shot EVERY screen.
  • Right down EVERY confusing step, or “weird” error, or redundant step.

Implement a Programmatic Job Advertising platform. For mid-market companies with 100+ open jobs per month, programmatic advertising solutions will scrape your website, like Indeed does, and then a computer will help publish your jobs to specific job boards, that will get you the best number of applicants, without blowing your budget on individual job postings. You can save 30%, or more, in the first 90 days, if you do it right. Will it take time to set up? Yes, but once you do it, it will be a long-term strategy that continues to pay for itself day after day, month after month. (Again, reach out if you want to learn more).

Implement a Career site Chatbot

Implement a Text Messaging Chatbot solution

  1. Implement

If that’s you. There are alternative solutions.
They can actually Save Money!
They can increase your Candidate Apply Rates by 500%!
They can increase your candidate pools by 900%!
They can be implemented within days.
And, they don’t require IT support, changing of your technical stake, changing how your recruiters work, etc.

If interested, call me directly:
Jonathan Duarte
949-287-4154

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Automated Scheduling with Text Messaging

Recruiting Automation – It’s here! Are you ready for it?

Recruitment Automation is quickly coming to staffing firms, recruitment process outsourcing (RPOs), and corporate talent acquisition teams.

What is Recruiting Automation?

Let’s define Recruitment Automation as automating, or eliminating, human steps, or workflow processes within the recruiting process.

We’ve been automating recruiting for years, so what makes today’s automation different? 

Over the last 20 years, we’ve been automating recruiting tasks like posting jobs to job boards, using email to reach candidates, etc. Prior to Indeed and mass job aggregation, most job postings were only visible on corporate career sites. The majority of the job postings never made it to job boards, because of the human cost on posting jobs. Job scraping and job distribution, and now predictive pay-per-click and pay-per-applicant tools from Job2Careers.com and AppCast.com have automated the ability to post jobs everywhere, and do it cost-effectively.

If you break down the recruiting process, Bill Boorman, suggests there are 88 individual steps required to hire someone. Many of those steps involve human steps that require significant training, follow-up, lots of attention to detail, and unfortunately… work.  A recruiter, or hiring manager, needs to screen the inbound candidates, for basic requirements, and then reach out to them for an initial “pre-screen”, to find out if they are Qualified, Available, and Interested (QAI). For most recruiting organizations, this is where the problems start.

To get ahold of a candidate, recruiters have had two primary tools, a phone, and email. No one is picking up the phone these days, unless they know who it is.

And, emails aren’t being opened, read, or responded to. So, recruiters are sending more and more emails. Making more and more phone calls, just to keep up. They’re also losing candidates in the process because the recruiters can’t manage the flow of the data and conversations.

Messaging and Chatbots are leading the new Recruitment Automation

Contacting job seekers via email is simply getting tougher and tougher. Emails aren’t being opened (14% open rates and 2% click-through rates), whereas Text Messages are getting deliver 95% of the time, and responded to within minutes and hours, instead of days.  Text Recruiting with job seekers and over sms messaging is by far the fastest way to get candidate responses and move candidates through the recruiting process.

If the above paints a dark picture, just remember, it can get even worse, because most candidates you want to recruit, are probably already working, which means they probably can’t have a call during their work hours. In the US, we’re currently at near “Full-employment”. Replacing turn-over candidates is becoming harder and harder, let alone, adding to the workforce.

These types of process changes, predominantly use chatbots and messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger, Text Messaging, and Web Chat, to communicate with candidates, while engaging and pre-screening them for their Qualifications, Availability, and Interest in the company.

Chatbots work 24/7, don’t require time off, and continue to learn as they respond to candidates using their existing smartphones, without the need to download another application.

Messaging is High-Touch, Personalized, and Private

If candidates are ready to leave their current employer, they have options, and companies need to act fast, and respond to candidates quickly if they want to interview and hire them. Dropping the ball, and not responding to candidates quickly enough, is going to become a bigger and bigger issue as the competitive nature for talent continues.

So, back to Recruiting Automation…

Tips for implementing Recruiting Automation in your business Today.

Here are some areas where you can implement some recruiting automation in your recruiting practices today:

  1. Sending Text Messages to candidates. If you aren’t doing this yet, ask yourself why you and your organization aren’t doing this. It works. It’s proven. and your competitors already are doing it. Are you worried about how candidates will respond? Good. You should be. Take it slow. Make your text messages personal. Respond back to candidates quickly. And, use a tool desktop application like GoHire, that not only let’s you use a keyboard, to type faster, but also stores all your candidate conversations.
  2. Add a Career site Chatbot to your career site. Candidates have options, so you need to make it easy for interested candidates to learn more about your company, the role, and your culture. Only 8.52% of your site visitors will apply for a job. Adding Web Chat to your career site is relatively inexpensive, and can increase your candidate flow by 100%. Essentially, allowing you to engage and convert 100% more candidates, then before web chat.
  3. Add a Text Messaging Chatbot, or an Apply By Text chatbot as a way for candidates to engage your company. For instance, in the retail and hospitality fields, you can advertise Text “Jobs” to 888-271-8898,  and let candidates engage with you, create profiles, answer pre-screening questions, and even set up a time for an interview, all from their smartphone and text messaging.
    If you want to automate reach-outs to existing candidates, to ask some basic questions, pre-screen them, or see if they have specific skills needed for a role, Text Messaging with a Chatbot can help.

How it works: Using GoHire’s Text Messaging system, send the candidate a templated response
What if recruiters could spend more time with the highest-value candidates, while candidates could also get immediate responses, and even status updates on their application process.

What if candidates could ask questions of recruiters, 24/7, to learn more about the company, and the specific role they’re looking at.

What if candidates to quickly engage companies without having to fill out 20-40 “required fields”, just to learn more about a company, their culture, and the role?

These are not only possibilities, but they are already realities for some of the early adopters of Recruiting Automation.

This is the future of recruiting automation.

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