The Career Site Is the New Storefront

Matt Charney [00:00:04]

All right. So we are live. Welcome everybody to the second edition of our executive round table. The career site is the new storefront. Which I'm actually very excited about this one. So basically essentially here's our thesis that we're gonna be talking about, is all candidates are consumers. All consumers have choices. Jobs are a big ticket purchase. But at the same time, you know we're a little bit let's say behind on how those work. So I think when we talk to people obviously there's a quiet admission that nobody really wants to say out loud, which are most hiring funnels are broken at the top. They're broken where intent meets reality, and that is the career site. Basically companies will spend millions optimizing traffic distribution and targeting, and then they'll send candidates into an experience that feels like filing taxes in 2007. Meanwhile research from sources all over the place including Harvard show that customer experience is now the primary competitive differentiator in most industries, but recruiting apparently missed that memo somewhere along the way. So the question we're really gonna be getting at's pretty simple. If your career site is where talent converts to action, why is it still treated as an afterthought? So with that, I'm really. You got a great group of panelists for this webinar today, so basically we're out up, outreaching our coverage here. So first off, Sam Fitzroy. Sam is founder and CEO of Dalia, and a very cool guy, very knows pretty much everything there is about career sites I would say. We have Carrie Corbin. Carrie designed some of the prettiest and highest functioning career sites in the space. Is a managing partner at Hope Leigh Marketing. If you're in the market, definitely check them out great creative agency. Finally we have Michael Goldberg. Michael is the senior director of global talent acquisition for US Renal Care, and an old friend. The three of us all live in Dallas-

Sam Fitzroy [00:02:09]

Live in Dallas

Matt Charney [00:02:09]

By the way. So -

Sam Fitzroy [00:02:12]

And it's operations. It's TA operations.

Matt Charney [00:02:15]

TA operations. Well, shoot. There you go.

Sam Fitzroy [00:02:18]

Important. No, it's all right. All good.

Matt Charney [00:02:20]

I have, I have eight titles and I don't, and like I don't even use any of them. So but the one I am using today is I'm Matt Charney. I'm principal analyst for Kyle & Co., covering emerging markets and the recruitment ecosystem, which is just about as exciting as it sounds. So, [laughs] with that, here's the reality of career sites very quick. They kind of look like brochures, right? Or those tables, you go into an expo hall where everyone just has different table cloths and the same like stuff. It's static content. No personalization, no conversion logic. The reality is it's like any sort of purchase. It, somebody's gonna decide whether or not to enter that process within seconds of hitting it. And as we'll see, most people bounce. And every one of those moments where people do bounce is misaligned. Anything you wanna add there, Sam?

Sam Fitzroy [00:03:11]

Yeah. I would say I think it's a massive opportunity. That's the only other thing that I would add. It is where more and more candidates are you know, Making decisions. That's what we're seeing in the data from our clients. And it seems like the opportunity just keeps getting bigger to get more conversion, get more like people who are really interested in your brand to actually apply to jobs. So I think, yeah, I just think it's a massive opportunity and it's very under-capitalized. So That's what I'll add.

Matt Charney [00:03:41]

Yeah. 100% agree. And to Sam's point, like the traffic that's hitting your career site on like a job description going to your, to your applicant tracking system is really high intent. So if like just TLDR in marketing that's a good thing 'cause it means they have more interest and there's more signal to noise than usual. However because of the way career sites are designed, the delta between visit and action is basically where all of that line item that says recruit with marketing or different advertising, like that's where it disappears. So the problem is, as we know, we go for volume metrics in recruiting. So we look at like total site visitors, total number of applicants, all that stuff, but You're optimizing for volume is the wrong problem to solve. You need to optimize traffic for conversion. So we're gonna like just high level we're gonna go over some themes and here's how it's gonna work, is I am going to like read some statistics. And then I'm gonna ask our panelists some questions. And hopefully we'll get through as much of them as possible. So state of career sites today 78% of candidates go to a career site before applying anywhere else. So it's not like read a job description, hit apply. As much as we'd like to think that they actually do mostly go to your site. Direct career site applicants versus job board applicants per Dalia's data have about 3X higher quality just in terms of qualified candidates. We've that old SHRM stat which is like the only thing that hasn't seen inflation in the last decade, which is [laughs] $4,700 average cost per hire. When career site conversion improves by just 10%, you see about a half reduction on that number. And here's the interesting one to me. 60% of that TA budget that we're all holding onto so tightly is actually just spent on job seeker traffic from paid media sources, not anything to do with the career site or converting them. So to Sam's point, it's under-leveraged and under-owned within an organization. So-

Sam Fitzroy [00:05:43]

Yeah, I would even say, I would even say, Matt, if I, if I can chime in that-

Matt Charney [00:05:47]

Please

Sam Fitzroy [00:05:47]

On that stat that I think that number 60% is pretty. It's not conservat- it's, it's not conservative. I think it's higher than that. I really do.

Matt Charney [00:05:55]

It probably is.

Sam Fitzroy [00:05:56]

Especially, you know, I, and I think it depends on the size of the organization as well

Matt Charney [00:06:01]

But we're in agreement that the majority of TA budget is spent on paid traffic, right?

Michael Goldberg [00:06:07]

Yes.

Matt Charney [00:06:07]

Which is silly, frankly.

Michael Goldberg [00:06:09]

Yeah.

Matt Charney [00:06:10]

You know, and so particularly as you see the rise of LLMs the way that the discovery's gonna work is gonna change a lot. We're not gonna go into that this time, but basically you have a very good opportunity. The timing's great. And the shift towards career site value is, has already happened. So theme number one is basically that your career site isn't an HR resource. If you look at it as an e-com platform, it is a revenue-generating channel and needs to be treated like one. So, you know, with that I kinda wanna just bounce into some of the questions that we have here. And let's see. Let's start off with a, with an easy one. I have, like, eight screens open, by the way. So I guess on this, you know, Michael, if your career site disappeared tomorrow, Like just went down, what impact would it have on your hiring?

Michael Goldberg [00:07:11]

Well, I'm thinking through the sources, Right? So I'm thinking through our source of hires, which we do, we do track because it helps us determine what we're gonna spend in the following year based on performance. So short answer, Eh, I wouldn't really know another way to get them into a system. But if that but With our sourcing team, which is small but mighty, They could still bring. We could still be prepared for the worst because we do have a pipeline of candidates. We keep those pipelines active and warm. But I think the real answer is, yeah, it'd probably, it'd sting a bit because we rely so much on it. And our website is a very basic website, right? And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think it-

Matt Charney [00:08:09]

But you-

Michael Goldberg [00:08:09]

Unfortunately it would

Matt Charney [00:08:10]

Your career site is your destination, right? When we think about it as your conversion engine, right, and kind of why I think that's a hard question to answer. We separate your sources, your channels from your career site as the destination, as the conversion strategy, right? So if you don't have the place to send them All the advertising, right? Where does it go? So-

Michael Goldberg [00:08:34]

Per-

Matt Charney [00:08:35]

And let me follow that up then, Carrie, with a, with a question, 'cause I'm sure you get it a lot from clients. So, like, why is it that companies they're so comfortable optimizing that job ad spend, but very rarely have budget for the destinations that those point to?

Michael Goldberg [00:08:50]

Well, for one, Let me back up my statement. They're not driving to career sites, they're driving to job postings, right? So [laughs] and we know job postings are all amazing. Right, all of them, right? [clears throat] but-

Matt Charney [00:09:06]

So good.

Michael Goldberg [00:09:06]

Or they might be driving to a lead gen page, right? So you can do a lot of advertising for lead gen, but that's not the majority. I'd still argue that's the majority of what, where a lot of your advertising's going to. So you know, and obviously when you're trying to drive conversion, your goal is to convert as soon as possible, and if you've got that high intent, they may never see your career site. So I think that's one of the things that is a little bit of an inhibitor to where am I, where I'm gonna spend the time and the money. The problem is, we're also not always spending the time and the money on the job posting because we're using, We're using an ATS-designed page that is not optimized for search or marketing. Well, and I think that's a great point, Carrie. You know, and I was talking about that with our marketing team today. I'm like, "What's, why do candidates come to our web, to the website? To apply for a job." Carrie's right. There might be people after they apply for the job, but in my discussion with my marketing team today, we were saying people just go out, and I, and I did it on Claude. Like, tell me about US Renal Care and Satellite Healthcare, and it gave me, tell me about the culture, tell me about the people. What's the Glassdoor ratings? What's the Indeed ratings? It provides it. So most, While that storefront is necessary and you want to keep them coming back because they're having a positive experience, they're just coming there for one thing. 'Cause they can get everything else Pulled on your career site On AI, and it gives it to them in five seconds.

Matt Charney [00:10:42]

Well, one thing-

Michael Goldberg [00:10:42]

And that's-

Matt Charney [00:10:44]

One thing to. Well, one analogy that we use a lot is that, you know, I have a big beautiful house, but I come in through the garage, right? That's kind of the equivalent of the way we think about our career site as a storefront. It's really they're coming in through the job posting, and if they aren't immediately convinced, right, or maybe they've seen it through passive advertising, then they're gonna spend the time on the career site. But you also risk losing them when you are spending the advertising and then they go looking for all the other things. Then that's where it's hard to track, you know, the traffic and the conversions coming back. Now then there's the other side of the passive folks and the people that do want to work for your company that are gonna originate at your career site and make it to the job posting. But again, that's not the majority. Yeah. Although weirdly, career sites, like, is one of the most visited assets of any company. So, you know, competitors are looking at them, visitor, you know. So it is a branding document of great importance.

Michael Goldberg [00:11:37]

Oh.

Matt Charney [00:11:37]

So, You know, I wanna, like, just follow that up Carrie, and ask, like, so TA owns outcomes obviously. They don't generally own the infrastructure, which is often sits in marketing but not hiring. Why does that gap exist? And do you like, are there any practical ways to fix it? Because most career sites are governed by committee, which is never a good way to operate a website in my, in my experience.

Carrie Corbin [00:12:10]

So I think, I think we've got, we've got two competing agendas when we think about, again, the applicant tracking system that's that's often tied to an HRIS system, and that we've tried to, we've tried to optimize enterprise tech, right? And we've got compensation teams that are writing job descriptions that are built for internal Legal compliance and not for external advertising, 'cause that's problem number one, and then we pull the lever and we post that to the website. Then we've got the rest of the storefront. The house a lot of times is controlled by marketing. And Marketing has a different and often competing agenda. And one, they're not the ones that are gonna prioritize The content on the career site because that's not driving sales. Like, they're not seeing it as that storefront or that conversion engine. In, although, right, even in big consumer brands, in my experience, a lot of times to your earlier point, my career sites were one of the primary drivers of referral traffic to the consumer site, right? So the traffic is there, is it being, is, but are we understanding the data enough to surface the data to have the right conversations with the marketing teams to build the business case to be able to then build that partnership angle and have a kind of cohesive strategy around how we go to market, but understanding we've got two very different audiences. You know, when I was at&T, this was a really early on, we were figuring this world out, right? And the amount of times when partnering with marketing, they were trying to just put cell phones images on everything that I was doing. I'm not trying to sell product, right? So you've got you've got competing agendas because you've got, you've got different target audience, you've got a different, and you've got a different conversion lever, different conversion angles. So you've got it, you've got. And that, there are a lot of times that alignment is hard, that misalignment is hard to overcome when you're trying to collaborate on a shared agenda.

Matt Charney [00:13:58]

Absolutely. -

Sam Fitzroy [00:14:00]

I would add to that-

Matt Charney [00:14:01]

Go ahead, sir

Sam Fitzroy [00:14:01]

I mean, we've also seen that it depends on the type of business that you operate, where it can be, like as Carrie said, it's kinda hard to align in many cases, unless your people are the product, and then it's, it starts to align a lot more closely to like Compass Group Foodservice. They're literally selling staffed staffing. Like, that is what they're selling, staffing restaurants, et cetera. And so for businesses like that, they tend to get a lot more natural alignment, and then everyone's rowing in the same direction, versus you're selling something that is disconnected from the people who, you know, like it's, there's a lot of layers. It's not the actual thing that's being sold. So I think that's just such a hard leap to make. It's such, it's very hard for most, and that the vast majority of employers get alignment because they're seen as a cost center instead of a revenue driver. So.

Matt Charney [00:14:54]

All right. So Michael, final question on this topic. Like, you're a TA leader ostensibly. Should you own conversion The way that marketing owns pipeline? Should there be a like an alignment conversation with account, shared accountabilities between recruiting and growth with all that said?

Michael Goldberg [00:15:17]

Yes. Isn't that our jobs as recruiters? I mean, seriously, right? We're, granted we don't, we don't make commission. You know, we're, our recruiters make a base. And so, but Our job is to own conversion. It's our job to figure out ways to work with, whether it's our internal marketing partners or potential external client partners to say, "What can we do to drive candidates To our site without spending programmatic?"

Matt Charney [00:15:54]

Right.

Michael Goldberg [00:15:54]

Because, I mean, hey, guess what? On that 60%, guilty. So, you know, it's, it's basically it's a necessary evil is what I call it. And that's what I used to call Glassdoor.

Matt Charney [00:16:08]

[laughs]

Michael Goldberg [00:16:08]

I still say it. That's what I call it-

Matt Charney [00:16:10]

Well, it became evil. It was necessary at one point, right?

Michael Goldberg [00:16:13]

Well, and I, [laughs] right. And I, and look, I love my Indeed reps, I and I love you know, Everyone and everything, they've been super helpful, but I just see The focus going away from that programmatic and coming up with more creative outreaches. Don't know what that looks like just yet, but creative outreach is to really pull in because candidates are used to seeing messages in their email from Indeed, or they're used to seeing IMs from LinkedIn, which nobody responds to anymore. I mean, that's the problem we're running into in healthcare-

Matt Charney [00:16:51]

Yeah

Michael Goldberg [00:16:51]

Is these candidates are all. I mean, it's, you know, it's kinda like when people are looking for jobs, like right after COVID, everybody was bugging everybody, "Hey, are you looking? Are you looking? Are you looking?" This, now it's the same thing with these candidates, especially the IT candidates. And now on top of that, you gotta know which ones are real and which ones are fake, which makes it even more of a tough challenge. But short answer, yes, we should be responsible. I have digressed. I'm sorry.

Carrie Corbin [00:17:17]

And-

Matt Charney [00:17:17]

You have not digressed. You answered the question quite well. Carrie, please.

Carrie Corbin [00:17:20]

I wanna add just one thing. So Conversion, of course, is the goal, but we're the only function that spends massive amounts of money to reject 99% of our buyers, Right?

Matt Charney [00:17:34]

Yeah.

Carrie Corbin [00:17:34]

So even when they do convert, if they are just volume and not quality, that conversion metric could end up being a bullshit metric too, right? So we really have to think about really understanding what our core outcomes are. But I'm still gonna go back to like, these are all really great questions, but we still have some root cause issues that really are strongly centered around technology and the tools-

Matt Charney [00:17:56]

-hmm

Carrie Corbin [00:17:56]

That we have in order to be held accountable and to hold-

Matt Charney [00:17:58]

-hmm

Carrie Corbin [00:17:58]

Ourselves accountable to those same type of metrics that marketing is. 'Cause we don't have the same technology. We have applicant tracking systems that are built for Tech, for compliance, that are not built for marketing, right? So it's why I call applicant tracking systems applicant sorting systems. And you Yeah. Or 'cause they're paying-

Matt Charney [00:18:17]

They, yeah, they strat. That's about it.

Carrie Corbin [00:18:20]

Right.

Michael Goldberg [00:18:20]

Carrie, you and I come from those backgrounds where we have worked for OCCP employers. US RenoCare-

Carrie Corbin [00:18:26]

Yeah

Michael Goldberg [00:18:27]

Is an OCCP employer. I completely understand what you're saying.

Carrie Corbin [00:18:30]

Yeah.

Matt Charney [00:18:31]

Yeah, but, you know, at the same time, I wouldn't worry about, I wouldn't worry about an audit anytime in the next two years, so you know, we're, we're good on that. [laughs]

Michael Goldberg [00:18:38]

You know.

Matt Charney [00:18:40]

But no, I mean, like when there's a. But yeah.

Carrie Corbin [00:18:42]

I agree.

Matt Charney [00:18:42]

So you know, we're, that was, I think that was all good points. We're gonna, this is kind of something we already covered, so we'll move on. But like we're gonna talk about conversion over traffic. Here are just some baseline statistics. Obviously, everyone's so concerned about the volume of applicants right now, that there is a whole trend going on where every candidate must be a fraud because who can apply for that many jobs? Et cetera, et cetera. But like, here's the thing, 58% of career site visitors, like, get lost before they even view a job, much less start for apply. That number is actually a little bit more depressing. That's 95% of career site visitors don't actually ever start the application at all much less view a job. And the data from Dalia, which is really good, I'd encourage everyone to check it out, shows the biggest drop-off happens between the job view and the application start, which should be pretty obvious. And that is a gap that is driven largely by friction and not necessarily intent. So it's kind of like a weird. So I think it wraps up with what you talked about. It's sorta weird in that it is technology dependent and it's workflow dependent. So all that is to say, was to talk about conversion over volume. Michael, I'm gonna start with you. When you look at just kinda conversion metrics can you share your baselines? Like, do you know how to, how to calculate those? And if so, kinda what, how and what's the formula?

Michael Goldberg [00:20:15]

So I know how, And I'm beginning to collect that information now in performance over the last year or two, probably two years with my. In fact, that's why I was talking to my marketing team. Because the baseline metrics for us are we look at looking at external, we do look at our funnel. We know what our application completion rate is, And that it needs to improve. And so, you know, things that I kinda Wanna start looking at is What are they doing on our website? And like, I had this with American Heart Association and Freeman a long time ago when I worked with them, right? We had those baseline metrics, and they basically, you know, really contained or contained around you know, the sources, where they're coming in from, What sources Are higher in specific geographic regions, are they converting, And when they do convert, how long, how much time are they spending in the funnel Before they're first contacted, and then until they're hired. So it's very basic, but you know, working with you know, potentially working with some, With some folks in the future that will, you know, help me fix that and get, dive deeper, because we do need to spend more time on it.

Carrie Corbin [00:21:57]

Right.

Matt Charney [00:21:59]

That's it. And that sounds relatively sophisticated, by the way, [laughs] as a function and as a conversation, so congratulations on that, Michael. -

Michael Goldberg [00:22:07]

Right

Matt Charney [00:22:07]

Carrie obviously, you know, working with your marketing clients as like some of the biggest employers in the world what, have you seen kinda what happens if the organization and when they switch their budget from focusing on acquisition to conversion? Have you seen examples of that and any sorta outcomes, positive or negative?

Carrie Corbin [00:22:35]

I don't know that it's that singular. But-

Matt Charney [00:22:42]

Okay

Carrie Corbin [00:22:42]

What we, what we look at when we're because with a lot of our clients, one of the first things we do is a source code audit, and we look under the hood of their tech, right? And we wanna understand how their tech is working together, because that's what's gonna impact our media effectiveness, what we optimize on their career site, what. And then we're also looking at their overall talent attraction ecosystem, right? We're looking at inbound and outbound, and what are all the pieces, right? 'Cause when you look at, one of the things that I think a lot of companies do is tend to look at each source singularly, right? Versus looking at how each source is performing relative to each other, and relative to the things that are not paid media, right? So I wanna look at how my paid media is performing against my employer referral strategy, against my sourcing strategy, look at all of those pieces. And then a lot of times too, we tend to look at like fully baked cost per hire. We don't talk about conversion and then, you know, so trying to kind of take a step back to look at that cost per source metric from both a paid and organic and earned perspective is really important to start to really isolate, you know, where you're seeing and then which ones are driving volumes. And then, and then that's where we start to layer in a conversion rate at every step of the funnel, right? It's not just the end conversion rate. We're gonna. I think I'm turning into a robot. Can you also hear me?

Matt Charney [00:24:00]

We can hear you.

Michael Goldberg [00:24:01]

Yeah, we can hear you.

Carrie Corbin [00:24:02]

I'm gonna quit-

Matt Charney [00:24:03]

Yeah, we hear you

Carrie Corbin [00:24:03]

Using my hands so much. But it's but we wanna make sure that we're optimizing for conversion through the whole funnel, and understanding, you know, that gives us a lot more data to make decisions from. It's, you know, so that we're not just looking at it through, you know, that singular lens. It's, it's, there's a relative relativity- Angle with all of the different data points that we're looking at to try to help them optimize their overall media strategy and their overall attraction strategy.

Matt Charney [00:24:34]

So Sam, I'm, I have the hot take question for you to finish up this section.

Sam Fitzroy [00:24:38]

Sure.

Matt Charney [00:24:38]

Which is like TA team's obviously still optimized largely for applicant volume, but the common complaints that funnels are flooded, we have too many applicants. Is more applicants just a proxy for terrible targeting?

Sam Fitzroy [00:24:56]

Maybe. -

Matt Charney [00:24:58]

[laughs]

Sam Fitzroy [00:24:58]

Maybe. There's so much that goes into it and, in fact, I just posted something about this today. But I think most TA teams I talk to are trying not to optimize volume. They're still set up to do so, and that's still how they're buying from most of their vendors. Like most of the job boards they advertise on, it's generally volume based. They're certainly not only paying for hires. And so that behavior in the pricing models, I think, is the main driver of volume. So employers aren't getting enough from their own assets, so they have to, you know, advertise, which they should. But the pricing model is just set up for failure and set up to drive volume. So I think it's a tough spot for TA teams to be in and I think job boards and external sites will move to more of a true performance pricing model for the actual outcome, the hires. But they've been very slow to make that change. But yeah, like it's just a tough spot. So I don't think they're trying. I don't think it's, it's, it's something they don't think about every single day. It's the number one, you know, conversation I have with every day is quality of applicant, quality of candidate, how can we reduce the noise? How can we just find the right people faster, you know?

Michael Goldberg [00:26:17]

Hey, Matt?

Matt Charney [00:26:17]

Go ahead.

Sam Fitzroy [00:26:18]

Yes.

Michael Goldberg [00:26:18]

One of our, one of our viewers, Eric actually had a really good comment in there. I don't know if you all see it. But everybody can see it if they have their chat up.

Sam Fitzroy [00:26:30]

I see it, yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:26:31]

Just wanted to point it out and Eric, thanks for posting that. You're absolutely correct.

Matt Charney [00:26:37]

Well, And thank you Eric, for participating. Appreciate that, man. So I'm gonna just actually jump ahead a section 'cause I think that the conversation's actually flowing in this direction. I wanna just talk about process, right? Because that seems to be something that every single person's mentioned as kind of being a bugaboo. So you know, looking at friction in candidate experience being kind of detrimental to all the stuff we're talking about. So just three quick numbers. 60, like I said, a 60% drop-off When they hit the career site and it requires registration. They're not getting past that for the most part. So if you have that, probably here's a quick fix. Lose it if you can. For every additional page in your applicant tracking system workflow. So let's say, you know, as the funnel goes down, they're hitting your career site, they're landing on a job, they're then applying. Every time they have to click into a separate page in your career site, then 38% will drop. So if your application's long, probably shorten it. And then this has always been kind of the concern for the last 20 years, and we still haven't fixed it. 72% of people apply for jobs exclusively via mobile phone. But most ATS workflows, certainly ad networks and other things are built for desktop first internal users. And ATSs, like we talked about, are built for internal efficiency, whereas candidates are looking for external empathy and those goals are always in conflict. So, you know, with that I just kind of want to ask Michael, we'll start with you. How many steps Does it take to apply on your site? Like you've been doing all this data. What's the average time it takes somebody from hitting your site to being able to fill out the application?

Michael Goldberg [00:28:29]

Our vendor is ADP RM. So 11 to 12 minutes On average.

Matt Charney [00:28:39]

Okay.

Michael Goldberg [00:28:40]

And it used to be way longer. You know, there's some and It's not an excuse, but it's something we need to figure out long-term, is What questions. Like to me, and what I've known and what, and what Carrie, what we've all been taught is the pre-screen question should only focus in around Minimum requirements, Right? Determine whether or not they're eligible.

Matt Charney [00:29:09]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:29:09]

Yeah.

Matt Charney [00:29:09]

Well, salary, right? That's always what the dance is.

Michael Goldberg [00:29:13]

Right.

Matt Charney [00:29:13]

It's early.

Michael Goldberg [00:29:14]

But here, but It just doesn't. I don't know. It doesn't, to me, it. We're asking a lot of compliance questions. We're asking some stuff that I think that could be filled out on the back end, like during hire that's causing some of that, and they're all in the pre-screen questions. And so we know that we're losing people. Like I run a weekly report. I can tell you exactly where we're losing people.

Matt Charney [00:29:45]

And where?

Michael Goldberg [00:29:45]

And we do have to, and we do have to apply. My question back to you, and I would, I would like to find out, is that something that the ATS can work around or do most. I know most have it, In the ones that I've used. Is there a way to opt out of it so that they don't have to do it? I mean, 60%, for what I know, is our yearly, that's a lot of people.

Matt Charney [00:30:09]

Well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna flip that one to Carrie. Carrie, do you think ATS workflows are fundamentally incompatible with like what modern online consumers want?

Michael Goldberg [00:30:21]

Carrie?

Carrie Corbin [00:30:21]

Yes. For 20 years we've been trying to solve that problem and break that down. I mean, a lot, a lot of the things that I built at&T were because I was trying to work around all of the shortcomings with Taleo [notification sound] I know. [clears throat] But And what, [chuckles] what I still see with clients a lot is we're still relying on. There's, there's still just those little optimization tweaks that especially newer folks in recruiting and, you know, that they don't know the tried and true stuff, like, they just miss, right? So there's a lot of, like, from my perspective as an agency partner trying to help people with looking at hood tech optimization, sometimes it's just helping the, fixing the how did you hear about us because they actually have Workday and they could make that go away, right, if they just set up their digital source tracking correctly. And, you know but figuring out how to optimize the questions are so ATS dependent, right? And ADP is not the favorite contender in that space, and I'm sorry, and you have all of my deep felt condolences, Michael. I love them in some ways, but it depends on the, on, you know, the instance that you have. But I know it, they've proved challenging for a lot of our clients when we're trying to optimize. And that's, and that's the problem is trying to make it, the tech and the career site and the candidate experience all work together. 'Cause we have to figure out friction by itself is not bad. We've all heard this, right? There's the good friction. We wanna-

Sam Fitzroy [00:31:49]

Yes, please

Carrie Corbin [00:31:49]

We wanna do, we wanna leverage the storytelling to tell the people the right stuff to help them opt out of a job. But then, and then we wanna create the minimum amount of friction so that we don't just have everybody hitting an Indeed apply or the always on applies and getting, you know, the, just the massive volumes. But, you know, so we want to. But, and it's the challenge is that the most coveted candidates are a lot of times the ones that aren't gonna take the time-

Sam Fitzroy [00:32:15]

-hmm

Carrie Corbin [00:32:15]

To go through all the obstacles to get us to that end goal. So that's where a lot of times we're a lot, we might be building, in our case, brand awareness strategies and really strongly leveraging landing pages, really good storytelling laden landing pages that might drive to a, you know, a quick lead gen opt-in or talent community instead because we're not gonna send somebody that's a passive candidate, especially if they're a highly desired passive candidate, to go. If they're scrolling through whatever social media and they see that ad and they click on it, they're not prepared to go spend 10 to 15 minutes filling out an application. We wanna make the path of least resistance and get them into that pipeline. And, you know, but again, pipeline, we think volume. So there's lots of different. It depends on the use case that we're talking on whether volume and friction are good or bad, and it's, it's making sure that we're putting them in the right buckets from a strategic perspective.

Sam Fitzroy [00:33:11]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:33:12]

I-

Sam Fitzroy [00:33:13]

Yeah. No, go ahead.

Matt Charney [00:33:15]

No, go ahead. I was just gonna say there's no other discipline that treats inbound leads as bad or makes the process onerous on them to try to get through to a purchase. Like, that's asinine for marketing, but hey. Go virtual edge.

Sam Fitzroy [00:33:32]

Yeah, I mean, to Carrie's point about, like, the right amount of friction and what is that, we see that with some of the companies we work with. That if you bring some of the friction out of the application process and up front to help people in a helpful way to, like, screen into jobs, that can actually improve the whole candidate experience and drive up overall conversion. We see that one of the biggest reasons that people will drop off of a career site is 'cause they just couldn't find a relevant job quickly enough. In fact, most people who connect through Dalia are on a job page, but then when they connect through Dalia, we send them to a completely different job that's much different than the one they landed on 'cause they didn't land on the right one the first time. So I think there's just so much opportunity to give people enough. Like, let them tell you a little bit about themselves so that you can start at the top of the funnel and guide them to the right job to improve their chances overall. That's a little bit of friction, but it also is really helpful. It's a better experience. It drives. And if you can pull some of that stuff out of your application process, That's, that's even better.

Michael Goldberg [00:34:42]

So-

Matt Charney [00:34:42]

Yeah. Go ahead, Michael.

Michael Goldberg [00:34:44]

Yeah, I was gonna say, you know, my goal would be if I could eliminate, Let's, I'll be, 80% of the friction, which I know exactly where it is, Is this, you know, It's, it's an ATS issue. So basically, 'cause we looked at some players that were gonna help reduce that friction, I mean, it would almost reduce it to zero, but it couldn't integrate. So, you know, and that's the other thing is, you know, when you're looking at different systems out there, Make sure that the integrations are say they what they say they can do. 'cause there was a lot of time and effort and, you know, only to find out it couldn't. So, but that's a whole nother story of friction. In this case though, you know the text to apply, the mobile, taking it from laptop to mobile Is what needs to be done. It literally needs to be a one, two, three experience. You know, here's another here's another, here's a next, your next webinar topic for all of us. Is a resume obsolete, Right? I wrote about that today in LinkedIn. Take a read. It's pretty good.

Matt Charney [00:36:01]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:36:02]

So-

Matt Charney [00:36:02]

I mean, people have been saying the resume's dead for 15 years, but then again, until while people are still using Taleo and ADP, no, 'cause it's the fundamental currency and those systems rely on, right? Like, you couldn't have their workflow without them. So here comes my question, and maybe it's an uncomfortable one. Carrie talked about Taleo, Michael in particular talked about like, why, what are the limitations forcing you into these obsolete systems?

Michael Goldberg [00:36:31]

What are what? Said again.

Matt Charney [00:36:32]

Like, why, like, so you said you know, it's, you've clearly identified it as a, as a business issue for your business unit

Michael Goldberg [00:36:38]

Right

Matt Charney [00:36:39]

The, you've had to reject qualified partners because their integrations don't work well on ADP's environment.

Michael Goldberg [00:36:45]

-hmm.

Matt Charney [00:36:45]

Why are you sticking with that system?

Michael Goldberg [00:36:52]

That's a great question.

Carrie Corbin [00:36:54]

I will absolutely take this. I'll let you off the hook, Michael.

Michael Goldberg [00:36:57]

Thank you.

Matt Charney [00:36:57]

Damn it. Okay, go ahead, Carrie.

Carrie Corbin [00:36:59]

First of all, the reason I started laughing is because usually it's not HR a lot of times that's making the decision to begin with on what their enterprise system is, right? It's finance and IT and maybe payroll that are driving the decision. Which is why, you know, the joke is no one uses Workday for recruiting on purpose because recruiting doesn't purchase Workday. HR or IT or payroll purchases Workday and says-

Matt Charney [00:37:24]

That's right

Carrie Corbin [00:37:25]

"All right, recruiters, you get to work." You know? So that's one of the core problems. Then when you look at the millions of dollars sometimes that are spent on implementations, that's not, you know, because it's an enterprise tech, you can't just change your ATS, you know? I mean, and then the Fascinating thing for me, right, is I've actually done some presentations to, like, Workday implementation teams, and in my conversations with them [laughs] they didn't know that they needed to help companies think about the advertising flow. They were so worried about internal workflow and, like, recruiter experience and hiring manager experience and all that, like never even occurred to them that they needed to think about the, you know, the whole experience from an external perspective. That blew my mind, right? And so, like, there's just-

Michael Goldberg [00:38:22]

That's-

Carrie Corbin [00:38:22]

There's, when we get, when we start peeling back the onion, the root cause reasons why, say, we've got a lot of stakeholders and a lot of people driving decisions, but then recruiting's kind of left holding the bag to figure out how to make it work.

Matt Charney [00:38:36]

Yeah. I mean, 100% I think that's true. And yeah, that's, it seems like it's really doubling down on waste, right? You have the waste of money going to job ads that don't perform and the waste of implementation specialists and legacy on-premise systems, the, like, it just a giant snafu. I was-

Carrie Corbin [00:38:57]

Well-

Matt Charney [00:38:57]

About to say something worse than that

Michael Goldberg [00:38:59]

Look, I'm, I'm, I'm I'm no lean expert, But I've, you know, I've studied it. I can tell you there's so much waste in a recruiting process everywhere.

Matt Charney [00:39:10]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:39:11]

And it's, And because we're so system bound, We can't, I mean, like, you know, the Incredible Hulk, you know, ruh, just kind of, you know, break out. And the fact that I want to be able to do what I need to be able to do my job without having to make it so freaking hard. That, to me, is what's so frustrating about these systems.

Sam Fitzroy [00:39:34]

So Michael, I think I remember at one point you had a revenue figure tied to new employees, And I'm curious if that's something that you still measure and if like, showing revenue either tied to not hiring or hiring somebody if that helps move the needle and get more resources.

Michael Goldberg [00:39:58]

Sorry. What's the, what was the metric again, Sam? I missed the first part.

Sam Fitzroy [00:40:00]

Revenue. Like, revenue generated per new employee. Is that something that you're still tracking?

Michael Goldberg [00:40:05]

Not as much because what we do. So we tried to put that dollar amount, Together. It's just extremely hard. Now, I will say this: Our retention is the, is the best it has ever been, and it's actually high for healthcare. It might, now might be the time to figure that out. There were too many moving targets a couple years ago.

Sam Fitzroy [00:40:32]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:40:33]

Right? So it's, you know. And here's what I will say, right, is I do look at the, the cost or the ROI of the source. And Sam didn't pay me to say this. Matt didn't pay, nobody's paid me to say this, but Dalia has always either been our top five or top six source Over the last three years. And it's because It's doing what our, what our applicant tracking system can't do, And it's done in a way that's not annoying to a candidate. So I do want to give a shout-out while we still have time. But we do, you know, Matt, we, you know, we can, we can talk about this offline some more.

Matt Charney [00:41:26]

Yeah, 100%. So yeah, no, this is, this is a really good conversation. Yeah, we're not gonna get through it, but I'm gonna go ahead and skip to job board dependency, right?

Michael Goldberg [00:41:40]

No, I kind of wanna-

Matt Charney [00:41:40]

Because I think-

Michael Goldberg [00:41:41]

Talk about the hidden applicant pool for just a second. Can I?

Matt Charney [00:41:44]

Yes, we can.

Michael Goldberg [00:41:45]

Sorry. It'll, this'll just be super quick. So-

Matt Charney [00:41:49]

No, please

Michael Goldberg [00:41:50]

And I think, I don't know what this slide says 'cause it's all purple. I have no idea. You were a TCU fan. But-

Matt Charney [00:41:57]

I had no idea I was color blind, by the way, so sorry.

Michael Goldberg [00:41:59]

Yeah.

Matt Charney [00:41:59]

I thought it was blue.

Michael Goldberg [00:42:01]

Oh, really?

Matt Charney [00:42:02]

Yeah, I did.

Michael Goldberg [00:42:03]

I'm so sorry to hear that.

Matt Charney [00:42:04]

Yeah.

Michael Goldberg [00:42:04]

So basically To your point, and you had and a lot of us have, or know that Matt, you had brought this up and Carrie did too, is that We have enough candidates in our system, And a lot of them just sit there Because they applied too late. So what are you doing at the. We're we're having our recruiters go back in, And that's the first thing they should be doing because we know they live in the area, we know they applied to the organization. We have their data, we have their resume and their phone number and email It's somebody that wants to work. And whether it worked out or wasn't the right time or what have you, but there are people that don't get touched, and I think that's where the hidden talent pools are. 'Cause, I mean, you look at someone like American Airlines, Costco Google, Apple, right? All with brand recognition name. I mean, Carrie, I don't know if you remember when you did TA operations there, but, like, how many candidates, or if you can't say, I understand, but, you know, was there a large number of candidates that went unnoticed that recruiters could go back and, you know, break that the bottom of the iceberg and get it to come back up?

Carrie Corbin [00:43:26]

[clears throat] That's the part that there's a lot of internal. One of the reasons why we talk so much about sourcing and in the pool talent attraction strategy with clients is because we see so many companies that are still so over-reliant on the job boards. And because, and we don't, and we also see where we don't appropriately use sourcers, we try to make recruiters be sourcers, and these are not the same people. And then we put in a CRM thinking it's gonna be the silver bullet, but we don't build it right either. We're just layering another tech on top of tech, and then we're asking recruiters to pretend to be sourcers or marketers. And so again, lots of root cause things to kind of peel back when you think about process optimization, efficiency, scalability. But the operational piece, and where I'm going with this to your question, Michael, is like one of the big reasons I was so excited to go to American Airlines was because they were so behind at the time, right? They, for so many years they had struggled, and they actually had all of their recruiting outsourced to RPO, and they didn't even own their instance of their ATS. And so-

Michael Goldberg [00:44:39]

What?

Carrie Corbin [00:44:39]

When we-

Michael Goldberg [00:44:39]

Those were their candidates. [laughs]

Carrie Corbin [00:44:41]

[laughs] They, and so when we, when I came in, we were going through the SuccessFactors implementation, which was the largest SuccessFactors implementation ever, apparently. We didn't get to transfer all of that data over. We had all of this, all of this candidate data that stayed with our RPO. And then we had a CRM that had been kind of purchased on just, Not through a typical you know, kind of qualification process. So it didn't work, it didn't, didn't provide our solution. And we didn't have sourcers, so we built the sourcing team under me, but I ended up actually only bringing in like two, even though we had thousands of candidates. But we really worked to kind of build a balance, again, between our inbound and our outbound and being strategic around that in spite of, you know, kind of maybe some of our operational challenges. But, like, I don't think we, I don't think a lot of companies just have the time and bandwidth to build out that operational and strategic arm or lever of their attraction strategy to really, to really make sure all of this stuff works together in the right way from a, from a recruiter enablement and optimization perspective. And like, again, just like that we then default to the things that we know, which is spending our money on job boards and continuing to bring people in instead of, instead of working through those pipelines. And, you know, when I was at&T, we, and it was just, it's so long ago, it feels archaic, but it's, it's fascinating to me now because of the clients I talk to that a lot of the things that they're still not doing. But, you know, when we built one of the first talent communities and we built a process around how we were nurturing those leads and how we were engaging those leads, and how anytime we had a sourcing request, we were going to that, and we were, and then we'd do, doing internal campaign. You know, it's like, but it's, there's a lot of operational process that has to be put behind that to build the framework to make that stuff successful. But if you just rely on recruiters and don't give them the training and the resource and optimization to do the work the right way, they're gonna do the things they know to do, which is spend money on job boards and continue to just fill in top of the funnel and not work through, you know, and understand that they've got so many different people that they could be, you know, doing. We've, we've gone to candidate enrichment with CRMs, and we're gonna make sure we've got the most up-to-date data on the people in our pipeline. But then we still don't always effectively source them and nurture them because we don't build that internal communication piece from that sourcing angle. Sorry, I feel like I'm on a soapbox.

Michael Goldberg [00:47:13]

No, that was great.

Matt Charney [00:47:14]

No. Yeah. No, I mean, so like kinda like I guess for you, Sam, like, Companies are spending money, it sounds like acquiring the same candidate who they're not gonna hire like three or four different times. Why is re-engagement in your mind still such an afterthought?

Sam Fitzroy [00:47:37]

I think re-engagement is an afterthought because it has not been as effective as spending money on job boards when you look at it on a dollar per hire basis. Or just like, maybe that's not true, but on an impact basis. Well, I've gotta make, you know, 1,000 hires. I know that if I well, spend money on Indeed, that will make a dent in that number. But you know, trying to reengage my existing database generally has not. We haven't seen that. So I think that's why most, like it's just not a no-brainer solution and why it's been a lagging solution for employers. I think there's a, like what I see as a common myth about your candidate database and the asset that it is. I think most. And that myth is that most employers believe that the total number that's in there is what they're sitting on and is available to them, but it's really not. Just in the same way that if you look at Indeed's registered user account, that's not who they actually have access to. It's only their current visitors. That's who they're like working to like drive, you know, action with. And the same thing is true for employers. We worked with a couple companies who would message back to candidates and measure the response rates and unsubscribe rates by date of that candidate joining their database. And sure enough, the further back the person had joined the database, the much more likely they were to unsubscribe, or reject your message, or not respond to your message. So it's really about, like, what do you have recently In your database, and how do you keep those candidates engaged? As Carrie said, if you have a systematic approach to keeping your existing database always engaged, then you get to go back a little bit further, then it becomes a little bit more valuable. But if you're just sending one-offs here and there to somebody who hasn't heard from you in three months or nine months, you know, it's-

Matt Charney [00:49:30]

It's not gonna work

Sam Fitzroy [00:49:30]

It's not gonna work out well.

Matt Charney [00:49:31]

Yeah, the whole concept of talent community is like, "We're not getting you a job right now. Sign up to get alerts for more jobs you won't get." but here's. I'm. So I'm working with a major consumer packaged good company right now to try to get around some of this, and one of the things we've found is actually not only ties recruiting back to revenue but also allows for much better tracking and just, like, basic re-engagement, is to give them offers and coupons via the email for the consumer product. So anyone using that, you can tie revenue into, and it is a very natural way to get, like, the actual consumer branding from the candidates. And they convert pretty well as a general rule too, because of the targeting that you can do once you have the professional interest and income. So you know, it'll be interesting to see what happens there. But we've seen some really good early results on that, so I'm I'm encouraged. But we are getting towards the end of the end of this time. This has been much easier. Oh, I went too far. Than I had thought. So we're gonna talk just very quickly about job boards and breaking job board dependency. 'Cause I don't think anyone here really loves traditional job boards or even the aggregators, right? So I guess with that said, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start with Sam. Most organizations rely on last-click attribution despite evidence that, like, multi-touch models are way more accurate in terms of providing insight. Why is it that recruiting has such an inability to get multi-touch attribution and bring in source data in, and how do job boards get the credit where no credit is due?

Sam Fitzroy [00:51:20]

So I, you know, feels like it's gonna be the same answer that we've provided to a lot of the questions here. I think, you know, and I'm not gonna use it as an, as an excuse, so I'll try to provide more, but-

Matt Charney [00:51:32]

No, you're-

Sam Fitzroy [00:51:33]

The technology doesn't allow it, basically. So if you're working with any ATS, you can only track one source generally. You. That's all they give you to show where that candidate came from. So even if you were able to capture the full story of that, of that person, where, like, the multiple places they interacted with and when they interacted with them you can't get all that data into an ATS easily to be able to measure how it converts through your hiring funnel. So I think there's, like, a very basic limitation with the ATS technology. It's not marketing tech. It's, you know, built primarily for something else. Oh, and it does recruiting. So I think that's just a natural limitation. You can get around that. Like, we do a few things where we can, you know, show multi-source values, so we'll just, you know, see where they originally came from on the career site. And then if we convert them later, we can merge those source values together. So Carrie, you mentioned doing source value cleanup. I mean, you should look at one of our clients who's doing this. You'll have, you know, Google, hyphen, Indeed, hyphen, Dalia. [laughs] And so at least that gets you the full story. But there's like, the systems just don't. They're not built for this kind of tracking. That's what we say.

Matt Charney [00:52:48]

Right. So Carrie, just, like, when you talk to clients, like, Do you think do most of them see job boards as a demand gen engine, or do they see it as, like, sort of the conversion architecture? Is it the end or the means to the end?

Carrie Corbin [00:53:10]

It's, it's the necessary evil. Like, right, it is the. They know that they still have to drive volume, but they hate the volume that it, that it drives, right? So it. Because it's driving too much, right? And so we didn't really get to talk about the quality application thing, but I. That's where I think, again, knowing what we can and can't solve for with the technology, which Sam, Matt knows that I hate that question of last-touch attribution because of that. Although as an agency, we're a lot of times building dashboards to marry that data and be able to show you a little bit more attribution. Same thing. But we've got to think differently about our process, and we've got to think differently about what we measure. And that's where a lot of times we're changing the conversation to how can we, how can we do performance advertising that gets us to a pay-per-qual- Qualified, maybe not quality, right? There's a difference between qualified that is-

Matt Charney [00:54:09]

Yeah, qualified. Yep

Carrie Corbin [00:54:10]

That is not a fraudulent candidate, right? And that completes the application. So I'm not paying for trash clicks, right? Our goal right now with our-

Matt Charney [00:54:17]

Well, you are

Carrie Corbin [00:54:17]

With clients, well, but not as many.

Matt Charney [00:54:20]

Yeah.

Carrie Corbin [00:54:20]

I'm gonna pay for fewer mistakes, right? If I can get to a qualified apply and I can, I can weed out some of that fraud and fraud bot and spam. But the. So there's that. But because right now a lot of the tech is focused on after the apply, and screening, and selecting, and doing whatever, but you still already paid for the mistake. So what can we do to try to minimize how much we're paying for the mistake on the front end? And then looking at how we better qualify through that conversion metric in the funnel to get to a quality metric so that we're looking at not a cost per application, but a cost per qualified application. And then our conversion point between that cost per qualified application and the cost per hire then gives us a much better, deeper data set to think about our sources and potentially minimize that dependency, roll back that dependency on the job boards.

Matt Charney [00:55:06]

Yeah. And I think to your earlier point, you had said that, like, job boards are evil or they're to blame. I don't think they're the villain.

Carrie Corbin [00:55:12]

They're not.

Matt Charney [00:55:12]

I think dependency on job boards is. And so with that in mind, you know, we have three minutes left. We could do another one of these, and we seriously should. But in the meantime, just top takeaways, career sites are your bottom line. If you own them, they are directly attributable to revenue, and you should treat it like a product, like your product team does. Measure what matters. Well, I'm not gonna get into that. We already had a long conversation on that. And it's easy to get, do the same thing again and again, and post and pray, I think is the, kind of the thing we call it. But those costs always compound, and it gets you into an even bigger problem, like doing it than if you just extricate yourself. So I think the TLDR there is stop throwing away money on Indeed and other sources that don't prove ROI on conversion, particularly when the average cost per click, a not qualified click right now is 89 cents a pop, and the average job's getting around 450 job board applicants. So it's a big old waste of money, but if you do wanna waste money, feel free to write me a check, and we will call it a day. So any closing thoughts, guys?

Michael Goldberg [00:56:24]

I would say Keep it simple, avoid the friction, And focus your energies outside Of programmatic, Because I think programmatic is dying too. There, I've said it. That's my hot sports opinion, as I say, peace out, but it's true. Because we aren't seeing the results we wanna see with it. I'd rather take that spend and invest it in either a new website or into new opportunities to build relationships. And I'd say the other thing was on what you were just talking about, is we need to get out into the communities more and really learn about the communities, because that's who you're really marketing to. You're not marketing to a person. You're marketing to a community, and you wanna have those relationships in the communities 'cause that's a that's what will get people wanting to apply to your job. There you go. Mic drop.

Matt Charney [00:57:27]

I think that's great. Carrie?

Carrie Corbin [00:57:29]

My add would be to take this full circle on that if we really wanna think more like marketers, we really need to understand the value of advertising for brand awareness and the storytelling and the. And again, where that gives you those opportunities to introduce some good friction in telling them the real you, who you are to work for as a company. 'Cause people still need to know who you are. They still need to be able to find you. You're not just gonna build the career site and people show up, right? We're not Field of Dreams. But you. So you still, but it's maybe rethinking about advertising and doing the right kind of advertising, and that's the part that's harder because A TA is held to a different standard than marketing in terms of conversions, I think, actually. I think they're held to a higher standard sometimes than. Because we're not just going and spending money on arenas and putting advertising in arenas and, you know, and Olympics and all, and Super Bowl commercials just for jobs, right? We're, we're held accountable to every metric that we do, that it's gotta drive our ROI to apply. And if we think differently-

Matt Charney [00:58:30]

Right

Carrie Corbin [00:58:30]

About brand awareness and like true marketers, and we do the storytelling, and then we let that plus the career site do the heavy lifting, we could certainly ease off of the job boards and some of the things that we've been trained to do as recruiters.

Matt Charney [00:58:41]

Okay. And I'm gonna take Sam's final thought. We had two amazing sponsors today. Make sure you check out Dalia if you're thinking about career sites or how to convert traffic better. And if you wanna make that career site look and perform great, Hope Leigh Marketing is probably the best agency in the space. So encourage you to check them out as well. Carrie, Michael, and of course Sam, thank you guys so much, and we'll see you guys next month.

Michael Goldberg [00:59:05]

Thanks, guys.

Carrie Corbin [00:59:05]

Thanks, everybody.

Michael Goldberg [00:59:08]

How do I get out? True?