If you are looking to make your recruitment advertising dollars last as long as possible, you are by no means alone! Across the industry, recruitment costs keep going up but that doesn’t mean that budgets have been reflecting those increases.
Once you post jobs and your budget is spent, do you know where that investment goes?
CARFAX was frustrated by this same lack of insight into the ROI of their recruitment advertising spend. Some jobs were easier to fill than others, some were in locations where finding the right person was more difficult, and there was no way to shift spend to account for that variance. The days of being able to spend budget and hope for the best are over. You need to be able to demonstrate that every dollar that is being invested into attracting new candidates is working for your business.
How? Well, marketing-savvy employers like CARFAX are combatting the changes in the industry by leveraging recruitment technology.
How a data-driven recruiting operation can help
Think about your recruitment team’s current technology. You likely have the basics covered with some combination of an ATS, a CRM, and/or a Recruitment Advertising Management System.
Is your current recruitment technology stack capable of gathering meaningful data about the candidates you post jobs for? If you want to take a metrics-focused, data-driven approach to hiring, you need to make sure that the technology at your disposal can deliver relevant, real-time, and granular data to help you make better decisions. The better informed you are, the more agile you can be in filling high priority jobs, and hard-to-fill jobs, saving you tons of previously wasted spend.
5 pillars of recruitment marketing strategy success
In a recent webinar we hosted with CARFAX and HireClix, Tara identified 5 Pillars of Success that would serve as indicators that they were headed in the right direction with their data-driven recruitment marketing strategy. They were:
- Increase the amount of external offers
- Decrease the days to fill jobs
- Lower cost-per-hire
- Lower cost-per-quality-apply
- Decrease need for Staffing Agencies
How was CARFAX able to accomplish these lofty goals with a static budget and increasing renewal costs? With strategy, technology, and clearly defined metrics.
1. Increase the amount of external offers
Getting more external offers was a goal of CARFAX when they began working with HireClix and Appcast Excelerate. What became clear was that it was not the amount of offers that helped to fill jobs, rather it was getting the jobs in front of the right people. You might be of the mindset that the more eyes you can get your jobs in front of the easier they’ll be to fill, but that approach doesn’t control for quality. Finding people that fit your job right away helps them move through the funnel efficiently.
2. Decrease the days to fill jobs
The best way to fill your jobs quickly is to make sure that your jobs are being seen by the people that they should be targeting. Not all jobs are equal – variables such as location, job title, and salary, can all cause variance in how quickly quality applicants enter the pipeline. By leveraging a programmatic technology platform that customized bidding strategies for their open jobs, CARFAX has seen their days to fill drop 36% since 2015.
3. Lower cost-per-quality-apply (CPQA)
By taking a programmatic approach to job ads, CARFAX slashed their average cost-per-quality-apply by 37% in the first year using a programmatic job ad exchange (what is a job ad exchange?). One of the key factors that drove this decrease in cost was the ability to make real time adjustments based on the ROI of an ad. When a job wasn’t performing well, bids were driven down, and when applications were submitted, bids were driven up in order to fill the amount of applicants as quickly as possible.
4. Lower cost-per-hire
CARFAX was encouraged to be transparent with their partners as to what jobs needed more attention and which jobs were performing well. Their ability to deliver that level of transparency, helped to grow their relationship with their technological partners. By analyzing real time metrics to identify benchmarks, jobs that exceeded the desired time-to-fill were enrolled in a watchlist that made it a high-level priority. Being able to adjust priorities helped to drive cost-per-hire down 29%.
5. Decrease need for Staffing Agencies
Tara Winesett at CARFAX said it best, CARFAX has an incredible recruiting team and no team wants to admit defeat and bring in a Staffing Agency to do their job for them. “Driving that reliance on Staffing agency by partnering with HireClix and bringing in additional resources like Appcast has been a key part in driving that number (above) from 14% to 0”. CARFAX is very proud that by embracing a programmatic strategy they’ve been able to become an independent recruiting operation.
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If you’ve enjoyed learning about CARFAX’s journey, and would like even more insight into how you can start using technology to scale your recruitment marketing and post jobs, check out our webinar with HireClix and CARFAX, How CARFAX Created a Metrics-Driven Recruitment Marketing Operation.
