TOPIC: Why Recruiters Must Think More Like Marketers
Thad Price is the CEO of Talroo – a talent attraction platform Based in Austin texas
Thad has spent nearly two decades in the talent acquisition space and was previously an executive with Job.com. As we head into Q1 of 2022, Thad believes that recruiters must think like more like marketers —- a theme we’ve heard many times in the recruiting sector
What Does Talroo Do?
Talroo is a job advertising talent attraction platform that helps companies find unique audiences and we like to think about the idea of profile-driven, programmatic job advertising, which is the idea of the right candidate, at the right time, in the right place, but the real key connection is it really is about the audience, and about the audience that you're connecting to jobs. And so, our thought process is in consumer advertising over the last 10 to 15 years, there's been a huge move to focus on audiences in market audiences.
So, an example is Ford's looking to advertise to folks that are in market to buy a truck, and so they want to advertise an F150 or new F150 features to audiences that look like they're in market to buy a truck. And so, that's the idea of programmatic advertising and consumer advertising that has been very efficient for marketers for a number of years.
You also run Jobs2Careers, you’re building candidate profiles through that site?
Yeah, that's absolutely right, so when we started as jobs to careers, it really was about building an aggregation job site where we were aggregating lots of jobs from lots of different providers, and through that, we started building profiles, job seeker profiles. We have over 40 million job seeker profiles and so from that, it gave us the ability to really understand what job seekers were looking for and to use those profiles in more of a real-time bidding fashion, so when we know someone is in market, when an audience is in market for a job, that we can help employers reach that candidate based on audiences and based on profiles.
From our perspective it's about ensuring that we're using the bidding technologies that programmatic systems are using, but being more, for lack of a better word, more digital in how we're right pricing and how we're attracting the right audiences in our ecosystem, powering a billion job searches a month.
Tell us about your upcoming Job title suggestion feature?
So about probably six to eight months ago we invested pretty heavily in trying to normalize metadata on individual jobs, so in our industry, unlike other industries, data is fairly... Well, it lacks normalization, so there's not a lot of metadata, right? It's a blob of text. And from our perspective when we think about matching and when we think about driving the right candidates to the right jobs, what we need to do is we need to actually normalize interesting things for job seekers from a blob of text.
And so, we developed a system to essentially pluck out what's interesting in a job title, in a job title and a job description, and surface that in job search results, so job seekers have more insight into individual jobs. So, one of the things we did of course, was salary and hourly rate and bonuses along with benefits as well that are buried in a job description.
We've seen that job titles with bonuses, job titles with salaries, with hourly rates, drive more activity, and drive a higher click-through rate from a job advertising perspective. And one of the things we're actually in the process of launching in the Talroo platform is machine learning driven job titles. So, our customers or our client success analysts on behalf of our customers, will be able to essentially click a button and generate machine learning driven job titles based on all of the data that we're collecting in real-time, so we're excited to leverage that.
Why do you believe recruiters must think more like marketers?
Well, I think marketing and sales it's contact sport. Just like recruiting, it's about the connections, the individual connections and when you think about a marketing and sales funnel, it looks a lot like a recruiting funnel. You think of the idea of I need to generate marketing qualified leads. I need to generate qualified applicants. I need to schedule these applicants. I need to screen these applicants, and from there I'm going to send an offer, and that candidate is either going to reject or accept an offer.
That's a very similar to a sales process of either signing or rejecting an MSA, or some terms, or some order that the individual sales rep is in the process of closing. I think if we think about it strategically as this process that we can learn from marketing and sales, then I think we're going to be a lot more effective from a recruiting perspective.
And there's the top of the funnel, we need candidates. We need to advertise. We need candidates. We need a great brand. All of these things need to connect and then from there, there's the experience. In one conversation I had a few weeks ago, I shared if you think about an applicant tracking system today, they're terrific at compliance and they're terrific at being a good CRM to an extent, and just as Salesforce is a terrific CRM, but there are a lot of things that need to happen before that to ensure a great experience for candidates and ensure conversion rates.
I think when we think of this idea of conversion rates and tracking every candidate through each step of the process, it's something that marketing and sales has been doing for years to be more effective at that role, and we need to be doing it, and we need to be telling that story as recruitment marketers as well and recruiting professionals.
Speed in the Hiring Process
Speed is everything. Going back to marketing and sales, if someone submits a request for a demo and the lead sits for days, then that is not an effective lead for sales. And studies show it's within the first 20 or 30 minutes if possible, connect with the lead in order to connect, in order to have a higher chance to actually close that sales lead and the same thing with thing is with candidates now.
If you're not connecting fast enough with candidates, then you're losing them because someone else is and I think speed where you're thinking about speed to higher, speed to connection, I think all of these are connected, but the first thing we need to be doing as practitioners is ensuring that we are connecting with the candidates as fast as possible, and thinking outside the box and leveraging technologies to be able to do that.
One of the things that we implemented, we had some press recently around it, is we started working with a number of conversational AI tools, XOR and Paradox, and when an XOR and Paradox customer leverages Talroo and they're using those existing systems, what we do is we surface the ability to schedule an interview when a job seeker is actually searching for jobs.
And that's exciting for us because there's a lot of anxiety when people actually apply for a job, and so if we can surface that you can schedule an interview, and use essentially a chat experience to schedule an interview, there's a feeling of relief that I'm scheduling an interview. And so, in that process, it saves so much time because you're able to actually schedule an interview directly on the calendar of a hiring manager.
And so, you're not applying to a job as a job seeker, submitting your information, it goes into an inbox of a hiring manager, a hiring manager has to open the email, send, open their calendar, find a time to available, communicate, ping-pong, back and forth with email, and then finally this interview happens. And so, I think when we think about speed and we think about speed of process, I think that it's important for us to look at how we can decrease the time it takes to connect with candidates, the time it takes to interview, all these things are super important when you're looking to scale up hiring and create a great job seeker experience.
Quotable
You bring up a critical point when you think about the resume, especially we spend 95% of our time in helping companies recruit essential workers, trades, hourly employment as well, and so one of the areas that we found is the resume acts as a block in so many ways, especially because most people don't have the resume on a mobile device, and most of the job seekers are communicating, and searching for jobs, and applying for jobs on a mobile device.
Thad Price, CEO of Talroo