LEAP Listens
LEAP Listens is a bitesize podcast hosted by Sara MacGregor and Roger Cayless who are both leaders in Employer Branding, Candidate Experience and Recruitment Marketing. In this ongoing series of podcasts they tackle client and industry themes and along the way host expert guests who provide opinion, stories and advice on the world of ‘people communications’.
LEAP Listens
How to do more with less in recruitment marketing with Jess Burns
In this episode of LEAP Listens, Sara MacGregor and Roger Cayless are joined by Jessica Burns from Placed, to talk about how employers can get more bang for their recruitment buck. From programmatic advertising and real-time algorithms to reaching passive candidates while they're scrolling, Jess shares how brands can spend smarter, not harder, and still attract the right talent.Yes, the robots are coming.
No, they haven’t landed the jobs (yet). Tune in now
LEAP Listens is brought to you by LEAP Create, an award-winning people communications agency. Find out more at leapcreate.co.uk
Sarah Duffy Lead Leap Create Creative Communications Agency. Welcome to Leap Listens, the bite-size employer branding podcast. I'm Sarah.
Speaker 2:And I'm Roger.
Speaker 1:And we lead Leap Create. Leap Create is a creative communications agency and we specialize in employer branding and internal communications. We work with in-house professionals to help bring the story of your company to life, to help attract and retain your best talent. This is our sixth series of Leap Listens and if you're new here, we chat to a variety of industry specialists about workplace culture and how to communicate with candidates and employees. And if you want to know more, head over to our website or Spotify for over 70 episodes to listen to. Welcome, hi Rog.
Speaker 2:Hello Sarah.
Speaker 1:Welcome back.
Speaker 2:Welcome, welcome. So here we are.
Speaker 1:We're today going to be speaking to Jess from Placed, and I know that you met her at our recent EB meetup where we talked about untapped recruitment marketing channels, and you were the fabulous host.
Speaker 2:Oh well, thank you. Yeah, no, it was good. Actually, jess and I had a chat afterwards and, um, she did seem to be under the impression I was called Simon, um, but for a while and I went along with it, but then, when we followed up with each other the next day, I I obviously had to own up to being called called.
Speaker 2:Roger, because this has happened in the past in my life, and, um, I've had to, I've had to, I've had to go through life being mark and robert to a couple of people who, if you don't get in there early, um, it's then too late, isn't it? And so with jess, who's lovely, but I, I thought I'd just let her know I'm not simon, um, and now, yeah, we're on proper, proper name terms.
Speaker 1:Good, good, good to hear. Okay, shall we dive in.
Speaker 2:Let's do it.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the podcast, jess Hi hi guys, great to be here Excellent. So, jess, tell us a little bit about you.
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, relating to recruitment, I started off in recruitment about 10 years ago now in probably one of the more traditional ways that most people do.
Speaker 3:I'm from Cheshire, up north in England, and I wanted to move to the big city for a couple of years London and to do so I obviously needed a job and an income and so landed my first gig in a recruitment agency, which was fantastic. I first of all started off doing local government recruitment, so learned a lot there around contract recruitment and all the things that come with that, and then afterwards moved into something a bit more focused on sort of the digital and technology side for another recruitment agency. I then wanted to do something a bit more different and started to enter the world of more sort of classified online advertising, and so I worked for Gumtree Jobs, selling their advertising there, working with large organizations. I worked in the key accounts team, so we're working with some of the UK's largest employers to help them advertise their jobs. A lot of that, as we know from classifieds, was sort of focused around like the listings being in the right places on right pages, using lots of keywords and things like that and display advertising.
Speaker 3:I then found out about Place five years ago, and that's where I'm currently working. I think the thing that excited me most about joining a company like Place was just focusing more on that candidate experience and targeting candidates in the best way possible. So that's where I am now.
Speaker 1:Excellent. So tell us just a little bit about Place and what they do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course. Of course we do a lot of things. We originally started our business with an app for candidates to come on, upload their CV. They get instantly matched with the right roles for them, so it uses a matching algorithm to show them the right positions. On there there's loads for them to find out more about employers of choice, so they can sort of read brand pages, blog pieces, they can take quizzes about certain roles as well and just make sure that the company is really the right fit for them.
Speaker 3:So that is very much focused on sort of candidate experience, helping the candidates make the right choices. Essentially, the last few years we've been focused on building that out and helping employers accelerate how they get applications, and so we've got another piece of software which is essentially a programmatic recruitment advertising software takes the jobs that are available on our platform and goes and advertises them across the whole of the internet in front of the right candidates, making sure that the right people see it on the right channels but the right message, the right timings and things like that and there's lots of weird and wonderful things that come with that. Making sure that employers are spending their money in the right ways as well, to make sure they're not wasting budget where they don't need to excellent.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, tell us what we're going to be talking about today, jess yes, so obviously the topic of conversation and I actually feel like I hear this all the time Excellent, so, yeah, tell us what we're going to be talking about today, jess, yes, so obviously the topic of conversation and I actually feel like I hear this all the time, I'm sure you guys do as well and it's not just in recruitment advertising, it's kind of in our daily lives how can we do more, how can we get more out of things with less money?
Speaker 3:Essentially, so it's not actually about, you know, cutting down resource in teams or anything like that. It's more about how can we use the budget we do have, which, unfortunately, is probably not growing, might even be getting a bit smaller um to actually reach the right candidates and making sure that you can still make all those hires that you need to um. It's something that I'm really passionate about, because I just think a huge amount of money is what is um used in this industry and, with things getting tighter, if the more you can target the right people, the better bang for your buck you're gonna get, as they say yeah, absolutely, and we met at one of our eb meetups which was all about untapped recruitment marketing channels.
Speaker 2:Um, I think you you commented about how much you enjoyed it and how um yeah handsome and charismatic the uh, the host was on the on the panel.
Speaker 3:I can't, I can't remember yeah, I think they were the exact words that I used.
Speaker 2:Yeah um, but obviously that that was all about kind of searching for some of those channels where people, uh, previously hadn't looked or were unexpected. But this is much more about finding those efficiencies. So you know, you've obviously come thinking oh well, like you've got an answer to that. So what? What is your answer to? Getting more for less?
Speaker 3:so I think, um, I think it's important. I think it first of all depends on what you want to achieve. Um, do companies want to increase the volume of applications? Is that the focus? Or is their focus getting more impressions? They want more people to know about their brand, but not necessarily focused on the application side. And then a huge one that I see is actually getting less applications but more of the right applications coming through. So first of all, I would say it definitely depends on the goal.
Speaker 3:I think how to do that one of the best ways is to use programmatic. Programmatic is used massively in consumer marketing, but it just sort of hasn't quite reached that gravitas and that speed of uptake in recruitment marketing just yet. So it's used all around as it's happening. But the best ways to increase efficiencies are by relying on the algorithms and using a platform that can. I mean, it sort of makes sense, but you can't have a team of people doing this all the time. But it knows the individual job level.
Speaker 3:This job is not going to get any clicks or applications at 4am on a Tuesday morning, but actually it's going to convert better at 11am on a Thursday morning, for example.
Speaker 3:It might actually switch off for certain days or certain times just to make sure that your listings aren't sitting there and you're not paying for exposure that you can't convert. Essentially, a lot of what the data and the algorithms is real time data. So a lot of what it's doing is looking at conversion rates. I think conversion rates are a really good way for us to see, obviously, if clicks are converting into completed applications which you need to be able to hire people. But it's actually using those conversion rates and telling us if a platform or if a message is getting the candidates with the right intent. You know, do they actually want to apply for that role? Are they completing the application? Are they relevant? You know you're less likely to complete an application if it's not relevant to you and you've actually read the job description. So it gives us a really good indicator of if that advert is being placed in the right place and at the right time and with the right message. So it can save you a lot of money by um switching channels off and on.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, focusing on doing more of the good stuff and less of the the bad stuff uh, so interesting, and I tell you why, and one of the reasons why I think sarah and I love doing this is that we learn. You know, we learn stuff when we're doing it. So a couple of weeks ago, we did a podcast with mark hawley, who Mark Hawley, who is one of the co-owners of Tonic, an agency, and it was all about how you kind of like, sometimes data can suck the life out of a really good creative idea because you're just so obsessed with you know, will it do this, will it do that? And the data that sometimes those kind of brilliant creative ideas that we all remember weren't born out of, out of interpreting the data. So, from your side, I totally get you know what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Is there, then, a creative front end of that that you look at? So almost where you're thinking well, it doesn't matter what the algorithm says, this isn't an ad that's going to draw anyone in. So do you have any influence over what it is that's being placed? And advice on on on the front end, if you like absolutely, absolutely.
Speaker 3:And I agree with data. You know people who don't really know programmatic even the word is quite long and and might seem a bit daunting and I'm not the most technical person. So, yeah, if I can understand this, and then lots of people can as well. And I agree with the data point. Um, yeah, absolutely. So a good example, um, because it's one that I've just been through with with another business. Um, if you, if you are whatever business, most businesses have like a supervisory level job title, whether it is um, supervising an internal team in head office or something, or a supervisor in a, in a supermarket or a restaurant, if you were to put that job title out into into a network or onto onto the internet, you're going to get candidates that are searching for that role. You have to be really careful because if you just put the word supervisor out, that that isn't clear enough, you you know you're not being clear enough. A supervisor of what? Is it? A sales team internally? Is it a restaurant or a cafe or something like that? So yeah, we do.
Speaker 3:It's definitely that human element. I would say it's still really important because you need to make sure that what's going out there is going to attract the right audience. But yeah, that's just a good example of you could put something out there and actually be looking for completely different things. So I think that creativity and that human element are really important. I think, as well, testing. You know like it's good to test things. If you lots of companies are super passionate about being on social media, targeting certain audiences, you can use the data from programmatic. You can set up separate campaigns and say just go on social, we want to analyze the results there. Just target this sort of audience. We want to. We want to analyze the results there. So it's definitely, yeah, definitely, um, be creative and and do new things, but just make sure you're reviewing the data afterwards to see if it's got you what you wanted is all I would say.
Speaker 1:So just a question for me with regards to the programmatic whereabouts are all of the adverts appearing? Like what channels?
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, so every programmatic network is different, but what we see is, I like to think about recruitment, advertising, info, main pillars. You can have your job boards and your aggregators, so that is your traditional job boards that you might see listings on. So all of those you'll often find there's like large ones that we probably all know about, but then also really niche ones which are really important as well. So we have all of those included. And then you've got your social media, so all the social media platforms. So they will obviously look like that. That can be really diverse as well, that can be sponsored posts and can actually be real stories, things like that.
Speaker 3:So that can be really creative Search engines, and for me that's anything from your classic like Google search or something like that. We see Bing perform really well as well, right through to larger sites like search or something like that. We see bing perform really well as well, and right through to larger sites like youtube and things like that, and so, again, any element of someone actually searching for something. And then, finally, and display advertising, that kind of one that you, you don't know, is kind of like following you around, almost often really good for retargeting candidates and so sort of seeing banner display advertising um on websites that you might be on um that are accessible on or scrolling on your phone.
Speaker 1:You might see a sort of block in the middle of the site so question then for me also is just, you're obviously reaching in all different channels and I'm assuming it's based on search behavior, right? So you're targeting a demographic and you're using those keywords and things that they're searching for to to target. Now, with regards to that, are they actively looking for a role? Because obviously we talk about a lot with our clients and you've got a huge amount 70 or 80 percent that are passive, not even looking for a role yet. And then you've got a, the other, the other proportion of that 20, 30 percent which are actively looking for a role rough statistics, but you know there and thereabouts and, um, you're targeting people actively. What about the passive candidates? How do you, how do you, capture those?
Speaker 3:yeah, yeah, no, really good point and I think there's there's some stats out there. Aren't there um, about how? Um I don't know if easy is the right word, but um, yeah, there's a, there's some huge stats around how you can really convert passive candidates potentially almost quicker sometimes than active candidates um, so it's definitely an audience you want to be reaching um. So we see the the best um way to do that on ours is um social media. If you're you know, if you think about social, you kind of target an audience and then you can advertise in front of them. So that's, that's a really good way to get that passive audience.
Speaker 3:I would just say the messaging is slightly different on social. We see messaging differs widely based on the channel that they're on. For example, if someone has physically searched on google for a delivery driver job near me or something, you need to make sure that everything they see in that journey is quite physically what they have searched for, because that's what, that's what they're looking for and something like social. You want to spark that interest. So, again, just making sure that they're seeing something quite interesting probably maybe more benefits led as well about about a business, the benefits that they offer, and so that that's how we often see that, and then with display advertising as well. So display and social there's no search element.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, the fact that you can just target that audience is really good are you seeing people using ai tools as a job search and how do you kind of, how does that work with your business? So if you were going into chat gpt and saying, oh, I'm looking for a job in whatever it is that you say a delivery driver, you know where's the best place and who's going to pay the most and are people starting to use those tools for their, for job searching?
Speaker 3:yeah, we are. We are seeing that um, sometimes it's it's hard to tell um, and I don't know about you guys. I feel like I'm still slightly on the fence with ai, I think, probably more leaning towards like let's embrace it. It just depends what for we. Yeah, we see a lot in this industry and I'm sure employers might be um being impacted by it as well, like bots, ai bots, sort of filling out job applications and things like that, which is frustrating for employers because if you actually can't speak to someone at the end of the phone, then it's kind of been a bit of a waste of time, effort and budget because you're obviously paying for those applications. So we use a software that detects if that is happening and blocks those IP addresses that are coming through from bots. So that, yeah, we are definitely seeing an increase in that, but we have some things to stop it impacting businesses we work with.
Speaker 2:So that's just purely a malicious thing, yeah, yeah. Yeah, just a malicious code that just kind of goes out and fills out fake jobs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, bizarre, and yeah, I wouldn't say I'm like 100% got my head around the whole concept just yet and why that is happening, but yeah, have any of them ever got the job? No, yeah, I have heard some stories around the jobs where maybe there's no face-to-face interviews, like companies actually offering a role to someone, and then they were just like there's no one there to turn up. Um, it's just bizarre though, isn't it?
Speaker 2:that is bizarre.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I was at an event and someone told me that they'd quite literally been able to offer a job to someone that didn't exist.
Speaker 2:They found that in the end I think what's quite funny is if, if the process at the other end is entirely automated too, so you essentially get a robot offering a robot a job that no one's going to show up for.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is um, so we've seen a bit of an increase in that. Um, I think, as long as candidates are like, I think this whole like yeah, chat, gpt, find the right jobs for me. Here's what I'm looking for, here's my background, you know, here's what I'm essentially gonna have the best shot of getting, I don't think there's any problem with finding jobs like that. It's probably just more efficient way of doing a job search, to be honest, yeah, great.
Speaker 2:So, look, I mean, can you believe, jess, that we're almost at our 15 minutes? But I'd love to. One thing we always like to ask is like advice that you give to people. So, because the title of this podcast is kind of offering, um, not exactly money-saving tips, but how you can get more for less. So what would be your, your number one piece of advice?
Speaker 3:I should just call myself martin lewis. Really shouldn't I?
Speaker 2:yes, yeah um.
Speaker 3:So advice I would, I think, um definitely go for it. Have a search of programmatic and I'm here to chat, obviously, if anyone wants to speak. But definitely give it a go. Give it a small amount of budget, see what happens, analyze the results. Don't be scared, it is quite like I said. It's quite literally all around us all the time and programmatic.
Speaker 3:I think 98% of marketing budgets use programmatic globally, so so it's not something to be frightened about. I would just say just make sure you know what you want to achieve, and you can achieve different things, whether it's volume of applications, quality of applications, employer brand and exposure, those sort of things. Choose the right platform for you and set those goals in terms of what you want to achieve and start small, measure it, scale up, review the data, make sure that it does integrate with your current systems, that you can actually track the impact at the end. You know that you're seeing completed applications, interviews and hires, so I'd say yeah, if I had to give a one-liner. Go for it, essentially, um, because it's it's not scary excellent are you gonna do it, sarah?
Speaker 2:so no, you do it, it's fine. You, you asked the last question are you sure okay so, jessica, one thing we always like to ask our guests is if they've got any current interesting reads or listens that they want to recommend, and it could be anything nice.
Speaker 3:Um, yeah, I think I'm big into podcasts like black different, so not related to the industry, but um, I I listen to um all of the feel better, live more um podcasts with dr rang and chastity and I think they're great just for giving that bite-sized information explaining um what you should be eating and doing for your health. I think all those recruitment folk or employer brand folk we are so busy but if you can help boost your energy or get more sleep or anything like that, it can only help right.
Speaker 1:Excellent. Yeah, I love that podcast. It's good, it's a good one. Yeah, it's a really good one, excellent. Well, thanks, jessess, it's lovely to chat to you. No, thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 3:It's been great to chat good stuff.
Speaker 1:Hopefully we'll see you soon take care okay, roger, that is the sound of the leap lift, and I feel like I'm slowly coming around to this idea I knew you would come around.
Speaker 2:And and what LeapCreate service are we pitching today?
Speaker 1:Okay, so today we're going to be pitching candidate journey mapping. This is actually one of my favourite exercises to do with clients. It's where we uncover key touch points to enhance brand awareness and attract top talent by creating really compelling and inspiring content and looking at the candidate experience.
Speaker 2:I have been on a few of these and it's done in a workshop setting and we map out a typical marketing funnel all the way from awareness, interest consideration right through to decision, and that allows us to identify and optimise each stage of the candidate experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's a great way to uncover untapped recruitment marketing channels and develop a really targeted strategy that resonates with potential candidates, particularly those that are hard to hire.
Speaker 2:And we can also understand what messaging and content is needed at each stage there we go. Well, that's it, we've arrived.
Speaker 1:On a serious note, if you did want to be a podcast guest or you did have a project for us, reach out to either roger or I on linkedin or head over to our website, leapcreatecouk, and contact us through there. We also have a number of different initiatives for employer branding and internal comms specialists. We have events, webinars and also sign up to our no Bullshit Guide to Employer Brand Newsletter.
Speaker 2:Oh, yes, hit subscribe.
Speaker 1:To our podcast. Yeah, so you'll be the first to hear.
Speaker 2:There's lots of ways to engage with us and our community.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Thank you.