September 27, 2022
Description
In this episode, Chris talks to Steven Rothberg, Founder and CVO at College Recruiter, Inc, about how companies can find the right candidates for the job. Chris and Steven discuss topics such as programmatic job ad buying, pay-per-click and other pay-for-performance pricing models, and high volume hiring.
About Steven Rothberg
Rothberg’s entrepreneurial spirit was evident from an early age. Disciplined in fifth grade for selling candy during math class and in college for running a massive fantasy hockey league, he managed to channel his passions into something more productive after graduate school.
A fully recovered lawyer, Rothberg founded the business that morphed into College Recruiter and now, as its Chief Visionary Officer, help to create and refine the company’s strategy and leads its business development efforts.
Rothberg has been widely quoted by local, regional, national and international media including NBC Nightly News, MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show, U.S. News & World Report, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, FOX & Friends, and CNN. He kept hearing that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, so he co-founded and am the co-host of the JobBoardGeek Podcast, the only podcast about the business of connecting candidates and employers.
Rothberg was named by Mashable as one of the 20 top people for job seekers to follow on Twitter, Fast Company magazine as a “Top 50 online influencer”, LinkedIn as having a profile in the top one percent most viewed, and TAtech as one of the top 100 influencers in the talent acquisition industry.
Transcript
Chris:
Hello and welcome to the talent tide podcast presented by job.com. This is the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host, Chris Nichols. And today we have Steven Rothberg, a recovered lawyer and job board visionary. We’ll be discussing how we how companies get better at finding the right talent. Steve, it’s great to have you on. You are a very unique guest to the podcast. We haven’t spent a lot of time together, but I’m very much looking forward to today’s episode.
Steven Rothberg:
Yeah, this should be fun. And I’ve been called a lot of things in my life unique is probably one of
Chris:
Good, I’m glad we’re starting off on the right foot. the best. So you, you go to your LinkedIn profile, which I encourage all of our listeners to do because I’m a big proponent of LinkedIn. So go check out Steven there, but you have a lot of different job titles, a lot of things going on. You’ve been in around the job board industry for a while now. You’ve seen a lot of change, I believe. Why don’t you tell us about your background and how you got to where you are today? Yeah,
Steven Rothberg:
sure. So I grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, right smack dab in the middle knew from the age of 13, that I either wanted to go east, probably Toronto or Montreal, West, probably Vancouver or south. Any one of those would have meant warmer winter. So I’m probably the only person who has ever moved to Minnesota for the weather. And if anybody has been to Minneapolis, where I live in January, and they think about me moving here for the weather, then that’ll tell them what Winnipeg is like in January so. So I went to came to Minneapolis for grad school. Graduated was working in my first year. And the sort of the lure of starting or joining a small business really pulled me started a business in 91, which is 31 years ago. And basically what it was doing for the first few years was publishing campus maps, selling advertising around the borders, to restaurants, retailers, etc. gave away the maps to the schools for free the University of Minnesota and some other schools. And then added an additional product a couple of years later. An employment magazine, which had ads in it from local employers regional couple of nationals like United Parcel Service, etc. And gave those magazines to College Career Service Offices for free. There were four different regionalised versions across the country. And the magazine was called college recruiter, because at that time, the people who were in charge of the college and university recruiting departments, for the large employers, the most common job title was college recruiter. And then this thing called the internet came along. So 1996, we went live with the first version of our website. And it was literally just supposed to be the sizzle that would help sell the steak that employers would buy ads in the magazine, we would run the same ads on the website, they would think that’s going to be the next silver bullet. Because there’s always another silver bullet coming, whether it’s AI or blockchain or whatever, it’s gonna programmatic or whatever it might be. But at that point, it was just the internet. I mean, it was it was an era where of the Fortune 500 Only 50 had websites and of the 50, only five had career sites and none of those five had a searchable job database. They didn’t have an ATS or anything along those lines. It was very much in its infancy, you’d go to their website, if you could find a career page it would usually say we’re hiring for and give you some bullet points. And if you’re interested, fax your resume to that was that’s what that’s what employer websites were in 1996. Flash forward to today. So College Recruiter helps about 7 million students and recent grads a year find basically any kind of job that requires zero to three years of experience, part time seasonal internship entry level, about a year and a half ago, we went global. So we are helping students and recent grads around the world. The businesses is still pretty tilted to the US, but we’re growing pretty rapidly and Canada, the UK, Europe and then other countries are coming as well. And now I think accelerated because of COVID. We also have employees in other countries. We’ve got a couple of people in Nigeria we’ve got a person in the Philippines and it’s it’s So we’re we’re pretty small, but we’ve got kind of a neat little global outlook.
Chris:
That’s, that’s very cool. I almost interrupted you. Because when you mentioned that there’s websites out there that want you to fax the resume, I’m gonna be honest. I’ve had a few clients that have come to us for help. And I went to their career site, and they said, email us your resume. Yeah, we’d be happy to talk to you. And it’s like, Oh, my goodness. Like, that is just not good. Yeah.
Steven Rothberg:
So if you’ve got a seven person company, and you’ve got a link there, you know, resumes at XYZ corp.com. Fine. Right. But if you’re looking to hire dozens or hundreds a year, get an ATS.
Chris:
Absolutely. There’s, there’s options for all sizes of companies out there. Now, there’s no reason to try to filter through emails and hope that somebody finds it. And they’re just, there’s options for every company out there at this point. Yeah, I’m glad you mentioned them. So what a transition I love this story, because it shows your entrepreneurial mindset to shift from what basically started as campus map, which probably are very valuable in Minnesota, because people were trying to figure out how to get to class as quickly as possible. And around what the the, the 10 months of winter that you all have hush and so it’s not
Steven Rothberg:
10 months, you’re grossly exaggerating, it could be more than nine and a half.
Chris:
And then you you transition from from from print to digital platform, and then onto a job board. I think that’s really cool. And it shows your foresight and looking ahead, and you’ve continued to, to own a space. And so the job boards space is one that is dominated, historic had been dominated historically by one to two players at the top. And then there’s always been, you know, dozens, if not hundreds, more, whether they are local, to certain markets, you know, say Miami jobs.com, or niche to certain types of of jobs. So travel, travel nursing.com. And then there is college recruiter, right. And so we have all these different types. So if you don’t mind, I’d love for you to provide an overview of the job or industry because I think it’s something that we we narrow our focus down very specifically into what we think job boards are. And I’d love to hear from somebody that’s been in it for the better part of two decades to understand what it looks like.
Steven Rothberg:
Yeah, sure, no, great question, Chris. And I and I agree with you whether the your sort of your view of it, it lines up very much with with mine. So 20 years ago, you had what was called the Big Three, you had monster, you had CareerBuilder, and you had hot jobs. And then hot jobs kind of was folded in and disappeared and came alive again and fold it in again. And whatever. It was a little bit like a prairie dog it kept poking its head up the early not early 2000s. Were was an era online, not specifically to job boards, but just for sites like Google, where they began to popularize pay per click. And in the job board space, traditionally Pay Per Click was where the candidate would see the posting on the job board, click the Apply button and go over to the employer site to apply when Google popularized that for consumer advertising, advertising a product services, even educational opportunities, it took a while for the job boards to embrace that the first one that did that really embraced it that really popularized it is now the dominant player. And that’s indeed, so when I look at the job board space now, I don’t see monster CareerBuilder and certainly not hot jobs at the top. But I do see indeed, LinkedIn. And then there are some some other big general job boards out there too. But those are those are definitely the big market leaders. Then you have like you were saying a bunch of niche sites. And it could be a niche in a geographic area. It can be a niche in an occupational field. It can be a niche with years of experience or education like us. So in our space in in sort of the early career. Some might call it college or university niche. You’ve got sites like college recruiter, way up is is another site. They were merged into yellow, I think about a year ago at this time. There are some other sites out like simplicity and handshake which operate basically job boards for individual College Career Service offices. And so employers that are that are looking to hire a lot of people across maybe a lot of different occupational fields are generally very well served by advertising those positions on the big general sites on eating and deeds of the world. Or on the LinkedIn ads, they’re generally well served depending on how many people they’re looking to hire, and the level of those people like how many years of experience or the kind of role with doing resume searching, which would be LinkedIn. Some people will say that LinkedIn is a social media site. I’ve never felt that way. LinkedIn has always generated the vast majority of its revenues, from talent acquisition, basically, profile searching and job postings. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is a duck. Other sites that generate the same revenues are called job boards, I’m not quite sure how LinkedIn isn’t. But in my mind, they’re, they’re a job board, they’re a heck of a lot more of like a job board than they are like a Facebook. And so when I’m talking to a candidate, or I’m talking to an employer, and they say, what sites should I use, what it generally comes down to, in my mind is usually three, maybe four different sites. If you’re an employer, and you’re looking to hire a bunch of, let’s say, early career, mechanical engineers in Miami, Florida, you’re probably going to be well served by advertising those on a big general site, and indeed a LinkedIn. Maybe also using resume the resume searching aspect of those sites. Also geographically focused sites, a Miami jobs or some site along those lines, and then an engineering site. And then if their early career, a handshake, a simplicity, a college recruiter, a site like that, that’s going to target those people at the early in their career. There comes the question to of scale. So there’s a huge difference, Chris, in my mind, between an employer who’s looking to hire maybe one or two people every few months, versus an employer that’s looking to hire dozens, hundreds, maybe even 1000s, that the tools that you use when you’re doing high volume hiring, are really different than if you’re just looking for the occasional person here, or the occasional person there.
Chris:
Why don’t we go there, that I’m interested in hearing your perspective on that, because we, you know, we have listeners from, you know, companies with 25 to 100 employees, and we have companies that are clients of ours and listeners to the podcast with 10,000. Plus, yeah, and so they’re hiring hundreds, if not 1000s themselves every year. And so I often find most companies have one large subgroup of jobs that they likely hire a lot. Most years, most companies don’t have, you know, 10% of these jobs, 10% of those, there’s usually some type of job that takes up the majority of the roles that they’re filling, but maybe talk a little bit about the different strategies that you would use, based upon your years of experience in the industry. If you put your if you put a different hat on if you put a chro or a VP of TAS hat on. Yeah. Or CEO of small business. Yeah,
Steven Rothberg:
yeah, that that employer with with small hiring needs, which tends to mean that they’re a small employer, but not always, sometimes you can have an if you’ve got a restaurant with 25 employees, and you’ve got massive turnover, you know, you’ve got 400% turnover, which actually isn’t all that unusual, then you’re always hiring for a bunch of people, you might not always have an opening today. But you know, within the next three or four days, you’re going to have a couple people quit. And so you are in that case, hiring at scale hiring and high volume. So if you’re just looking for a person here or a person there, it’s rarely going to be worth it to invest money in some kind of like real high volume tool, whether it’s online assessments, whether it’s a really robust enterprise level ATS, whether it’s something like programmatic where your job postings are automatically going out to maybe dozens or hundreds of different sites, probably paying on a per click basis, you’re probably going to get the volume that you need by posting a job to an indeed, a LinkedIn, maybe a couple of niche sites. So you might spend hundreds of dollars posting your ad, and you’ll probably get the response that you need to hire that person here or there for the employers that are hiring at scale. At that’s really different. Because at that point, you simply don’t have enough time in the day. What when I’m talking to an employer about hiring at scale, what I’ll typically say to them to sort of frame the conversation is, if you’re looking to hire one person, for a typical early career, kind of a role of general have somebody with zero to three years of experience, you probably only need five qualified applications or resumes. But if you’re looking to hire 100, people, you might need 500. If you’re looking to hire 1000 people, right, I mean, the numbers just keep going up and up, it’s really different to post a job to and getting, you get five good applications and maybe 10 that aren’t, versus posting an ad, and getting hundreds of applications, you need to be able to scale that your time now is far more important than the money you have. You can get economies of scale, you can post that job in a lot of places, and you need to automate. So one of the things that I’ve seen in the last couple of years, that’s very encouraging to me, is that more and more employers who are hiring at scale, are using a lot of automation, to make that experience better for the candidate that can tell the candidate right away, you don’t meet our minimum qualifications, right? You are awesome. But you’re in Bangladesh, and you’re a citizen of Bangladesh, and this job requires a security clearance and you’re going to be working in DC, sorry, under no circumstances can we hire you, you should tell that candidate that right away. The other thing that I’m seeing a lot of with automation are assessments, they’ve become a lot better. When I was a lot younger, Myers Briggs, and some personality tests like that kind of dominated, they were never scientifically validated, they opened up a lot of employers to a lot of legal exposure. And the new assessments are much better, because they’ve been scientifically validated, they actually can predict your productivity in the workplace. One of the other things I love about about the use of assessments is that they surface candidates that you otherwise might have ignored. So I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we were hiring for a full stack developer. And for the first time, we used an assessment at the front end of that process, we didn’t interview any candidate until they had gone through the assessment. So every single candidate that applied went through the assessment. And what we found were the top candidates that on paper, we thought would be the best ended up assessing the worst. And the candidates that we looked at, it’s like, how can you possibly have thought that you’d be qualified for this role, some of them assessed the best because they didn’t have the degree, they didn’t go to a certain school, they didn’t have a certain job title in their past. But what they did have was the ability to do the work. And so we ended up interviewing people that we otherwise we absolutely would have rejected. Now, employers that are hiring at scale can do that really efficiently. Because those assessments can be pretty pricey. But when you start to spread that across hiring a lot of different people for a lot of different roles, all of a sudden the cost drops to like $1 per person. And if you can’t spend $1, on a bunch of candidates that you might be looking to hire, it’s like, you shouldn’t be in the high volume game. So assessments also allow you to reach out to candidates that don’t fit your stereotypical hire. So if you’ve always hired Yeah, I think generationally, right. The world of recruiting from, say, the same 12 schools, and the same two majors, everybody that you’re hiring looks the same both, you know, gender and skin color, but also just the kinds of classes they’ve taken, the professors they’ve had the textbooks they’ve used, so everybody thinks the same. By using assessments, you’re really diversifying your workforce. And every study that looks at that the more diverse a workforce, the more productive that workforce is. So I’m, I’m a big believer that the technology has now finally caught up to high scale to high volume hiring. And that when I still see employers really struggling to retain that workforce, and you start to pardon, you scratch the surface a little bit. A lot of times it comes down to them seals still using the same process and the same tools as they were 20 years ago, and wondering why they’re not getting different results. So It’s encouraging. There’s sort of a whole new breed of talent acquisition, people that are a lot more data driven, and looking much more at not for just filling seats or going to the same schools or going to the same career fairs. But actually looking at the productivity, where did we get our best candidates from? In terms of who’s the most productive employee? Not who’s the least costly to hire? And that’s where I think talent acquisition is made huge strides in the last few years. to it really took off in the early 2000s, the same the same time that job boards started to grab hold, too, right. And so companies historically didn’t have talent acquisition teams, or let alone talent acquisition leadership, right? It was just kind of funneled under HR, some people now have to do that job. Because we have so much volume, somebody needs to do it, we’ll call them a recruiter. Yeah. And so you have a group of people that came up, who have finally got taught themselves primarily, right how to do talent acquisition. So you have individuals that are now senior enough that had been in the industry, quote, unquote, for 1520 25 years now that have some foresight, whereas in say, 1998, it was a much more segmented part of most companies, it was probably a manufacturing facility out in Warsaw, Indiana, was hiring for themselves in Warsaw, Indiana, with no corporate oversight, no structure, etc. So how, in your mind, I think people get lost on the purpose of job boards. And they, in my mind, you mentioned the word Silver Bullet earlier, I believe sometimes we look to job boards to be a silver bullet. What is your percent perception of what the purpose of a job board is, within the funnel of talent acquisition? Love the question, and I’m gonna give you a weird analogy, a job board is a bus. So what job boards have always been well designed for is bringing candidates to your door. But once the candidate gets to your door for a larger employer, that’s your ATS, a smaller employer, it could be your Facebook page where you’ve got like a button that they can apply through. But we can deliver candidates that are pretty well targeted to your door. And no further, once they’re at your door, once they’re once they’re on your site. At that point, you take over. So you have to have a page or section on your site, perhaps an ATS. That is that is good at getting, getting rid of the candidates that aren’t well qualified, right, in a good way, in uh, you know, not telling them to like, you know, go to hell. But allowing those people to self opt out, so that they understand what you’re looking for, and that they opt out of the process, preferably before they even start to apply. And then in a good assessment does that you they can see immediately that they are not well qualified for that role. And so they don’t end up applying, if you put the assessment up at the front, the art, the website also needs to be really good at converting candidates who are well qualified, especially those who have not yet been convinced that they want to work for you. So a lot of times the best candidates are somewhat passive. I’m not a big believer in candidates being active or passive, right? I mean, Chris, if your boss is awesome to you this morning, you’re going to be more passive. But you show up at work this afternoon, and your boss is just a total jerk. You’re all of a sudden going to be pretty active. If you are married, and everything is going well and stable and whatever, and things are good. You might be more willing to consider a new career opportunity because you’ve got more bandwidth. But you know, you have a new baby, you’re going through a divorce, you’ve got you know, a close relative who’s really sick, all of a sudden you’re gonna be more passive. You just don’t have the bandwidth. It has nothing to do with your qualifications. So when a kid when a job board delivers that candidate or candidates to your doorstep, it’s on the employer to then convinced the well qualified by candidates to apply, and the poorly qualified candidates not to, or show them a different role that they’re better suited for, you’re not well qualified for this sales role, but you are well qualified for this customer service role. So why don’t you apply to that? When the candidate has applied at that point, all the metrics are on the employer side, the how many of them are interviewed, how many get offers, etc, the biggest difference that we see, I mean, we work with 1000s of employers, the biggest differences that we see employer to employer, which ones are happy, which ones aren’t, the are the employers that have a well thought out candidate friendly hiring experience. So we work with one employer, a fast food company, that it’s taking them, I think they told me 22 days to go from the point of application to the point of a job offer. So over three weeks for fast food, they’re unhappy, and they’re complaining about job boards being terrible, and they can’t find any higher candidate candidates that want to work for them. And whatever, we work for another work with another fast food company almost the same, I mean, you’d pull up at the drive thru window, and you wouldn’t be able to distinguish the food too much, unless you’re a fast food aficionado. And they’ve got like a seven day hiring process. Well, guess who is filling all their seats, guess who is happy Guess who’s getting a really good return on their investment, when they’re advertising a role? It’s not about the pay, they’re both paying about the same. It’s not the industry, it’s not the location, it’s the hiring process. And the job board has nothing to do with that. That’s all on the employer side. That’s a VP of talent acquisition, who has said, we need to make this as good as possible for the candidate. Because if we wait 22 days, they’re going to be employed someplace else. And so no wonder they’re gonna ghost us.
Chris:
That’s it from being an active company, and a passive company, right? I mean, when you when you think about that same analogy applied to organizations, I could not agree more, you have to know your, you have to know the talent that you’re trying to attract. And you have to understand what their needs are. Because if you don’t, you’re never going to attract them in the kind of in the droves that you would like for them to be there. You need fast hiring processes. If you’re in, you know, high volume environments, like fast. Yep. But you know, what, if I’m an accounting firm, I might need to slow that process down to make sure that we’re finding the right cultural fit the right type of person that can grow and develop around the people that we have, etc. And so we get so stuck on metrics. And then we all assume that all the metrics are the same for all of us time to hire. Yeah, go look up on Google recruitment metrics, and time to hire always comes up first. But the reality is, every position is different in your organization. So A, you probably shouldn’t be getting an aggregate number for that data, right? Because it’s going to take us, you’re going to have outliers, like hiring VPS, or executives that you’re going to want to spend more time with. And those numbers are going to offset numbers that aren’t relative of the fact that maybe you know what we’re hiring people in 15 days, we have these 15 jobs that we filled at a senior level, that hat that took 180 days that are causing significant moves and changes. And so one of my Pastor Steve O’Brien, who’s now at syneos, health, he used to be@job.com. And I do a presentation called your strategy sucks. And we talk about stuff like this, right, like, strategy is, is tactical, likely you don’t have to have a real strategy because you’re reactive to the market and the situations that you have. And so you talked about a couple of things with regards to passive versus active. You’re so right about the difference in how we approach those individuals and how finicky they can be. I maybe I’m not active at all, but a recruiter sent me a message today on LinkedIn and said, Hey, we believe that you’re worth we have this job that we believe is worth 20% More than the salary that you’re making today. Well, that’s interesting, because I got a 3% bonus last or a 3% Raise last month on my annual review, these people are saying I wasn’t looking but now I am. And it has nothing to do with really like my management or anything. But you know what? It’s proven that if we job hop, we make a lot more money. Yep. And so there’s all these elements that play into that and it’s it comes back to understanding the people that you have on your team and understanding what makes them tick. Who’s looking at them how they line up in the industry.
Unknown:
job.com is a HR technology company dedicated to providing the best digital recruitment platform in talent solutions on the market admission a job is to remove the friction from the hiring process by delivering technology that creates more effective talent placement, better fit career moves, and a more human hiring process.
Chris:
As we talked about assessment, which you’ve talked a lot about today, Steven, yeah, assessments can be a blocker in the recruitment process, as well as, you know, a nice additive. And so, especially in this environment today with a lot of jobs in the market, if I’m looking for a job, and I see an assessment, I might choose to skip over that. So and go to go to go to an easier path of resistance, less resistance. So can you talk about the right time to use an assessment, maybe the different types of assessment that you could potentially use? Any any insight on that?
Steven Rothberg:
Yeah, absolutely. So like everything else, not all assessments are built equally, right? I mean, you’ve got some really great assessments out there, you’ve got some really bad assessments out there. One thing that very few organizations do when they ask a candidate, not even an applicant, to get to go through an assessment, very few organizations explain to that candidate, why they’re going through the assessment, and how that’s going to be used, and what to expect. So if you were to tell a candidate ahead of time, that we put the assessment ahead of the application, because we’re more concerned about what you’re going to do for us than what you did for other organizations. Explain that, that that the work that you’re going to do for us over the coming years, is what is driving our hiring decision. And the best way for us to predict that is through this three minute assessment, and tell them, it’s three minutes. Now, if you put a fast food worker through a 45 minute assessment, I don’t care how much you explain it to them, they’re not going to stick around, you put a CFO through a 45 minute assessment, she’s probably going to stick around, if she knows that, that’s actually going to be evaluating her ability to do the job in your environment. The other thing is tell them right up front, not after I see this a lot after is this is this is what your assessment showed, these are the areas that you could improve upon, these are the areas this is how we’re going to rank you compared to other candidates. Now, you don’t tell Joe, that these are Cindy’s results. But you can tell Joe, that we’re measuring you against these eight different factors, you’re really, really strong and seven, one of them you’re not strong in, and but you’re still a 93% match. And so you’re going to hear from a recruiter within a day. And you just tell them that kind of thing up front, and what to expect in the process. If people know that you’re going to contact them within a day or five days, or whatever your timeline is, and then you exceed that. You tell them a day you call them for hours, you tell them five days you call them in for right, you’ve wowed them. And you have that assessment, you walk them through what does that mean for them. And these are some areas that you can improve on. The other thing is the what you asked about sort of when in the process, if you do have a good assessment that actually is is scientifically validated, to predict the performance in that role in your environment. And that’s a if if if then I would put that at the front, I see a lot of organizations putting assessments at the back of the process. So they get in the application, they interview people, they narrow it down to three finalists, and then they give them an assessment. And I think that that made sense in an era where assessments were really expensive, because it didn’t want to spend all of that money assessing everybody. But now assessments are really cheap. And they’re much more scientifically valid than they used to be. So I’m a huge proponent of putting that upfront, telling the candidate why telling the candidate what to expect, and sharing the results with them. And just saying that for for everything, not just the assessment, but the whole hiring process. If you’re going to take two weeks to make a decision. And there are four different milestones in those two weeks, tell them tell them, you know, we’re going to be reviewing your application within two business days. And if you tell them to, you want to make sure it’s actually one and occasionally to right, meet or exceed what you’re telling them. If you can’t tell them with any degree of certainty how long it’s going to take to hit a different step in the process. Then I think strategically you need to understand why you can’t predict that. Why can’t you determine if it’s going to take two days or 20? If you know if I’m talking to you and you’re the Senior Vice President of talent acquisition for some big company I say, how many days does it take for you to review an application? And you say, I have no idea. Okay, fair enough find out. And if you say we can’t predict that, it can be sometimes two hours, sometimes 20 days, sometimes 200 days, you should be looking for another job, you should, you should know, that, you know, unless a meteor hits the world, you’re gonna be you’re gonna have every single application reviewed in two days, or 10 days, or 20 days, whatever it is, and then you promise that it’s amazing how candidates respond to that kind of accountability, and that and that roadmap, it’s also very important because the candidates, then you have a lot more credibility when you’re talking to them. When you tell them, hey, you know, I’m going to extend this offer to you. And if you accept, here’s the roadmap that we have to offer, you know, you’ve been with us What if you be with if you’re with us for six months, you’re going to have this path, this path or this path. And you know, and they’ll believe you, what happens right now with a lot of job applicate job applicants is that they just simply don’t employ they believe the employer. It’s like, okay, I’m going to work for you because I want to paycheck, I need to pay my rent, I need to buy my my meds at the pharmacy, maybe meds at non pharmacies, but that’s another story for another day. And who can blame them we all need to eat we all need to have a roof over our heads. And and the lack of trust with employers is just is huge. The more you can earn that trust, the more you’re going to have people who will apply who will show up for their interview who will accept your offer and who will be productive.
Chris:
So you in my mind just encapsulated what I think makes a great talent acquisition team. It’s it’s honesty. Yeah, it’s authenticity. Yep. Transparency. Yep, it is under promising and over delivering. Right? Instantly, if you do those things people are going to enjoy, they’re going to recommend other people come to you. And that is, that is the pie in the sky effect that you want to create. Because the and I always tell people this to the bar is so low to be on talent acquisition, right? And you want to if you don’t believe that, just go look at LinkedIn, go look at Facebook groups, go look at Twitter, and just see how often companies are bashed by the fact that they can’t communicate effectively to candidates throughout the recruitment process. It’s why I’m a big fan of candidate expectation videos, set the expectation upfront, tell them what’s going to happen during the process. Yeah, let them know what it’s going to look like. They’ll be more bought in the fact that they are probably applying for more than one job. And if you’re the one company that tells them what’s going to happen, they’re going to remember you, they’re going to say, I’m going to look for the email from XYZ company because that was actually kind of interesting. And I think that the assessment piece as well, that you mentioned, putting it at the front also gives you more information about the types of people that you’re attracting, and it gets helps you understand who who they are, right, which allows you to get better at your marketing. It allows you to get better at your your branding, and making sure that you’re representing yourself as you want to right like this is who we are. You can speak to your audience more effectively, no matter the different types of positions, because you can segment that. And so it just requires you being proactive versus reactive. Yeah. And so you’ve talked about the assessments, you’ve described how to use them, are you going to do some free advertising for some of these assessment companies you need to do like, reaching out to do you have a favorite, etcetera.
Steven Rothberg:
You know, one that I one that I’m hearing more and more about is plum IO. So Caitlyn McGregor is the CEO, I had the pleasure of meeting her. Her company, and my college recruiter are both members of this new talent solutions community group that has been put together by the folks at career crossroads. And so I had the pleasure of spending a day and a half at the paradox office in Scottsdale, with Caitlin and got to know her and their product. They’ve hired some real rock stars in the industry. One of the really interesting things about plumb in our, in our little niche of sort of early career is that one of the largest banks in Canada, the Bank of Nova Scotia now has completely done away with resumes for their students and recent graduate candidates. So if you’re a student at University, Toronto or some other really great school, you want to work for the bank of Nova Scotia, you go to the plum assessment, and then that determines if you’re going to be interviewed probably extended an offer etcetera. The number of successful hires and people who ended up staying with the bank after their internship and for more than a year skyrocketed, because they’re bringing in people who are a much better fit for the role and for the organization. So there is some drop off, I do think it’s important for people to understand that when you use an assessment, you’re going to have fewer applicants. And if your measure of success is the number of applications, we’ll you know, good luck to you. Because that’s not driving your business objectives. What your business objectives should be, is hiring people who are going to be the most productive, and minimizing your cost per application, minimizing your time to hire whatever, those are all proxies, and they are metrics that are worth looking at. And everything else being equal, if you can reduce your time to hire, if you can reduce your time for your cost per application, that’s that’s going to be better. But that’s about efficiency. It’s not about effectiveness, effectiveness is getting the best people in those seats, so that they’re with you the longest and they’re their most productive, most productive. I see a lot of employers on the recruitment side who are focused on metrics around hiring, and cost per hire cost per application, et cetera. And then it’s almost like there’s nothing It has nothing to do with what happens after that person starts. And I think that that is an area that I’m hoping HR is going to get a lot better at over the years, is looking at who’s been with us for three to five years. What were our sources with hire? Was it campus recruiting? Was it LinkedIn? Was it career fairs? Was it billboards beside the highway, and and then focus more efforts on those channels.
Chris:
While I completely agree with you, my concern is that we’re nowhere near that point, Stephen. reason I say that is because if you look at sales and marketing, which I believe sales and marketing is kind of a precursor to talent acquisition, because you see a lot of the same software that is in ta now was maybe a part of sales and marketing process. Seven, eight years before, right? And so when I looked at the sales process, and marketing, and how they were obsessed with the new and shiny object, Steven, which means we want new clients, we want bigger clients, we want better clients. What do we always do, we forget about the ones that got us to where we are. Yep. And we don’t talk to them enough. The great companies do like the really great companies do. The problem is even good companies struggle with with it, because they’re chasing something else. And they forget. They forget the good that got them to where they are. And they lose track of that. And so that’s where my concern is, to your point about are we getting closer to, to helping what we call from the dead period. So offer accepted until three, five years out, because there’s so much more that we could do to extend the life of an employee’s tenure. Even understanding when people start looking for other jobs and understanding when that point is in their career. I’m a big believer in career transparency. And so building the roadblocks to your next promotion, right, starting young people out on a path. And not just young people, when you bring somebody in mid career, hey, the opportunities for you, we want you to work cross functionally, we want you to learn this skill while you’re here. Those are the things that keep people engaged, it keeps them around. And it keeps them from becoming active job seekers, because they’re busy, right? Like they’re there. They’re happy, they’re busy, etc. And I’m also glad that you mentioned plumb, because Jason Putnam is a friend of job.com. And I was worried that if you didn’t say that I was going to have to send an email to Jason apologizing. That was one of his competitors. So that’s cool. I’m a big fan of plumb as well. I love I love it. If you’re unaware of plumb check them out, because it is a different type of assessment that you’re probably used to. And the way that they go about it, I think is quite unique. So I would encourage that, Steven, we are at time today. But I’m going to give you the chance to do some free advertising too. So if you’re, I think it’s important for our listeners to understand why should they come to you when what does the ideal company look like when they’re coming to you? And wanting to know more about college recruiter or University Relations etc. Yeah, like,
Steven Rothberg:
yeah, company is the our customers are primarily fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and other employers that hire at scale. And when we’re talking scale, we’re talking at least dozens hundreds, sometimes 1000s a year. So employers that are looking for like one intern here or in one new grad there, quite frankly, we’re not the right place. But when you’re looking for, for dozens, hundreds, even 1000s, we’re really, really good at that. We’re really good at designing a package depending upon the employers needs. So we have some customers of ours, like big intelligence agencies, big government comm agencies, whose primary need is branding, is, is raising awareness. So the US Department of State hires a whole lot of accountants do accounting students in schools across the country know that, no, but when they get emails, some of which come from college recruiter saying, Hey, we’re the Department of State, we’re looking to hire accountants, now they know that now they’re going to be more receptive to those sorts of opportunities. So we do a lot of branding campaigns like that are what really sets us apart is a product called jobs at scale. It’s a pay per click job posting product, where typically we get a feed of jobs or we scrape just the jobs employers want us to run from their website, and do that on a pay per click basis. Average cost of hiring a student or recent grads through on campus recruiting is about $5,000, when you include staff time, travel costs, etc, as you need to, through a job board, like college recruiter, it’s about a 10th of that. It’s usually like 400 or 500 bucks. So you can do that in weeks, rather than in a year. And you can do it for about a 10th of the cost. And hiring online versus on campus is inherently going to lead to a lot more diverse hires. And that leads to better productivity.
Chris:
It’s a great point, because you we all are biased and that we talk, we tend to be more open to talking to people that look like us, because we feel like we know that we have something in common with them. And it’s not necessarily malicious, but it’s just human nature, right. And so we do it. And so it’s you know, if it’s really hard to be the diverse organization you want to be whenever you only have certain people in roles, and you’re trying to find people to go to these different career fairs and things. And so I think that’s a great point as well. You have to be intentional about being diverse. And so I think that’s a great segue into Steven, how can people find you? Where can where can they learn more about these these wonderful ideas that you have a college recruiter and listen to you and learn more about the industry?
Steven Rothberg:
Sure, if you just want to learn more about the company, collegerecruiter.com That’s pretty easy. And one thing that I know, some of your guests are leery about doing but I’m cool with it. I’ll give you my email address Steven@collegerecruiter.com. Thank you, Chris. It’s been a lot of fun.
Chris:
This has been great. I appreciate it. Steven. And this is a another episode of the talent tide podcast. We had a great guest today and we have many more scheduled up and coming so we look forward to those and remember win the day. Thank you. We’ll see you soon.