Are you making the most of your marketing spend?

Sergei Mak, Director and APAC CEO, Daxtra

Year on year, it seems that more agencies are neglecting their own candidate data. They're spending more time and money searching external sources for candidates without realising how much of their marketing spend is being mismanaged and how many great candidates they have sitting within their own database.

When we speak to potential customers, particularly recruitment agencies, about the challenges they're experiencing in their recruitment operations, one that comes up continually is the complaint that the overall ‘cost of placement’ has become too high, largely due to the job board spend.

With each job board advertisement costing $250300 and generating 10-20 candidates, this works out at between $15-30 per applicant. This approach also doesn’t capture passive candidates, who often tend to be stronger.

So why is this marketing spend being mismanaged?

There are usually two main reasons. First, a recruiter will often pay the job board for a candidate view with a credit, but the profile won't make its way onto the recruitment database. Second, a recruiter will often use a job board credit to view a candidate on a job board without checking their database first to see if the candidate is already present there.

If a candidate found on a job board is already on their database, the agency is essentially paying for the same candidate twice (or more!).

The recruiter conducting the search across multiple sources also wastes precious time that could be better spent elsewhere.

Our own research also suggests that only 10-15% of all placed candidates originate from the in-house talent pool database - the rest come from job boards advert responses or job board searching.

Thankfully, recruitment technology can help solve these two problems. There are solutions available that can automate a lot of the manual candidate data loading processes, such as directly loading resumes from job boards in your database.

The same solutions can also clean and update existing candidate records within your recruitment database, which helps to ensure that candidate profiles remain up to date and easily searchable.

To solve the second issue, recruitment agencies should look for a candidate search solution that can effectively search their database and job boards simultaneously to quickly find relevant candidates for a position.

A tool with this capability will help recruiters identify whether the candidates they find on a job board are already stored within their database.

Advanced candidate search tools that can search different platforms simultaneously are often available as products that can integrate into many leading CRM and ATS systems.

If you're unsure whether you're mismanaging your job board spend or whether you're making enough placements from your ATS or CRM, consider asking yourself and your team the following questions:

Is your recruitment database the first place your recruiters search for candidates?

How many of the candidate profiles that you view on job boards are making their way into your ATS or CRM? How many placements that you make come from candidates that are already stored within your ATS or CRM?

Are your recruiters checking to see whether a candidate record already exists within your database before uploading a new candidate profile onto it?

What percentage of your placement fee is taken up by your marketing spend? What is the average lead time required to find and select suitable candidates for a shortlist?

If you have analytics suggesting that you're not making enough placements from your recruitment database, or you're unhappy with the amount of money you're spending on sourcing candidates from job boards, it could be time to audit your current recruitment workflows and tech stack.

Doing this will help you see if there are areas of your recruitment process that could be optimised and to see if there are technologies on the market that could help.