RecruitingDaily Podcast
The RecruitingDaily Podcast is a series of conversations and interviews with thought leaders and practitioners. Each week, the topic digs into the biggest challenges faced in HR, recruiting, and the latest technology innovations you should know about.
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RecruitingDaily Podcast
Inside Interviewing: Trials and Triumphs of Recruitment Advertising with Chris Russell of RecTech Media
Get ready to navigate the complex dynamics of HR tech with us as we host a captivating conversation with Chris Russell from RecTech Media. He keeps his finger on the pulse of industry trends and keeps recruiters in the know in this exciting episode of Greenhouse: Inside Interviewing.
The conversation takes an exciting turn as we delve into the role of AI in creating job advertisements and the use of conversational AI in crafting content. We also tackle the challenges of working with major job boards and their evolving pricing models. Listen in to discover the synergy driving innovation in the recruitment advertising industry and gain insights into the future of HR tech.
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This is William Tinkoff, and we are broadcasting from the Greenhouse booth at HR Tech. We've got Alex and Chris with me and we're going to do all kinds of fun stuff in a very short amount of time. We're going to pack it in. So, chris, do us a favor and introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit about what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, all right. So Chris Russell, rec Tech Media, my job is to inform the monitor recruiter out there, so cover the space analyst influencer consultant.
Speaker 1:And you do a great job. Thank you, sir. By the way, Alex, what?
Speaker 3:about yourself. What are you doing, alex? I'm now responsible of getting two really big teams together in Brands Pathologic and Broadbean.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And we are always helping people find jobs around the world.
Speaker 1:So you manage both of them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we just closed 100 days from the acquisition, so we are kind of getting now. We spend the last 100 days integrating the teams, the product. We still have a couple of months to go and to finish everything, but we are on the path of being one brand, one company.
Speaker 1:So Alex, here's the deal. Chris and I are now going to start interviewing you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, now it's just good, I already have a question.
Speaker 1:So we're just going to skip some of the regular questions because, first of all, what you've built and what you have is great. I love both. What historically Broadbean, I love what Pandologic does. Let's go with how you put them together and how you're communicating that out with the audience.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So the first thing, that the idea that investment is behind it. Obviously it's like we want to offer the broad portfolio of solutions to clients that want to advertise for the criminal right. So let's say it's a job for a very specialized IT role and you have to do, like you know, obviously, advertising in a very specific set of job boards and that would work for that role right. At the same time, as a business, you might also have, you know, high volume hiring and you want to completely automate the process of advertising, of sending jobs, the thousands of places.
Speaker 1:So, if I got that right, so in some cases programmatic works for you, because you know that it works Okay, in some cases you want to do multi-posting, exactly. You want to put it across, okay, exactly, and so you got both.
Speaker 3:So you want to be able to do it all. So you know about it. We have global clients, right. Right, so you have Amazon on one side. They have like AWS, they are looking for engineers. On the other side, they are looking for drivers right, so they operate in 180 countries Right, some countries have a programmatic market. Some countries just have, you know, the traditional duration job boards. That's right. So you have to be able to service them everywhere. Yeah, you want to be able to meet that candidate base, wherever it is.
Speaker 1:Chris, I know you got questions. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Fire away. Broadway is one of the longest running, I think, companies in our space. What do you attribute that success to? What's the longevity driven by?
Speaker 3:I think the simplicity of the value proposition from the beginning is that we track people's jobs right. We live in the ATS. We don't ask for the recruiter to change their operating system or their process or the workflow or anything. We just adjust to that. So we make sure that they know how much they're spending, where are they spending it, what's the performance, how do they place people and that, in a nutshell, is the success of the brand. Obviously, over the years, with a lot of personality.
Speaker 2:It's been a quiet success. You know it's like you just keep plugging away.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have like three and a half thousand clients. You know 100 plus ATS systems were integrated, you know, within the workflow and fully integrated within the UI, and every month we have about a million of jobs and about 12 to 13 million of applicants that are going through broadening. So it's a huge kind of like a bird's eye view into the labor markets globally and how what's going on, what's happening, how people find jobs. So we are now combining this with the latest in recruitment advertising technology in Pandos. Pandos has gone now fully programmatic. We have the ability to predict budgets. We have the ability to tell the clients you need to spend that much to get that many applicants in that amount of time. We are integrating you know what we call down funnel. You know hiring analytics. We are now understanding not just who is an applicant, who was an applicant that was actually placed and started to work. So we are now working with clients to say that.
Speaker 1:That's because you're tied into the ATS Exactly, you can see if they're hired.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. We're going now down funnel and even we have a relation with the client where we only charge them for applicants that have started the first day of working. They have presented themselves the first day at work. So that's the idea. And we see clients in the process of automation, so they're starting with transactional distributions of posting. Then we have large clients that say you know what? I don't want people to spend their time posting jobs anymore, so can we put some rules around it and say, ok, all the IT jobs will go there, and all the finance jobs will go there, and all the French jobs will go there. That's like the auto posting based on rules. And then the last stage is like we trust your algorithm, we trust your data understanding. We want you to control the budget and decide where we'll post.
Speaker 1:So, with the mothership owning Veritone, owning Pando and, I guess, owning Broadbean, as well how are they helping you? Because AdTech is really cool, really progressive and farther and advanced than we are in the art world industry. Right, we think we're advanced. No, no, no. So there's a different game that's being played over there. How are they helping you? How are they helping shape some of the direction for Pando or Broadbean?
Speaker 3:So, on a combination of things, they have all the experience from the commercial advertising space, right? So, to give you an understanding, we now doing a pilot for a client where they advertise on radio and audio and podcasts for jobs and we are able to use technology to attribute and the applicants that they are getting on the ATS. Right, so we are making a podcast. Job advertisement comes on, we talk about it Like Spotify or somewhere. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:And what happens is?
Speaker 3:that we are checking at the same time at the career side of the client, the activity, the spikes, and we are able to attribute, like the audience, that they receive back and how many of them apply and how many are good applicants. So it's really understanding how commercial advertising was doing that over the years. We have that inside knowledge and we have these capabilities and it's really important. The other part is the base technology, like things like how do you track, how do you use conversational AI to create content?
Speaker 3:So on the commercial side, a lot of the content that goes to advertising nowadays is created by AI, right, so live from that end we did some job expansion and title expansion and location expansion and job advertising, but we haven't gone to the point to really create variants or A-B testing in content that works better than other stuff. So we are all these ideas, we have an innovation lab in Fatveriton and they help us really test with all these new waters.
Speaker 3:That's a synergy. Obviously, at the end of it, we're talking about huge amounts of data and having the expertise of managing these huge amounts of data. How do you connect there? When we're talking about Dan Fanele and the recruiter, think of any commercial advertiser. How well connected their you know the CRM and ERP and their shopping kiosk is to their advertising. They know.
Speaker 1:They know everything.
Speaker 3:Who bought where they came from. Are they buying again?
Speaker 1:That ad shows up on Instagram. Then you go over to Facebook. It shows up over there, exactly, you're listening to Spotify. It shows up on a commercial. It's like okay, which I like. I know it's kind of off-putting to some people, but I actually like because it's more relevant to me. Yeah.
Speaker 2:What questions do you have? I was going to ask you, too, about the job board space, since you guys work a lot in that.
Speaker 1:Have you seen any?
Speaker 2:challenges, working with the needs of the world. All these new pricing changes are coming out with. Any thoughts on that kind of model?
Speaker 3:On our side, we obviously partner with. You know 7,000 job boards globally, right. So we have to be good partners and we always try to find we need to explain to clients. They are right. We have to give them very clear data and I think the key there is improving conversion and improving the data flow.
Speaker 3:So what we are asking for job boards is to really allow us to simplify the candidate journey, and that's what we're working with them on, so to give an understanding that you know people like to, as I say like, talk back about, indeed, and the dominance that's a reality in any advertising market where you have like a, you know, a dominant player.
Speaker 3:There's always going to be the what 10,000 pound gorilla or whatever the bit is, and I can tell you that there are many, many countries in the world where they have a similar player that's not in this. Seek yeah, seek you have like info jobs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have to navigate those relationships. What we had, you know, obviously really focused on the outcomes what's best for the client, how we can optimize the budget and how we can optimize the experience for the candidate. I think that's where I see a lot of positive development is that both ATS and job boards have really opened up to the idea of okay, we want to make it easy for the candidate, we want them to apply there. So now we have a pretty complex integration work on our side, but we are getting like the screening questions from the ATS. We pass them on to Indeed. You know, indeed presents them with a quick apply to the candidate, collect all the data. Then we get that data, we present them back to, let's say, an ATS like Workday or you know.
Speaker 1:I say 21. Great house, yes.
Speaker 3:So that's like I think that's the biggest development that I'm seeing.
Speaker 1:Are you still being asked by TA as much about source of hire?
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course it's a. I think it really depends on the, you know, the labor supply and demand. Right now we are at the time where the question is about quality not quant, yeah, yeah, so the question is really yeah, so it's quality of hire and source of hire at the same time. Right, where do I get the really you know good kind of base data? It's nice to combine those two, that'd be really interesting. Yeah, I know you have another one.
Speaker 1:I got one 10. All right, thank you so much, chris. Thank you so much for helping us out.
Speaker 2:It's great, it's great.
Speaker 1:This will be great. We need to do this more often, yeah we gotta do this bit.
Speaker 3:Thank you for coming.
Speaker 1:Thanks for carving out time and thanks for everyone for listening.
Speaker 3:Thank you XJ.
