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 this is costing or 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 around $400 and generating 10-20 candidates, this works out at between $20-40 per applicant. This approach also doesn’t capture passive candidates, who often tend to be more suited to the role.
So why is this marketing spend not being used as effectively as it could be? 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 on average - the rest come from job boards advert responses or job board searching.
Thankfully, recruitment technology can help solve these two problems. Solutions such as Daxtra Capture can automate a lot of the manual candidate data loading processes, such as directly loading resumes from job boards in your database. Daxtra Capture 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. Daxtra Search Nexus helps recruiters identify whether the candidates they find on a job board are already stored within their database.
For example, when Daxtra customer Maude Boivin, Vice President Consulting Services at FX Innovation, first approached us, her team was facing numerous challenges. Her recruiters wanted more resources, they were requesting more money for online candidate sourcing and were facing more restrictive time constraints and smaller staffing levels. Their candidate data within their recruitment database was also outdated, leaving their database unsearchable.
Maude decided to implement Daxtra Capture to clean their existing data and ensure their incoming data was fully enriched and structured, while using Daxtra Search Nexus removed the potential for duplicate job board views. By searching over their CRM first, their recruiters could make better use of their existing candidate profiles. Daxtra Capture and Daxtra Search Nexus have enabled FX Innovation’s recruitment database to grow significantly, and their spend per placement decreased by 30%.
If you're unsure whether you're utilising your job board spend effectively 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.
