Create, Manage, and Work With Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces.
Each week, Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter and Peter Zollman of the AIM Group, along with guests from the world's leading job sites, analyze news about general, niche, and aggregator job board and recruitment marketplace sites.
What's next for job advertising?
Alex Murphy is the Co-Founder and CEO of JobSync, a platform that provides seamless integrations between job sites, ATSs, and other systems used by talent acquisition professionals by emulating the ATS application natively within the quick apply functions of the job sites.
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Steven (00:09):
Welcome to the Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces podcast. I'm Steven Rothberg, the founder of College Recruiter, Job search site at College Recruiter. We believe that every student in recent grad deserves a great career.
Peter (00:23):
And I'm Peter Zolman, founding Principal of the AIM Group, the leading global business intelligence service for marketplaces and classified advertising companies. We consult with recruitment marketplaces, companies and publish AIM group, recruitment intelligence, and a free weekly digest. We also host the annual Global Rec Buzz Conference.
Steven (00:44):
This is the podcast for you to learn more about how to create, manage, and work with general niche and aggregator job boards and recruitment marketplaces. Peter, it is good to be with you again today.
Peter (00:58):
Good to be with you.
Steven (01:00):
So, AIM group, what are you guys looking at right now?
Peter (01:03):
Well, we've been doing a lot of reporting about pay transparency and the impact it has on job boards, recruitment marketplaces, which are requiring it, which are not, how it affects the, the job boards and how it affects the employers as well, because obviously that has an impact on the job boards too. Lots going on in that area. New York City, California, Washington State, and overseas. There are a number of places where there's talk about pay transparency or in some countries it's just expected.
Steven (01:43):
Yeah, we're seeing a lot more job boards talking about either really pushing employers who are advertising their jobs to disclose this, to disclose the compensation range. Some requiring it at college recruiter. We started to require it a couple of years ago. If employers did not provide us with actual data, then we estimate it. And that's what Indeed's rolling out now. And by January 1st, that's every posting on Indeed is supposed to be like that. And yeah, I'm in Europe right now, and it, it is not nearly as controversial here as, as it is in the, in the us. I would love to hear from today's guest, Alex Murphy, the, the CEO of Joby, what his thoughts are on this topic as well, if that's all right, Peter. So Alex, what, what are your thoughts?
Alex (02:38):
What's interesting to me is I hear a couple in interesting points from both sides of the spectrum. One side being if you provide the pay range, you get more engagement with those candidates or from those candidates from the form of more applications. However, that's, that's kind of polluted data, I think, because the companies that voluntarily put forward pay ranges are the ones that pay the best. And so they're going to intrinsically attract more of those candidates. They probably have other benefits as well. Whereas if you're in the middle of the pack or the bottom of the pack, and then if everybody's dis disclosing pay ranges, then you've got a range. It, it is it is something that is likely to reduce engagement for those that are at the bottom. One person might say, Well, tough luck. But at the same time, maybe that company has a whole host of other reasons why people like to work there.
(03:46):
Maybe there's something that happens inside the business that adds value to the workers' days that is not necessarily compensation or direct cash compensation. And so I think you know, if we look at like the studies that McKenzie's done and, and a bunch of others of like, why people quit. People don't quit jobs just for money, Actually, it's not even at the top three list of the list. And so I, I don't think people take jobs just for money either. And so I think that it is putting much more emphasis on one data point in the evaluation, which becomes a, a filter, which I think has probably a lot of unintended consequences that we won't really know for a few years to come, especially in the US where we're not used to this level of, of transparency and clarity.
Peter (04:41):
So pay transparency is one issue. Another issue is the economy. What the heck is going on? Jobs are still hot even though nobody knows what's
Alex (04:53):
Happening. You know, it's interesting. I recently did a a pitch competition actually back at HR Tech and you know, in, in terms of promoting job sync and talking about what we're working on. And the, the center of the center of what we're working on is, is the fact that hiring is so difficult, and you start to kind of try to unpack why is hiring so difficult today? Whereas as recently, really as like eight years ago, certainly for most of the last 50 years, companies have viewed hiring as simply just a, a basic administrative function that would just happen. And that's no longer the case. And it's a function of supply and demand. In the us the most recent BLS data shows that there are roughly double the number of available jobs as there are people to take those jobs.
(05:53):
People voluntarily leaving roles is at an all time high, continues to be month after month. That's maintained. That's people switching jobs. Recent data Josh Berson reported out about, like, it's not actually people just leaving jobs to go from like company A to company B, like McDonald's, Burger King. It's people literally changing their entire profession, whole you know, wholesale. And so there's a, there are a lot of dynamics right around that. But, you know, Adam Smith, I think predicted this a couple hundred years ago. Supply and demand, when they're not in balance, like that creates havoc in marketplaces. We could talk a lot about why like the developed world does not replace their own, right? So population rates are declining, pregnancies are down. You know, and then on top of that, we're all afraid as, as all get out of the, the immigrants coming to take our jobs.
(06:55):
And so we've enacted horrible immigration policies that, that stop the best and brightest and everybody else from coming across our borders to help offset the reduction of people. So you know, that, that those are all the things that are kind of rolling together to create this very peculiar position that I think if we look forward, it doesn't change, right? And it's, it's really cemented by a big, much, much longer term trend, which is how companies are valued. If you go back 60 years ago, companies were valued based upon their assets, right? So inventories, plants, the things that they held as as an ownership interest in today, the vast majority, those are tangible assets, right? The vast majority of the value of an organization is derived from the intangible assets, the largest of which are the people and the intellectual property of those people.
(08:01):
And so you can't, you can't do a reduction in force and get rid of 25% of your people and watch 20% of the value of the company drain out the door and expect your business to do well. So you don't have the same remedies around a RIF to address your company's problems that you did 20 years ago. And so that's a really interesting dynamic as well, because that's, that really speaks to like what the future looks like, where, you know, five years ago we thought AI was gonna go replace everybody's jobs. In fact, all these technologies have actually proven to do is create more demand to have more people to do the functional work inside of these organizations, which shouldn't be terribly surprising cuz that's what's happened with every single technical advancement forever all the way back to the wheel.
Steven (08:56):
Yeah, and I, I, I agree and thank you for laying that out. The, so, so much of what we hear in any country seems to be very inwardly focused. I'm, I'm in the UK right now, people in the uk I'm amazed at how similar the narrative is here as it is in the United States, as it is in Canada, as it was in Belgium when I was there a little bit earlier this fall. Everybody seems to think that, that this is a national dynamic and that their, their own country's politicians are to be blamed for it. But it's, it's global. It's, it's happening everywhere. So I don't think it's I, I don't think it's any one organization. But before we get too far into that you know, one of the things that some of our listeners might wanna know more about is, is about Job Inc. And about sort of how you are positioned in the marketplace. And maybe you can help us the listeners better understand that in terms of the evolution of the industry, because I see job syncs place in the industry, and I won't steal your thunder on that as being a very natural outcome of the industry and actually kind of overdue. So maybe you can give the listeners like a couple minutes of where you see the industry as a having come from where it's going and how Job Sync is positioned to, to help improve that.
Peter (10:21):
He only had 90 seconds at HR Tech, so he is gotta keep it to 90 seconds.
Steven (10:26):
<Laugh>,
Alex (10:27):
I I had three minutes, so at least there is that right? I won't, I won't get into, you know, all the market dynamics, but you know, at the end of the day, you know, what we're trying to do is help reduce friction. Yeah. And we're trying to identify the places where friction creates the greatest negative impact and remove that. And right now what we're really focused in on is the top of the recruitment funnel. So we are an integration and automation platform, which means that we connect the various systems that companies use to hire, and we're really focused in on the applicant tracking systems and job sites to make the application process seamless and to reduce the friction that a candidate experiences when they're applying. So we enable large enterprise companies that use systems like Workday and Tole and success factors to have their application experience take place on the job site, whether it's Indeed or ZipRecruiter seek in Australia and, and the like to make it so that their application can take place on the job site, which then has a material impact on outcomes in terms of the return on ad spend.
(11:48):
So our customers see commonly a three to five x increase in applications for the same ad spend which has, you know, all sorts of derivative outcomes. They are, the recruiter is no longer doing the manual work of ma moving applicant data around. That means that, that the recruiter can be more responsive. That means that they're going to move to a slate of candidates more quickly cuz they actually have enough candidates. It means that then they're gonna get interviews done, offers out person starts at a much, much more compressed timeframe.
Steven (12:31):
We'll be back right after this break. Welcome back to the Inside Job boards and Recruitment marketplaces podcast.
Peter (12:48):
One of the things that we've looked at is the changing nature of recruitment, advertising, marketing evolution from job boards to recruitment marketplaces and evolution from newspapers to job boards. So recruitment marketplaces niche boards, aggregators, marketplaces and so forth. What do you see and how does that play with what you are trying to do of ultimately making the application live right on the site and then feed directly into the company's ATS or equivalent?
Alex (13:28):
I'll say my co-founder, John Bell, when he was running Boxwood Technologies, had a really good perch in 2012 and understood from the data that a, his candidates had not changed. They were running job boards for associations, but yet the application rate had gone down by 80% from 2002 to 2010. Why this happened. And the answer was because what, what employers asked in the application and where that application took place had changed remarkably. So the introduction of the offsite application experience was a mid two thousands reality. Prior to that, you'd have a couple screening questions, get the name, email address, phone number of the candidate, and it would be emailed to the recruiter. That was replaced with bringing the person to the applicant tracking system in part to deal with things like compliance from the E E O C and, and other pieces to have a consistent common application experience.
(14:29):
That then led to the proliferation of questionnaires that then got expanded to all sorts of craziness where applications started to take on average 30 minutes or longer to complete. None of which actually took into consideration the actual candidate because people looking for jobs don't apply to one job, they apply to many jobs. And so when you ask for 30 to 45 minutes to apply and that person needs to apply to 30 jobs, that's an obscene amount of time just to have the first point of an expression of interest take place. So things really got out of balance performance from those job boards went down. And so all of a sudden starting around, call it 2000 eight, nine, ten, you started to hear the phrase, job boards are dead. Now all of a sudden we have this new thing, Recruitment marketplaces, marketplaces fun fact of recruitment. Marketplace is a job board.
(15:31):
They're the exact same thing. Job boards have existed as recruitment marketplaces. A marketplace is a dub tool sided reality employers on one side and job seekers on the other. That has not in, that's not any different today than it was 20 years ago. Sure some of the functionality and features are, are somewhat different, but the function of searching for jobs, getting an onslaught of email with matching job listings and applying to jobs is the 99.9% use case for recruitment marketplaces and job board. So I would say that that evolution is really just naming to make people feel better as it's related to like from the newspaper world. I think that it's interesting cuz it's, you know, this is technology advancing, right? All of a sudden, instead of three lines in the newspaper on Wednesday afternoon you get to have unlimited text and applications show up in your email.
(16:32):
Not not in the facsimile paper, rolled up on the floor. All of those things are, are certainly improvements. And but ever since that technology started to kind of push, we have had a massive proliferation of tools to try to solve all these little problems, right? So now you've got something like 2,500 different companies tracked by talent tech labs in their ecosystem chart. There are 450 vendors exhibiting at HR Tech. Like that's an amazing, like that's an amazing statistic. It's a huge number of people trying to solve essentially three different problems, right? There's like the people trying to solve for like benefits and kind of employee experience and the recruitment function or talent acquisition function, and then the actual HCM layer, right? Like these are the three fun core functions that happen inside of companies. And you've got 450 exhibitors all competing for the same, same mind share, same wallet, pretty interesting dynamic.
(17:46):
What we see is that that proliferation has resulted in a again, an unintended consequence, but a tremendous amount of work for the recruitment and HR staff having to manage data between those siloed systems. Enterprise organizations often have more than 50% of the global 2000 has three or more ATSs, which is crazy, right? Like they have more than three ATSs. Like that's, and, and, and, and they do it for a reason. Like it's, it's actually not crazy. Like there's, they're really good business reasons to do it and like it doesn't stop there. They have 12, 15, 20 or more different systems that help support their TA teams. And all too often the data gets trapped inside of those systems. And so in order to get insights, they extract that data and recruiters become Excel jockeys and they become proficient with things like v lookup tables and pivot tables and, and all these different things that you do to make Excel work kind of like a a database. But in, and the consequence of that is that they no longer are engaging with the candidates that they're trying to recruit in the first place. So a lot of these systems that don't interact and integrate very well, or if they do integrate, it's like the lowest common denominator. So like they'll pass email address, but none of the actual data comes through. This is a a growing problem, not, not a stable one.
Peter (19:23):
What's the one bit of advice, and by the way, I would disagree with you a little bit about the recruitment marketplace versus job board. I've often said if you're just a job board, you're gonna be out of business. You've gotta have much more than that. You gotta have community, you gotta have content, you have to have effective ways to apply and information about the companies people are applying to.
Alex (19:50):
But that's, but, but, but Peter Mun Munser had all of that in 2003. They had 3000 pages, they hired 50 community writers, they took comments. Then 2003 they were doing this. They had logins and they had messaging. And I mean, we can talk about like the advancement, but I mean, you know, if you're, what if what you're saying is that you need your, your career platform for whatever you wanna call it, needs to enable engagement and actually have more reason to exist than just the job listings. Yes, I agree with that statement a hundred percent. And you could survive just as a job listings list serve, so to speak, in 2004 for a moment. Especially as Indeed started to give you free traffic. And then when they took that away, then job boards really did kind of die a little bit. At least a number of them did.
(20:43):
But my, my point is only, it's, it's not that the, the name, like the companies they have evolved on, right? In terms of what their feature set is, and it's not a mark like that, it's a new thing altogether. It's like I'll, I'll use SAS as an example. SAS as a phrase, software as a service. It's the same exact thing as an application service provider and before application service provider. If, if you had something where your data was stored on, on the system on the server, right? Which people had to describe in the nineties, but that was actually a business model in the nineties. It's not like SAS is new, it's the use of the phrase software as a service was a new invention of terminology, not in terms of functionality. That's my only point.
Steven (21:31):
If it, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it
Alex (21:34):
Is a duck and it's a dog
Peter (21:36):
<Laugh>. So, so what's your one, one bit of advice to a job board slash recruitment marketplace, whatever you want to call it, for dealing with today's realities and the challenges of helping employers find talent?
Alex (21:59):
My one bit of advice is to spend a little bit more time actually thinking about what their day to day life and problems look like. I think that from the job board operator world, I'll just, I'll go back to a a conference like eight years ago, this guy who ran TA for scripts Healthcare was giving a talk about how he evaluates talent and takes that back to the source. And he showed on the screen this gigantic spreadsheet that had the sources of, of talent that had come in. So all the usual suspects you know, the Indeeds and so forth. And he had a chart that laid out what the outcomes were in terms of the percentage of candidates that stayed for 90 days, 180 3, 65, and who were the top 20% performers in year one. And his objective is to hire top 20% performers.
(23:05):
That's always what they're trying to do, right? And when we, when I went back, we talked about it where I was working, it was like, that's not our responsibility. And I, I would, I would say if that's, if you started from the perspective of that is what you're trying to do for your client, then I think that that would help solve a lot of problems that shouldn't say problems that would make you better at working with those, with those customers, right? And if you get better because they feel like you're a partner, then they're gonna disclose more information and they're gonna treat you like a partner at which point then you're going to to learn things about what you're doing. Maybe it's the way your matching engine works or maybe it's the way that you present information or maybe there's a data point like pay transparency that would actually elevate what the quality of candidate, the candidate pool is that you're able to help surface that aligns with what their needs are.
(24:03):
And just give you one quick example. A couple, a few, like probably 10 years ago, had a conversation with a large employer making 12,000 hires a year. And it, it is probably more than 10 years ago because hot jobs still existed. She said, we just recently fired hot jobs as a vendor and I said, why too many applicants that we couldn't work with. In other words, they were giving us too much noise for what we actually ended up getting and it took the time of our recruiters to sus through all of those bad si I don't wanna say bad applicants cuz I don't think it's about the people being bad, but misaligned, right? Yeah. Poorly matched, right? Good way to put it, right? Like people that weren't right for this role that now I need to call and reach out to and tell them, Hey, I'm sorry you're not right for this role, which is a really bad way to start your relationship with people or if they're not gonna work for you. You're creating bad sentiment in the, in the I'll say in the, in the broader ecosystem, right? So getting more aligned, understanding what the end objectives and goals are, the business objectives of the TA team that you're working with. So you become a much tighter partner, I think is a, is a, is an awesome place to start.
Steven (25:31):
Alex, as we're leaving off, for the listeners who want to learn more about Joby share with us how listeners can find out more about Joby or you.
Alex (25:41):
So easiest way is to go to joby.com so j o b s y n c.com. And I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn. My handle's a Murphy 59 and be more than happy to chat with with anyone. And everyone
Peter (26:06):
Inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces is a co-production of Evergreen Podcasts College Recruiter and the AIM
Steven (26:14):
Group. Please subscribe for free on your favorite app, review it five stars are always nice, and recommend it to a couple of people you know who wanna learn more about job boards and recruitment marketplaces.
Peter (26:26):
Special thanks to our producer and engineer, Ian Douglas. I'm your host Peter Oman of the AIM Group, the leading global consultancy in the field of marketplaces and classified advertising. Find out more about our reports on recruitment marketplaces, job boards and classifieds, including our new recruitment marketplace's annual at aim group.com/reports.
Steven (26:51):
I'm your host Steven Rothberg of job search site college recruiter. Each year we help more than 12 million candidates find great new jobs. Our customers are primarily Fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and other employers who hire at scale and advertise their jobs with us. You can reach [email protected].
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