Can't find talent, or it can't find you?

This article is for all the CEOs, COOs, and other C-suite leaders who've been told their organizations can't fill mission-critical roles. You've been informed about the talent supply & demand issues, and the Great Resignation but that's masking some very practical things that you could do to make things better.

I speak to leaders in the recruiting industry every day, and one concern continues to trump all others:?the lack of applicants and qualified candidates for mission-critical roles! It's been a problem since before the pandemic, and I feel we're all a little tired of talking about it.

I agree, so let's DO something about it!

Agile recruiting is all about using data and processes to test and learn your way to better results. Recruiting is essentially just marketing your company to prospective candidates and then selling them on the idea of wanting to work for your company. So, there's a lot to be learned from the top sales and marketing practices out there! Any good marketing team or sales leader has a "funnel" and understands the capture rate and throughput (efficiency) of those processes. They look at three leading criteria and review them constantly:

1. Am I capturing the audience's attention? For recruiters, this would equate to?clicks or views?for your job advertising
2. Are the people who are viewing my advertisements completing the process? For recruiters, this would be?apply-clicks and completed applications?(not the same!)
3. Am I attracting my target audience? For recruiters, this would be the percentage of?qualified?applicants

I recently posed this question to my LinkedIn audience: “What percentage of candidates that “click” on your online job postings do you think actually start the application process?”?The answer, according to?Appcast's 2022 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report,?is around 4.05%.

A lot of my followers got it right, but many thought it was much higher. Most recruiting teams I speak with don't know?their organization's application rate, and that's the point!

Think about it this way; over 95% percent of people who choose to view your online job advertisement walk away, and that's assuming you're at best average. For many employers, it's much worse!

To make matters worse, not all applicants who start the application complete it! What? That makes no sense!!!

The math can become a little scary; and again, the smart folks over at?Appcast?have given us the data we need to better understand the issue. For example, using data from the healthcare industry, Appcast reports a cost-per-click (CPC) of $1.10. This is what it costs to get someone to view your online job advertisement (on average). They also report a cost-per-hire (CPH) for a subset of their clients and that was $1,051. Since they are tracking the media costs only, we can do the simple math and know that it takes?~955 views of an advertisement to get one hire, on average!

If we assume the ~4% application start rate mentioned above, then you'd have approximately 38 candidates begin your application, but you could be losing many of them if you have a high-friction application process.

I want to be clear. I am not saying this is a good or bad result! I am not making a judgment on the outcome, but rather simply observing the opportunity for improvement!. That being of those 954 candidates, some could have been taken deeper or completed the process. What happened to them? Where in the process did they land or exit? How many were qualified candidates?

What to do!

Here's a practical checklist that I hope is helpful. If I were a CEO, COO, or other C-suite leader, I'd want to know the following KPIs for my recruiting organization, and how they compared to industry benchmarks.

1.????What is our company's apply rate?(apply clicks / apply starts)? How many times does someone view our online job ads, relative to the number of people that begin the application process?

2.????What is our company's application rate?(apply starts / completed applications)? What percent of those applicants end up completing the process and end up in our systems (Applicant Tracking System or ATS)?

3.????What percentage of completed applications are considered qualified?and move to the next step in the recruiting process?

4.????What's my cost-per-hire?(media only) now and how is it trending over the last 3 years?

5.????If my cost-per-hire is up significantly (spoiler alert....it is!) then is the driver the?cost of the media, declining performance of the media, or both? Which are my high and low-performing media sources?

Regardless of what I found, I'd still want to optimize my apply rate and application rate. Here are some proven ways to boost your application rates!

1. Well-written, gender-neutral job advertisements. Well written in today's market means data-optimized, and A/B tested. When was the last time your job ads were updated and were they tested or simply rolled out?
2. Include salary & benefits information! As you can see from this job advertisement heat map, it's what's important to the applicant. If you don't want to display salary information, many job boards allow you to provide it with the job ad without displaying the salary. This is important when candidates search by salary range criteria!
3. Adopt low-friction application paths and reduce the time and number of steps it takes to complete the application. This is Marketing 101! Each additional step is driving drop-off rates! I encourage you to apply for your own jobs online and see how long it takes, and how many steps are involved to complete the process.
4. Make sure candidates can easily apply to your job advertisements from a smartphone or other mobile device. According to Appcast, almost 70% of job search activity now starts on a mobile platform.
5. Lastly, make sure you have solid attribution data for all your paid media sources, and that you can access this data from within your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). You need a single source of truth about media performance. You can't make improvements if you don't know what's working, and what isn't working!

There is hope!!!

Averages can be very deceiving! To help understand the range of performance here are the application rates for nine large organizations (anonymized) all operating in the same industry.

As you can see there is a range of performance in excess of 1000%. The top performers are beating the middle of the pack by over 200%! These organizations are all operating in the same economic conditions (largely) and yet some are able to generate dramatically better results than others. Your organization is NOT solely at the mercy of external market conditions, there are many things you can do to improve results! You just need the data, a little persistence, and a test-and-learn approach!