The elephant in the room, and the gorilla on the drums
It was brilliant, wasn’t it, that gorilla campaign? Rewrote the rule book for advertising, made us all love Cadbury’s again, and I bet Phil Collins was pretty pleased with it too.
According to Campaign magazine: “online exposure for the online ad delivered more than ￡2 of short-term sales for every ￡1 spent. TV reached a bigger audience but delivered only 60p of short-term sales for every ￡1 spent. And online delivered 19% additional reach for the campaign, in particular reaching a higher proportion of younger consumers than TV.” There you go: ROI.
The employer branding equivalent, of course, would have a million different measures of ROI, each one questionable and therefore neurotically caveated to pre-empt whatever criticisms it might be susceptible to:
- You drove more applications eh? What was the quality like?
- Application numbers dropped? Sounds like a failure!
- It reached a bigger audience? Sounds like it wasn’t well targeted!
- It reset expectations about the company? I bet that caused a deluge of poor quality applications!
And so on...
And of course, if we bring diversity into the equation, we have another deeply ambiguous and difficult set of ROI variables to contend with.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that recruitment marketing, unlike chocolate bar advertising, has to try to solve for what’s downstream, which is a minefield of selection processes that can’t handle volume, take ages and are inherently biased – so the link between even great work and recruitment performance will always be questionable.
And this elephant has tusks, because these processes are often overseen by the people who pay the marketing bill.
pymetrics provides an alternative. By using validated gamified neuroscience and the very latest in machine learning technology, we allow employers to process high volumes of applications quickly, with better predictive accuracy than anything that has gone before, and we systematically remove bias too. Our clients have seen massive improvements in diversity, time-to-hire, quality of hire and cost savings. Look us up.
The upshot? Maybe we can help everyone make the ROI case for recruitment marketing a bit more straightforward.
To put it another way, imagine a world where the marketers amongst us didn't need to worry about the equivalent of selling too many chocolate bars, or making sure that only the right people were buying them.
Haven't you been waiting for that moment all your life?