Recipes for humble pie anyone?

I’VE NEVER BEEN VERY SURE ABOUT WHAT IS RIGHT, said Bill Door. I AM NOT SURE THERE IS SUCH A THING AS RIGHT. OR WRONG. JUST PLACES TO STAND.”
― Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

I’m writing this sat in Costa (other brands of coffee are available) after first scouring the cakes to see if they serve pie, in several flavours. If last week’s email campaign is anything to go by this “journey” is going to be interspersed with a lot of pie stops and I’m going to get bored of the same flavour – humble. Our first email campaign was a great success and all of my sarcasm is being served back to me, tenfold.

The campaign reminded 17 lapsed clients to send us some work, encouraged 38 potential clients to pick up the phone and call us & 26 to visit the website. The sales team are buzzing and Mailchimp has more than earned its keep because we have also been able to follow up on emails that bounced & update our records with new contacts. In total 293 email recipients took action (if only to read the email) and only 12 of them were to unsubscribe!

All eyes are on me now. I’ve joined in (or perhaps “press-ganged” would be more accurate) the new sales initiative by writing a weekly blog and so far 600 people have read the first two but the sales team want more from me so I’ve been dragged to a new business meeting. The meeting is the result of a potential client receiving our “this is us” email & calling to invite us in for a chat. I say new business, I’m actually going out as Business Prevention Manager because I already know we can’t help and that’s that.

We (“we” because our sales person has come to the meeting, I suspect to supervise me) arrive to very pretty offices and are greeted by a welcoming lady who offers us a brew. General smiles and polite conversation and then it goes something like this –

ME – “So, you asked us to come out for a chat, how can we help?”

THEM – “Our job board contracts are due for renewal and we want to know what you can do?”

ME – “By “what we can do” I assume you mean “how much can we get the cost down?””

THEM – “Yes”

Me – “We can’t”

And that’s that. No point in adding frills, we can’t. We can’t just take an existing job board client, with an existing relationship and an existing contract and expect the job board to sell us advertising for their existing customer, who they have looked after for the last few years & and undercut their own price. Why would they? Would you agree to one consultant within your branch undercutting another just to get a sale you already have? Of course not and, unless there’s a very good reason, I wouldn’t even ask the advertiser to.

But, the client has made me a brew and they are nice people so I suggest that maybe we can chat through which job boards they work with and how they are going to decide which ones they will renew. It’s not the cost saving help they wanted but perhaps we can share some of our experiences when buying advertising. The client proudly produces a list of placements they have made in the last 3 months, identified by the advertiser and proudly point out that the majority of their placements come from referral and recommendation (as it should be). A glance at the list shows the job boards I’d expect to see (that TV advertising, no matter how annoying and cheesy, is really bringing in results) and I see one that they aren’t currently using – great, this will come in useful in a minute. From this list, and this list alone they intend to choose their job boards………. I don’t think this is enough.

I won’t bore you with the whole conversation (my coffee is nearly cold and I think Costa want their table back, or to start charging me rent) but these are some of the things we discussed.

Start at the beginning of the process, of the jobs you posted how many views did each job get? You can write the most beautiful advert but if no one sees it there really was no point and it’s a waste of an advert credit (the fewer credits you waste, the less you spend, the better the return on investment from the good adverts). If your job isn’t being viewed it’s because it can’t be found – normally because you’ve used the wrong type of location, there’s no salary or you have no/the wrong keywords in your advert. All of this is assuming you have used the right job board to begin with – check that the job board markets to the people you are looking for BEFORE you buy credits and get them to evidence this, don’t just take their word for it.

How many people received your job via email? Over 30% of your applications come in response to people being emailed your vacancy rather than searching for it BUT, if it wasn’t sent out they won’t receive it and, therefore, can’t apply. The JBEs (jobs by email) are also a great way of reaching passive candidates who may not be actively searching for jobs.

If you are failing on either of the above your consultants need training on how the job boards work & how to write an effective advert; without a decent advert, it really doesn’t matter what job boards you use, what inventory or how many, your ROI will be low.

What’s your objective when you write an advert? Is it just to fill the vacancy you have on your desk? If it is then you’re just an order filler, working for today. If you write the advert with the objective of not only filling this vacancy but also getting good candidates to use in the future your ROI will be higher (because you are filling multiple vacancies from one advert). After filling this vacancy you will have candidates to spec out to prospect clients (a much easier conversation than just ringing up and saying “want to use us?”) and if a client calls in with a job you can talk to them about suitable candidates whilst they are on the phone rather than saying “leave it with me”. My clients list of placements evidenced this as they’d made a placement from a job board they hadn’t used for over a year.

You can’t judge a job board based on the number of applications because as a consultant you aren’t paid based on the number of vacancies you advertise or the number of applications you receive; you aren’t even paid based on interviews – only placements! But, it’s unfair to judge a job board’s success on placements alone because if you’re getting good people registered in your database they might be placed in 12 months’ time, long after you stopped using the job board or, you may have picked up a different vacancy when you made that spec call. In my opinion (and after 15 years of doing this job it’s a fair opinion) you should judge a job board based on:

• The standard of the jobs you write;
• The number of CVs you deem good enough to add to your database;
• The number of interview slots you fill from job board candidates;
• The number of placements & the ROI based on spend.

Now, if you’re really clever you’ll break this information down based on candidates applying in response to a job posting & those you found searching the job boards CV database because it’s not just what job board to use but what product to buy.

And that was that, we’d had a chat, we’d had a nice cup of tea and we left.

A week later I’ve just received an email from the client we went to see – they thought the information we provided was “a massive help and really appreciated”, could they advertise two jobs through our Emergency Candidate Boost package and would I go out to train all of their consultants?

“Business Prevention Manager”? “We can’t help and that’s that”? Pass me another slice of humble pie!

– Chelle