Earlier this month, Julie Calli was promoted to Recruitics’ newly created role of Chief Strategy Officer. In the position, Calli, a recognized leader in the recruitment marketing space and a nominee for this year’s ReSIs award for “Innovator of the Year,” will provide strategic oversight and direction in product and customer offerings.
Since joining the company in 2013, a year after its founding, Julie has shared her love for data-driven recruitment marketing with Recruitics clients of all sizes and industries. As she steps into her new role, we had a few questions of our own for our new Chief Strategy Officer:
Q: What can we expect to see from you in your new role?
A: I’ve always been in a position to help identify talent solutions for our clients, and I worked closely with our development team to build the proprietary technology we offer today to support the challenges companies are facing in this space.
As the Chief Strategy Officer, I will continue to push the edge of innovation in recruitment advertising. We are in a talent constrained market highlighted by an unemployment rate of less than 4 percent and a growing talent gap – and the same old ‘post and pray’ methods simply won’t cut it. It’s a war for talent, and the demand for creative solutions is more important now than ever before. My purpose is to create new opportunities for companies to attract talent, and I’m excited to embrace non-traditional methods as a big part of the solution. To me, recruitment marketing needs the same innovation as consumer marketing, because like consumers, candidates have choices. As more technologies and sources emerge for recruitment advertising, you can expect that I will continue to make data-backed decisions based on what is working. And, we’re always on the cutting-edge of the latest technologies here at Recruitics, so an open mind and an appetite for “what’s next” will always be a part of my personal approach to the solutions we drive.
Q: What’s changing about recruitment advertising?
A: The aforementioned talent gap has gained recognition from venture capitalists, resulting in the investment of $9.2+ billion in talent acquisition solutions over the last few years. For employers, this has lead to a boom in potential technologies and advertising solutions. This leaves hiring companies with an even more confusing landscape of which tech, sources and solutions to use. The fragmented and confusing nature of the market leads to a greater need for a consolidated source of truth.
Advancements in pay-for-performance have been revolutionary to the industry, but only to the early adapters at this point. The majority of employers have yet to include the rapidly advancing programmatic technology into their overall strategy. Those that apply these strategies have measurable, predictable and optimal outcomes, but mass adaptation is still in its early stages.
In talent acquisition and attraction, it’s critical to factor in the human side of the solution and take a holistic approach that incorporates technology as well as a company’s employer value proposition. Recruitment advertising continues to sophisticate, but not every solution or piece of technology can be bolted on and be successful. Choosing the “right” solution for a company’s particular needs – one that can integrate with existing platforms and produce the results that are most important to the business – will include data-backed decisions, where results can be tracked and analyzed.
Q: What’s the most important element to a successful recruitment advertising strategy?
A:
I love this quote, and it’s really why I joined Recruitics. Companies that embrace their data are going to be most successful in today’s recruitment marketing space. What might work for one company might not work for another. There are variables that some can control and others that they can’t – factors like, user experience and apply flow, whether they have strong representation of their employer brand, and conversion rates. Despite all of this, the common underlying thread is data. You must have visibility. In fact, this is why we launched Recruitics Analytics in the first place – so that all companies would have the same opportunity to objectively assess their recruitment advertising spend and success.
At the end of the day, it comes down to the fact that recruitment advertising and recruitment marketing equal cost, and that cost must be managed and justified – and data is the only logical way in which to do that.
Q: What trends are you observing as we head into the second half of 2018?
A: A couple of big ones come to mind:
Number one, the gig economy is changing the way people search for work and how companies hire.
There is a growing segment of the workforce making a career out of temporary work, and
companies are struggling to advertise to these candidates who are still learning how to properly search for these “new jobs.” Our goal at Recruitics is to help employers leverage data to properly position themselves, make better decisions around their talent acquisition strategies, and to guide them by targeted means based on their supply and demand, with influence from the gig economy.
The second ongoing trend continues to be the increasing importance of employment branding in this competitive landscape for candidates. Business success, let alone the success of a company’s recruitment marketing program, depends on it. It must be genuine to be believed. Unlike marketing, your brand impression is not something you can always dictate. It is heavily influenced by people’s experiences, and therefore is forever changing and subject to opinion. Regardless, however, employer brand is a critical part of a company’s total talent strategy, especially in a competitive market, like today’s, where job seekers expect a seamless experience.
Ensuring a “good” candidate experience, one that is genuine and aligns with expectations, is an important employment brand factor to measure. Analyzing data points, like candidate rejection rates for instance, can help you understand and improve your process. Stakeholders are becoming more and more interested in trends surrounding their candidate experience, and things like their rejection rates, because they understand that their candidates double as their consumers.
A special thank you to Julie for sharing her invaluable words of wisdom, and please join us in wishing her the very best in her new role for Recruitics. We’re excited to see what you do as our Chief Strategy Officer!
To understand and optimize your recruitment marketing ROI, request a demo of Recruitics Analytics from Julie and her team. It’s free.
