Editor’s Note: The following blog post contains a case study which demonstrates how Recruitics was able to dramatically lower a client’s cost-per-applicant, while simultaneously growing their applicant volume at an unprecedented rate. While the percent change and recruitment marketing strategy described herein are accurate, we have rounded cost metrics to protect our client’s anonymity.
Advertising jobs online isn’t easy. In order to find success and drive ROI, you’ll need to be able to hit your target candidates at the right time, with the right message and for the right cost.
Doing so, however, is contingent on your ability to locate your target candidates to begin with. That said, if you’re limiting yourself to one or two sources--or, just one way of advertising your jobs online--then chances are you’re missing huge swaths of your target audience that live on the vendors you’re not leveraging.
Diversifying your recruitment marketing strategy--both in number of vendors, and methods of advertising your jobs online--is critical to achieving success and turning talent acquisition into a business driver. This is called finding the right media mix.
To illustrate this point, let’s take a look at a Recruitics case study.
Our client is a staffing and recruitment agency that, because of current trends in the space such as the skills gap and seasonal hiring trends was struggling to find applicants at a reasonable cost. By leveraging Recruitics’ proprietary and industry-leading technology, and by collaborating with our team of in-house recruitment marketing experts, our client was able to bring their average quarterly cost-per-applicant (CPA) down to a respectable $11. But, there was still work to be done.
This CPA was mainly related to our client’s lack of a diversified media mix in their recruitment marketing strategy. In fact, during the time of their $11 CPA performance, our client was only advertising their jobs online using one CPC job aggregator.
While a CPA of $11 was reasonable, our client saw even greater results the following quarter thanks to our continued optimization of their spend through media diversification.
In order to really drive costs down and grow our client’s applicant pool, we had to diversify their strategy in both sources and cost models. We were able to accomplish both by adding two job boards as new sources, and taking advantage of their job slot offerings in order to leverage a new advertising method. These slots were then optimized using Recruitics Job Slot Optimization.
Making this adjustment to our client’s recruitment marketing strategy allowed us to “flip the script,” so to speak, on their metrics--creating the X, or flip in trend lines, you’re seeing in the chart above. For the first time in months, our client was beginning to see application volume outpace their associated cost, and their CPA shrinking into the single digits. In fact, at this time, they saw their quarterly CPA drop to an--at that time--low of just $4.50.
And later, as we added a second CPC job aggregator to their growing portfolio, we continued to see the same decreasing trend in their CPA, as well as the same increasing trend in their application volume. The results: an additional 34 percent decrease in cost-per-applicant and an added 60 percent in applicant volume.
To reiterate, our client’s original strategy, with Recruitics’ optimizations, included just one aggregator on a CPC model, leading to a CPA of about $11. By adding two job boards using slots and a second CPC source, we were able to help our client increase their total quarterly application volume, over a 9-month timeframe, by 1050 percent and decrease their average CPA by 71 percent over three quarters.
When it was all said and done, our client was able to drive the most applicants at the lowest cost, finishing with an average quarterly CPA of $3.
While there's a lot of data to digest here, the takeaway is simple: In order to drive the greatest ROI, you’ll need to diversify both the number of vendors you advertise your jobs online with and the way in which you advertise jobs online.
For the average hiring company, we recommend a minimum of three to five sources for optimal return on both applicant volume and cost-per-application; however, the exact number of sources needed for the best ROI is unique to every employer, staffing agency and job board.
Want to find the right media mix for you? Sign up for a demo and learn how you can achieve greater results from your recruitment marketing strategy today.
