Recruitment ad agency's secrets in using tech and posting jobs

[00:00:13] Welcome to Episode 85 of the High Volume Hiring Podcast. I am Steven Rothberg. I'm the co-host along with Jeanette Leeds. Jeanette's unable to be with us here today, but I think somehow I'm going to figure out a way of plowing through this. I am joined today by a guy that I've known for a long time. I think I've shared a beer or two with him over the years, but Michael Eng of Job Elephant. It's an employment advertising agency, but I'm not going to steal your thunder.

[00:00:41] Michael, maybe you can tell the listeners a little bit about you, Job Elephant, when you founded it, what you do, that kind of stuff. Yeah, thanks, Steven. So I'm Michael Eng. I'm the founder and CEO of Job Elephant. We are what's known as a recruitment advertising agency, first and foremost. We help employers get their jobs distributed to all the different nooks and crannies of the internet.

[00:01:12] So we're talking about job boards primarily, but also that can be things like social media. It could be a lot of different places. And the point being to try to find and surface those candidates that you might not be able to source on your own and to be able to kind of surface those folks so that you can expand and get a larger applicant pool to choose from.

[00:01:39] Awesome. And so you founded the company, if I remember correctly, 25 years ago? Yes, exactly. Yes. So you've seen a few things come and go over the years. Yes. And before we dig into that, because I think it'd be interesting to sort of to talk a little bit about like where we've been, where we are, where you think things are going to be going. But let's first sort of do like a bit of a check in for your clients, because some recruitment advertising agencies work a lot in different niches.

[00:02:07] Some are pretty general. They have clients from all different kinds of industries, geographic locations. But who are your ideal clients so that the listeners have a handle on where you're coming from? Yeah, that's a great point. And so, you know, 25 years ago, there were probably over 100 recruitment advertising agencies in North America of all different sizes.

[00:02:28] And you had, you know, Bernard Hodes and you had TMP Worldwide and some of those older names that still kind of exist in different forms today. And for the most part, most recruitment, you know, when people think of advertising agency, they think of Mad Men, they think of Madison Avenue. They think of, you know, having some, you know, bourbon or something like that in the office at noon. Just at noon? Yeah. But the recruitment advertising agencies are a little bit different.

[00:02:58] And when I started Job Elephant, I created a dot-com right as the dot-com bubble burst. At that moment, there was a real sea change in the space. That being going from the analog of newspaper advertising to the digital platforms of things like CareerBuilder Monster. Well, CareerBuilder didn't quite exist then, but CareerPath, its predecessors.

[00:03:21] There is also, you know, you had Craigslist, you had a whole bunch of different online platforms that were really starting to undercut and lower the cost of recruitment. So those really expensive, you know, $25,000 Sunday newspaper ads that you remember, those days are long gone. And now things are really focused on the digital space.

[00:03:48] The industries that Job Elephant focuses on, higher education, public government, North America, is that about right? Yeah. So in marketing speak, they have a segment called SLEDS, a state local education district is what that stands for. So we specialize in higher education. So we work with about 1,200 colleges and universities throughout North America.

[00:04:16] And we also, that dovetails really nicely with like smaller governments. So think of your county and type of organizations where they don't necessarily have the resources in-house to do a lot of these types of things. And so we offer a really easy turnkey kind of a solution that helps get them the best talent for their jobs.

[00:04:43] One other thing is just as an aside that I've learned over the years, we went online in 96. So we're, you know, about the same age. It wasn't really much of a business until the late 90s. So we, you know, kind of cut our teeth in the same era. But one of the things I've learned about a lot of government agencies, not all, but a lot of them, is that they really have no recruitment marketing expertise in-house at all. It's just not a function. And, you know, is it better, worse? Whatever.

[00:05:13] It's just different than a lot of our corporate friends. And so they're going to come to a job elephant for that help. Another thing that I wanted to talk with you about is the differences between, say, corporate employers that are hiring at scale versus higher ed government. Do you see different collateral, branding, job postings, technology?

[00:05:42] Like, what are some things that for the kind of business that you do, when you're talking with your peers at, say, the rate and season for the world? It's like, wow, that's really different. Well, I think, you know, working in the sectors that we do, what I would say is that there's just so much diversity of the types of recruitments that we're doing.

[00:06:06] And what I mean by that is, is that if you think of a college or a university, it's like a small city in and of itself. It is. Yeah. The types of jobs that we've advertised for can be very technical, very specialized. So as I like to tell people, you know, I've literally advertised for rocket scientists at Jet Propulsion Labs at Caltech, which is one of our customers. I've also advertised for air traffic controllers.

[00:06:35] You know, one of our customers is Penn State. They have an airport. So, you know, there's just random stuff like that that happens. And then, of course, these things also kind of dovetail into each other because then, you know, one of our competitors might be in health care and really focused on that. That's typically why we've kind of positioned ourselves in the market to go after this kind of underserved group, as I feel, the public sector.

[00:07:05] And the thing is, is that a lot of colleges and universities also have hospitals that are associated with them. So we end up being in the same spaces as everybody else because we're everything under the sun. If you think of any of these types of different organizations, like and again, going to your contrast of like corporate recruiting, typically those corporations are focused on a certain industry, a certain specialty, whatever that might be.

[00:07:32] And so that lends itself more to, okay, sure. They need accountants. Everybody needs those things and everybody needs salespeople or some kind of form of that potentially core business functions. But they don't have the breadth of just like, you know, like again, just, you know, one of my clients is a community college and they power the local zoo.

[00:07:59] So, you know, got zoologists and veterinarians and, you know, I mean, just, it's, it's really amazing how many different niches there are out there. And so that's really focused. And I'll kind of jump to the next subject a little bit, which is that what doesn't work for our customers for the most part is the programmatic advertising. Okay.

[00:08:23] You know, we've been to all those same conferences over the last 10 years and it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But the, at least we've all heard those, those claims, but it really lends itself to what I would say more generic jobs per se. And it's great on the, on the local level. But when you're trying to find those zoologists, they're not on places like Indeed.

[00:08:52] They're just not, you know, and they're not looking there necessarily, but they're a member of some society or association. And typically those different organizations have their own niche job boards. And so I look at, at job elephant as being a completely different side of the equation. So I think somewhere in the neighborhood of half of all recruitment advertising dollars are spent on programmatic, but that means that the other half is not. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:09:22] So I focus on the half that's not programmatic. Before we move on, I need to let you know about my friend, Mark Pfeffer and his show, People Tech. If you're looking for the latest on product development, marketing, funding, big deals happening in talent acquisition, HR, HCM, that's the show you need to listen to. Go to the Work Defined Network, search up People Tech, Mark Pfeffer. You can find them anywhere.

[00:09:50] So the programmatic advertising, it basically, computers making your buying decisions for you based upon the rules you provided it. It might be, we only want this ad to run in the U.S. on engineering sites, you know, maybe, and not necessarily, but usually coupled with performance priced, cost per click, cost per application.

[00:10:15] So shifting from programmatic, which is not overwhelmingly dominant on the corporate side, but it is massively important on the corporate side to high volume hiring. You're hiring 100 people. It's almost a given that at least a part of that is going to be programmatic. And it might be done in-house directly with your own team. It might be through an ad agency or an RPO or something like that, but it's there. Sure.

[00:10:45] I hear from you, not so much on your side. What about cost per click, pay per click, pay per application? Some of the performance-based pricing, is that the same? Is that rare for your clients or is that different? We work with all the players that, you know, in the space. And so we can do all those programmatic things as well.

[00:11:06] I just would say that the underserved part of the space right now is still on the traditional duration-based job postings because that is going to be those, that's a pool that is just underserved. One of the things about programmatic that I think that you would agree with is that everybody's fishing in the same ponds. There's only a certain set and they're all chasing each other's tail.

[00:11:34] And so that lends itself to like, I don't know, there's at least 100 or so different job boards that are part of these networks and things like that. Our network is about 25,000 different media sources. So we're talking about super hyper-localized, hyper-niche markets that are just not part of any of those programmatic buys. Interesting. So I'm not anti-programmatic, if you will. There's a use case for that.

[00:12:03] But the counterpoint that I don't think gets enough airtime these days is the fact that there's still a need for those association job boards. And again, within higher education, because we have so much experience with that, that's where there's conferences. They're doing job fairs at these conferences. There's certain, you know, segments or disciplines where the only way to get break-in to certain, you know, fields is to go through those scientific organizations.

[00:12:33] Interesting. So I think I've got time for basically one more question. And something that you and I were talking about just before I hit the record button in the green room, as they say, is that a lot of employment advertising agencies that work with basically the corporate market,

[00:12:48] they do a lot of branding work, writing job postings, sometimes even strategy around, you know, you know, this employer just closed a factory in such and such a town. And so there's that workforce planning. You're looking to open up a factory. Lo and behold, the workforce you're looking for is pretty similar to the one that just closed. We're advising you to go into that town. Right.

[00:13:15] I'm kind of hearing from you, not so much with your clients. That would be a key differentiator. Correct. Well, one of the things that we've invested heavily in technology over the last 20 years or more and been tracking all of our advertising. And because we've got such a foothold within certain segments, again, the municipalities, the county governments, and higher education, and specifically,

[00:13:42] we've seen a lot of things and we have our own proprietary data on this. If you're trying to hire, you know, some very specialized position, we've got most likely, you know, an astrophysicist, for example. We've advertised for that before. And so we know what worked, what didn't work.

[00:14:03] So we actually built out our own algorithm so that we can bring and bring to the customer, okay, over those 25,000 different media sources, the job elephant, you know, anything out of the sun, essentially. We can now tell you, here are the top five places to advertise. Interesting. So maybe another topic for another day, but maybe we'll sit down for a bourbon at lunch, pretend we both are cast members of Mad Men and talk about whether, in fact, you aren't doing programmatic.

[00:14:31] Because that, to me, sounds like a very in-house programmatic product that would be of no interest to most corporations, but of massive interest in the public sector. Exactly. And I think it's still early days, you know, we didn't touch on, you know, a lot of things. One of the other analogies, since you brought up newspapers or Amazon, if you remember back then, Stephen, if you had any job that had anything to do with computers, it went in the keyword computer.

[00:15:02] Yes. There was like a quarter of the newspaper was computer jobs. Right. Which could be programming. It could be hardware. It could be that one of your acquired skills is Lotus 1-2-3, for those of us of a certain age. Yeah. It was all these things. And so I really feel like when you start to talk about something like AI, now we're talking, today, we're just like, everything is AI. It's just computer. Yes. Yeah. It's still super early.

[00:15:32] We don't even know what the different, you know, specialties are. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Well, Michael, this has been awesome. It's great to see you again. Thank you so much for giving us a little bit of a peek into your world. This has been fun. Yeah. Thanks for having me. Cheers.