Kill Your Indeed Habit: What Job Ads Actually Cost You

[00:00:06] Everybody, welcome back. Today, we are talking about something really cool and near and dear to my heart as a person that expands between marketing and talent. And it's about advertising in this crazy world that we live in. And first, I want to say that this episode is brought to us by our affiliate, pin.com. Use our code TALENTLESS to get 10% off your first three payments with them. Great sourcing tool. So let's start. Today's guest is Jason Bustolka.

[00:00:35] Woo, you did good! Right on the money. Yeah. You sounded like a true bohemian there. I mean, I don't know what's happening today unless I have enough coffee. Jason leads the Stratech Talent Consulting Advisory where he advises employers and HR tech companies on recruiting operations, technology design, and workforce strategy.

[00:00:57] 25 plus years in HR and recruiting, including stops at Microsoft and HCA Healthcare. If you don't know them, I don't know how. Where he led strategy and operations for a national recruiting team of up to 600 people managing over 40,000 open recs and more than 125,000 hires a year. If anyone can talk about this subject, it is our friend Jason. So welcome, Jason.

[00:01:27] Thank you. So this gets into a lot of deep questions for me, and I have so many for you, Jason. But I was reading the other day about how much money talent teams are really spending on just job ads, job adverts, like all of these crazy things. And I think people should really be questioning it. I got brought into a client recently to reduce not only tool spend, but ad spend. And it's a different world that we live in right now.

[00:01:53] So why don't you kind of bridge the subject for us about how you talk about this? Yeah, it's first thing that amazes me is how many companies can't even answer the question, what did that ad spend do? So, you know, I still talk to a lot of places where either they have no idea where their candidates come from at all, or they literally are still relying on a candidate to select a dropdown to tell them where they came from.

[00:02:18] As if the candidate actually cares that you get accurate data, you know, so the quality of their data, of their knowledge of where candidates come from, where they hire the best candidates from, and that is lacking. And in many cases, it's not even because their system couldn't provide it. It's just not configured properly to do it. And they didn't know to ask. And the vendors, frankly, don't care if you don't care. Right. So that piece by itself just absolutely amazes me.

[00:02:47] The number of people that if I just say, how many visitors did you get to your career site? They go, I have no idea. Where do they come from? I have no idea. So, of course, they don't know conversion rates. They don't know anything. So they're just throwing money out there like a lot of hope and prayer. Right. And I guess that is the definition of post and pray. You know, I used to think post and pray, you know, before I went into the high volume world, post and pray was like anybody who relies on a job board at all. That's posting and praying.

[00:03:14] And then you go to work in volume and you realize, OK, that's just not realistic. Not all posting is praying because a lot of posting is very strategic where you're posting, how you're measuring the quality of that traffic, how well you're converting that traffic, etc. So I said some of us just need to get better at religion and because we still need to post. The reality is I've been hearing the job boards dead my entire career, just like the resumes dead.

[00:03:41] I mean, I sure see a lot of resumes for something that died. It's like the walking dead at this point. Right. You know, so we keep talking about these things are going to go away. These things are going to go away. They're never going to go away. They're going to transform and they're going to change. But what an organization needs to know, you need to have the data to be able to tell how you're performing. And if you don't, you need to figure out do your platforms support you being able to get that data? Is it a configuration issue? What is it?

[00:04:11] Because without that, everything else, you're just flying blind. Yeah, we talk about this a lot on this show about data and connecting the dots. And the fact that you brought up that LinkedIn drop down thing for me is immediate for me. Like, where did you come from? I don't, you know, like I just check like the first bots when, you know, I don't really think it through. And I don't, I don't think I've ever tied the two together.

[00:04:37] Like maybe we should be more intentional about what that dropdown actually does and what it does on the back end of something. Because it's important because that's how we spend money, right? Well, I equate it to, you know, if you've ever been gated to watch a video because you have to answer a survey question. I wouldn't pay for that survey day in a million years because I know I just click a box and move. I don't even know which box I clicked. And it's very similar on that front.

[00:05:03] If you're making your decisions based off of that, you're making your decisions, you know, based on, you know, fairy tales and wishes. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, I advertising spend for this kind of stuff, especially like healthcare. Now, I think about this, like how targeted you have to be in healthcare because it's its own like monster in recruiting. So what is the solution to the dropdown? Where should we be spending and where do you see the biggest short term improvement really quickly?

[00:05:32] Yeah, I mean, basic source code tracking has existed in ATSs for years. I was at a conference a little over a year ago and I was talking to a health system that I will leave unnamed. And they were just going on and on how great Phenom People was. It's like, oh, my God, it's the best thing since sliced bread. And I said, what's so great about it? Well, now we finally know where our candidates came from.

[00:05:55] And I just went, wow, you bought Phenom People to get something that the tech platforms have been supporting for years and years and years and years and years. And you're bragging up Phenom People as their best thing since sliced bread. So, you know, it's just interesting when you run into the number of people that don't realize that this exists. And when we put in ATSs in small companies, too, very small companies, we're able to track where all the candidates come from within a modern ATS.

[00:06:24] So it just me. How did they ever get in a budget? I don't know what leaders are like in other organizations, but HCA, our operational leadership would have been beating the heck out of us if we weren't able to explain to them how we know that these dollars are turning into value. And maybe that's the reason why a lot of these places do struggle to get advertising dollars is because they can't explain to their leadership how those advertising dollars are working or not working.

[00:06:50] Yeah. This is something we talk about on this show, right, all the time, too, is understanding the whole of a business, not just the put some butt in a seat type cup of recruiting and talent. And this also goes to me about understanding how marketing works. That's purest form.

[00:07:09] I bet most recruiters couldn't even tell you how those advertising dollars should be spent or what marketing spends them on or what is a doable budget. And I think that doesn't take much to learn really quickly, especially in this world of AI about where effective how to manage your budget effectively and also ask for the right dollars and how to track those dollars.

[00:07:33] And all of those things, I think, is just should be a basic skill you understand as you're spending money or spending that money. We should be able to explain it. Well, and it's so different from organization to organization, too. I put out an article a few weeks ago about just how broken Walmart is, which absolutely blows my mind that the largest hire in the United States has a website that is completely broken. But it is.

[00:07:59] And if you want to go out and read more about it or watch the videos because I've recorded it all for you to watch on YouTube, you can. But according to SEMrush, when I went and pulled the data, Walmart's getting about 14 million visitors a month to their website. So just think of that dream. 14 million visitors a week. Why would you be spending any money on advertising? Well, I can tell you why. Their conversion is horrible.

[00:08:25] Just go on their website and engage with the so-called tools. I mean, the tools, it feels like caveman tools that they're using to hire with. And it's still amazing how common it is with companies like this. So they don't have working Google for jobs. No, what is wrong with you? And then all of that traffic that's coming to your site, you're doing such a horrible job of converting that traffic.

[00:08:52] I literally took different resumes, including mine. I have a son who has a high school diploma and some retail experience. I took a senior finance leader's resume and it loaded it into their resume matching software. Find me a job. We all got the exact same set of job matches. Exact set. It doesn't do anything. It's just randomly throwing jobs out there. And so now imagine when you take somebody who's vastly underqualified.

[00:09:17] So my son with the high school diploma, the first job that came up was like $130,000 a year job. They aren't going to hire him for that job. But how many people are applying for that job? Now you've created trash for your recruiters to have to work through. You know, so this is just what amazes me is good tech has existed on the front end forever. Google for jobs is not a mystery. Believe it or not, Google tells you how to do this properly. Right.

[00:09:43] But these organizations, the implementations that they do are just horrible. Theirs happens to be an in-house built product. But I've seen many from some of the best brand names out there where the implementation is done wrong. And I go and I look at the code from the outside and I can see why you're broken. So it really, it shocks me that large companies who are buying large vendors end up with, you know, just a very poor product. But it's very true.

[00:10:11] If I'm not converting the candidates, then, you know, of course, I'm pouring more and more money into the top of the funnel. But the interesting thing is all this stuff that's broken on your website is usually not broken if you indeed easy apply. So what we've done is we've taken this expensive source, Indeed, and we've given their candidates the happy path. But if you want to come directly to me, I'm going to give you the horrible path. We're going to have trolls under the bridge waiting to attack you.

[00:10:38] Why have you given Indeed the golden ticket to pump candidates into you and charge you money? And yet, if somebody wants to come to your site, seek you out as an employer, apply for a job, you make it more painful. In fact, I find it funny. There are some people whose whole site is, please point you to Indeed and go apply for Indeed. I know. That was actually what I was writing down.

[00:11:02] I was I actually used to do that as a recruiter because the apply path at the company was a 12 page apply path versus Indeed was a one click apply. So if it was a candidate that I sourced had a great phone call with, I was like, yo, this is the apply link. Go do this one. And because on the back end, it showed it the exact same. The only thing different was the source. So it was like these 12 pages were all for not. We really didn't need that kind of effort justification.

[00:11:28] And we didn't warrant any of this, which is why we had such a high drop off rate in our top of funnel in our application pool. The other thing that I was going to say to kind of note on what you are saying was I feel like TA has moved from a role that was like HR's little sidekick, you know, paper pushing admin to not only strategic partner, but you also kind of have to be a jack of all trades. And the fact of like you really have to understand your tech, like you have to understand what source code is.

[00:11:57] I was somewhere where they had just implemented a new software. This is like a Fortune 200 company, very, very large. And they had no source code. They had no way of knowing where any hire was coming from, where anything was coming from. And who did they? They used Phenom. So it was funny that you were saying that. And so they used them and that was the very first time that they were ever having like source data and stuff like that as far.

[00:12:23] And all they were doing was simple tracking, which had, you know, this out of the box ATS that they purchased been adequately, you know, integrated and synced correctly. Which one cool audit or consultant can always come do that for you.

[00:12:37] By the way, which was my suggestion to the company, because if you have leaders who aren't that jack of all trades, who don't know their tech, who don't understand conversion rates, like basic data, who don't understand market spend and branding and attraction, which is a whole marketing thing. Like you really have to have a hat in every little boat and really understand this ecosystem because TA is its own little vessel like that.

[00:13:06] Versus in HR, I feel like you don't really have to know data like that. You don't really have to understand the marketing. You should. It helps. Like it's going to get you further. But if you don't know what source code configuration is as an HR generalist, it's not going to probably kill you. If you don't know what it is as a TA specialist, it's going to definitely impact the insights you provide and the results and like impact you can replicate as well. So anywho, that was just what I thought.

[00:13:35] Yeah, it's recruiting software is such a different world than the rest of ERP software. And it's the reason why systems like Oracle and Workday and UKG, they all suck. I don't care who, which one they are, they all suck because they were not built for the transactional nature of recruiting. If you think about finance people working in there, HR people working in there, nobody is working with, you know, at HCA we get like three or four million candidates a year, right?

[00:14:05] So this is transactional volume and it is so high. And so recruiters are doing so many actions. Like time and motion matters in a recruiting recruiter's world. And then the same thing from a candidate standpoint, when you don't build a website thinking like e-commerce, which is really recruiting is way more e-commerce than it is anything else.

[00:14:28] And you build it like traditional paginated systems, you know, are built within ERPs. You end up with just these horribly substandard products and they don't care. I mean, Workday does not care. You know, UKG does not care. You know, Workday's native career site cannot even be set up to be Google for Jobs compliant. Not the way it's built. They don't provide the proper tech to do it.

[00:14:58] So they clearly don't care about career sites or they would do those things. But yet what we're seeing is so many of these companies are starting to go, well, we're trying to limit our number of platforms. And, you know, so we're going to whatever comes out of the box, that's what we're going to use. And don't get me wrong. You shouldn't just be like adding vendors like crazy without any thoughts. But there are point solutions that are very purpose built, that are exceptional at what they do and have big impact in your organizations.

[00:15:27] And many people should be looking at those point solutions rather than trying to do everything under the umbrella of their ERP provider. Yeah, I agree. I know that you've had a lot to say about Indeed as well. And you just brought them up. And it's always a good topic for me and people because I fight them about Indeed all the time. And as they change their model, it seems like every day, you know, I'm curious because they are generating a lot of money where people should be doing a lot of this.

[00:15:55] What's your general feeling about where they're at right now as an organization and as a job board? This episode of the Talentless Podcast is brought to you by Do Better Consulting. Hiring is broken. Job searches are broken. And honestly, most career advice out there is just recycled nonsense. Do Better Consulting exists for people who are done guessing. They work with mid to senior leaders, founders, and talent teens to get clear on their signal, how they show up in the market.

[00:16:25] How they hire. And how decisions actually get made. No fluff. No templates just to say you have them. Just strategy, structure, and honest feedback that actually works. If you're tired of spinning, it might be time to do better. Head to dobetterconsulting.net. Well, I think the soul of Indeed rotted some time ago. And I'll say this not even from an employer. Start from a candidate.

[00:16:50] I, before I was in recruiting, when I was an HR business partner, I was like the biggest proponent of Indeed for job seekers. I said, it's all the jobs in one place. Why wouldn't you go there? Well, that's exactly the reason why you shouldn't go there now. It's not all the jobs in one place. I mean, you're not going to see them. It's who paid the most.

[00:17:19] It was two at the top, two at the bottom. Everything else was organic. And truly, they were out there trying to get as many of the jobs off the web as they could and truly trying to offer up as many options to a candidate as they could. That day has been long gone. As soon as they started to hide what was sponsored, it just meant that everything was sponsored, right? It wasn't really coming up if it wasn't sponsored. And so for me, they destroyed the value proposition to the candidate.

[00:17:48] And so now people ask me where to go look for jobs. I say go to Google for Jobs. Google for Jobs is trying to get every job out there, right, regardless of where it comes from. It's not perfect. It's not that there's not any scammers out there, other things. We have those issues. But if you want to find every job, I have seven kids from the age of 18 to 27. And they're at job hunting ages, prime job hunting ages. And when you would look for jobs, like when you're in high school and locally, I'd say don't go to Indeed. You're going to miss half the jobs.

[00:18:18] Half the local places don't. They're on snag a job and things like that. They're not doing it on Indeed because the cost has gotten crazy and they're buried in it. And so we just see that you're literally missing out on 50, 60 percent of the entry level jobs from these smaller businesses. So they've killed the candidate proposition on that front. But then you flip to the employer side and it used to be a fantastic proposition that you're going to get a lot of free traffic. Only pay for the traffic.

[00:18:47] You know, it's in truly high demand. And I have no problem with I'm a capitalist. You want to make more money, make more money. I just had too many times where Indeed was sitting across the table from me and telling me that this is for candidate experience. This is going to make the candidate experience better. And I had a whole bunch of senior leaders on from Indeed. And I just said, stop blowing smoke up my butt. I don't want to hear that this is all about candidate experience.

[00:19:16] How is a minimum job spend about candidate experience? Right. And and I just kept hammering on it. And I said, guys, again, if you just tell me it's for the money, it's just we're looking for more money. I said, I'll take that answer. And finally, I got them to say, OK, we're trying to make more money. Thank you. Just, you know, don't pee on me and then tell me it's raining. And that is what, you know, Indeed's been doing for a long time with the employer. And and I think the the the the the death knell that they tried was obviously the A.I.

[00:19:46] apply. Yeah. And when when that came in, I said all along with all this bot traffic that they've been having problems with on Indeed. I said, if they wanted to stop that bot traffic, they could. You could stop a huge amount. These bots aren't that smart. I've gone out and tested most of these bots. And you could do things like just looking for pattern recognition. How fast did you fill out an application and different things? Natural human things. Right. And there's all kinds of things they could have put in to stop bots. They chose not to.

[00:20:14] And and it's really interesting because HCA uses a special finish apply URL from from LinkedIn. So bots have a hard time getting through it at all. And you can see it in their traffic that they haven't gotten the same level of spikes from these bots because of their unique apply. And I literally was on the phone with a client yesterday. They have shut their easy apply off completely. And they're just saying we're willing to take the pain because of the trash. They said it's costing us more money.

[00:20:43] We're spending more money for applicants. But they said the amount of bad applicants that it stopped from getting through. So instead of Indeed deciding to let's let's roll out the carpet to fight the bots. Right. And stop the trash traffic. We can't beat them. Join them. And we're going to we're going to do the same thing and then charge you for it. I mean, it's it's pretty sad.

[00:21:05] As I've said, if you haven't read the terms and conditions of Indeed, just download them, put them in AI and say, tell me why as a company I should be concerned with this. Oh, my God. AI has got a long story to tell you. There's all all kinds of concerns in there. So they've they've gone draconian. As I said that, you know, the the orange chair is dead. It's gone. And it's been replaced by the green chair at Indeed.

[00:21:33] Indeed. And, you know, it again, if they would just be more forthright on this is what we are, then I can live with that. Just don't lie to me. I love that. Just don't lie to me. Let's do that today. I will say I do feel like a lot of those companies, they I mean, they're they profit off of TA dysfunction.

[00:21:54] Like, oh, yeah, they profit off of the inability to be able to source somewhat like quality, like every little notch that a recruiter can't successfully do is their angle to profit from. Like that. So a lot of times whenever you ask, like, what's in it for the recruit? Like, honestly, probably nothing, probably the reverse. If they could make it even worse, they would. They'd make more money from it, which because whenever you think about it and they make those one click applies with all of the trash.

[00:22:24] And now you have companies who are entering AI at the top of the funnel because they've created so much that they're like, well, let's have AI go through it. So now we have this cycle of what's created and what's handling it. And it's all just different technologies that we're all having to pay for to where if we would just strip the whole thing away and don't let them do any of it, then we go back to the organic way that we used to before to where it's just funny.

[00:22:51] It's funny that we're buying into the cycle, that we're layering this stuff whenever it's just like, had we not started with the AI nonsense, I think, you know, we wouldn't have to be solving AI nonsense with more AI nonsense. I mean, I agree. Things evolve, though, and I'm fine with that. Just don't don't outpace yourself. Right. Like, I don't I get concerned when we're so want to be at the forefront of everything. We haven't thought everything through. Also, we just don't have enough water.

[00:23:20] Yeah, we don't have enough water. All right. We don't have enough water. Like, chill out. You don't need to make the meme. You don't need to do whatever you were about to do on Claude. Like, save the water, y'all. So I have to do this for our listeners. I've done this myself. But, Jason, I want you to walk a talent leader right now through an audit of their spend at its basic level on advertising. How would they start if they're not source track?

[00:23:47] What do they stop immediately doing and how do they start looking at things? Yeah, I mean, well, first thing, you have to get source tracking turned on or you can't audit anything. But once you get your source tracking turned on, the first and most simple is cost of application. Now, a lot's hidden in cost of application, right? Quality of app from different places, et cetera. But that's where then you start getting into quality measures. So cost of a quality app. And boy, if you want to talk about something that's debated amongst organizations, what's a quality app?

[00:24:15] But generally, the way that most people define it is, is did the recruiter move that candidate forward to further consideration? Whether that be to a phone screen or to a hire manager review, we've said that this applicant on the face appears to be meeting the qualifications of the job. And and we won't look at them further. And it's as good as definition is probably anybody's going to find. And you make sure you have your steps and statuses set up in your system. So you track that move and you start measuring that quality point.

[00:24:43] And then obviously then the cost per hire by source. Right. And then, of course, you have to break it down to different things because, you know, you think in health care, nursing versus janitorial can be very, very different and different sources will perform in different ways. But if you can't explain that basics of that funnel, you know, you're you're missing out horribly on what that looks like. And then, like I said, the the conversion metrics upstream.

[00:25:09] So understanding what is the traffic coming to my website and and where is that traffic coming from? It's amazing the detail that you can get through any really good career site as to explaining to you where your traffic is coming from and what that traffic does. It's really we used to break down the traffic to what's the bounce rate by source? What's the time on site by source? What's the actions on site by source? And you start to see some really interesting things.

[00:25:36] And one of the things that I saw in the data back then was I said, guys, are we advertising on Bing? And I kind of got heckled a little bit. Advertising on Bing? Jason, nobody uses Bing. And I said, well, there's like 11 percent of our traffic comes from Bing. So nobody is a pretty strong statement. And the traffic that comes to us from Bing stays on the site longer, does more actions.

[00:26:03] And if you go and you start to research Bing users, they're older than the average Google user. And so they're the most experienced people coming to your site. And so we started advertising on Bing. Not that it was going to replace Google and Indeed. And this is the other thing is people make it sound like it's a binary switch. Either I completely replace Indeed or I keep it completely using Indeed. I can't do something in between. And as I said, Indeed and every other advertising source is a hockey stick effect.

[00:26:32] If you want to increase your candidates by 20 percent, often it might mean that you have to increase your spend by 60 percent. So it's not a matter of do I replace one? Do I reduce the dependency off of each one of these? And I take back my talent acquisition strategy. Right now, so many people have completely outsourced their talent acquisition strategy to Indeed. It's just the most common to Indeed. And I just say, just take control of it. It doesn't mean that Indeed isn't still 60 percent of your traffic.

[00:27:02] But when it's I literally talk to people, it's 98 percent of their traffic. And Indeed can do whatever they want. The tail is wagging the dog. If they want to increase their price by 5x, you have no choice. You don't have anything else built to fight that, right? Right. Whereas if you actually have a website that converts and Indeed does a 3x, 4x. And I was talking to a client, they have 3x price went up in their cost for physical therapists.

[00:27:28] 3x from $150 to $500 in less than six months. And my whole thing is, is I go, I know that in between now, if you do Google placement ads, you're going to beat that Indeed price. You're not going to be spending $500 a pop to get them from Google placement ads. You know, so it's having all these different levers that you can pull. And you have to utilize the different ones, measure them, see what their cost is.

[00:27:53] And maybe my cost per quality app in physical therapist is, you know, it's $225 on Google. And I'm not using it now until Indeed does something stupid and jacks my price up to $500. And I go, well, wait a minute, I got the Google lever I can pull. You know, so what are the levers you're going to pull? And if your only lever you're going to pull is the lever to dump more cash into Indeed, then you failed. Right there, you failed. You don't have another choice. And frankly, Indeed should be charging you more money. Why wouldn't they?

[00:28:22] It's just good business. It's capitalism. Absolutely. It's capitalism. I do believe in, like, the strategic anything to anything, right? But definitely in where you're spending your money. You should be in control at all points. And I do completely agree with you that I feel like our industry especially is just giving all the control away to these major players and not really said, okay, wait a minute.

[00:28:50] And taken a pause and looked at what actually is happening. I talk about this all the time when it comes to tech spend, right? We're so willing to spend trillions of dollars to get great tech, but we're never actually looking whether it's efficient and doing the right thing. And we're using it every day. Are we even using it half the time? And I think the same, it can go and take that same mindset and move it to advertising.

[00:29:18] And it kind of is that same thing. Like, what is the most effective? Should we even be there? All of these other pieces that I don't think we're questioning enough. We're just not saying what's happening enough and then diagnosing and then having a fix. We're just saying, okay, let's just throw some more money at it. And it just doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's easier for leaders to throw money at it than to admit that they don't know what they're doing or what they're talking about or even how to have the conversation.

[00:29:47] Like, in its full truth, that's honestly what I feel because there are a lot of things that I feel whenever you do outsource majority to Indeed, they're not even doing it well. They're just able to explain what they're doing.

[00:30:03] And that surface level enough is usually enough to get executive buy-in just because they're able to articulate in confidence what they're able to provide or do or whatever, regardless of the validity of it, regardless of what the actual data is showing. They're at least able to provide something. And because they can do that, regardless of if it's even, again, good, they're just able to give enough surface to make people feel like it's important.

[00:30:30] And so they're able to get also that buy-in. So that's something that I feel like our leaders, again, they can't talk to it. They definitely can't talk to it confidently. They can't talk to it confidently in an executive suite and try to get buy-in and put theirself and their team on the line for it either. So I think it's something, again, to where TA leaders have to be a jack of all trades. And a lot of them are not ready to admit that they don't really understand the tech. They don't really understand the conversion and how that works.

[00:30:57] They don't even understand the difference between a prospect and an applicant and, like, the actual transition that goes with that funnel. Well, I was speaking to a recruiting leader of one of the top 10 health care companies in the United States, size-wise. And I was talking to him about their tech stack. And he said, our CFO has said we can't spend money on anything else except advertising. That's the only thing.

[00:31:21] And I said, but your conversion is literally so bad that they have recruiters who are putting their emails on the job and say just to apply, just to email me. Because they're using ORC. I know exactly what you're talking about. Ew, ew, ew. Yeah. I mean, literally, you feel like you need to take a shower. Yeah. And it's so bad. I used it today. And I said, I can come in there. I can literally come in there and bring you less than $100,000 worth of tech, right? Fix all of that stuff.

[00:31:50] You're spending multimillion dollars in advertising money. And I can probably give you a 10x return on your tech investment. And I'm sure I can bring a vendor to the table that will guarantee it. They'll guarantee that if we don't pay for you, you get it for free because it's just that broken. You have these CFOs. And again, CFOs know finance. They don't know recruiting. So I understand the simple thought, well, spend more money on advertising. That makes sense. All the rest of this doesn't make sense.

[00:32:19] And that's where, you know, my whole thing is, Brian, just give me time with your CFO. Let me explain to them how the world works and how advertising is not just a third-party vendor. Advertising is the entire process of consuming the applicant. And if you can't fulfill that on the end, it's like advertising for a retail store, but then putting a lock on the door and don't let anybody in. That's essentially what you're doing. Literally. Yeah. That's a good point.

[00:32:46] Yeah, I feel too like sometimes I see some of these, the ad spends and it's like spending money on a Super Bowl ad, right? And not seeing the return on the Super Bowl ad almost, right? It's like this, it's this weird thing of like spending all this money to do this one thing and not being able to understand it or measure it. Makes no logical sense, right? It doesn't make logical sense to do that.

[00:33:12] You wouldn't spend a million dollars on a Super Bowl ad unless you understood the conversion or what was going to happen after. I feel like it's so similar here and that we need to equate those dollars. And honestly, talent gets less and less dollars, it seems like, every year. So every bit of money, you're spending separate large organizations. And so, you know, you need to count every dollar and make sure it is effective. I just, it's insanity to me.

[00:33:39] Well, and I think the larger the company, the bigger of the ecosystem of tech they try to buy. So it's the ORC, it's the SAP, it's the ISIMS, it's those larger brands. Whenever you think of the ecosystem of these products, because ORC is like so massive, they have supply chain, they do finance, they do HR, IS, they do ATS. And so a lot of these larger companies are buying them for the whole entire eco suite.

[00:34:05] And honest to goodness, TA is at the very, very bottom of that list of will it make sense for them? Will it improve them? Will it work? And for the most part, depending on the size of the company, they usually even go to HR, which HR is only going to care about their HRIS. They don't even really care about the ATS. So if your company, like if they care more about finance, let's say there was a company I was at where their finance person had been there 20 years, but their CHRO, they had had four in the past three years.

[00:34:33] Well, guess who's going to be able to pick the system for the company that we're all about to live with, even though they're about to retire? Like that's us, honey, because we didn't have that spokesperson. So there's a lot of weird reasons that I've seen companies have the certain systems that they have. But I will say that you're exactly right. The tech can make or break some of these things because ultimately we know it is process, it is people, and it is product.

[00:34:56] And if the product is the band-aid for a lot of the people in process aspects, and if it's not properly bridging those gaps as it should, then it's honestly just causing more havoc. And it's not the band-aid that it should be for the process with the people involved. So that's the only other thing that I would say is I feel like the reason that certain HR tech is bought or certain ATSs are bought are often nothing to do with TA at all.

[00:35:25] And in fact, they were like the last person on the plate. And nine times out of ten, TA tries to be like, let us get an off-brand ATS, a little rinky-dink. And then it's all about, okay, well, what can sync with the HRIS and connect to make it seamless and all these other things. So, yeah, again, TA leaders have to know tech. And there's so many that don't and can't even have this conversation because they're just not aware. It's a new piece of it, I feel, for those in leadership sometimes. A lot of them.

[00:35:55] Even if TA does have a say, they often have no idea how to run an RFP. Right. This is why I remember years ago there was an article, I don't remember where it was, that it said the average company at the time only keeps the recruitment marketing platform for 18 months. And at the time it seemed like everybody switched, switched, switched. But I would always meet these people and they'd say, oh, yeah, I'm switching, you know, from Beamer-E to whatever, Eightfold, you name it. And I'd say, why?

[00:36:24] And they'd say, well, it has this feature. And I'd go, you know your old one had that feature. They just didn't have it configured. And I look at HCA, we ran telemetry, then Jobbyte, you know, became Jobbytes recruitment marketing stack. And I had a team of people, that's all they did was drive projects in recruitment marketing.

[00:36:48] And if I look at what we first implemented, when we first bought the product versus the what it is today. In fact, when we had external analysts come in and look at it, they go, we've never even, we didn't even know that Jobbyte could do this. It's not even advertised functionality. And I go, the funny thing is most of the people at Jobbyte don't know they can do this either, right? These were projects that we drove.

[00:37:10] And so if you think that your vendor is going to continue to drive projects and better the performance of your system, you're dreaming. I said client success teams are an oxymoron. They really, they don't come and drive things. The typical client success manager or representative at a company, they're not an expert. And basically they come in and, okay, well, if Desiree complains, then I'll take her complaint back.

[00:37:38] But they're not coming in and looking at your analytics and your stack and everything else and saying, you know, we should be optimizing here, Desiree. We should be doing this. And so if you don't have somebody doing that internally, then you better have somebody externally doing it. Right. And it doesn't mean they have to be doing it every day and, you know, all this kind of stuff. But the periodic check-in, the same thing, if you're going to do an RFP, do you really have people involved who even know?

[00:38:03] And what I ultimately end up seeing also often is, well, these are the four companies we're having in the RFP. Why? Because those are the four companies that everybody's talking about. Oh, right. It's the four names we know. Yep. The four companies that are built on horrible old legacy tech that are still charging premium prices for their stuff because they have so much money invested. Even though new companies in the market today have duplicated everything they had in 18 months on a better tech stack.

[00:38:32] You know, so lots of technical debt. You know, you look at, I don't call iSIMs iSIMs. I call it FrankenSIMs because it is what it is. It's a spider web of APIs of a whole bunch of companies slammed together. And you have this constant struggle with these companies, too, is I bought all these different companies. They had their own customer bases. Am I really willing to give up those customer bases and truly integrate them? Well, no.

[00:39:01] So now I need customer service that continues to, you know, support whatever X company that I bought. And and but then if I roll them all together in a platform, my platform's too complex now. And my my my client services people that I have can't even explain what it does. I've always found it so funny that it was so common in our organization that we knew the functionality of of our vendors platforms vastly better than they did. And we were all the time.

[00:39:29] I was at an Indeed thing one time and I'm talking about Indeed about how we do roll ups of employers and everything else. And they go, that's impossible. You can't do that. This platform doesn't work that way. And so I went out to my website and I showed them. I said, it absolutely does. And we are. And they look and they go like, oh, we didn't know that. So it just amazes me how often, you know, that that is the case. And not everybody is a geek with this. I must admit, I'm a geek in this. I live in this stuff all day long.

[00:39:57] So you guys are literally as you were telling, just so you know, it wasn't even that long ago that I was on a call with telemetry telling them about an idea I had on how we could run some of their stuff. And they were like, we have never had anyone do it like this before ever. And I was like, well, jot it down, honey, because there's a lot more. And we tested it. We would pilot a lot of different things because I love that type of stuff. Just to see what it brings and things like that.

[00:40:24] The other thing that I will say, another reason that I think the nerds of the TA group know the products better than the actual vendors themselves is because nine times out of ten, the vendor that created it wasn't even someone in TA. So I can't tell you how many times we've taken on products. And then they're taking my ideas to create and implement and change their product along the way.

[00:40:47] Literally, that happened with an ATS that is now pretty big to where they used to have like, what was it, like a product person meeting just to be like, so what would you do if this was this? And like at the time, I didn't really know what was happening because I was a dummy. But then I started realizing like they're actually making these changes. Like they're doing these things. Well, I was so frustrated on how bad the bots are or the chat bots are that they have on these websites. And I mean, Paradoxes is horrible.

[00:41:17] Phenoms is horrible, etc. And I was talking to a client and telling them how I didn't like their bot. And I literally coded this weekend a bot that works better than all of them. And this is my thing. And I can point you guys to it. And then I can give you all kinds of large companies running Phenom and running Paradox, etc. And put my bot up against their bot. Mine beats it all day long. And what they're still doing is they're running these things on legacy decision trees.

[00:41:46] There's no LOMs. There's no natural language. There's nothing behind it. When I literally ask a question, you know, tell me about your 401k. And Phenom goes, can you please reword that question? Okay, Jason. How can I reword that question? Do you need it in Farsi? What can I do? That's so funny. So it, I don't know. And it's like, did anybody actually do test cases with this? You know, in the old days of software development where you had use cases.

[00:42:15] Yes, the old days. Like real users would do. Right. Nobody does this. Nobody does that anymore. I used to use Paradox whenever it was first Olivia. They did do testing back then because this was before they even had the unsubscribe. The other thing that I will say is, Jason, I think I finally met my match because your bot and my bot can have a bot off because I am that nerd who also, that's why me and Desiree were laughing so hard.

[00:42:42] It's because literally I've made one that it's ready to take on the world. And she's a genius. And she's, wow. Like what an advisor. Well, also this, I'm an investor in a company and I was talking to my friend and they're still small and they didn't have an ATS. And I said, why don't you have an ATS? He goes, we just don't hire that much. We don't really need to. And I said, well, let me build you one. And so this weekend I built an ATS. This weekend? This weekend.

[00:43:12] Yeah, I built it. Well, I started a Friday afternoon and I probably have 10 hours into it, but I built an entire ATS. I want to know everything. Desiree is about to make us stop talking. Including I've got full automation functions in it. So it does all that. I just want all of our listeners to know this is now the geek show. Oh, I'm freaking out. Like I'm losing my goal.

[00:43:36] For all these years before I had the ability to do this stuff, I would always go like, gosh, I wish somebody would build this. I wish. And now I just do it. Like I do it now. Yeah. So, yeah. But what this demonstrates is if anybody go up, look up my history, you will not see a computer science degree out there. What this shows is, is this is what the legacy companies are up against. You're up against the ability to build code has been commoditized.

[00:44:05] It get get over it. It is commoditized. Now, I am not I'm not a fool. There's a difference when you're talking about, you know, in the midst of your finance and your ERP and the compliance challenges and everything else. And I know there's throughput issues that you need to think about. And so I understand, you know, load testing of systems and everything else. And I'm not playing in that world. But the point being is, is getting to a functional product is getting so quick and so easy.

[00:44:34] And then you throw the right kind of knowledge on top of it, who does know how to load test stuff properly, who does know how to instruct all those things that I met a CEO at a couple of years ago, years ago, a couple of months ago at the conference for NAC or up in Milwaukee. And he said, we've come to the conclusion that there's no software that we can't can build that can't be duplicated by somebody else in a matter of weeks, if not days.

[00:45:00] And so as a result, he said, what we've turned ourselves to is we're really a consulting company. And everything that we're selling now is an outcome. We're not selling software. Software is just part of the toolbox that we use to deliver the outcome. And if you're not moving down that road as a vendor, I think you're going to be left behind. But if you're also not moving down that road as a buyer, you're a fool.

[00:45:23] Stop letting Paradox or whoever come back to you and say, well, you know, the increase this year is 20 percent for your new three-year contract. Get ahead of that game. Don't get down until you're three or four months away and you don't have any choice because, oh, they love when people drag their feet on a renewal to the last minute because now you don't have any other option. They can throw whatever you want in front of them. You should be coming to your legacy vendors right now and asking for how big of a cut am I getting?

[00:45:50] Because the value of your technical debt stack, which is really what they have, has gone down exponentially in the last 24 months and it's only going to get worse. And so we need to talk about different kind of pricing. And you need to start looking at different vendors because there is a whole new wave of vendors that, you know, hey, they didn't raise $400 million like Eightfold did and have these massive returns that they need to provide to people so they got to charge exorbitant fees.

[00:46:16] These vendors are coming in and duplicating this tech really quickly with very little investment. And they're going to be operating on a margin that these large tech companies are going to have a hard time doing. So that's my prediction of the future. And I would be looking at your tech stacks very, very differently in the next 12 to 24 months than you have in the past, you know, decade. Jason, that is a great place to end this conversation.

[00:46:39] And by the way, very, very, very, very thoughtful for me as well as people go ahead and do this work. And I hope if you didn't listen to anything else, you listened to that last statement Jason made. Ashley, do you have a talent outside the box today? I sure do. Let's go. Well, because we talked about source code today and clean source code, which made me think about clean data. And what exactly does clean data mean and why does it matter?

[00:47:09] Well, let's discuss this. For the most part, clean data means two things. You can have data hygiene and then you can have data integrity. So data hygiene is whenever you're actually properly configured. So the data that you're getting in is clean, clean out. Usually people say shit in, shit out. I was about to say clean in, clean out, but then it didn't really make any sense. But that's what I'm trying to say without beeping myself. So you can have data hygiene, which is basically, again, actual cleanliness of the data. What it is is what it's reporting.

[00:47:38] And then there's also data integrity. So this is specifically whenever we're thinking about recruiters. Let's say that we're looking at time to fill because that's what everybody on the planet looks at, regardless of its validity is anyway, not the point. Data integrity would be when do you teach your recruiters to actually hit hired in their button on that data set there whenever they're doing a job offer. So do they get to hit the button hired whenever they send the letter? Do they get to hit a hired once the person signs? Do they have to wait till day one?

[00:48:07] All of these things would actually impact the data depending on whatever the practice is that your recruiters are supposed to follow. And depending on that individual's actual data integrity, do they hit the button whenever we say to hit the button, will actually influence the cleanliness of the data. So it's going to take two things to have clean data. That's going to be your data hygiene and then your data integrity. Jason, this is your time to tell everybody how to connect with you, your company, all the things.

[00:48:35] Yeah, of course, they can connect with me on LinkedIn. Happy to take their connections. I typically publish a newsletter weekly. I say typically. And I try to make my newsletters a combination of sarcasm and quality information. So but if I can't throw some crazy sarcastic analogy in there, it kind of loses its punch. And you can come visit me at strattechconsulting.com. And yeah. Jason, it's been a joy.

[00:49:03] And if you haven't looked at your recruitment advertising budget lately, please go look at it. If you learn nothing else from this show, you know where to find us. It's everywhere right now. I feel like we're taking over the world. Right, Ash? Taking over the world. And we could also see it outside Wreckfest and HR Tech this year. I got it. Wreckfest and HR Tech this year. Jason lives in Nashville, folks. So he better be there. And also my book is coming out this October. Leadership is a practice night, not a personality.

[00:49:32] Girl, she forgot that time. We'll all be at Wreckfest. Everybody come. I do 100% believe it's the most fun and one of the best conferences in the country and in one of the best places. Yeah. We will be hunting you down. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye.