Evolving beyond the mere word "programmatic" and effectively engaging candidates where they want to be engaged. Amit Chauhan, CEO of JobAdX, friend of the show, and kick ass sponsor is accosted by Chad & Cheese to talk DYNAMIC VIDEO ADS.
Another StaffingTec bourbon fueled podcast powered by the MENSA cast over at Jobcase.
<insert podcast about video here - irony>
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION sponsored by:
Chad: We caught up with friend, sponsor, and most importantly JobAdX CEO, Amit Chauhan during staffing tech in Nashville. Check it out. Sponsored by our friends at Jobcase.
Joel: Yo, Chad, got a question for you.
Chad: Okay.
Joel: Say I'm looking to hire hourly workers for hard to fill jobs. Where should I go?
Chad: Easy, Jobcase.
Joel: Okay. All right, now let's say I've tried the job boards and all I'm getting is clicks and what I really want are qualified candidates, actual people. Where should I go?
Chad: Dude, Jobcase.
Joel: Now, what if I want the team who is helping me with all this sourcing to be really, really, really smart? And before you answer keep in mind I'm talking Mensa smart, like MIT affiliated data scientists and people who are at the forefront of machine learning. Who you got?
Chad: Oh my god, dude, it's Jobcase. Jobcase. Look, with 100 million members in their community, active and passive job seekers, a huge team of data scientists who are experts at targeting and connecting employers with the right candidates, the answer is always going to be Jobcase.
Joel: I dig it. I'm picking up what you're putting down, but what if ...
Chad: Hard stop. Jobcase. See for yourself why the answer always comes back to Jobcase for all your hiring needs. Learn more at jobcase.com/hire. That's jobcase.com/hire.
Joel: Job Case.
Announcer: Hide your kids. Lock the doors. You're listening to HRs most dangerous podcast Chad Sowash and Joel Cheesman are here to punch the recruiting industry right where it hurts. Complete with breaking news, brash opinion, and loads of snark. Buckle up boys and girls. It's time for the Chad and Cheese Podcast.
Joel: Still here at StaffinTec in Nashville and we have a friend from the pod.
Joel: Not just a friend a sponsor.
Joel: A sponsor.
Joel: Full discloser.
Chad: That's a total disclosue.
Joel: Yeah, so the gloves are not coming out.
Chad: How? My ass. Whatever. I don't think you know who you're talking to.
Joel: Let start with this. We have Amit JobAdX, Chad and Cheese Podcast, I'm Cheese, he's Chad. We have a Canadian here. We have a playoff hockey game in the city -
Chad: In Nashville.
Joel: That you could walk to.
Chad: The Preds.
Joel: And you're not going. Please explain yourself to us as well as your Canadian brethren.
Chad: Hand over that card. You're not going to be allowed back in.
Amit: Absolutely. I'm Canadian now but I was born in India. So I'll give preference to cricket or anything else any given day. So if you have a cricket game in Nashville I'll go to that.
Joel: When hell freezes over. The day before that happens we'll let you know.
Chad: There will be cricket.
Joel: Now, in your defense, you're an NBA guy.
Amit: Oh yes, 100%.
Joel: Toronto Raptors all the way, right?
Amit: Yeah, die hard fan.
Joel: They'll be in the playoffs, so you'll be doing that and bypassing the
hockey.
Amit: No, absolutely. I think like the day I landed here in Canada I started watching NBA Raptors. Luckily, I've been doing great since then.
Joel: Are we talking the Vince Carter Raptors?
Amit: No.
Joel: Okay, post Vince.
Amit: No, it's I'll say DeMar DeRozan and Kyle Lowry Raptors.
Joel: All right.
Amit: And now we have Leonard. So, yeah, we'll see.
Joel: Yeah, enjoy him for the next two months or so.
Amit: Come on. See, we're the north.
Joel: They are the north.
Amit: It's about the team. It's always all about the team.
Joel: That's the north. True. [crosstalk 00:03:44]
Amit: It's not about no single player.
Joel: As people know, my wife is Canadian. She actually has a We The North T-shirt. So I kid with you for the Canadian thing. But anyway, let's get down to business. You've presented at least twice today, so someone owes you something at the show cause you're presenting all over the place.
Chad: Three times? He presented three times today? Holy shit.
Joel: Something new that you sort of have launched at the show or recently. Talk about your video offering.
Amit: No, absolutely and it just came organically to us that we started as a candidate attraction and engagement platform. We were learning a lot about how candidates are attracting to job postings, what they're clicking on, what they're applying to. And we realize that since we have those dynamic ad units what if we add a video component to it? Because one of the biggest things we saw that companies are spending a lot of amount of money on creating that video content that either sits on their career website or are just like randomly blasting on YouTube, which -
Chad: Gets no views whatsoever, yeah. You're creating, spending all this money, and for shit, right?
Amit: It just goes down the drain without any ROI. But active job seekers, they want to see who are you. Like who are you as a brand, as an employer. And that's exactly created as an opportunity that if you can distribute the same video content why are dynamic ad units, like what kind of impact it can have. We ran a couple of tests with some of our clients early on just to see it in controlled environment and the performance were ridiculously good. We see a lot higher percentage of candidates who see and click on the play video.
Chad: So give me some stats.
Joel: Do you have any numbers?
Amit: On the high level number we see almost 46% of the candidates who click on the view video they actually click on the apply. So from the video to apply radio is incredibly high and also the conversion rate is 12% higher. So the people who watch the video and go to the career website they are more likely to apply for the jobs because now they already have a sense that who you are as an employer.
Joel: So this seems like a natural progression to me. We have more and more video solutions, skill scout, video my job, hire view and -
Chad: Content, content, content.
Joel: Just haven't connected with the actual job posting. You have to go to the corporate career site to see an imbed video. Now that we are finally connecting videos and we're here at the Monster Event who launched Monster Studios fairly recently. They're doing sort of the same thing. So it's a trend that I'm, I guess encouraged about. I'd like to see more of it. What advice would you give to companies who are looking to do video but quite haven't done it yet?
Amit: See we talk so much about recruitment marketing and employer branding but in necessity we're still not treating job seekers as a consumer. Exactly because you have to look at it from the same view, same lens that okay these candidates if you truly are doing recruitment marketing they also are consumer, they are the same candidates who might be buying our product also. When we advertise videos about employment, about employer brand or about the culture of the company that actually delivers a lot stronger message that you can ever do with a text job. Most of the time text job are just copy paste of the same job requisition you had from years ago. With employer branding if you're spending that much money on creating like a brand recognition use that collateral even more smartly and distribute it. Show it to the active job seeker, get in front of them, treat them exactly same how you treat your customers because it's a coherent process right?
Amit: Like if you have the same brand progression through your candidate experience they're gonna remember when they buy your product. They're gonna remember that this company, I remember I went through their looked for a job for them, the candidate experience was remarkably good and now I'm buying their product, it's good or if it's a bad experience they're gonna remember that as well.
Chad: So how easy is it for companies to get their videos in their job feeds? Right because you know as well as I do, adoption is the hardest part of anything that we do. So, companies don't want to lift a finger to do anything else right? They're already stuck in their process. How can you make it easy for them to make sure that they can actually leverage that content that they've spent money on?
Amit: Well it's incredibly simple. We know that you have already spent time, energy and money to create that video content. We want to make it seamless that you can just distribute it to us. So if you already have a page that you are sending to us like for your text job you just need to add another field for URL for the video and we'll get it, we'll display it in our unit. It's a seamless process, it doesn't change anything. It also gets you a lot more visibility in the publisher network just because they're so much more demand.
Chad: Right.
Amit: Increasingly the clicks and the visibility on mobile devices is incredibly high for the video job ad which is almost like 60% of the audience overall. Because candidates if they're in a bus or if they're just walking down they want to see the video, they don't want to read your job description and they just know if I want to apply for this company or not.
Chad: It's not so different because if you're on a desktop right? You want to scan and kind of get through it quick but when you're on your mobile phone I mean I rarely watch YouTube on my desktop, I watch it on my phone all the time and I don't know if that's just me or but it sounds like -
Amit: It's everyone.
Joel: And what are some best practices that you've seen? Like how long should a video be? What should the content? Should it be really really professional? Is it okay to be sort of pick up your iPhone and do a recording? [crosstalk 00:09:41] I think a lot of companies think they have to have really good agency created video and I've seen numbers that say the opposite that people like that sort authentic I'm your hiring manager I'm gonna be your boss, here's what it's like working here -
Chad: Just as it's not like Blair Witch right?
Amit: Exactly 100% and that's a good point. I'll say the most optimal like length of the video is 60 to 90 seconds, anything beyond that just becomes too much for anyone to view and actually consume that much information. What we have seen more personalized and for example, even recording a video from a iPhone about talking about, "Hey you know what? I'm the person who's hiring, you gotta be more with my team. Why we're a great team."
Amit: Even if that content is there that's more than creating those fancy videos that takes a lot more effort, a lot more money. Because a lot of them people know that what's an advertising and what's a true culture. There's a big difference like we're consumer we live on internet right? It's very very difficult to lie to someone say okay, this is our culture because those were like you had a whole production crew in your office, everyone was asked to sit there smile and do all those things. It's not possible when you have someone just recording it. So give them you can say backstage experience of who you truly are and whom they're gonna work with and that just works a long way.
Chad: This is really heavy on the candidate experience side which means for you guys, I mean for you guys to start focusing on that is I mean that's different than most other vendors that are out there who are not gonna quote engagement types of companies. You guys I mean it seems like you are focusing more on an engagement experience.
Amit: As a advertising exchange if we don't talk about how we're attracting or engaging candidates or the core consumer in this space we're literally failing ourselves because we are not talking about the core piece. If it doesn't work for the consumer it doesn't work for the employer. So, that's our focus is how we make it more appealing for consumers, how we make it more efficient for them so that the benefits are actually resulted back to our employers which is great for us because then they'll love us as well, but the whole idea is make it in such a way that candidates see those ads, they engage with that, they give us good data about their behavior online and we use that data to make it even better.
Joel: So once you're to put your conference hat on for a second and the set-up here is really unique. Vendors get a table they set up times to talk to attendees. Do you like that format? Have you guys had some success and then secondarily of the vendors you've seen here, what are some interesting companies or trends that you're seeing from the conference?
Amit: No it's a great set-up. The amount of time that we've given to talk to each partner that we meet here is very good like it's 25 to 30 minutes. So we get a lot of conversation done.
Amit: Most of the time the discussion we've had we're already discussing next steps. So it's like a lot of information is being shared so which is great. It's great first step to get to a new introduction and secondly one of the thing we've found about this particular conference is there are people with specific problems. So companies are coming here, they're looking for solutions, they're looking for people who can solve the problem they have in hand and that is a great place to be in. If you're a vendor and you're looking to reach out to people who are looking for solution you couldn't get better than that. From the vendor side there are some remarkably good companies like there are some chat boards that we have already met which are doing great. We also had some automation marketing companies for staffing itself also scheduling and back office work for staffing. So there's very different pieces that we have met and a lot of them are very good potential partner to us.
Joel: So knowing you guys as an innovative software company who has their nose down on the coding, what can we expect from you in the future in terms of new features and things that you guys are working on?
Amit: Our focus has always been into one thing that how we can make system more efficient and when we talk about efficiency is what can we do for companies to acquire high quality candidates at a lower cost. That's the motive for us -
Chad: And demonstrate performance right?
Amit: Exactly. So three things that we corely focus on the first thing starting with how do we target candidates at the best level. So it's all goes about data. One of the things I say advertising without data is bound to fail. So we data we live, breathe and eat data all day long. Secondly, once you have targeted how you attract them to engage to actually see your ad and do something, take some action and that's all about how we position our ad units and what we were doing with that. And the last is engagement. Once you've done the right things about targeting and attracting how do you engage? One of the core parts for the video job ad is actually the engagement and we're actually going further with this that how we can even collect the job application on the sites where our candidates are, so that the experience is 100% seamless and they don't even have to go to a third party site to finish the applications.
Chad: So are we starting to get to the point where the humans understand that they're not smart enough to do this well and that they need algorithms to actually but it seems like from an adoption stand point that you're starting to see is that humans are like okay I can't do this as well as an algorithm or JobAdX or a vendor that doesn't need a day trader trying to bid for jobs.
Amit: Not 100% -
Joel: Unfortunately.
Amit: So our goal is not to replace someone in particular or that's not the process here -
Chad: Makes sense though right?
Amit: Yeah, the idea is to make the job easier for people who are already doing it. So for example, if it's a day trader or even for recruitment marketer, how we can make sure that the information that they have, the data they are collecting or the collateral they are creating how we can spread it in a way or distribute it in a way that make a lasting effect on their effects. Because right now I think one of the most common things we have seen is recruitment marketing get to a point where they have a lot of collateral, they create a buzz on social media and that's it. That's when it comes to sell, how do you measure the performance of an employer video that you just spent 100 thousand dollars creating. That's where we come in and say okay you want some data around that? Give us that video let us distribute it in our exchange and we will tell you how many people actually like it as compared to the ones that are others there right?
Joel: All right Amit your marketing team made we promise that I would ask about your redesigned websites so let's have it.
Chad: You know in our production I'm gonna cut this right?
Amit: No, absolutely.
Joel: Good luck with that dude.
Amit: No, perfect, yeah. Are you going to edit this or no? Okay, but yeah, so the first version of our homepage was literally designed by me -
Chad: And it was so sexy.
Amit: It was ridiculous. No wonder it has the most typos you can find in any corporate website but that was the need of the hour. So last year we decided that okay now we need to get more professional, we have some really large clients and we want to make sure that when they're working with us we represent their image as well. So we went through the whole transition process and also came in that because we evolved as a platform, as a company ourselves we saw the transformation happen, so we wanted to have that consistent with our messaging as well. So we decided that it's time to redesign the website and more importantly not just redesign the website but also redesign our messaging. So come up with a messaging that aligned with our mission and vision. So we launched our new website, so please everyone can go and take a look and it's on www.jobadx.com and give us feedback and just email it to Isabelle directly so that she can get it fixed.
Joel: And what is that URL Amit?
Amit: Yeah that's isabelle@jobadx.com
Chad: That's the email but just go to jobadx.com
Joel: Just take off the isabelle@ and you've got the new website. Amit thank you go much for stopping by we appreciate it.
Chad: Go get a beer man.
Amit: Thank you.
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