Noah Kagen (early member at Facebook and Mint and founder of AppSumo) has a great video about hiring employees.  Basically, he says that his goal was to hire good team members that needed to focus their skill set.  It’s more important to have a believer than a mercenary.

Let’s be honest… I don’t think the headhunter that is looking for their $5K bounty is going to be overly concerned about the long-term ramifications of your workplace environment.

The second tactic companies use is ads on Indeed.com.  It reminds me of the old days when the media buyer would default to print ads whenever there was a tough decision to be made in the marketing budget.  Everyone read the newspaper and it was comfortable… in the long run that didn’t work out.  The problem with putting ads in Indeed.com is that it attracts a less desirable employee.  In all likelihood, potential employees answering an Indeed.com ad has been let go of their job and doesn’t have any professional contacts.  If the employee was exemplary, they would have already been scooped up by a company; that hasn’t happened.  So, you are dealing with a pool of prospects that are not either team players but have good skills. Or maybe they are good team players but have extremely diminished skills with little upside.  Doesn’t sound like an ideal pool of job candidates I would like to be choosing from.

Quite frankly, another issue is employers are given control of the job search process to outside forces whose first priority is not to find a candidate that’s a good fit, but rather to bring in candidates for the sake of, well… bringing in candidates.

Copley Advertising has come up with a better way, one that will give a free flow of candidates to the employer and still retain control of the process at a fraction of the cost.

First, we sit with the client and find which positions need staffing.  Then, we select about 40 companies with current employees they believe would be a good fit for their company (skill and culture-wise).  We geofence the companies and tag all smartphones in the targeted company and play a :15-second video.  The video is of one of the company’s employees saying, “Hi, my name is Jane.  I like working at company X because of their corporate culture”.  Corporate culture is one of the four key points that workers -especially highly trained young workers-look for in a workplace.

Once the target sees the ad, we capture their device ID.  If they engage with the ad, we place their ID in a retargeting folder.  After the target clicks on the ad, they are taken to a landing page with a video. “Hi, my name is Jane and I’m a Systems Analyst at Company X.  We have a great company culture, work/life balance, promotion track and a good pay scale.  Below are some additional videos of friends of mine who also work here. If you leave your email, we can send you some updates concerning changes in the employment climate and pictures from outings we have had.  Hope to talk to you soon.”

You would have links to another video that will have other employees talking about the company and suggesting email sign up. If the target doesn’t sign up, that’s fine because now we have three ways to track the ID: the impression IDs, retargeting IDs and the Facebook pixel on the site.

We set up a Facebook retargeting campaign using the captured Facebook IDs. Running the impression IDs through a Facebook converter, we end up with a 30% conversion rate. Now you’ve essentially exchanged impression IDs for Facebook IDs. We then create a look-alike model with the Facebook IDs matching the main data points, identifying similar Facebook users in the US. We set the look-alike to 1% of the US population and will end up with about 2,250,000 Facebook IDs with similar data points.  You can start a campaign with the data and drill down to focus on specific location and behavior indicators; you can drill down further again using Facebook’s Audience Insights.  Once you have a critical mass of retargeting IDs, you can launch a campaign that receives on average 2X to 16X click rate.

And the great news is that you will now have a short-term and long-term funnel that you can draw from when need. You’ll be able to filter candidates that fit your company and those that don’t.

After the campaign is set up and running for about a month, there is a nominal maintenance fee needed to keep the captured IDs in place.

“We’ve found recruiting in its present form to be outdated and ineffective. Copley Advertising’s goal is to disrupt the space and introduce a clean, modern model that is beneficial to both the company and the candidate. Win-win means just that.”  John Flynn, CEO, Copley Advertising.

Or you can go back to someone who is going to charge you $5,000 per body or to place ads to non-networks, rusty-skilled candidates on Indeed.com. Good luck with that.

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Copley Advertising

Brookline, MA 02445

John Flynn

jflynn@copleyadvertising

617-595-0138