Anthony Onesto traces job postings from newspaper classifieds to the internet, then shows how Puck added podcast-style audio to career pages and saw more clicks and applications. Audio cuts through the noise when candidates are scrolling on their phones.
Hey everyone, it's Anthony Honesto. And here's my burn the box drop for this week. Today I am talking about sound. Well, audio. Let me double click on that. Audio on job descriptions. Talking about how, Susie, to create a more interactive and differentiated experience with our job descriptions, put audio podcast like audio next to them. But that's the end of the movie. Let's start at the beginning of the movie. But before we do that, what I want you to do is pause right now and just think about the amount of messages, any type of message you receive, whether it's an advertisement, a job with, whatever it is, think about how many messages on a daily basis you encounter. So let me give you some information from research one. There's one survey that said active job seekers view an average of 38 job advertisements on a daily basis during their job hunt. And that of course fluctuates overall online messages. This includes emails, 120 to 150 a day. A lot of them of course are work related or spam, frankly. Then you have messages from social media platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, they're adding another hundred to your messages or our messages on a daily basis. And then think about just your smartphone, like your, your text messaging. All of this is adding up to hundreds and hundreds of messages that folks are getting on a daily basis. Now that's online. Now think about the offline messages you have. TV ads, digital billboards, word of mouth, friend says, hey, have you checked out that new craft beer? So we are bombarded with messages on a daily basis. So the point here is how can you make your job listing, your job descript, your career opportunity, stand out in this flood of messaging. Now before I get into that, and of course you already heard about how we're thinking about it, I wanted to really look at the history of the classified ad or the job listing. So if you look back in history, in the 1700s, 1800s, we started to see classified job listings appear within print newspapers. The proliferation of print people started adding jobs and career or classified job listings in their help wanted sections. Um, by the late 1800s, early 1900s, industry specific recruiting became commonplace. Right. So started thinking about exactly what professionals and what job and they would actually post these jobs in respective trade journals and publications. So going super niche in terms of their focus. And then newspapers gradually enhanced their classified sections. They added bold fonts, borders, oh, now we're getting really excited, and other formatting elements to make advertisements more striking. They wanted to differentiate an offer and it was also an opportunity for them to gain more and more revenue. In the early 1900s, we started to see the creation of private employment agencies. Yes, recruiters have been around. I know it feels like they've only been around for the last 20 or 30 years. They've been around for a hundred plus years, assuming some of the recruiting up duties from these companies and started making those connections. And then in the mid-1900s we saw the rise of radio and television and that was opening up new avenues for job advertising, making them more interactive, active and then digital. And the Internet in the 1990s started, and that birthed a whole bunch of job boards. Monster.com, if you're familiar. That was a staple for me when I graduated college in the early 1990s, late 90s and 1990s dating myself. And the Internet expanded and of course now we see job board aggregators like indeed, still very popular these days. And then you add in social media and that increased job channels, the ability to get to an individual very specifically. So still a lot of messages. The modern job post allowed a lot of interactivity. Like you saw with the proliferation of radio and tv. We could add elements like video, quick apply, we could utilize automation for targeting text analysis. And we've been exploring all these things at Suzy, but what we found is if someone's on mobile, they're not going to watch a video if they're in motion. It's very difficult to be in motion and watch a video. But one thing sparked an idea that I had and we had here at Suzy and was in fact listening to our very own podcast with our CEO, Matt Britton, with the CEO of iHeartMedia, Gabe Troverman, who's also one of our board members. And they were discussing the rise of audio, of course, iHeartradio, podcasting, digital streaming radio stations, all of these things. And a light bulb went off. I said, what if we can add audio to our job descriptions? If people are in motion, they can click on the audio and continue to be in motion. If they're riding their bike, they're exercising, whatever it is, can't watch a video, but you can obviously list to audio. And because audio is becoming so popular during COVID I thought it was an incredible opportunity. And then I found a company called Puck and they do exactly what I was thinking. They add podcast like audio to job descriptions. And our partnership with Puck has increased our click to applies has increased the interactivity we can measure thanks to Puck, if people are listening to the audio, how much audio they're listening to, which audio they're listening to. And essentially we went into our organization and interviewed folks like a podcast. So. So they'll call, they'll set up the recording, they do all the production. They are now our career site. So if you go to susie.com careers you'll find all our job listings enhanced through the Puck experience. And it really has been an incredible opportunity for us to differentiate, you know, those thousands of messages that come in on a daily basis, whether you're a job seeker, you're just a consumer, you're getting hundreds of emails, hundreds of messages, you're getting digital billboards. This is just an opportunity for companies to think about their job descriptions a little bit differently. So from that simple classified ad to the bold and the frames that they added to TV and the proliferation of online sites like Monster, and indeed, we really see such an opportunity. And I think this is just the start of really creating a great experience for our job post and folks that are interested in careers here at Suzi. So our bet here at Suzi is that audio is going to be the next frontier.
