Measuring the success of recruitment marketing | with Lori Sylvia

You're very welcome to episode 88 of the Shortlist. My name is Johnny Campbell. I'm the CEO, co founder of Social Talent and your host for our podcast and live broadcast here today on YouTube and LinkedIn. If you're listening live, by the way, we always welcome your questions and thoughts. Just join in on the comments on LinkedIn or YouTube and we'll call them out and bring you into the discussion. If you're not listening live, listening to the podcast, any reference to links, notes, et cetera that we put out here, articles you can find in the show notes on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen to our podcast. This is show number 88 and we're going to be talking today about measuring the success of recruitment marketing. Before I get into that, a quick reminder that we're hosting another event here at Social Talent next week and that is our regular Social Talent Live event, which is a free event you can register for. And our theme, this, this, this, this quarter is going to be DEI and Creating Safe Spaces at Work. We're talking a lot about psychological safety, safe spaces from a diversity, equity, inclusion perspective. And that goes out February 24, 2022. And you can register for, for, for your free place@socialtalent.com forward/live and it goes out live at 4pm Dublin, London time next Thursday, 24th February. That's 11am New York time and 8am LA time. So same time as our podcast, except a day later than our normal Wednesday. There won't be an offline or, you know, recorded version. So you the only way you can get in on the conversation that 90 minute broadcast is to attend live and register@SocialTown.com live. But let's get back to today's show. So we're going to be talking about recruiting marketing and it's a good time because, you know, proactively attracting the best talent is becoming mission critical for many organizations right now. Employees and candidates know exactly what they want from work and in a sea of very high attrition rates. We've talked about this on the show. Low engagement. It's the companies who are leveraging a really strong brand that are coming out on top in this war for talent. And recruitment marketing could very well be the key to this success. Joining us today on the show to talk about this is Laurie Silvia Laurie is joining us from Boston and she's the founder of Ratty Recruitment Marketing, an online community of over 30,000 professionals, the largest community of recruitment marketeers in the world. And also the founder of Rally Insight which you'll tell us more about. Over the course of the show, we're going to be talking about the importance of analytics and measurement when it comes to this discipline, this profession, and how recruitment marketing enables TA to do their best work. And why the adoption of marketing tools and tactics can future proof and elevate your approach to recruiting. Larry, you're really welcome to the show. I'm dying to have this conversation. We had to delay it by a few weeks, but I think it'll be all the while worth it. But maybe could you open us up? Open up by telling us about your background, tell us about your combined recruitment and marketing background and what makes you the person to create this community and to create the Rally inside product.

Well, first of all, thank you so much, Johnny, for having me. I'm thrilled to be on the short list. I've been a listener and so I feel like, I just feel very excited to be here and to have this conversation and pretty much I'll talk about recruitment marketing at any time, at any place. So really happy to dive into recruitment marketing today, particularly around the analytics. So a little bit about me. I'm a marketer for over 20 years and really built up my career working at startups. I worked at a number of different startups, startup software startups in different industries like the mobile phone industry and connected cars and Internet of things. And then in 2014 I got a job as the CMO of a recruitment marketing technology company which was Smash Fly. And I did that for about three years. And while I was there, I had the idea for Rally, which we can, we could talk a little bit more about sort of what was happening at that time and why I founded Rally, but a little bit about Rally. So Rally is, as you said, the largest community of practitioners across HR and talent, acquisition, marketing, communications who are learning recruitment marketing and employer branding skills. And so we provide a community platform, an educational platform where we provide, produce the largest number of educational material about recruitment marketing. So whether you're a beginner or you consider yourself a professional or you've been at this for a long time, you're one of the pioneers in this space and you consider yourself a real expert, we've got tons of resources for you that can help you do your job better.

You mentioned pioneer in this area, this, this particular area of recruiting isn't that old. Like, it's not like they were employing player branding or recruitment marketing experts knocking around LinkedIn 20 years ago. Like, when did this really take hold in your opinion? When did recruitment marketing become A thing by itself as opposed to just a sub part of someone's job in the recruiting team.

That's a great question. I think it was around 10 to 15 years ago that we first started seeing practitioners bring marketing strategies into the process of recruiting. And I would say up until that time it was primarily advertising strategies. So even if they called it marketing, really, if you look back at what people were doing, it was primarily advertising strategies. And then this concept of employer brand came forward and it was the idea of basically being able to communicate with candidates about the value proposition of your company. And then I would say from there, which is kind of like the art a bit, I would say from there the science really behind marketing really came forward and it was all about what were going to be the strategies and the tactics and the channels that you were going to use in order to attract and engage and recruit talent to your company. So I think that recruitment marketing as a discipline has really evolved over the last like five to seven years, where now it's not only a strategy that many companies use to recruit, but it's also a career opportunity for people. So there's a growing number of people who have a full time role doing recruitment marketing, which is very exciting and it's been exciting to sort of see that evolve over the last five to seven years.

You mentioned strategies and let's bring it back to 2022 for a sec. Larry. So I want to jump into an article that was published recently by Fast Company and there are many, many like this, right? Because this is the way of the world today. And this one is entitled Six Ways to Better Compete for Talent in 2022. And of course against the backdrop of the great Resignation, this crazy busy time we're seeing in recruiting, the author proposes six methods for, for kind of being better in 2022. And included in that it does talk about, of course, your basic stuff, getting your process stuff away better, the know, looking at salaries, et cetera, right? But it does mention showing for example, your DEI work. But you know, which I argue is part of that employer brand piece, right, as opposed to your job specs, et cetera. But it talks about doing things right, but it doesn't really get into how do you communicate that to the world. So I want to get your thoughts on this article. You know, do you think these six ways are a good six? List of six. But more importantly, I think to the topic, how, how does one go about communicating this six or any of these things to the market when it's so noisy and so busy Right.

Now, I love that you asked that question because actually when I read the article, my mind immediately went to, okay, so as a recruitment marketer, how do I message this, how do, how do I communicate this, and how do I get that message in front of the right talent, you know, at the right time? So, yes, I mean, I think that those, the six things that are discussed are like, all very good. But there's, there's a lot, there's a lot more that companies can be doing to make themselves an attractive employer. But if we can just look at it through the lens of someone who's a recruitment marketer. So who, who are these people? Okay, they're not the same people that are doing recruiting. So they're the people who are kind of ahead of the recruiting team. Responsible for the careers website, for example, responsible for defining that employee value proposition, responsible for managing the company's reputation across, you know, Glassdoor, Indeed, etc. Responsible for the job advertising, responsible for social media. They're the ones that are building awareness for the company. And when I look at that article and it talks about some of the things that are important for companies to do in order to be attractive to, to potential candidates, I think back actually just a couple of years ago, where the people who were in this role of doing recruitment marketing in many ways were in a position to affect any kind of significant change. If a company had systemic recruiting problems, you know, if there is a problem there with diversity and inclusion, if there's a problem there with compensation and benefits. And these are some of the things that are mention in the article because I would say at that time, really before, before 2020, recruitment marketing for many people was viewed as a tactical role. They were seen only by like, the activities that they were doing. Like, we need a great careers website, we need some content to go out on social. But actually what's happened in the last couple of years is that role has become much more strategic because these people are at the front end of what candidates, how candidates view a company. And so they can sort of take that mirror and reflect that mirror back internally and are now empowered in many cases to talk to executives at the company about why people maybe are not choosing not to work here or why people are leaving and what can be done about it. So I think that recruitment marketing is in a really exciting stage in terms of the evolution of not only the discipline but also the career of the people who have this role and how it's becoming more and more strategic where they can, you know, they can have, they can have a seat at the table and have those really important strategic conversations about how to make your company a great place to work so that people will in fact want to work there.

So we're talking about the people in recruitment marketing. Right. Which always brings me back to a question that I've been involved in this conversation many a time, usually over pints at the end of the night. But I'd love to get your opinion on this. And that is whether somebody who, you know, if you look at the best recruitment marketeers, you look at the people who do it really well, do they tend to come from marketing into recruitment or from recruitment into marketing? If that makes sense. Laurie?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is Johnny. This is exactly one of the reasons why I founded rally back in 2017 where I had been working as the CMO of Smashfly, was the first CMO at Smashfly. I built the marketing function, I built the marketing team. And at that time recruitment marketing really was something new. There were a number of people in the industry who I really consider the pioneers who in many cases were my mentors helping me learn about recruitment marketing. But as a company, Smashfly was educating the market about what was recruitment marketing, why, why you needed to do recruitment marketing, why you needed to just, you know, spraying your, your job ads everywhere. And there were, you know, I could count on my fingers and my toes the number of people who had a full time job doing recruitment marketing at that time. For most it really was just a strategy. And I remember like, you know, going to some of the largest companies in the world and trying to explain to them, you know, here's our recruitment marketing platform and here's why you need technology to help you do this. And the talent acquisition leader, like we'd, you know, we'd find these forward thinking TA leaders which would be amazing. And they'd say like, I totally get it. Yes, like we need to, we need to use more marketing and branding strategies to help us with our recruiting strategy. But then they'd say, well, like, well who here on my team knows how to do this? Because like we don't have anybody on the recruiting team who has any of these skills and who are really going to be successful even using this product. And that kind of light bulb went off in my head and I, and I saw not that employers weren't like the forward thinking employers at the time were interested in making this shift to this new strategy, but really that their teams didn't have the skill set. So it was, it was kind of this twofold issue of Talent acquisition leaders, chros lacking an understanding of the strategies behind the marketing, the branding strategies that were needed, and then lacking the people on your team with the skill set to be able to implement those strategies. And so I founded rally in 2017 and you know, nobody was in my community at that time. I bootstrapped the company. I went to a number of people that I, I knew in the space and said, hey, I'm, I'm going to start this, you know, and got a number of people involved in the community as mentors and other vendors, as sponsors. And slowly but surely we started teaching the industry about the strategies behind recruitment, marketing and employer branding and along the way helping them to develop the skills. And as you said, Today there's almost 35,000 people in our community, which is really exciting. So in the beginning I would say they all came from recruiting because they were those folks that were in the TA organization really trying to upskill like very, very quickly. And along the way it's been pretty cool to see the number of people coming into the community from marketing and communications and those folks who were trained marketers finding a new career opportunity in recruiting. So if you were, if it was like 2018, 2019 even and you were a CHRO or a TA leader and you said, yes, I'm totally behind recruitment, marketing, employer branding, we need to hire someone, the chances are you probably would hire somebody in from marketing to perform that function for you on your team because there weren't as many people with the skill set. But today there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people that have a TA background or an HR background that now have the skills, they understand the strategy and they have the skills. So the number of people coming into this full time role or like leading the strategy in the company are, have grown up from the recruiting side and hopefully because Rally has helped them along the way and, and learning what recruitment marketing is and how to do it really well at their organization.

Yeah, I think you're right. It has been an evolution and I've seen in the early years myself as well that you had folks who went in from recruiting into this marketing role and they were, you know, speaking at conferences and putting online what they felt was like the most revolutionary kind of concepts and marketeers I know were looking at going that's a one on one marketing, like what? And then you had folks went in for marketing who were like, well this is easy, I supply all my marketing knowledge to recruiting. But there's a nuance to marketing, to talent that then has a choice in whether they work for you and then you have a choice in whether you accept them. It's more complicated than a typical consumer relationship. So I think both sides of things to learn from each other. Because recruitment market isn't just marketing applied to just another sector. And there's a whole profession of marketing that can be really well applied to recruiting just like it can to other things. So nuances there, but there's different perspectives that can come to this. But I want to jump into our second article and get your thoughts, Larry, because it's very specifically on recruiting marketing. It's from Forbes, and this article is published by Nicole Fernandez. And this basically, you know, looks at recruiting marketing as an emerging profession, of course, according to International Journal of Management Accounting Economics. But the author points out three things that she thinks are missing. One being that a lot of recruiting marketing efforts lack authenticity, the second being that they're not differentiating between each other. And the third piece that they don't sound human. Are these three comments or observations, ones that you would support and agree with, or what are your thoughts on this?

I do, I thought this was a good article and I agree with those three things. The differentiation is really tough. And this is where I think the more experienced practitioners have a real ability to use recruitment marketing to the company's advantage. Because ultimately it's really a messaging exercise, like really understanding what is our value proposition as a, as a company, why would somebody want to work here? Why does somebody stay working here? And then creating this messaging platform that you then communicate back out, you know, through all of your recruiting channels. And so it's only by going through that process, which is, there's a, you know, there's best practices of going through that process of creating an employee value proposition, are you able to uncover the differentiation in your company? So everyone talks about, you know, being, you know, being human and, and being authentic and transparent and all those things are essential and you have to do those things. But when I look at like the real discipline of recruitment marketing, it comes actually in that differentiation part. And it's, it's, it's not easy to achieve. We, there's many, many great recruitment marketing agencies also that can help your company if you don't have someone full time on your team who, who does recruitment marketing, or maybe, you know, recruitment marketing is new at your, at your company and the person who's in that role maybe hasn't been in that role for very long. There's a lot of agencies that can help you with that as well. But I would say Getting that right is really critical. Otherwise, what do you see? You see the same thing again and again. You know, we're a great place to work. Why? Because we're very innovative, because we respect diversity and inclusion, because we're committed to sustainability. Like, it's the same messaging again and again and again. And actually not many companies are not doing a good job at really bringing forward what makes their company really unique and being able to bring those values forward so that you're kind of attracting people who align with those values. And the people who, you know, aren't interested in working there because they have. They really understand what this environment is going to be like, sort of, you know, opt out, and that's fine too. But I think the differentiation part is where the strategy really comes into play.

I'm glad you mentioned that word strategy. We had our guest, Elyn, last week talked about how, in her opinion, recruiting was really poor at just developing strategy. What you described to me there, you talk about differentiation. That's part of strategy. You look at a business strategy, you're probably in a sector with a bunch of other competitors, all selling roughly the same product to the same bunch of people. But your strategy has to define how you are differentiating yourself, what your differentiated go to market strategy or value proposition, and then you live by that. Right? Because you have to find a way to win against your competitors in a way that's unique and different to everybody else. Yet that doesn't really ever come into strategies for recruiting teams and often marketing teams. I think you're right. It's such a critical part is how do we differentiate ourselves and then living by that and following that and doing the hard work upfront to define it, whether you use an external agency or you work internally and survey whatever it might be. That sounds really important. I want to take another point of the article, though, which was the they don't sound human. And again, we hear a lot about authenticity, transparency, et cetera, et cetera. But I do want to dig into the channels to market here because oftentimes I sat in a meeting recently where we talked about recruitment marketing strategy with a large employer. And you know, when they're talking about, you know, it's not working quite as well as they want to. The the focus was around how do we just change our digital agency, our creative agency. And I sat back and listened and thought, you know, you could change your creative agency and you might get slightly better ideas on how to, you know, position your differentiation. I said, but if you just take what you have and you change your channel from a typically inauthentic channel which is the official company channels, the company social media career pages, et cetera, and move towards your employees who are generally seen from my research as a more authentic channel. My argument was you could, you could do a lot more. Is that your experience? You know, it mentioned in the article at the end, employee advocacy and employee ambassadorship. Is that part of modern recruitment marketing strategies or should it be in your opinion?

Okay, I'm going to disagree with you a bit. So there's like a few things that you said there that I want to unpack a bit. The first one is about changing your channel and that hope, you know, hoping that you'll get a better, a better result. Actually I see no differentiation in channels. I don't know about a recruiting channel that you don't, that you don't know about. You know, or I, it's like there everybody knows the same recruiting channels. We all know the same job boards, the, the same niche job sites, the same social media channels. You know, we can use email, we can use sms. Like there is no differentiation actually in identifying a channel between one employer or another.

I should probably correct myself there. I definitely misspoke there. My more meant was the voice on the channel. I totally agree. The channels are the same. There's no different channel.

The channels are the same. The channels are the same. But I do hear other people saying that, oh, we got to find the right place to advertise our jobs. Actually this programmatic job advertising software that can do that for you, like you don't really, don't need to spend any time thinking about where should I advertise my jobs. There's technology that does that, does that very, very well. So then it becomes maybe what you were referencing is what do I do on that channel? And that is where the differentiation is. It's how, you know, how do I market myself as a employer through these channels. And that is, that is about content, it's about messaging. So yeah, and, and, and creative to some degree because you've gotta, you've got to get seen and often before you can be heard. But yeah, I would, I would agree that it's, it's your use of that channel that is the differentiation. Now another element is budget. Okay, I could have more money to spend than, than you might have, but largely we know the same, the same channels. I, I actually give credit to those people that don't have a lot of budget but figure out how to do big things like those people. I love those people. I have huge respect for those, for those people. And this is why I have a great affinity for recruitment marketers because many of them are the first person at their company to have this job. They're in the job for the first time. They don't work for somebody who knows a lot about recruitment marketing. Actually only 10% of the people in our community say that they work for someone who's teaching them about recruitment marketing. So they're really having to figure this out on their own. And once they can think through that messaging and then think through, okay, how am I going to create content that can communicate that messaging through, you know, and which of the channels I'm using are the most effective, then they, then they can really start to make an impact for the company. Now another thing you mentioned was the use of employee advocacy and you were referencing that because it's important to be authentic and also be human. And I see employee advocacy as having tremendous growth opportunity for us. In recruitment marketing, we have a new tool called Rally Inside which tracks, measures and analyzes your recruitment marketing. It looks at how candidates are engaging with your recruitment marketing to help you attract and recruit talent to your company. And it's looking at all of the company's channels side by side in the same way and consistently. For those employers that are using employee advocacy as a channel to communicate back out with candidates, that channel consistently gets very high engagement. So whether you have an employee advocacy tool that's helping you like automate that, or it's simply like you just sharing some, you know, the latest employee story in Slack and, you know, immobilizing some of your brand ambassadors to get that shared back out with their networks. I think that that could be a strategy that if you're not using that this year, could really, really help you both in making sure that you're communicating through the, the trusted channels, which are those from your employee, also in a human way, but also leveraging, leveraging those folks in your organization to tap into their networks. And this is like, you know, zero cost marketing strategy. Really, that can have a very high, high return.

I want to take that point on analytics and dive into it. I have a user question, our listener question from Kathy Iverson I'll get to in just a minute. But Larry, when it comes to analytics, I'd love to get your view on what are the core basic analytics to measure. Because folks who perhaps aren't as familiar with marketing, the profession as it's evolved in the last decade might still think marketing is a black hole. You throw money into and you know, marketeers just say that's brand. We're building there, we're building brand. And you know, that's what that money spent on my experience and I think yours as well is that that's not how it works. It is a, it is a profession where you can really measure the dollars. You can really see what works and what doesn't work. And you can see it quite fast. Fast. Talk to me about the metrics and KPIs that you feel are most important that marketeers are using or should be using and what you've seen around those metrics in the last year or so.

This is something I've become very, very passionate about because I actually think that analytics are personal. So when someone's asking you to explain how did this campaign perform or how does that channel perform, it's not just a reflection of, of your strategy, it's, it's also a reflection of your ability, you know, as a professional. And so people, people have a very strong, like personal visceral reaction to being able to, to explain how something is performing. So the other thing I want to say on this is that as recruitment marketing kind of has been growing up as a career and as a strategy, we've been looking at it really through the lens of recruiting only. And so like the initial way that people were measuring the impact of recruitment marketing is they're really talking about recruitment advertising. They wanted to understand what is the cost per click, the cost per applicant, the cost per hire. And those are all very important measurements that you need to understand because a lot of your budget is spent there on advertising jobs. I would say that's part of, that's like part of your role as a recruitment marketer is to advertise your company's jobs. And that's how you should be tracking and measuring your effectiveness. But the other part of your job is to market your company as an employer. And that, you know, I, even the biggest billboard on the busiest highway is not going to make somebody want to work for your company. You, you have to invest. And this is like a long game, it's not a short term thing of like I have to hire this many people this month or this quarter. This is a longer term strategy that if you do it right, will ultimately make your job advertising dollars less, you know, can be less because you're spending more. You've done better at marketing your company as an employer. And I think that the way that we measure marketing our companies as an employer, the effectiveness of doing that is three things. It's reach, engagement and reputation. So what have I done as a recruitment marketer to expand the reach of our employer brand? Are we making sure that people are thinking about what it's like to work for us and considering that they might want to work for us? And then the second one is around engagement, how well am I keeping that talent audience engaged? Are they engaged with what we're saying because they're interested in who we are as an employer? Are we making ourselves attractive? And then the third one is reputation, which can be sometimes difficult for a recruitment marketer to really influence because there's so many things that go into the company's reputation as an employer, but at the very least you need to be monitoring it and you need to be in the conversation and doing what you can to try to shape it. So in, in that sense, reach and engagement and reputation don't are not necessarily measured always by hard, by hard dollars. So you, you need other ways to measure, you know, are you expanding your reach? Are you keeping your talent audience engaged? And is, is your company positively thought of as, as an employer?

So on that kind of difficulty of perhaps measuring reputation, I related question to that from Kathy Iverson listening live on LinkedIn right now is if your organization has a marketing and communications department, how would a recruitment marketer differ themselves from that core department? Both are selling culture and the brand. But what could the recruitment marketer focus on? Can they be combined or should they be separate?

This is such a great question. Thank you, Kathy, for this question. It comes up all the time in our community. One of the most important things is you really need to partner with, with your marketing and communications team. Like recruitment, marketing and marketing need to have a great partnership. There's so many problems that will come from when these two people or these two groups don't have a great partnership. It used to be, by the way, that you'd say, well, the difference is in audience that, you know, the marketing team is communicating the company's customers, is communicating with partners, is communicating with investors, and the recruitment marketer is communicating with, with candidates. And then it used to be that, well, their channels are different, that a marketer is using, you know, these, these channels and a recruitment marketer is using these other channels. And more and more we see that it's blended actually that marketing and recruitment marketing are both, that their messages are both reaching candidates and customers, that there are share channels like on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like probably the number one most common share channel, maybe after the, the company's website and for sure they're using the same strategies and, and tactics. So I think that where there is a different differentiation is the focus. So there's tons of overlap, but somebody's got to be ultimately responsible for it. And so this is why you need someone dedicated to doing recruitment marketing. Because often the people who are doing marketing, they're tied to revenue generation, to leads, they've got to be focused and aligned with the sales organization and the recruitment marketing folks. While they are touching on these other areas and they're influencing these other areas, they're the only ones in the company that are focused on marketing the company as an employer. So this is where I think it's focused on. It's not really so much it's focused into some degree audience, but even that's becoming, becoming more blurred and overlapped.

I have another related question from Louise Long, who's also listening live and she's asks Laurie, what social media channels do you think are the most critical for recruitment marketing and do you think it's of benefit to create different pages? I assume on those channels solely focused on the people culture side of an organization, I guess, as opposed to the corporate or product side. So two questions in there. Maybe if you could expand your thoughts on those.

Okay. Okay. Well, thanks, Louise, for the question. I would say that as we're using Rally Inside, as the people in our community are using Rally Inside, we're starting to see what channels they're using for recruitment marketing. And the ones that are performing the best often are different based on the industry that you're in and the audience that you're trying to reach. But generally speaking, I would say that the ones that are performing the best are LinkedIn and Facebook and employee advocacy as a channel. Those are, those are channels that you don't own, but you're, you're trying to earn, you know, your share voice on those channels. Channels that you own are your ability to communicate directly with your talent audience, maybe through your, your ats, through your talent database. And that can be email and also text, sms. So email often will perform better than social media. So don't forget about email and text. That's my, I want to make a plugin for that because that does consistently perform well for the, for the people who are using Rally inside. And then the question about, well, should we have a dedicated career social channels? I would say if you're just getting started out, no. It's really hard to build a following on social media. It takes a lot of content. It takes a consistent strategy. It takes great content because you're rewarded by those social platforms for great content, content that gets engagement. And then the more engagement your content gets, the bigger your reach will be. So you really have to have like dedicated people doing recruitment marketing to keep sharing the content on these social channels. If you don't have that, I wouldn't even try to create my own career social channels. So I would partner up with the marketing team and, and understand that we're both communicating through this channel. We need to share the real estate because we're, we're reaching candidates and we're reaching customers through these, through these shared channels. Eventually, as I see employers strategies become more mature, many of them are adding their own dedicated careers channels. But if you talk to them, they'll say, this is hard. We need people to do this. We need a constant stream of content and we're constantly, you know, trying to tweak and figure out the best way. The one that I think people gravitate towards the most is Instagram. Because Instagram often can start out as a way of like really activating and mobilizing your employees. Your. If your employees can like really get excited about the company culture, then you can showcase that on, on Instagram and that can eventually move from employee engagement to also candidate engagement.

I love that advice. It's something here in social talent. As a smaller business, we don't have differentiated recruiting channels on the social recruiting pages on the social media channels. But you're right, Instagram is one we use more for showing what we do as an organization from an employee perspective, not a product perspective. And our recruiting team are more likely to use that. I think that's common across many businesses. I want to ask you about Rally Inside and thank you for answering those questions. Larry Wonder, could you just take a step back and explain to our audience a little bit more about what Rally Inside does, who uses it and perhaps if you can, could. Could you share some of the insights from. I know you published new data this week from your early customers to get an idea of what's happening right now. Back to our First Article In 2022, as this market's heating up, what's changing or what's interesting to know that you could share with our audience from that. So walking us back to who uses the product, what it does, to what insights can you share with us?

Well, the reason why I created Rally Inside was after of working so closely with our community over the last four and a half years and even three years before that when I was working at Smashfly, just seeing this huge challenge with our community being able to show the effectiveness of their work and you know what it's like. I don't know. Maybe you don't know what it's like working for someone who doesn't understand what you do and therefore can't appreciate the value you bring. And that happens when you're not able to, to really track and measure and demonstrate the effectiveness of your impact. And so that is the reason behind Rally Inside is to help our community know first and foremost for themselves if what they're doing is effective and then be able to show that to their leadership, to their peers and other stakeholders in the company and hopefully that can then give them, gain them more respect and gain them more resources and more and more budget. What the product does is it tracks measures, analyzes benchmarks, and also reports on candidate engagement with your recruitment marketing content. And when we use the word content, it's, it's broad. It can be both typical organic content that's shared over social media all the way to a job ad that you're posting on a niche job board. So it's, it's regular employer brand content content as well as jobs content, paid and organic. Any place where you're sharing content, you need to be tracking your content and Rally Inside helps you to create that tracking link. And then it's analyzing 25 data points about this piece of content that you're sharing to try to attract and engage and recruit talent to tell you, you know, what, what's most important to candidates right now. And our candidates sort of interested in what, in what you're offering as an employer. So that's a little bit about why I created Rally Inside and a little bit about what it does. And so who's using the product, really? Anyone who is publishing content for recruiting can use Rally Inside. And we just launched it to our community at the end of last year. Year. And it's like the, it's, it's. We've been overwhelmed honestly by the number of people who, who want to use the tool because we have a free version that's available for anyone who is in talent acquisition and in hr. So, yeah, so I, I'm like, oh, I'm like a data person. I love like diving into the data. And I was looking just last week on what the benchmarks were telling us so you can benchmark your strategy against all the other employers who are using the tool. And it's anonymized and aggregated. And so I was in there like looking and like I was kind of hit by a Brick a bit because I noticed something in that employers had really shifted their strategies in the first five weeks of 2022 because there's this massive recruitment frenzy. And so what we found was that the people who are using the tool were publishing jobs content 21% more often content about an individual job or about an internship program or benefits, something related to like, you know, we're hiring and apply now, but this content was getting 62% less engagement. So candidates are really saturated with jobs content right now and they're, and they're tuning it out. And because the people who are using our tool have shifted their time and attention to advertising jobs. Advertising jobs, promoting jobs, promoting jobs. It means they're actually, they've actually spent less time on creating what you and I would consider like the traditional recruitment, marketing, employer brand content, which tells the story of the people who work at the company, talks about the company culture, talks about the company in general. And so we saw like the people focused stories get published 40% fewer times and company content get published 70% less. But actually this kind of content is getting the most engagement, as much as 200% more engagement than jobs content. So my advice right now is like pause before you publish. You may have been working, working really hard on, you know, some campaign and you're getting ready to launch this hiring initiative, but just talking about, you know, come here to work is not going to break through the digital noise right now. It's not going to get people's attention. Candidates are really tuning that out. What is going to get their attention is when you talk about the people at your company, the culture of your company. So think, think about being able to tell those stories. Leadership stories, awards, partnerships, all of those kinds of types of content are really what's getting candidates attention right now.

I think it's something that good recruiters instinctively know. I imagine recruitment marketeers professionally know. We'll be able to have a data product that proves it to everyone else who need to convince of this to get the buy in. For this to change the strategy is critical. So it's brilliant that you've launched that. Larry, we're at at near time. I can't believe we've covered so much. You've given so much advice and tips and insights so far, which I suppose is probably, probably expected of you considering you built a whole product around insights. But I was wondering if you wouldn't mind giving us one more. We ask every guest on the shortlist to leave us with one piece of advice for our shortlist. Our advice shortlist a piece of advice that the guest has either garnered throughout their career from their experience or perhaps has been passed down to them. So I was wondering if you could share with us one more piece of advice before we close out the show today.

Larry, I knew you were going to ask me this and I really thought, Johnny, about what I wanted to say here. So my advice actually is for CEOs, CHROs and talent acquisition leaders who are, who are thinking of investing in recruitment marketing and who are bringing in the first person at their company to do recruitment marketing, which is amazing because there's more recruitment marketing jobs open now than there has ever been before. And my advice to you is to enable this person to do their best work because if you don't, they won't stay. And we're now at that point with this profession and this discipline that I see people leaving a job because they don't have the leadership support. They're working with people who sort of just like don't get it, who don't give them budget, who don't give them resources, who don't give them authority to, to really use all their skills and their expertise to make a real impact at the company. So bring in a recruitment marketing professional but really empower them to do their best work and that's how you're going to get the most out of them and really, really make a difference in your recruiting strategy.

It's great advice. And you know so many employers citing hiring and talent as being like the number one, number two most important thing for their strategy or achieving their strategy and goals this year. I think that's great advice. Larry, thank you so much for joining us. I know you're just beginning your day. It's been a pleasure. You've just rained down upon us so much wisdom, advice and tips. It's been fabulous and I think our audience were really responsive with great questions and I'm sure they will all have tons of takeaways and not least of which will be the last piece of advice you gave there. Larry, if people want to find out more about Rally Inside, want to sign up for the free version or check out the paid version?

Where can they go to rallyinside IO? Very simple.

Rallyinside IO Check it out now if you've any interest in figuring out why you need to spend your money in different areas and focus your attention on different strategies and need the data for it, rallyinside IO is the place to go. Larry, thanks so much for joining us. We'll hopefully have you on again soon. You Take care.

Thank you.

And thank you for joining us this week. We hope you again will join us next week. Our show next week, next Wednesday, will be all about thinking holistically. I'll be joined again by John Vas Teleka. John's been on the show before, huge hit previous times. He joined me on the show here for the shortlist. And John's going to be talking about why talent acquisition leaders need to care more about onboarding, compensation and internal mobility, things they don't typically have responsibility for. John's got a wealth of experience in this area from the fantastic clients he works with in his own background. He'll be joining me live from Seattle, from his home in Seattle, next Wednesday, 23rd of February. And that's at 4pm London, Dublin time. That's 11am on the east coast of the US and 8am on the west coast. And if you like that, want to hang on for more joy the very next day next Thursday, you can join us for Social talent live. That's February 24th and you can only join us live. The podcast is always available on your favorite podcast app by the Wednesday evening. But Social Live is only a live event and you can join us by going to socialtalent.com live now to register. And that's going to be broadcast at 4pm Dublin, London time. That's 11am New York, 8am LA time on February 24th. And the only way to get access is to register@SocialTown.com live. So whether it's Wednesday or Thursday, I'll hope you see you next week, maybe even twice next week. Take care.