Joveo’s Revolutionary Rallying Cry: 4-3-2-1!

Nike says, “Just Do It.” Apple says, “Be Different.” There are many popular rallying cry examples. At Joveo we are different. Our rallying cry, a simple phrase repeated enthusiastically throughout our entire company, isn’t a slogan. It’s a short series of numbers: “Four, three, two, one!” Let’s dive into how these aspirational numbers are motivating Joveo to change the world of recruitment advertising, to significantly benefit our clients.

Unpacking 4-3-2-1

“Four, three, two, one” encapsulates Joveo’s goal as a company, and our vision to enable  highly efficient recruitment advertising.

This straightforward arithmetic is dramatically different from today’s recruitment landscape, in which, for example, we see 51 applicants per hire in retail. The approximate math that factors into those apply-to-hire (ATH) ratios looks something like:

Cross-industry average:

• 750 clicks on the job ad
• 70 candidates apply
• 8 candidates make the short list
• 1 candidate is hired

Joveo:

• 4 clicks on the job ad
• 3 candidates apply
• 2 candidates make the short list
• 1 candidate is hired

In comparison, the efficacy of 4-3-2-1 is revolutionary, reducing Joveo clients’ time and cost to hire by several orders of magnitude. An average click-to-apply (CTA) rate of 12% in the scenario immediately above would jump more than six-fold to 75% with Joveo. The ATH rate improves similarly, from 12 to 1 immediately above, to 3 to 1 with Joveo – that’s 400% more efficient.

Finding precisely the right audience

Optimizing job ad placement is fundamental to reaching the right audience. This is a function of two factors:

• Presenting the right jobs to the right candidates
• The right candidates must also intrinsically identify as high-intent, whether they are seeking a new job actively or passively.

Joveo is focused intently on optimizing the “talent funnel,” meeting both of these requirements to increase CTA and deliver high-quality applications. Ad placement must therefore be optimized along multiple lines:

• Outlets for active job seekers (such as job boards and LinkedIn) and passive job seekers (such as TikTok and other social media).
• Further winnowing down options in both of these categories to pinpoint the best match for the job with candidates.

Targeting the right audience relies on constructing digital personas and cohorts of people who fit the particular persona. For example, a delivery driver persona would likely spend certain amounts of time on various social media. There are typical job sites that a teen looking for food service employment would go to. And so forth and so on.

In addition, cohorts tend to move back and forth between the internet and social media in a particular way. Once the digital footprint of a persona has been established, you’re able to create the right cohorts of similar individuals. Then, once the cohorts have been established, it’s infinitely easy to target the right audience with a job ad. Examples could include:

• Advertising an in-store food service job on Indeed
• Placing an ad for a part-time food delivery driver on TikTok during lunchtime hours
• Recruiting seasoned travel nurses on NursingJobs.com
• Advertising part-time jobs for home health aids on Facebook, showing the ad to users who are nurses during evening hours within a specific locale.

Today, this occurs only occasionally in the job advertising market, and in a fragmented way. Most often the wrong audience is targeted, because the most fundamental element, the job seeker profile, is incorrect. But the biggest, and most common mistake of all is poor geo-targeting;  much of the time, advertising dollars are spent promoting jobs in locations farther than the target is willing to travel, either locally or cross-country, for example such as advertising a New York City job to an audience in Austin, TX.

Joveo is at the forefront of improving every facet of ad targeting by using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to gather and analyze vast amounts of data about candidates, build digital personas for the cohorts, and optimize geo-targeting. We are constantly researching how to target the right passive and active job seekers, aligning them with the job profile, cohort, personas and location. In this way, our goal is to pinpoint individuals who are well qualified and interested, dramatically boosting the likelihood they’ll apply when they see the ad.

Optimizing the application process

However, even when the right audience is targeted and a qualified candidate clicks on an ad, there’s a huge hurdle between interest (the click) and intent (actually applying): the application process itself. Some are downright tedious, requiring applicants to create a login ID, log in to the company’s website, and answer possibly extraneous questions. Let’s break down what’s wrong with this all-too-common approach:

• Job seekers don’t like to create multiple new IDs, sharing their personal information right away with prospective employers. This inconvenient and privacy-compromising reality results in up to 90% of application dropouts occurring at this stage.
• Candidates don’t want to answer multiple pages of questions. During this phase 30% to 40% of applicants leave without completing their application. Some come back, but most don’t.

In sum, from 100 clicks on job ads, perhaps 60 candidates will start the application process, but only 10 to 20 will actually complete it, resulting in a CTA ratio of 10%-20%. This is a huge dropout rate. Joveo is developing optimizations to address this issue, such as:

• Eliminating the need to create a separate login on the company website by automatically creating permission-based logins, or using LinkedIn or another social media.
• Pre-populating parts of the application using information from the social media profile as well as the digital personas.

With these changes alone, some Joveo clients have already seen a 300% increase in the number of completed applications – an accomplishment that adds rocket fuel to our pursuit of “four clicks, three applies.”

Streamlined shortlisting and hiring

From application to shortlisting, candidate screening occurs. In many cases it involves human intervention from recruiters at the hiring organization, but with very high-volume jobs, the screening process can be simplified and streamlined. It starts with identifying and converting high-intent applicants, which directly translates into high-quality shortlists and eventual hires, boosting recruiting efficiencies.

Again, filling high-volume jobs hinges on candidates being interested, qualified and available in the right place. These requisites can be established through a pre-screening process or after the application process, to maximize applicant quality. For example, an application process for delivery drivers could ask screening questions to make sure the candidate is qualified, such as if they have a driver’s license, and if they have been a driver with the particular delivery service in the past.

If the applicant doesn’t have a driver’s license, or is located in a place where the delivery service doesn’t operate, they would not be placed erroneously on the shortlist. Additionally, if they’d been a driver in the past for the service, they would not be eligible to be treated as a new hire, such as receiving a hiring bonus or other incentives.

Thus, automated screening processes produce a shortlist of highly-qualified candidates – ideally, two of the three applicants in Joveo’s 4-3-2-1 paradigm. From there, because the ad has been targeted at the right cohort, and because the application process has been simplified so much, it’s highly likely that of the two shortlisted candidates, one will be hired.

So there you have it, four-three-two-one – blastoff! All of us at Joveo are working hard to make our rallying cry a reality. Join us in the journey; learn more about how our global team can give you total picture of current recruitment advertising costs by requesting a demo of Joveo solutions today. And follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn, where we’re always working to help you get the most out of your recruitment advertising.