Media Buying Guide Introduction Media buying for advertised

Media Buying Guide

Introduction Media buying for advertised recruitment and brand building can represent a large proportion of your budget. This guide explores how to get the most from your money through a data-driven approach to sourcing channel evaluation, forecasting and deployment, and the different methodologies and options for recruitment advertising. The resource will cover: • • Understanding your routes to market • Working with platforms and aggregators • Job wrapping • Pay Per Click advertising • Dynamic media allocation and machine learning advancements Step by step guide to building a media plan • Establishing historical source effectiveness • Forecasting future advertising demand • Planning and costing out job and branding requirements • Negotiating tips for getting the best deal 2

Traditional Routes to Market ATS/Manual Job Wrapping Aggregation Many ATS provide direct posting options to many of the job boards you use, and are willing to negotiate with new job boards to integrate them if multiple customers might benefit. However more niche or regional job boards may require manual posting/unposting. Some job boards and platforms such as Indeed, Linked. In, Glassdoor, etc. allow for Job Wrapping by which they scrape ALL jobs from your website/ATS and post them automatically. This can save time for recruiters Aggregators such as Broadbean or e. Quest connect with your ATS and handle single-click multi-channel job distribution, and also may assist with media buying based on their broader buying power. Choosing your route to market is always a balance between control and efficiency. Managing job posting from your own ATS on a channel-by-channel basis can take time; Wrapping and aggregation is quick but formulaic and can supress creativity and agility. Media buying and value for money depends on a number of factors such as economies of scale, brand value, negotiation skills and regional pricing models. 3

ATS / Manual Job Management Managing your job adverts on a channelby-channel basis, often via direct integration in your ATS, provides ultimate agility in when, where and how you advertise. Your ATS will rarely integrate with all the channels you wish to use, so there will be unavoidable manual channel usage, which can cause a considerable admin burden. This flexibility is useful for limited pilots and trials. It also means you must manage individual relationships and negotiations with all your channel partners. Key Considerations - Is your ATS well integrated and what is the process, speed and feasibility of new integrations? - Do you have sufficient resources to effectively manage the process? - Is partner relationship management a core skill and can you afford the time? - Can you implement effective source tracking for nonintegrated channels? - Can you save on time-based job credits by posting for 2 weeks instead of 4 -6? 4

Job Wrapping Key Considerations Automated job wrapping is the quickest and most efficient way of advertising on platforms which support it, not even requiring any action by the team. It happens automatically in the background. It also means that ALL your roles will be marketed, which can present too much noise and choice for candidates, and possible brand fatigue. - Do you hire a significant number of similar jobs? Job wrapping can duplicate adverts unnecessarily unless you are judicious on what is posted on your own site. - How easy and effective is the decommissioning of job adverts? Do you have precise deadlines which require more control than wrapping affords? - Will job wrapping undermine ability to trial other channels, or highlight most important roles to hire against? There is no ability to drive hiring priorities via these channels, and errors or substandard job adverts are harder to rectify. 5

Aggregators Key Considerations Job Aggregators allow for a lot of flexibility in posting/unposting roles, particularly if they integrate well with your ATS. You can sometimes use their buying power to get preferential rates on channels instead of going direct to the supplier. Aggregators are easy to use, but take time and effort to set up, and often require trade offs on job advert appearance and the data structure for your jobs in the ATS, since they need to match up simultaneously with multiple channels. - Does your ATS only integrate with aggregators? Some ERP style recruitment platforms will only do this, such as Oracle’s Cloud Recruiting platform or their legacy system Taleo. - Will you need to change or add to your Job data structure in your existing system in order to pass correct data to aggregator? - Aggregators can provide cheaper media buying opportunities, but add a posting charge which needs to factor in to total value of service and budget. - What is the aggregator’s track record and attitude to onboarding new channels, and will you require them to add important yet unsupported channels? 6

Pay Per Click Key Considerations Pay Per Click advertising is an alternative to traditional job posting. Sites such as Indeed and Facebook lead in this field, and allow you to pay for traffic. This is most useful when you have a very well defined requirement which can narrow the audience of people who see the advert, and drive relevancy amongst those who subsequently click. Budget is usually set as a campaign total, or an ongoing daily or weeks maximum budget. - Do you have jobs that can be narrowly defined by a keyword someone may search for, or by a data variable in their existing profile? - Are you set up to handle smaller and more ad-hoc supplier transactions? - Do you have access to SEO/SEM/marketing professionals who can provide extra insight into PPC tactics? - Do you have specific campaigns or critical hiring requirements that could use a boost? - Is the PPC platform likely to attract and engage the specific talent profiles you want to attract? 7

Automated Job Distribution & Machine Learning The advent of machine learning and AI in recruitment, and the harnessing of big data and more accurate performance tracking has led to the emergence of Automated job distribution services. This is a step away and beyond traditional methods and is still developing as a technology. Companies like On. Recruit and Smart. Recruiter’s ‘Smart Jobs’ are leading the way currently. Their technology measures past channel success, macro factors beyond your own organization, and in-the-moment performance to continuously adjust and redirect your job posting mix to drive the outcomes you need. Key Considerations - Are you comfy handing over your channel mix and decisions on where to post to a 3 rd party? - Is it ok that some job boards you traditionally post to may not feature your jobs at any given time? Will candidate expectations be impacted? - Do you want to experiment with a wider array of job boards and advertising channels? - Are you able to set up some A/B testing? - Typically these solutions are all-in: are you happy to accommodate a full year pilot? 8

Creating your Media Plan 1. Measure and analyse historic source effectiveness 2. Forecast channel volumes for job filling The next pages demonstrate how you can take a quantitative and holistic view to your media plan requirements, and consider both how to fill jobs using your chosen channels, and how additional branding, PPC and paid content may enhance your hiring efforts. 3. Cost up job board / channel requirements 4. Cost up extra branding and content requirements There are several ways to buy media: directly via the end supplier, via a preferred branding or digital agency, or via advertising/job board aggregators. Get quotes from each in order to determine the best overall value, and most cost efficient route to market. 9

1 - Historical Source Effectiveness Use insights derived from accurate data to understand usage and demand Leverage manual, ATS, aggregator or web analytics to get data on where applications originate (page 3 &4) Cut data to demonstrate functional, regional and seasonal channel performance (page 5) The better the data you have, the better you can understand what media channels work, and predict which will be most useful in the future. Data quality is only as good as the systems in place for collecting it. If you don’t have an ATS, and use spreadsheet trackers, make sure you capture the channel directly from candidates via a “Where did you hear about this job opportunity? ” question. Ideally use a drop-down list of set options to make data analysis easier later on. For ATS users, review your source tracking processes. Make sure system entry source is captured, and that it doesn’t change or is replaced when you move candidates between jobs in the system. Example: A candidate is unsuccessful on application but is nurtured and hired 3 months later. Their source is now ‘ATS/talent pool’ but their original source is important from a media buying perspective. 10

What data is useful? When collecting and analysing data for source effectiveness, consider three questions in priority order: a) how prolific is the channel, and how efficient is it at producing candidates who are successful; b) how well does the channel do for different job levels and functional specialisms; and c) does the channel perform differently across time, or seasonally. Core data: Number of adverts used, applications per channel, avg. applications per advert, number of hires per channel, number of candidates progressed to interview per channel, and cost per channel. 1 Secondary data: underlying channel performance per job category and/or per job level (e. g. entry level vs manager level; sales vs customer service) 2 Tertiary data: performance across time on an annual basis (e. g. quarterly data or monthly data, by calendar or financial year) 3 11

Example Source Effectiveness Report This example spreadsheet shows advertising channels with the respective number of positions available for hiring, adverts used, applications received, # applications per advert, candidates progressed to interview, offer and hired. There is an Application: Interview ratio and an Application: Hire ratio, and cost metrics which factor in whether you operate an annual contract or an individual job cost. CHANNEL Positions Adverts Applications Apps per Ad Interview Job board 1 36 36 2200 61 68 Job board 2 70 55 4675 85 50 Job board 3 20 10 60 10 Free job boards PPC Campaign Agencies Career site Referrals Offer Hires 25 24 12 10 5 5 A: I 32. 35 93. 5 60 A: H 91. 67 467. 5 120 Cost unit Cost per hire £ 12, 000 Contract £ 1, 200 £ 5, 500 Contract £ 550 £ 150 Job £ 300 For additional insights, add a filter for level of role, function of role, location of role, and quarterly or monthly performance. 12

2 - Forecasting channel requirements Partner with your HRBPs and HRMI to look ahead at next 12 mo hiring Use attrition data from HRMS to size up likely replacement needs Discuss growth and project hiring needs with HRBPs or the business Workforce planning is no easy task and works best with a combined bottom-up (what does the historical data tell us? ) and top-down (what do business leaders and HRBPs predict? ) approach. The key things to consider are: 1. 2. 3. 4. What was historical attrition, and will it remain steady or change? What is projected net growth, if any? What new markets, products or offices will require an uptick in hiring? What macro economic factors may have an impact, upwards or downwards, on business performance and hiring? Use these questions with the help of your HRBP/Head of HR/business leader to arrive at a target hiring figure, and some insights into what level, regions and functions the hiring will take place within. 13

Convert forecast into channel strategy 1 Using Source effectiveness data and knowledge of your recruitment plan for the year to predict whether certain channels will yield more or less hires in the coming year. E. g. will you launch a referral programme refresh which will increase % of referral hires? Will you place restrictions on agency hiring? Arrive at a final total % hires to allocate as a target for online media Use your source effectiveness data to select which channels will remain in the mix, which can be 2 dropped due to non-performance or a change in requirements, and which you may wish to add. Assign a % hires target to each. Be aware of inherent bias in your channel selections. If you use one channel more extensively, it will naturally produce more hires. The process ratios (applications: interview: hire) highlight the background effort involved and may challenge your view of value. 3 Apply a 5% margin of error to your hiring projections, and reflect this in your resulting channel requirements forecast, and ultimately your budget request. 14

Example Forecasting Let’s take a company with a hiring requirement of 500 heads per year, and accurate source effectiveness data to predict future channels. The company’s combined growth and attrition projections point to a similar hiring plan as the previous year, but with some trends (small increases in referral hiring, and agency usage driven down). First, we need to look at their channel forecast (see right) which displays last year’s hiring figures and the variance with the year before and the expected channel mix for next financial year. Channel No. Hires Internal 50 Referral 90 Agency 60 Careers Site 65 Free boards 35 Paid boards 200 - Job board 1 80 - Job board 2 45 - Job board 3 25 - Job board 4 25 - Job board 5 10 - Job board 6 10 - Job board 7 5 Total Hires 500 % Hires FY 19 v FY 18 FY 20 Fcast 10% +1% 12% 18% +3% 20% 12% -6% 10% 13% -2% 10% 7% -1% 6% 40% +5% 42% 16% +7% 19% 9% +3% 10% 5% +0% 5% 5% +1% 5% 2% +2% 3% 2% -7% N/A 1% -4% N/A You can see that two job boards have underperformed and are being removed. . See next page for the resulting media plan. 15

3 – Job Fulfilment Plan Armed with your forecast, and historic effectiveness data you can now create a plan for filling your vacancies via the nominated channels. Calculate your volume of advert/credit requirements by this formula: Application: Hire ratio * Target Hires / Applications per Ad Be aware that some job boards use re-usable slots rather than posting credits, so you may need to consider how many roles you need to advertise at any time. Use the resulting requirements to gain individual direct quotes, and a quote from your preferred media agency and/or aggregator. This will reveal the most cost effective route to buying your media, and can be used as a useful negotiation platform. See sample media plan below (annualised). If you have quarterly or monthly hiring projections, this can be expanded to give even more granular cost forecasts. Channel Target Hires - Job board 1 95 - Job board 2 50 - Job board 3 25 - Job board 4 25 - Job board 5 15 # Adverts 143 275 50 60 32 Totals: Cost - Direct £ £ £A Cost - Pref. Agency £ £ £B Cost - Aggregator £ £ £C 16

4 – Additional Branding/Media Consider whether you want to additional media budget. This could be useful for a number of reasons, including: Linked. In ‘Work with us’ impressions to draw attention to your brand. Pay-Per-Click campaigns to target niche or critical skill sets. Banners, premium positioning and other enhanced visibility options to make you stand out against other employers. • Glass. Door premium services to replace reviews with branded content at top of your profile. • Advertorials and case studies to support brand recognition. Then, plot out the additional branding (example below), and engage suppliers direct and via agencies and aggregators to find the most cost effective route. Useful tips for negotiating are on next page. • • • Channel Tool/Feature Purpose Job board 2 Homepage banner General branding Facebook PPC adverts Niche role campaign Industry magazine Advertorial Employer branding Job board 3 Embedded videos Higher click throughs Quantity/Scope Cost - Direct Cost - Pref. Agency Cost - Aggregator 3, 000 impressions £ £ 1, 500 budget £ 1, 500 N/A 2 page feature £ £ £ 5 videos across jobs £ £ £ Total: £A £B £C 17

Media Buying negotiation strategies Negotiating with suppliers is a competency in its own right. Do your research, be prepared to be creative with your approach, and get your best negotiator to lead conversations. Top tips for getting the best deal: Find out the supplier’s Year End and Quarter End dates, and if possible initiate your contract shortly before a key financial performance date. The best deals are offered when sales reps are racing to a finishing line. Leverage any international locations to probe regional pricing variations. Is the supplier investing in a new region? Use that to secure best global prices, but be prepared to be directed back to HQ location. If you have a strong brand, use brand value in negotiations and underscore value to the channel. Use alternative buying strategies (e. g. outsourcing to an aggregator) to unlock better discounts against rate card. Ask for free premium branding and talent engagement extras when agreeing prices. Sales reps usually have more latitude over these features than core pricing. Take advantage or parent group utilisation or multi-year deals to get much lower unit rates. 18

This guide was developed by Peter Hetherington, Head Judge for the FIRM Awards. Peter Hetherington peter@beechamconsulting. co. uk +447989 403644 19