Recruitment Advertising in 2022 with Kshitij Jain, Joveo

Recruiting is not an easy role, especially when you have hundreds of jobs to fill each month. The job often demands an ability to manage stress and thrive in a chaotic environment.

High-volume recruiters have their hands full on a daily basis; managing the expectations of applicant quality and volume, running adverts across numerous job sites, pulling up performance reports from dozens of dashboards, engaging one-on-one with large numbers of applicants, coordinating interviews, and much more. And all while running against time and constrained budgets!

In this conversation, we consider some of the big challenges facing sourcing and recruitment pros, drill down on what is working in the world of job adverting in 2022, and how the recruitment industry's tech toolkit will continue to evolve.

Bill's guest this time is Kshitij Jain, Founder & CEO at Joveo, a programmatic recruitment advertising platform that aims to be simple, transparent, and easy to use. Harnessing machine learning, the platform's goal is to connect clients with the right candidates for the right roles, faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Interview Questions Include: 

• Please introduce yourself and tell us about the mission of Joveo
• Tell us about Joveo's technology platform, the problem it solves, and its impact on the recruitment world.
• What kind of clients are you working with? 
• Let's talk about high candidate sourcing costs - many sectors have seen big increases in costs associated with attracting employees. e.g. restaurant workers, retail etc. Why is this the case?
• What are programmatic job ads and how do they help solve the problem of reaching top talent?
• What is the next paradigm shift in the world of recruitment marketing we'll see in 2022? How will the ecosystem need to adapt to this shift?
• As a leader of a growing company, in a post-pandemic, fast-changing world, what are you most optimistic and excited about? What drives you and the Joveo leadership team amidst all of the turmoil and uncertainty in our world?
• To summarize our conversation today, what must talent acquisition teams do to win the war for talent today? How can they work more like consumer marketers?

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast, and Iceni

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the HR chat podcast, bringing the best of the HR and talent communities to you.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Recruiting is not an easy role, especially when you have hundreds of jobs to fill each month. The job often demands an ability to manage stress and thrive in a chaotic environment. High volume recruiters have the hands full on a daily basis. Managing the expectations of applicant quality and volume running adverts across numerous job sites. Pulling up performance reports from dozens of dashboards, engaging one on one with large numbers of applicants, coordinating interviews and a whole bunch more and all while running against time and constrained budgets. Hey, this is bill Bannum host of today's HR chat interview. And, and if you are a high volume recruiter or leader with ambitions to scale your business quickly in 2022, then this episode listeners is definitely for you in this interview. We're gonna consider some of the big challenges facing sourcing and recruitment pros. We'll drill down on what is working in the world of job advertising in 2022 and how the recruitment industries tech toolkits will continue to evolve. My guest. This time is shooted Jen, founder and CEO, over at Jovi, a programmatic recruitment advertising platform. That aims to be simple, transparent, and easy to use harnessing machine learning, the platform's goal to connect clients with the right candidates for the right roles faster and more efficiently than ever before. And by the way, listeners, if you find this conversation interesting and helpful, you'll probably enjoy two additional conversations supported by Joo coming up later in Q1 of 2022. So do stay tuned for KJ. Welcome to this episode of the HR chat podcast.

Speaker 3: 2:08

Hello, bill exciting Monday. How are you doing today? I

Speaker 2: 2:11

Am great. Thank you. And I'm also looking forward to today's conversation. Uh, why don't we jump straight in? Why don't you start by telling our listeners a bit about yourself and what's going on over at Jovi?

Speaker 3: 2:22

Sure. I, uh, leading a Jovi, which is I would call it as we are cooking up some interesting stuff. And the master chef, uh, I've been in the space for about 20 years managing online recruiting sales, product management, customer service from AsiaPac to Latin America to us. So been the space long enough, uh, uh, work with monster first startup was a job application startup called mobile acquired by indeed and then, uh, jovi.com. So, yep. And an exciting journey that we have been on. I think, uh, being right place at the right time is very important and Jovi happens to be such with, uh, my team members, uh, which are about 215 numbers today. Uh, Jovi has gone from zero to two 50 in four years time. So that's about me and Jovi. Awesome.

Speaker 2: 3:10

Thank you very much. Now, maybe you can tell us a bit about Jovi O's technology platform then, um, talk a bit about the problems that is solves and, and its impact on the recruitment world.

Speaker 3: 3:23

One of the most, uh, important indicators of a successful startup is the right timing. Now, if you add, uh, the right ingredients, which is the right team, the right mission, uh, uh, you know, people have the heart right heart, uh, uh, and, and, and follow one direction. I think you can get there. Uh, but the timing is an important one. And, and the space we are in, uh, you know, back in the day when mobile was becoming, uh, Omni presents, right? Uh, there was a lot of opportunity that came, uh, as, as it became more and more, uh, I think we started seeing, uh, chat parts and then, uh, the job would started changing and they started becoming a lot more so to speak paper, click, I would not really say paper performance yet. Uh, and, and then the different models existed. And, and that's where we came in and said, okay, we are going to make all of this confusion of, you know, paper posting, paper slots, paper, click applications, uh, who is working. Who's not working, you're gonna just simplify all of it and make it a simple click of a button and, uh, created a, a, a talent delivery engine. Uh, uh, uh, we call it as a sourcing and job advertising distribution platform, which automates all of this and provides, uh, real kind reporting to companies, uh, on, on not just the sources they're using, uh, but what is the efficacy of those sources to hires and, uh, and what we've done as a result is not only have we given our customers, our, our talent acquisition folks, uh, ability to see real time data, but also use the data to improve the results next time, around their high, having the same positions open. So it, it is a technology that gets better by time. Uh, you know, it's, it's a baby that you need to feed and it, it grows and, and delivers better. Uh, so that's what, uh, Jovi is. Um, this is the problem we solve. Um, we have solved a lot of other problems in the space where not just the data to be shown in the data to be used, but the data to be accurate. You know, there's so much of a fraud that exists in the industry. The costs are, are so high, like, uh, you know, this is not untrue, uh, that, uh, you end up paying five times, uh, for a certain click, then the cost to acquire that click, uh, uh, at the end of the funnel, know the, uh, uh, sourcing, uh, funnel. And, and this is where things really, really go bad. And I think we're trying to solve all of that.

Speaker 2: 5:52

Okay. I wanna pick your brains a bit more there. Um, you mentioned that, um, maybe the numbers on what they should be in the industry, let's put it like that. Um, are you able to share any examples? Are, are we talking about maybe inflated numbers of, of clicks or inflated numbers, but I guess it wouldn't be conversions cause you can, you can measure that pretty, pretty easily. Are we talking about some, some platforms out there may offer different, uh, all numbers when it comes to impressions as well? What, what, what does that look like?

Speaker 3: 6:20

Sure. So, uh, set all levels, impressions, clicks, applications, uh, and attribution. Uh, so for example, what happens to the clicks and applies that, uh, uh, our outside attribution window, uh, that, uh, has been established for a certain job bot, what happens to those, right? Are they, does any of the system call them as, you know, organic, native or generic? No. Uh, uh, there is always a claim to, uh, take that over. There's a lot of, uh, bots and, uh, wrong type of flex. Now I'll give you the, the fraud in, in there's a line at which the fraud becomes a lot more of a blur. The line is such that, uh, when the, when the job seeker location and the job location happen to be two different ones now, and it is done intentionally so that the acquisition of clicks can be done at a cheaper cost, then that, that kind of is a borderline fraud, but there is a, a click road where a lot of bot still happen in the system. There are a lot of duplicate clicks. Uh, there's a lot of foreign clicks that are intentionally being sent, uh, application attribution, uh, and just the spend attribution for that matter is also, uh, around, uh, and I personally believe that if you buy something for, you know, 20 cents and sell it to a dollar, that itself is a, is a fraud, right? That's not fair, right. It's, everybody's right to make money, but, uh, there's so many things that are wrong in principally the ecosystem that it needs a transparent, uh, platform that is, uh, uh, that is able to show the efficiency of every job board to the end customers.

Speaker 2: 7:55

Okay. I'm loving it today. We've got a man on a mission here, listeners, so that's fantastic. So, um, what, what kind of clients are you working with then KJ, which industries, you know, which sectors, which markets have perhaps seen the maximum adoption for programmatic job ads?

Speaker 3: 8:10

Sure. So actually anybody, uh, which, uh, any, any, any company, any, any business category or segment that hires in high volumes, the programmatic job ads can work, uh, very, very efficiently, uh, because, uh, for, for a technology to make sense of data, it needs lots of data, right? That means it needs a lot of homogeneous data. That means that lot of jobs, uh, needs to be of a similar type. So if you're looking for we VP analyst and you're looking for a VP of research, uh, uh, and there is no historical data of that, then all you're doing is distribution. I'm hoping that you'll have a better reach and better spread, and somebody will click on it. But when you're looking for a package handle or you're looking for a delivery driver, and that is when the technology gets very, very effective. So for us, any such company that, uh, has requirement, uh, such as this would work, uh, as far as we are concerned, we work with the, uh, uh, uh, a lot of, uh, uh, gig companies, direct employers staffing, and RQs, these are the three top categories for us. Uh, we work with the are two largest right hailing companies in the world, two largest staffing agencies in the world, uh, uh, one of the largest healthcare employers in the world. So we just focus on the highest volume jobs. And so that we can add a lot of value, uh, going forward with our

Speaker 2: 9:27

Customers. Let's talk a bit about high candidate sourcing costs. Now KJ many sectors have seen big increases and costs associated with attracting employees. So for example, restaurant workers, retail, and so on. Why is this?

Speaker 3: 9:42

So that's a very interesting question. Uh, there is a, this is a time of a great reshuffle, uh, you call great resignation, great inspection. And a lot of people, they realize that they do not want to be in the job they are in. So they re-skilled. They moved out back in the day when, uh, travel and hospitality was at a full stop. Uh, people moved out to become ERs, Uber drivers, and so on and so forth. And they never came back. They love the flexibility they have over there. So it's getting very difficult to bring those candidates back, hence the cost to acquire the candidates in those industries, which are previous on a lowdown, has got up. Then a lot of industries, people don't want to be in a high touch job, right? When they're, they come in close contact with people. So there's a health risk. A lot of nurses are not coming back. There's a lot of burnout that has happened in that industry. And a lot of other such, uh, similar industries, like, you know, senior care daycare and so and so forth, uh, you know, stimulus checks didn't help, right? Uh, that's a stimulus check, uh, checks acted as stimulus not to come back to work and, uh, and that, uh, you know, that will go away. But then for a time being, that is what it is. Uh, one other thing I like to add over here is in which people don't talk about is the burden of home falls on the women when all the daycare centers are closed. And as things were, uh, went from back to worse, as men started coming back to work, they were responsible to take care of the children and, and they never really got back into it. So I think a combination of these result into a lack of supply, whereas the demand was very high and, and result into increase in costs. Getting

Speaker 2: 11:13

Applications is, is hard enough at the moment, but, but getting the right kind, the dates to apply is perhaps an even greater challenge during this great reha or great resignation, whatever one wants to call it, how does programmatic job advertising then solve that problem of ensuring quality of applicants?

Speaker 3: 11:32

Sure. So, you know, if you can start thinking about it, right. One, one of our jobs, uh, is from a quality of applicant standpoint. I think even before that educating the world about the supply and demand gap, educating the world, that to get the quality you need to be able to spend more, right. For example, avid CPCs, uh, in, uh, a restaurant food service industry has gone up almost three times from 58 cents to 1.4,$5 and so on. And so then, and every other category you would see that, but when it comes to delivering, uh, better quality applications, I would kind of take a pause and say, let's not call it quality. Everybody's a quality applicant. Uh, we talk about best fit candidates, most relevant candidates or applications to a job. And, and by that, you need to make sure that you are able to put, uh, uh, the right job in front of the right person, right? There's been so much of waste stage happening in the industry where there's been a model of spray and pre right. Uh, let's give nursing jobs in the spread out there, and some nurse will see it and you get a hundred clicks and then you get 10 applications and you get only one higher and that's wrong if you knew just the right 10 nurses. So having that intelligence, building those kind of audiences in your ecosystem as programmatic companies are supposed to do, it's supposed to be programmatic, right? It's not supposed to be dumb job distribution technology. And that is a different that can make all the difference when it comes to delivering relevant and so to speak quality candidates, uh, uh, other of course, a lot of things that can be done in that direction. Uh, some of the examples I can give you is, is your it's your job content perfect. You know, is that giving you the best outcome from ability to attract the right kind of candidates, uh, uh, uh, have, have you learned from the highest, right? Which sources are delivering the highest, and even, even if the cost of acquiring candidates like a cost per click or a cost per apply from those sources could be high, but your conversion at the lowest end of the funnel, right. Which is from apply to higher, if that is the highest, then you might as well spend more at the top of the funnel when a click is to them and, and, and, and make sure that you get the highest, most relevant candidate exposure, uh, as a company, I think one should even ask, uh, uh, do I know my lookalike audiences, right? It has been the existing and at tech world forever, and in our industry, nobody ever uses lookalike audience. You know, we talk to our customers, many don't even know about it. And, and, you know, uh, we could take the candidates and find a look like audience for, let's say a package, uh, handler in Atlanta. And we know that, uh, uh, there are about another 20,000 of those out there, which are not in job board ecosystem that we can reach out to, by creating an audience of 10,000 such that you already know. So, so those kind of things can help you put a right job in front of everybody. And if you look at right, it's a job for everyone, it's our job to deliver. That's the acronym of our company's name, it's our job to deliver the right job in front of the person to make sure the person gets hired. So that's kind of how we drive about improving the relevance of the applications by making sure that we put the right in front of the right person.

Speaker 2: 14:33

Okay. Thank you. I originally was gonna ask a little bit about, what's changed over, over the last couple of years as a result of the pandemic, but actually I, I'm gonna skip that. Um, and instead I wanna jump straight to, uh, what else what's next? What's, what's coming up. What, what, what's the next paradigm shift, if you like in the world of recruitment, KJ, uh, recruitment marketing specifically, uh, that we are gonna see this year, or maybe into 20, 23 as well, and how will the ecosystems, so, you know, job sites, technology, providers, agencies, and so on need to adapt to that shift.

Speaker 3: 15:07

So it's, it's, it's pretty, uh, it's an iron that I'm gonna say what I'm gonna say, you know, back in the day, 20 years back in this industry, when I was, uh, in front lines and would go to my customers and, you know, we would sell a million dollar packages on a paper post basis. And, uh, and the, and the end of the year, when we went for renewal, the customer would always say, all right, these spent a million dollars with us, and we hired these many people. And, and that would be the judgment day for us. That's where the rubber met the road for us. And, and I think the industry is eventually going to get back there, right? Uh, everything is going to get measured by tracking to hire measured by the conversions to hire measured, be too higher. So that is going to be a shift that's gonna happen. That recruiters, talent, acquisition professionals are gonna start demanding and saying, I want that, uh, a deep, uh, uh, intelligence to where the hires are happening in, in, in, down the funnel metrics. I believe transparency and fraud would be two themes that, uh, you know, talent, acquisition, uh, uh, professions worldwide would start waking up to and say that, uh, uh, uh, we want enough transparency. We want transparency to every source, uh, behind every, uh, uh, agency behind every platform. One thing is very common opaque, opaqueness, right? Nobody talks about what's behind exchange. Nobody gives hundred percent visibility of every single click and the source of it. And I think that's gonna change. And, and that is going to lead to, uh, reduction in fraud. Uh, that's also go, education is also going to lead a lot of reduction in fraud. In terms of people start asking the right questions, a platform will start incorporating it and, and things will happen from there on, so I believe that, uh, this, this wave is gonna happen, but I would not want to just stay with 2022. I think 2022 is a year of paradigm shift, but it is, it is still work in progress. I think where it's going to eventually get down in four or five years, or three to four years, is our industry will see the emergence of, uh, our own on, in the industry, right? A, a company that will come out and say, you pay me on a delivery model, right? If I hire you get paid. And I think that is going to be eventual, uh, uh, medicine for all the, uh, uh, problems that exist in the industry. So I believe that, uh, all this that is happening right now is going to be actually lead to that. And the one who gets there first and, and, and, and the largest scale is the one which is gonna win. So that's kind of my take on, on what is gonna change and what companies would need to change.

Speaker 2: 17:45

Okay. Okay. Thank you. So, as a leader of a growing company, then KJ in a, in a post pandemic, fast changing world, what are you most optimistic and excited about? What drives you and the Jovi leadership team admits all of the Turmo and uncertainty in, in, in our world today. And perhaps you can link that back to, to the company mission.

Speaker 3: 18:06

So, uh, our mission is to<affirmative>, uh, make sure that we help everybody get a job, right? There's a job for everyone. It's our job to deliver it to them. And when I say job, I mean, I don't mean job ad ad, I mean, uh, help helping them get a job. And we realize that, uh, we'll have to go deep into, uh, sourcing, uh, the candidates, uh, whether it is by job distribution, through regular job or, or worldwide web, or to reengagement, remarketing, retargeting, whatnot. Uh, the idea is that this entire experience, uh, uh, of, of trying to find, um, uh, uh, the right candidate, the right applicant, uh, and the right hire is so painful that we wanna make it, uh, uh, very, so from a talent acquisition standpoint, uh, it could be, and should be as simple as just go in and plug in how many hires you want to have, which location you wanna have. What's your job description. And the system should automatically tell you, this is the time. This is the speed. This is a cost in which you're gonna get it. And the system will automatically continuously update a camp campaigns and, and manage the campaigns. And the mission of Jovier is to help, uh, both job seekers, uh, and, uh, and, uh, uh, talent acquisition professions at the same time. I would even say that, right. You know, one thing you need to realize, and we all need to realize that the world of job seeker is over. Now, I know I'm saying something very strange. Uh, job seeker means someone who seeks a job job seeker. I think it has not turned on's head. Its jobs are seeking people. People are not seeking jobs anymore. So now how do you adapt to that change? And, and, and that is what Jovi's vision has always been. Our mission has always been that people put an ad in front of the right person so that the person doesn't have to go out looking for a job. And, uh, uh, in the post pandemic world, uh, where, uh, there is going to be a reach happening constantly, right? We are going to live in the world of constant flux and, and people have had this introspection everybody's, uh, are trying to pursue their happiness, right? Our job is to make sure that we are able the right candidate. And, and frankly speaking, if you deliver hires at the end of the day and people get the job that they deserve to get, and their happy it as, as a company, we talk about the global happiness index, right? Have we improved, uh, you know, when a person who gets a job where a person is happy, the entire family gets happy, right? There is a lot of goodness that comes as a result of it. So we constantly talk about how do we make sure that we deliver more hires from whatever we do otherwise, what's the point, right? You can spend hundreds of millions of dollars, a billion for your platform. It's tantamount zero in their mind, if you're not actually delivering hires and showing companies that they're being successful as a result of that

Speaker 2: 20:50

KJ, I am sorry to say that we are already coming towards the end of this particular interview. I, I know what you're thinking. How is that possible? We, we are getting on so, well, it only feels like it's been a couple of minutes, but that's the case. Anyway, um, before we do wrap up to, to kind of summarize our conversation today, so maybe you wanna pull upon some of the points that you've made so far as part of this, uh, this answer, what must talent acquisition teams do to win the war for talent today? And as part of that as well, maybe you can share how, how can they work more like consumer marketers?

Speaker 3: 21:23

So, uh, one aspect of it, uh, could be called our as talent acquisition professionals. Uh, you know, they could be more functionally driven, right, or more professionally in that sense, like a consumer marketer, not like a talent, uh, professional and more data driven, metric driven, performance driven, you know, like, uh, all of those kind of things, right. Uh, you know, getting a little bit more into the data side of the house and, and that would help. And that's from what they can do in a day to day life as a, as a talent acquisition professional, or a recruitment marketer for that matter become more like consumer marketer. And that's a good answer, but I think it goes beyond that answer, right? It, it, uh, it goes beyond that. Uh, so consumer marketer always focused on reducing the cost and humans are not cost or relevant to a cost, right. Uh, humans are where you want to get the best candidate. Right. I don't see a single hiring manager in the world would, would say that all I want to do is minimize cost. No, I would say I wanna get the best candidate. So, so invest in understanding your job descriptions, invest in understanding, uh, where jobs are being shown, invest in finding how your jobs are being shown, how you're perceived, who you're presented, how you engage with the candidates, uh, is the application process, right? Like make an investment there at the same time, make an investment where you're reaching out to candidates, right. You're not just praying and praying it. So, so that human hang to our industry is always a unique one versus, uh, the consumer side of the house. So I would would say, bring the consumer side of mind and human side of heart,

Speaker 2: 22:53

The consumer side of mind and the human side of heart. I like that. And just finally for today, AKJ how can our listeners connect with you? So maybe that's through LinkedIn, uh, maybe you wanna share your email address, maybe your really cool and your all over, um, pro social PLA forms, such as Instagram and TikTok and whatnot. Um, and also how can they learn more about the cool things happening over at Jovi?

Speaker 3: 23:17

Well, we are very active on social media, right? Uh, you can go to a website, uh, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter handles Facebook. Uh, one of the things I would say is, uh, just get in touch with us, uh, hear from us, uh, learn from us. We will love to tell you a lot about what you're doing. Uh, you can go to a website and reach out to us. So, uh, we have a lot of blogs that we continuously publish listen to this podcast. Uh, and, uh, we would love to be, uh, uh, in a position where we can share our knowledge and our learnings with our, uh,

Speaker 2: 23:45

Customers and prospects. Awesome. Well, KJ, that just leads me to say for today. Thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR chat show. Thank you, bill and listeners, as always until next time. Happy working.

Speaker 1: 24:02

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