Ever wondered how you can navigate the labyrinth of job advertising to find that perfect candidate? Thad Price, CEO of Talroo, joins us to unravel the mystery of 'programmatic plumbing' and how it's transforming the landscape of job advertising. He takes us on a journey through Talroo unique approach, leveraging real-time apply signals to connect with specific talent audiences for specific jobs. This is a stark departure from traditional platforms, and Thad eloquently explains why.
Thad also dazzles us with the unique features of the Talroo ad platform, designed to support talent acquisition leaders in their quest for the perfect candidates. From campaign creation to setting budgets, targeting cost per application goals, and gaining valuable insight into job-seeker behavior, Talroo seems like the magic wand every recruiter wishes for. He also delves into the power of qualifying questions in pre-filtering candidates and how their insights data vaults talent acquisition leaders ahead of the competition. So, if you're interested in understanding the future of talent acquisition and job advertising, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Ever wondered how you can navigate the labyrinth of job advertising to find that perfect candidate? Thad Price, CEO of Talroo, joins us to unravel the mystery of 'programmatic plumbing' and how it's transforming the landscape of job advertising. He takes us on a journey through Talroo unique approach, leveraging real-time apply signals to connect with specific talent audiences for specific jobs. This is a stark departure from traditional platforms, and Thad eloquently explains why.
Thad also dazzles us with the unique features of the Talroo ad platform, designed to support talent acquisition leaders in their quest for the perfect candidates. From campaign creation to setting budgets, targeting cost per application goals, and gaining valuable insight into job-seeker behavior, Talroo seems like the magic wand every recruiter wishes for. He also delves into the power of qualifying questions in pre-filtering candidates and how their insights data vaults talent acquisition leaders ahead of the competition. So, if you're interested in understanding the future of talent acquisition and job advertising, this is an episode you don't want to miss.
Listen & Subscribe on your favorite platform
Apple | Spotify | Google | Amazon
Welcome to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast, a show dedicated to the storytelling that happens or should happen when practitioners purchase technology. Each episode is designed to inspire new ways and ideas to make your business better as we speak with the brightest minds in recruitment and HR tech. That's what we do. Here's your host, William Tincup.
Speaker 2:This is William Tincup and you are listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Thad on from TauRu and we'll be learning about the business case or the use case for why his prospects and customers use TauRu. Thad, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself and TauRu?
Speaker 3:Thanks so much, william. Great to be here and I'm really excited for the opportunity to tell our story. So I'm Thad Price. I'm CEO here at TauRu. Previously I was VP of product and I've been in the job board industry for almost 20 years, and today TauRu was focused on helping companies attract frontline applicants and essential workers for their open recs through more of a talent matching platform that uses pardon the term programmatic plumbing.
Speaker 2:Okay, so let's define programmatic loving Programmatic plumbing yeah. What is the now? I'm curious, because now I got to know what this term means.
Speaker 3:In the job advertising world. There's been a lot of movement in the last few years with building a programmatic job advertising platform and a lot of the recruitment advertising agencies leverage programmatic job advertising to help ensure that you're reaching the right candidates at the right price at the right time at the right place, and what we've seen in our business is that's been very helpful for companies to be more efficient in advertising on Indeed and ZipRecruiter and other job boards. And when we think about our talent matching platform, the whole idea when we were thinking about building TauRu was because when we started as a job board, so we started. We own and operate a job search engine, jobs2careerscom, and we were going to market. What was challenging with that is we were one of many job search engines and one of many job boards and typically what happens in the industry is a lot of that buying is brand based. We were talking about this earlier. It's the individual that spends a lot in brand. If we think about the origin story of Indeed many years ago, we think a monster career board, everything that happens, a lot of investment in brands to get to the gravitas that a lot of the businesses are in today. And so when we started thinking about the TauRu.
Speaker 3:The thesis behind TauRu it was hey, could we open up a lot of our plumbing, a lot of our jobs2careers matching, and could we create a way that we could allow companies to reach the right candidate at the right time at the right place, based on candidate profiles, and be action oriented around attracting candidates within our search and match, which is the TauRu product.
Speaker 3:And so, if you think about the agency products you think of, or you think of Appcast, or you think of Pandologic and some of the traditional programmatic systems today, all which we work with and that we're partnered with, those systems are basically collapsing all of your job advertising services into one platform, even what you do with Indeed, even what you do with ZipRecruiter. And our thought process was what if we can build that plumbing, that programmatic plumbing, in our ecosystem that we're powering, in our talent matching platform? So we could still work with Appcast, pando, other recruitment marketing agencies that we work with, but allow us to be more effective at reaching the right candidates in the search that we're powering and in the match that we're powering. And so that was the power and the move behind a single destination, which was jobs2careerscom job search engine, to this idea of TauRu as a talent matching platform and be more effective at reaching right candidates at the right time at the right place, based on downstream signals happening at the applicant tracking system.
Speaker 2:What's your, what's your take on there's programmatic in the way that we see it in the recruitment space Versus programmatic in the way that ad tech people see it?
Speaker 3:and Go ahead. Yeah, that's a terrific question. So, in in the job advertising world, in the talent acquisition world today, programmatic is seen as a job distribution Engine right, a way to ensure that you're being more effective at making rule-based assumptions or bids on, indeed, or on Zip, recruit or other job boards right, how we think about, when you think of, like, online advertising in general, programmatic is about rule-based buying. Right, it's about right audience, right time, right place. However, the thing that's still a little different, that hasn't hit how an acquisition today and job advertising today, is this idea of audiences. And what I'd like to, what I'd like to share, is that, if you think about the idea of audiences today, if you go to, if you say, hey, I want to advertise to Find people that are looking to buy a home Right, all of these companies have built Audience groups of people that are in market to buy a house, and so realtors want to advertise to that audience of homebuyers.
Speaker 2:And it's more or less real time.
Speaker 3:It's more. Yes, absolutely, it's more real time. Yeah, in today's world, programmatic job advertising isn't there yet, right, it's? I'm still buying on, indeed, I'm still buying on a job board. I want to be more effective and, believe it or not, that's how we are different, in that, when we think of how we're as a talent matching platform, it really is that idea of Real-time, based on apply signals, reaching audiences we have.
Speaker 3:We like to think of talent audiences and talent audiences can be. This market is in, this group is in market for a warehouse job, this talent audiences in market for a receptionist job, and so the idea of bringing audiences to this idea of job advertising, I think, is something that's unique and Will be where this goes in the future. And so, from our perspective, is when we think about tower and what tower means. Is it really means Bringing talent and recruiters together and providing a great match, and that's at the end of the day, when we think about the traditional Programmatic systems, that's what they're missing. They're not really controlling the match, right, the match between the candidate and the match between the candidate and the employer. They are controlling, like bids, how much you're spending, but the match and the real-time bid and the connection is what's so powerful? Because, at the end of the day, it's about quality and it's about cost per hire For talent acquisition professionals and recruiting teams.
Speaker 2:So I'm assuming everything we do, obviously with the market that we care about is mobile first. Right, that's right. Okay, I'll lead off with the my bias. I hate software categories, despise them. But I also know that HR and recruiting budgets are built in Excel. So when in the budget are do we put programmatic plumbing like where do they? Where does people like carve budget out for you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we would fit in job board job or advertising Okay. So when we think about job board advertising, it's important for us to think about how to win in. Job board advertising is about being a more effective product than what's in the market today, and we think by powering match if you think of profiles, people bringing people together more effectively, focusing on quality of match that's what it's all about to win more market share. So a great example is something that we've all been talking about for years In this industry, and it's one of the things that we're we're looking at solving and investing pretty heavily in is when I say the power of match is when people apply to a job.
Speaker 3:Today, even on very large job boards, job sites, we ask so many questions at time of apply that I have to answer over and over again as a job seeker right, and we've been talking as an industry about this idea of the black hole right at Plotow a job and I never hear back or I don't know since the beginning of Folks applying for a job and what I think one of the things that happens is if we think of town acquisition teams, we think of human resources in general, it's a nice industry. It's an industry of nice people. It's hard to tell someone no, it's hard to tell someone I don't think you're quite a fit. So what I think happens is because a lot of the qualification happens let's call it during the apply process and not before the search happens. I think what happens is we just are in this interesting cycle where people are applying to the jobs over in Oregon that they're not qualified for because they're not reading job descriptions or whatever the case is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's spray and pray, but it's the opposite, right, exactly, it's candidate spray and pray Exactly.
Speaker 3:So what we could be doing is we could be surfacing the requirements of the jobs and normalizing all that data in the front of the process at search time, right.
Speaker 3:So at search time, if you can filter at search time, if you can create great matching and ensure that you're connecting the candidates to the right jobs, then what happens is you can drive higher quality applications, which should drive a lot more efficiency in the ecosystem.
Speaker 3:And so I think everything that we're doing is studying jobs, normalizing jobs, being able to surface the right types of features on an individual job to job seekers to be more effective when the power of choice happens and when I say the power of choice, it's that when a job seeker's at time of search, we're powering searches, we're powering search and match when they're looking to make a selection and engage with the job. We want to surface as much information at search time and filter as much as we can at search time so that the downstream experience is better for the employer, a lot more quality applicants, and then, of course, the other benefit of that is that for matching job seekers to the right jobs, then the applicants we are generating are going to have a better experience because we all have less of the black hole phenomenon that's been hitting the industry for years.
Speaker 2:Well, there's several things that either the front end of the funnel is filled with a bunch of garbage and then recruiters get frustrated because they have to find their way through the garbage, or again the spray and pay on both sides. We've all had volume related problems, and so I think one of the things I love about this is it solves not necessarily quality of hire, quality of applicant and, like it knocks people out, whether, however you want to phrase that, and it brings. Okay, you're going to have 20,000 people apply to your job Check Great, your ego is stroked, fantastic. But really you're only going to need to interact with 100 of them because those are the only 100 that are qualified and that's manageable for most recruiters. Okay, out of 100, I'll get to 20 that I really think are awesome, and I'll get to five that I can pass over to the hiring manager. Great, got it. Let's do some buy side stuff real quick. When you demo and when your team demos, what's the aha moment or your favorite part of the demo?
Speaker 3:I think probably, when we dive into our insights product, a couple of things that we provide, that's pretty unique. The first is, when you look at our demo, when you look at the TauRu ad platform, it looks a lot like. It looks a lot like a very simple version of Google AdWords. Right, I've got my jobs. My jobs have been synced directly from the applicant tracking system that you're using. Once the jobs have been synced from the applicant tracking system, scraped, synced into the system, then our team or you, a talent acquisition leader, can actually create campaigns and say here's my campaign for sales in Austin, here's my campaign for customer service in Dallas, and you can set budgets and you can set target cost per application goals within each of those campaigns. Once we sync the jobs and, of course, whenever a new job is open that fits those rules and those requirements in the applicant tracking system, our system will automatically load that job into the platform. So the idea of ad hoc campaigns to focus on what's important and what you're missing from a higher perspective is really important. And then we're essentially connected to the applicant tracking system, so we're not asking you to use another system. Right, the candidates are going to be delivered into the applicant tracking system. So that's the first thing that's interesting. When people are like, oh, I get it now right, these jobs are ads, they're integrated into our platform. The other thing that's interesting is we have a job title we call it smart job titles where if a job title from your applicant tracking system is a applicant tracking style job title, because of all of our data and because of our insights on job seekers, we can help you instantly optimize that job title and expand that job title based on job seeker behavior and what we're seeing from search results. That's a benefit of having a search engine. Empowering a search engine, empowering search and matches. We have access to behavior. That's interesting as well.
Speaker 3:The second thing that I would say in the job sector, we think about the optimizing job titles. We also think about qualifying questions. You can add qualifying questions within your job families and your job campaigns. You have to answer those questions before you interact with the job, which I think is really important. Going back to this idea of hey, let's try to actually get some information from a job seeker, to try to connect them before they grow through this long process of answering all of these questions applying for a job and only to find out they're not qualified. That's the jobs area, the other area that I think is really interesting, and we have reporting and analytics and that's somewhat table stakes. The last piece is our insights data. That's the AHA moment, where all of the behavior that's happening the searches, the rank, the top companies, in some cases prices all of these things are available for talent acquisition leaders in our platform. In 2019, we run HrTech product of the year for that insights product.
Speaker 3:When you think about systems today, all of these systems are very different. Indeed has their ecosystems, a recruiter has their ecosystem, we have our ecosystem. But to be able to surface all of this data in this idea of talent supply and what's available and what do you need to be competitive, I think is very different and interesting. That's the AHA moment because when we work with traditional programmatic systems that are using the bidding tools, a lot of this data isn't available in those systems because they don't necessarily power the search and match needed to be able to understand that supply side, Unlike when traditional advertising, you've got Google and others that have. They're powering the match, they're powering the ad serving, similar to us. They have access to that supply side information.
Speaker 2:They care about it because that's what they sell. There's a different. Incentives are a bit different. I know our market will catch up. I feel strongly that we're a couple of years behind ad tech, but we'll get there. Questions go ahead.
Speaker 3:I think you're right If you think of who today goes and says I want to buy an ad on Yahoo. Right, yahoo has a lot of people, but they have a lot of people go to Yahoo a day, but no one says I want to go buy an ad on Yahoo. What happens today is that's actually what still happens when people buy job advertising. They're like I want to buy an ad on insert job board but that's not what happens. And it's about the audiences is about. They say I want people in market to buy a home. I'm not really concerned where it comes from, but I want people in market to buy a home.
Speaker 2:They might have a price, they might have a ceiling in which they don't want the traffic if it goes above that, but they want people again pre-qualified. If you could script questions for prospects to ask of your sales team and TauRu, what would those questions be? What do you want people to be asking TauRu?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want. We engage with prospects and customers. One of the things that we have a lot of conversation around is your cost per hire. How are you measuring cost per hire? What is your cost per hire? What does that experience look like? We embed that into our sales process. How we think about it is. Recruiting is more like sales. It's a contact sport. Timing is everything. Speed is everything. Speed to Canada is everything.
Speaker 3:From our standpoint, the biggest need when we're engaging with prospects and potential customers is have a conversation about what your goals. We're not trying to be in a situation where we're trying to line with your goals. We're not trying. I know it takes time to get some of that really important information from a customer or prospect, but we're truly trying to partner by partnering around a cost per hire goal or by partnering around even a cost per interview goal. Something that helps us really understand what you're gauging is what's so important in trying to think of the way that we can help and we can provide this additional talent pool that's outside the other, the current talent pools you may be working with.
Speaker 2:I love that. Okay, last question it's about your latest and greatest, your favorite success stories, customer success stories, without mentioning names. That's not really the important part. The important part is the story. Maybe they were skeptical to start with and then you got them in, you got them on board and then boom, life changed. So take us into a couple of those if you can.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely so. The first thing, as I said earlier about cost per hire, we like to think of cost per hire in many customer conversations with our North Star. Where we're going, where we need to optimize, we want to be partners and what we in some cases what we typically find is that sometimes it's hard to it's hard to understand cost per hire in many cases. Sometimes that information is not on the front lines, it's within a different leadership, a different leadership segment, so to speak, if we're working in more of a decentralized hiring process. But that is truly what we're looking to optimize around. And a great example is that we have a staffing firm that we've worked with for a fair amount of time, terrific partner of ours. And what's interesting about that staffing firm is lifetime value of a candidate is very important for them, right? Because they're looking to put the candidate on assignment and as they put the candidate on assignment, they're generating revenue from billings, essentially from that candidate. And having a good ROI, a terrific ROI for a staffing firm, is so important to continue having that customer renew and continue having that customer to create a raving fan. And we've been very fortunate to have a lot of customers like that where the LTV. The lifetime value of a candidate on assignment continues to pay off, and so that's been a great story as well.
Speaker 3:One of the other stories we have a number on our homepage you can check out under customer stories is it's all about hires. For us and you'll see this time and time again in a lot of the conversations and a lot of the case studies it's you know, we're hiring people because of tower. It's about hires. It's not about applicants, right, it's about outcomes. It's about outcomes for job seekers and it's, of course, about outcomes for employers, because great people truly grow great companies, and you need to think about your talent as not a cost center, but as a profit center. And the companies that think about talent as a profit center are the ones that change the game. They try new ways to find new talent pools and they're the ones, in my opinion, that will constantly be on the leading edge of any business or any sector.
Speaker 2:Drops. Mike walks off stage and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I absolutely love what y'all do and just appreciate your time.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I really appreciate the invite Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and thanks everyone for listening to the podcast Until next time.
Speaker 1:You've been listening to Recruiting Daly's Use Case Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform and hit us up at RecruitingDalycom.