Freelance copywriter specialising in recruitment communications
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How recruitment marketing agencies are being embarrassed and having their role negated by some job boards

31/8/2013

14 Comments

 
Last week I made a very interesting but slightly alarming discovery. As someone who writes a lot of online copy for direct employers via their recruitment marketing agencies, I sometimes take the time to check whether a particular ad has run and, if so, whether the copy I wrote has been tweaked at all or run ‘as is’. Anyway, imagine my surprise when I discovered that an ad I wrote specifically for the Guardian’s online careers section and one niche job board was running in The Sun newspaper's online careers section!

I mentioned this in passing to the client’s ad agency contact when we next spoke and they, at first, like me, were surprised, but then, when the potential consequences dawned upon them, a little bit shocked. Here’s why. Direct employers use the services of a recruitment marketing agency for a variety of reasons. Amongst other things, they take away a lot of the hassle of advertising the employer’s vacancies. Copy, design, if for print, and media recommendations, sometimes based on extensive research if the role happens to be particularly niche or specialist - all are part of the service an advertising agency provides. The aim being the age old adage of the right ad in the right place, thus cutting down on the employer receiving irrelevant and poor quality response. On the other side of the fence though you have the media. Sometimes it’s the online version of a national or regional newspaper or trade publication, sometimes a niche or generalist job board. It all depends on what the vacancy is.

By and large, the agency/media relationship works fine. But, I can see a turning point coming where some recruitment suppliers, i.e. job boards, are going to seriously shoot themselves in the foot and alienate themselves from the advertising agencies that they, if not wholly, then certainly to a great extent, rely on to give them their business. The reason? When my agency contact got in touch with the job board in question they were essentially told rather glibly “Oh yeah, The Sun is part of our network. What’s the problem? You’re getting the extra coverage for free”.  Er, hello? That kind of skewed thinking is ridiculous. If it were the case then let’s just get rid of every recruitment advertising website out there and just have one great big job board where the world and his partner can post their jobs. Hey presto, you’ll have what, an audience of 5 or 6 million and hundreds of replies to every ad you post (not to mention lots of lovely spam to go with it). See where I’m coming from? It’s quite simple. Quantity doesn’t equate to quality, and never will.

If I was an employer who wanted to recruit a highly skilled professional I would want my ad agency to advise me where to place the job based on targeting the right audience and cutting down on poor and irrelevant response, not have my vacancy fired out to all and sundry in the knowledge that many of the applications I get will simply present me with an administrative nightmare. Think about it. The repercussions could end up not only affecting job boards bottom lines but destroying their relationship with the agencies that are advising their clients to advertise in a certain medium but can no longer rest assured that their vacancies aren’t being farmed out to other sites ‘in the network’ that neither the agency or client requested. Indeed, it’s already happening. Some job boards admit to having networks and social teams on board whose role is purely to scattergun jobs all over the place in the deluded belief that they are doing the advertiser a favour.

In the instance I mentioned about The Sun, it turned out that the client had, for their own reasons, previously requested that none of their jobs appear on a News International website. But, as well as the embarrassment of an ad agency finding out that a job they painstakingly wrote the copy and did the media research for, had in fact ended up being advertised in a totally different place, there are also other possible consequences.  Firstly, what about the candidate journey? They think they’re replying to an ad advertised in The Sun, but lo and behold then get redirected to a job board, then redirected yet again, to the employer’s website. And what about the employer’s HR or admin team that have the task of trying to keep the whole job application experience a pleasant one, but struggle, because they’re bogged down with loads of unwanted response, the majority of it awful because it came from sources where they didn’t even know they had advertised?

It seems to me that the whole online recruitment experience is becoming a mess because of this latter day notion that taking an ad targeted at one website and firing out to lots of others is actually a good thing. It’s not. Recruitment marketing agencies beware. You'll end up embarrassed and your role negated unless you do something about it.

14 Comments
Alastair Blair link
31/8/2013 08:33:11 am

I agree with this. The biggest offender is Indeed, which appears to be scraping everything in sight. Add in the fact that quite a few publishers, including some of the major job-boards are paying Indeed for rankings and you have a problem that isn't going away anytime soon.

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Alasdair Murray
1/9/2013 08:58:51 am

The main offence here was that it wasn't a job lot aggregated ad as such, it was a proper 'lift' that was appearing in The Sun's own housestyle and livery. Like the old days when you'd put an ad in say The Telegraph and the following week you'd find it lifted and running in somewhere like the Express who were trying to grow their recruitment section. It was considered a cardinal sin back then! :)

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Phil Woodford link
31/8/2013 12:02:03 pm

I think the role of agencies in this transactional market place has been under threat for years now. I don't do a lot of this kind of work, so I may be a bit out of the loop, but does anyone actually make money from it?

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Alasdair Murray
1/9/2013 09:02:09 am

Do you mean the agencies or the writers Phil? I know the commission on an online job ad is a pittance, but it's more the principle involved and indeed the perception - i.e. what's such and such a company doing advertising senior specialist roles in The Sun? As for the writing side of things, I make a modest living, but thankfully don't just write recruitment ads.

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Alastair Blair link
1/9/2013 09:44:46 am

There is a clear and definite trend towards clients buying their own advertising directly from the media rather than via agencies. There is simply not enough money from a job posting compared to, say, a big full colour print advert for agencies to make a decent living, hence the difficult search for other revenue streams over the last five (and more) years.

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Alasdair Murray
2/9/2013 03:28:37 am

Agreed, but I'm sure that many direct clients wouldn't be particularly happy with finding their ad in The Sun if they'd not requested it. During the course of the ad agency's discussion with the job board in question, to add insult to injury, the account handler was told "The Sun online has a 75% ABC1 readership" as if they were foolish not to have put it on the schedule in the first place!

Alistair Williams link
2/9/2013 09:53:09 am

Alasdair, on first read it seemed that you were suggesting that it was the Guardian that was sharing a network with the Sun, rather than it being that 'one niche job board'. Shouldn't we know who they are!
(And I also had to reply to be one of three Alistair/Alasdair's on a thread).

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Alasdair Murray
2/9/2013 09:56:41 am

Hi Alistair. I can see what you mean. I didn't feel that naming the board in question was right, given that I wasn't the person/agency that was wronged. Maybe the agency in question will name names. Certainly some others will find out in the due course of time :)

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Stephen O'Donnell link
2/9/2013 10:52:44 am

I never really understood what a Recruitment Marketing Agency or Recruitment Advertising Agency actually did that was of any real value. I say did, because these businesses don't really exist anymore, do they? The people writing the cheques clearly thought the same thing.

That aside, the specific location of any content on the internet is moot, because it can be drawn from anywhere else. I could write a piece of code here, which would display an image hosted on someone else's server. As a result, the ownership of any data is relinquished as soon as it is made public on any website. Of course the laws regarding origin of material, and passing-off still apply, but would be a nightmare to enforce. Around 2001, many job boards, including Jobserve and Stepstone, contested in the courts the ability of aggregators to crawl their site, index them, and then deep-link to the information without prior permission. The defenders claimed they were merely helping the public find what they were after, and helping the job boards attract more traffic. The job boards protested that bring visitors by this route, and bypassing the branding and search functions of their homepages meant that the content was effectively being misappropriated for another company's commercial gain. Confusingly, both sides lost.

Even in the case where you wish to restrict your advert to be only displayed on one specific part of a job board network, owned by the same organisation, they will contend that they are doing you a favour. The truth is that they are using your content to prop up their business. It has always been the case that the job board media truly need the content from any advertiser, in order to appear relevant to candidates. In the face of this, advertisers have never felt able to assert themselves, and settled for what they were given. This includes employers being charged 10 times that of recruitment agencies, jobs being duplicated countless times under different categories, and across wide and often inappropriate networks, and ghost jobs being included in search results, but never actually visible to candidates (only to search engines).

Frankly, I don't see it as difficult at all to deal with an over supply of applications. It really is not that hard to whittle down the serious contenders, and dispense with the rest (in a professional and sensitive manner, of course).

Reply
Alasdair Murray
2/9/2013 11:52:58 am

Thanks for the comprehensive reply Stephen. Recruitment marketing/advertising agencies certainly do still exist. I work with them day in day out. Some call themselves recruitment communications agencies these days granted, but essentially they still do the same things, but the ratios have changed. Indeed, they have had to diversify and get more involved in the employee branding and communications and web design side of things for example, in order to stay in business. However, there are still some large employer advertising accounts out there that spend a fair few bob on their recruitment ads and, just like in the old press days where lifting an ad out of one publication without letting client or agency know was considered a heinous crime, so it should be today too, not just for some of the reason outlined, but also out of a sense of perception i.e. what are they doing advertising in The Sun for a senior level teccy?

Regarding ownership of data, a fair point, but if I had paid a few hundred to specifically have my data advertised in a particular place I would surely have the right to be a bit miffed if all and sundry came along and pinched it and passed it off as their own paid for content, no?

As for the difficulty of dealing with an over supply (or vast swathes as is sometimes the case these days) of applications, I have heard of quite a few employers not being geared up to cope with the volume. We're talking several thousand for a store opening and hundreds for something like an average paying admin role.The last thing many employers need is more response from inappropriate channels that they haven't elected to use. I suppose the main thing that irked me, and more so my agency contact, was the job board's attitude. They couldn't see what was wrong with giving them free advertising in a publication they hadn't asked for and, as mentioned above somewhere, told the agency that The Sun online had a 75% ABC1 readership, as if to say 'so what's the problem'?

Maybe I'm making a mountain out of a molehill but coming from a background as an account handler in recruitment advertising/marketing/communications/call it what you will, I know it was an issue in the press days. Maybe people just accept the sad fact of life that no one really knows how many live jobs there are out there as every bugger is pinching content and passing it off as their own.

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Stephen O'Donnell link
2/9/2013 12:20:49 pm

Sorry, I was interrupted.

I meant to finish by stating that advertisers really need to assert themselves more, as nothing is going to change otherwise. Additionally, I wish that candidates had a means of asserting themselves more, but that's only likely to happen when new and better job boards start cutting into the revenues of existing ones.

Reply
Alasdair Murray
2/9/2013 12:44:54 pm

To cut a long story short, the account handler tried to assert themselves and was told something along the lines of it's a development issue so may take a week or so to get the job taken down. Finally, after much fuss and an insistence that the job was removed in the next ten minutes, it was done, but still the job board thought the agency were crazy not wanting the extra free coverage. There is a mentality that abounds these days that goes something like "sod quality, never mind the p*ss poor and irrelevant response they'll get, shove this ad in as many places as possible". As I said in my blog, why not do away with job boards and just have one huge and very messy national careers portal where everyone can post their jobs? There is a reason that doesn't happen and it's called having some control over the audience you choose to reach. The modern day reps at job boards, and many recruiters it has to be said, just don't seem to grasp that concept at all.

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Sue Sowerby link
25/9/2013 04:52:26 am

Well Alasdair. Having read your interesting blog and seen the comments, we thought "this wouldn't happen to us, only other advertisers". Well today it has and not only has it hacked off us as the recruitment marketing agency, but it has also hacked off the client concerned.

Here's what happened. We placed an advertisement on The IT Job-board for a client and it's fair to say that the response was low; but having said that, it was a difficult job to fill because on the JD there were too many non-negotiable skills required for the role. Client has now asked us to looked into another job-board, having changed the job title to something more 'recognisable' in the industry and on doing some research, we found our ad, complete with ad copy that we had written on Jobserve. We never asked for it to go on Jobserve initially but it appeared on there without client branding and looking so unprofessional with no paragraphs, joined up sentences, the lot. Literally it was a bunch of text that had been dropped in. On further investigation through Google, we then found the ad on The Sun's job-board. OK, displayed slightly better but the role was not at all relevant for The Sun market, despite their 75% ABC1 audience. And it doesn't stop there, the job has also appeared on Emptylemon and Jobuzu and others. We have since established that these job-boards work with a company called Jobg8 who are responsible for the distribution of these jobs to other job-boards. We have contacted the job-boards concerned and asked them to remove the job immediately. Client wants quality, not a quantity of inappropriate CVs so any comments about "increased number of applicants" just doesn't wash when they are the wrong type or do not have the right skill set for the role in question.

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Alasdair Murray
25/9/2013 05:00:19 am

Hi Sue. I'm glad someone sees,and shares, the frustration that this other agency felt. Media buying and ad agency account handling isn't my bag these days but nevertheless I can still share the annoyance having been in situations myself in the past where various publishers have swiped ads and called them their own. It's nor aggregating, in a way it's something much worse as it's job boards and publisher career portals creating something that they really aren't i.e. the right vehicle for many of the vacancies they are perceived to be carrying as the client's and agency's choice. It;s deception really, but what can anyone do about it?

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    About Me

    An experienced creative freelance copywriter and former recruitment advertising agency client services executive up to Director level, I have also worked in the advertising departments of national and regional newspapers and at a London Advertising Sales House. I set up my own copywriting business back in 2001 and work with a wide range of clients on a variety of press and online copywriting projects, the majority focused on recruitment communications. You can also find me on Twitter under my pseudonym '@RecruitmentCopy'

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