I spent time with some folks from Ingenio a few nights ago, an online advertising company in the Bay Area that's doing very well these days ($100m+ in revenue, large stable of prominent clients). It was really just a social occasion, as one of my friends from college has worked for them for several years. As the night went on and we talked about their business model, I started to see some clear applications in the recruiting world.
Their main product is what's called pay per call advertising. In other words, you target people based on various criteria with a banner or text ad. If you get a person interested enough, he or she calls a phone number and gets directly routed to the right person. This works very well for automotive dealerships and local, directory-based businesses, but I could easily see a staffing firm or company using this as well.
Back in my recruitment advertising days, we ran an unbelievably successful line ad campaign in local newspapers for AT&T Wireless' Messaging unit (they were looking for people to sell pagers). The headline was simple: "You have an interview. Now." It was followed by some copy about the opportunity and a phone number to call for an immediate interview, which was really a call center we set up to ask a series of questions. It created a sense of urgency for these people and a feeling that they wouldn't have to jump through the traditional hoops to get immediately considered. We got a very high response rate.
I got the same feeling as I thought about pay per call advertising and recruiting. I immediately thought I could see Ingenio's pay-per-call advertising working well for high volume recruiting roles like call center positions, sales and retail. Or military recruiting. I could even see some healthcare positions being a good fit for this.
As I imagined the possibilities, though, I began to think this could be an excellent fit for other, more difficult to find roles - where people don't often have resumes and you're only option is to go after passive candidates or use search firms. If you target your keywords well enough, the response rate for your advertising could spike vs. waiting for a click-through or a resume submission to happen. In other words, no matter who you're targeting, this could provide a sense of immediacy that a click-and-apply scenario wouldn't, and could pay for itself rather quickly.
Would love to hear from anyone that's tried this method of advertising and what the return was.
Hey Dave. I actually have done this while staffing a large call center in the past. Potential applicants would be connected (via a micro site) to an 800 # that would put them directly in touch with a 24x7 call center rep..who basically screened them and made an offer (or not). That said, your point about the ad model and "passives" makes me think this ingenio app could make a savvy staffing/ recruiters sourcing plan come alive.
Posted by: Rob Humphrey | June 09, 2007 at 04:27 PM