What happened after the Apply?

I was asked in a client meeting the other day to give her the truth about a couple of things she'd heard about Indeed in her industry networking group. And I was quite happy to.

To be fair, I get a lot of questions about Indeed. And at the rate it's growing, changing, integrating and building more technology into everything it does, that's hardly surprising. Heck, even I get bamboozled by it sometimes.

Indeed is a beast. It's enormous, hugely influential and constantly evolving. A lot of my clients know Indeed is a bit like Marmite to me. I do actually like Marmite, by the way.

I know we need Indeed. They know they need Indeed. And the amount of data it has, uses and shares back with employers can be genuinely insightful. But it comes with its irks. There are things about it I find frustrating, things I think could be clearer and things I still question.

Which is why I find disposition data so interesting.

Because this is one of those areas where I think Indeed could go from being a very powerful recruitment channel to something much more useful.

Maybe not perfect. There are still a few things I'd struggle with. But one step further, and I think it gets a lot closer.

It isn't new. But our relationship with data has changed.

Disposition data isn't new. Neither is connecting an ATS to a job board. What has changed, I think, is how normal it now feels for systems to talk to each other.

Jobs are pushed from ATSs to job boards. Applications come back the other way. Assessment platforms connect to recruitment systems. Data feeds dashboards, reports and decisions.

We expect more from that data too. Stakeholders want to know what worked, what didn't, what they got for their money and what should happen next. So the idea of an ATS feeding information back about what happened after somebody applied doesn't feel particularly radical anymore.

And that's the bit I find interesting. Because suddenly the trail doesn't have to end at Apply.

Not all applications are equal

There have been many, many times over the years when clients have sent me applications that make this point rather brilliantly.

A car wash expert applying for a director-level role with a six-figure salary. Or an applicant based in Bournemouth confirming that yes, they were perfectly happy to commute to Carlisle four times a week.

Examples like these highlight a genuine problem.

On paper, they're both applications. The advertising platform sees an application. The report gets another one added to the total. Your cost per application potentially gets a little bit better. But the employer hasn't moved any closer to making a hire. That's why I've always been slightly uncomfortable with application numbers being treated as the end result of recruitment advertising.

They're an important measure. Of course they are. But there is an enormous difference between generating 100 applications and generating 100 people who might actually be able to do the job.

If 100 people apply and nobody gets interviewed, was that really a successful campaign?

If 20 apply, ten are suitable, six are interviewed and three are hired, surely the second set of numbers tells us much more.

And this is where disposition data starts to become really useful.

Closing the loop

The bit I find fascinating is how simple the principle actually is.

Advertising knows what happened before the application. And the ATS knows what happened afterwards. Join the two together and you start to get a much more useful picture.

If an advertising platform only knows that somebody applied, that's the signal it has to work with. If it can also see that the candidate was reviewed, progressed to interview or was eventually hired, that's a much stronger signal.

Indeed already uses disposition information from connected ATSs to understand what happened to applications further down the recruitment funnel.

And this is where I think recruitment marketing starts to get much more interesting. Because we're beginning to connect two parts of recruitment that have traditionally been measured separately.

For years, I've been reporting on what happened before the application: impressions, clicks, applications, conversion rates and cost per application. The employer then takes over and measures what happened afterwards.

But they aren't really two separate things, are they?

They're one recruitment journey.

What if we went one step further?

This is the bit I keep coming back to.

Imagine if, when we set up a recruitment campaign, we weren't simply deciding how much we wanted to spend and how many applications we hoped to generate.

What if we could tell the platform what problem we were actually trying to solve?

For one vacancy, the problem genuinely might be volume. There simply aren't enough people applying. For another, applications might be pouring in but hardly anybody is suitable. Another employer might have enough suitable candidates but struggle to get them through to interview. And somewhere else, people might be applying, interviewing and being hired perfectly well, but leaving again three months later.

Those are four completely different recruitment problems. Yet we still tend to judge the advertising using many of the same early-stage measures.

That's why I think disposition data has so much potential.

Not because sending a status from one system to another is particularly clever. But because of what we might eventually be able to do with the information.

Could a campaign be optimised around suitable applications rather than all applications? Interviews? Hires?

And, why stop recording at the hire? Could retention become part of that feedback loop too? Because ultimately, the employer doesn't really want an application.

They want the right person to join their business.

That's where it gets interesting

I'm not quite ready to declare Indeed perfect. Anyone who knows me would probably be deeply suspicious if I did. There are still things about it that frustrate me and things I think it could do better.

But this is one area where I can see a genuinely positive direction of travel.

The more our recruitment systems can learn from what happened after somebody applied, the less we have to judge success purely by what happened before it.

And maybe that's the real opportunity.

For years we've optimised recruitment advertising around the bits we could easily see. Now we're getting much better at seeing what happened next.

So perhaps the next question is:

If we can increasingly see which applications actually led somewhere, should cost per application still be the thing we're optimising around?

I think that's probably another blog.