What we need to learn from high-stakes retail and digital marketing | Job Board Leaders’ Monthly Roundtable | ep25

Today’s Job Board Leaders’ Monthly Roundtable featured Yazad Dalal, head of global new business and growth strategy for Joveo.

Steven Rothberg of College Recruiter job search site moderated. They discussed the data used by consumer vs job marketers.

Agentic Recruiting Platforms

Modern platforms use LLMs to automate workflows and improve candidate screening. Mature firms now prioritize employee lifetime value over cost per hire.

Data Driven Metric Adoption

While advanced metrics like conversion rates improve performance, many employers resist shifting from volume to quality based strategies. Dynamic bidding models help.

Quality vs Transparency

Employers often prioritize lower costs despite claiming to value quality. Job boards must demand transparency to align expectations with realities.

College Recruiter hosts these on the 2nd Thursday of each month. Want an invite? Email Steven@CollegeRecruiter.com.

AI-Generated Notes:

• Meeting Logistics and Introduction: Steven Rothberg welcomed participants to the 25th Job Board Leaders Monthly Roundtable, confirming that meetings are scheduled for the second Thursday of each month from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. US Eastern time (00:00:24).
• Yazad Dalal’s Professional Background: Yazad Dalal, Chief Growth Officer at Joveo, provided an overview of their career, which spans nearly 30 years, including roles at Monster.com, Vault.com, Raiden, Oracle HCM, and Accenture (00:02:35).
• Joveo’s Agentic Recruiting Platform: Yazad Dalal introduced Joveo as an “agentic recruiting platform,” utilizing prompt-based and multimodal large language models (LLMs) to automate hiring workflows, including candidate attraction, screening, and interview scheduling, allowing clients to focus on decision-making rather than logistics (00:04:30).
• Data Maturity in Talent Acquisition: Steven Rothberg and Yazad Dalal discussed the disparity in data usage between consumer marketing and talent acquisition, noting that many employers remain fixated on surface-level metrics like cost per hire, while sophisticated clients are moving toward post-funnel metrics, such as employee lifetime value and revenue per hire (00:06:52).
• Accountability for Employee Lifetime Value: Yazad Dalal explained that while they do not dictate job board strategies, some clients use advanced algorithms to predict employee lifetime value based on initial performance, which increasingly impacts how budgets are allocated across job sources, prioritizing quality over volume (00:09:18).
• Dynamic Pricing and Programmatic Trends: Yazad Dalal emphasized that successful consumer marketers do not use flat-fee products, relying instead on real-time bid adjustments and constant optimization to shift budgets to high-performing sources, a practice essential for modern talent acquisition (00:15:33).
• Adoption of Advanced Metrics: Yazad Dalal noted that while many employers underutilize advanced metrics like bounce rate, time on page, and AB testing, a mature growth marketing team should run multiple concurrent tests on creative, copy, and landing pages to determine conversion effectiveness (00:17:47).
• Market Understanding of Funnel Metrics: Ethan Bloomfield challenged the notion that a significant portion of employers understand funnel metrics, arguing that even in the enterprise sector, widespread adoption of advanced data metrics is overstated, with many remaining at a surface level (00:18:56).
• Real-Time Bidding Operations: Jason Gorham described their organization’s operational model for real-time bidding, using XML to DSP to check publisher inventory and executing a “fill or kill” strategy based on availability to optimize placements (00:20:51).
• Role of Job Boards in the Media Mix: Jason Gorham emphasized that job boards function as part of a media mix rather than a singular solution, noting that they do not compete with or replace other vendors but offer different value propositions within the ecosystem (00:22:38).
• Niche vs. Large Job Boards: Responding to a question from Mike Corso, Yazad Dalal argued that the size of the job board matters less than the ability to deliver performance, noting that Joveo remains platform-agnostic and will optimize across any board if it produces quality results, citing the long-term viability of platforms like Craigslist as an example (00:22:38).
• Optimizing for Diverse Roles: Steven Rothberg and Yazad Dalal discussed the complexity of optimizing for different roles, noting that employer brand and social impressions significantly influence candidate quality, necessitating a shift toward quality-focused strategies rather than simple volume (00:25:12).
• Employer Resistance to Data-Driven Approaches: Steven Rothberg and Yazad Dalal observed that some employers are not data-driven and view job postings as a compliance exercise rather than an outcome-based activity, which creates challenges for job boards trying to optimize performance (00:29:31).
• Aligning Fees with Quality: Vicki Xu raised concerns regarding the misalignment between CPC/CPA structures and quality metrics, noting that job boards often feel penalized for optimizing for quality when billing models favor volume or lack access to necessary down-funnel data (00:30:36).
• Enhancing Job Posting Quality: Yazad Dalal suggested that job boards should be stricter with clients regarding posting quality, noting that Joveo proactively scores postings based on criteria like title, salary transparency, and formatting to reduce friction and improve conversion rates (00:32:34).
• Data Integrity and Spot Audits: Regarding issues like missing geographic data or salary transparency, Jason Gorham recommended conducting random spot audits of job feeds to ensure data accuracy and compliance, a practice supported by Steven Rothberg (00:34:59).
• Estimating Outcomes When Data is Unavailable: Sam Fitzroy and Steven Rothberg discussed using estimates for down-funnel metrics like cost-per-hire when direct client data is unavailable, providing a baseline to justify the value of job board services compared to more expensive alternatives like on-campus recruiting (00:37:10).
• Compliance and Performance Incentives: Yazad Dalal clarified that while Joveo does not have a formal compliance department, they encourage salary transparency and quality postings primarily to drive performance, which coincidentally aids clients with legal compliance requirements (00:39:23).
• Prioritizing Data-Driven Improvements: Yazad Dalal advised job boards to focus on “lowest hanging fruit,” such as removing negative friction and introducing positive friction like screening questions to ensure candidate quality, while also deepening data environments within specific niches (00:41:41).
• The Paradox of Paying for Quality: Ethan Bloomfield highlighted a recurring challenge where employers claim to value quality over volume but are unwilling to pay higher costs for better, more targeted candidates, leading to difficulties in growing niche job board businesses (00:45:25).
• Employer Willingness to Pay: Steven Rothberg and Ethan Bloomfield discussed the tendency for employers to express a desire for quality at conferences but prioritize lower costs in practice, noting that unless employers are willing to pay for quality, providers struggle to justify the expense of driving higher-quality traffic (00:47:50).
• Managing Client Expectations and Transparency: Yazad Dalal emphasized the importance of transparency in the relationship between platforms and clients, arguing that providers must proactively set expectations regarding the costs of high-quality candidates and show performance at the publisher level to build trust (00:50:05).
• Addressing Dishonest Data Practices: Steven Rothberg raised the issue of programmatic vendors misleading publishers by cherry-picking cheap, low-quality sources to set unrealistic cost-per-application benchmarks, leading to an industry-wide need for greater transparency (00:53:14).
• Demanding Accountability: Yazad Dalal advised job board leaders to demand transparency from their partners and hold them accountable for performance reporting, stating that it is unfair for partners to withhold outcome data that prevents publishers from optimizing their performance (00:55:44).
• Closing Remarks and Future Meeting Schedule: Steven Rothberg concluded the call by announcing the next meeting for September 10th, which will focus on the security risks posed by AI agents and hacking, a critical issue for job boards holding large volumes of candidate data (00:57:48).