Challenge:
One of our clients works in finding qualified professionals in pediatric and school-based settings. It’s very competitive to recruit nationwide for occupational therapists, speech language pathologists, psychologists, and other positions in school and clinical settings.
Recruiting for educational positions is naturally cyclical because of the school year. More candidates (naturally) look for jobs at the end of their academic calendar. However, companies can’t just wait and recruit during the summer months. They must recruit year-round and in this competitive industry, the beginning of the month was proving to be even more competitive.
For this company in August 2022 through December 2022, the cost of an application in the first week of the month was 67.4% higher when compared to the fourth week of the month. Why is it so expensive at the start of the month?
Companies have monthly budgets and typically reset those budgets on the first of the month. When the algorithms of the job boards see fresh budgets at the start of the month, they get excited! With so many companies competing for a small pool of candidates, the cost of applicants compounds on itself and gets quite expensive very quickly.
Knowing that candidates look for jobs throughout the entire month, we needed to adjust our strategy.
Solution:
Our solution focused on being aggressive with pacing the budget. Allocating 60% of the budget into the software at the start of the month kept the algorithm from quickly spending the budget during the first seven days.
In the following weeks, we added 10-15% of the budget. Slowly pacing the budget was our solution to overcoming the very competitive start of the month. The flow of applications might slow down from our typical numbers at the start of the month, but we are playing the long game for the entire month.
We want to distribute our budget more evenly throughout the month to take advantage of two factors:
- Our competitors having less budget in the back half of the month.
- Candidates searching for jobs consistently throughout the entire month.
Results:
The chart below showcases the cost per application during each week of the month from August through January:
| Month | 1st Week | 2nd Week | 3rd Week | 4th Week |
| August | $125 | $81.02 | $74.90 | $47.47 |
| September | $62.27 | $51.84 | $34.31 | $41.72 |
| October | $121 | $82.02 | $59.44 | $49.18 |
| November | $97.48 | $68.79 | $38.56 | $21.63 |
| December | $52.84 | $41.80 | $49.18 | $17.57 |
| January | $16.30 | $23.91 | $27.60 | $34.57 |
In January 2023 – the new strategy delivered 72% more applications with 16% lower budget (when compared to the results from Q4 2022).
The takeaway – constantly analyze your data and test different strategies. By looking at the data, trends become apparent. Once you find a trend, use your knowledge of the industry and jobseeker behavior to adjust. It won’t always work for the first time, but constantly making data-driven decisions will lead to more ROI with your budget!
The recruitment marketing team at Haley Marketing manages the job spend for dozens of clients and accounts for millions of dollars of budget for companies in the staffing industry while maintaining a monthly retention rate over 98%. We are here to help eliminate wasted spend for companies and to increase the ROI on their budget. Contact our team today to learn more on how we can help with your recruitment marketing budget!
