Challenge:
One mistake a lot of staffing companies make is not reviewing their job performance reports and assuming that budget is spending evenly amongst all sponsored jobs. Staffing agencies think they can sponsor a fair number of jobs with a reasonable budget and expect the budget to be spent evenly amongst your posted positions. Unfortunately, that’s not how it typically works!
Before a company starts with our job advertising management service, we like to analyze a good portion of its past data – looking at past results and determining the necessary areas for improvement. One common issue we see when looking over that data is the monthly budget not spending evenly among job postings.
One of our new clients (a manufacturing staffing agency) shared its job performance data from the previous three months with our team, and the first thing our team noticed was the overall impact of its budget being poorly dispersed. The client had a fair amount of positions taking up a large portion of spend – causing a high cost per application as well as leaving a large number of positions with very little budget.
The company was sponsoring more than 150 positions but had one position that spent just over 10% of the entire budget! To put this in perspective, we did a quick analysis of their top 5 spending positions.
Previous three months combined before coming to Haley Marketing:
| Overall | |||||
| Clicks | Applies | CPC | CPA | CR% | Spend |
| 9,553 | 1,284 | $ 1.29 | $ 9.57 | 13.4% | $ 12,284.03 |
| Top 5 Positions | ||||||
| Clicks | Applies | CPC | CPA | CR% | Spend | % of Spend |
| 761 | 106 | $ 4.03 | $ 28.95 | 13.9% | $ 3,068.78 | 25.0% |
The top five posts, or 3% of their sponsored postings, took up a quarter of their entire budget!
On top of that, these five positions had a 68% higher Cost Per Application than their average CPA. That combination of five positions using 25% of the budget at a 68% higher CPA than the rest of the jobs was definitely not helping results.
Solution:
Our team implemented a programmatic rule that would prevent individual postings from overspending. We put a $125 spend limit in place, so any position that reached $125 in monthly budget would move down to a smaller campaign with significantly less budget. For this staffing agency, $125 made the most sense when accounting for their budget and number of sponsored positions. We wanted to prevent overspending by a handful jobs but also ensure their high-priority jobs received a sufficient amount of spend.
This rule ensured that budget was spent a bit more evenly while lowering the overall cost per application. We wanted to avoid a disproportionate amount of the budget being spent on a handful of positions. Within the first few months of starting our job spend management service, we dramatically lowered their cost per application with budget spending much more evenly.
Results:
The chart below shows the results after three months of working with Haley Marketing and the impact of the spend limit rule implementation.
The third month after coming to Haley Marketing:
| Overall | |||||
| Clicks | Applies | CPC | CPA | CR% | Spend |
| 11,305 | 1,339 | $ 0.36 | $ 3.02 | 11.8% | $ 4,044.26 |
| Top 5 Positions | ||||||
| Clicks | Applies | CPC | CPA | CR% | % of Spend | Spend |
| 651 | 107 | $ 0.65 | $ 3.98 | 16.4% | 10.5% | $ 425.68 |
As you can see in the data above, there is a dramatic difference between these results with Haley Marketing Group, and the company’s initial results when managing internally!
The overall cost per application decreased 68% – going from $9.57 to $3.02, driving in more applications in one month with Haley Marketing than the staffing agency was able to bring in during a three-month period on its own! The top five spending positions went from spending 25% of overall budget, to only using 10.5%.
The Takeaway – When a large chunk of budget is going towards a small percentage of your jobs, your CPA is entirely dependent on how competitive those roles are to fill, and that can greatly fluctuate your overall results for the better or worse. Implementing rules that enforce more evenly distributed budget spend will ensure that a few competitive positions aren’t dramatically increasing your overall cost per application.
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. 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!
