How Compass Group Reduced Job Board Dependency with Shay Johnson

Live from RecFest, Chad & Cheese sit down with Shay Johnson of Compass Group USA, who explains how his team cut $1.5M in Indeed waste in six months, boosted apply conversion from 2% to 12% using Dalia, while turning chaos into a hiring machine—using automation, smart re-engagement, and in-house programmatic control.

If you’re sick of burning budget and begging Indeed for scraps, you need this playbook.

Enjoy!

PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION

0:00:00.2 Shay Johnson: Over the first six months of having kind of those combined solutions that we talked about being deployed, we spent $1.5 million less in the first six months, and we just continue to optimize...

0:00:10.9 Chad Sowash: We spent one point what?

0:00:12.2 Shay Johnson: $1.5 million less.

0:00:13.6 Chad Sowash: Less.

0:00:16.0 Shay Johnson: On Indeed.

0:00:16.1 Chad Sowash: On Indeed.

0:00:16.1 Shay Johnson: Now I will say...

0:00:17.6 Joel Cheesman: Did he say $1.5 million less?

0:00:19.7 Chad Sowash: In six months.

0:00:20.8 Joel Cheesman: Just making sure I got that. Yeah, okay.

0:00:21.6 Shay Johnson: Now I will say what's good about that because I'm partner guy.

0:00:25.1 Joel Cheesman: All right, let's do this. We are the Chad & Cheese Podcast. We are here today with Shay Johnson, VP of Strategic HR Partnerships at Compass.

0:00:33.4 Shay Johnson: Hello, hello.

0:00:35.0 Joel Cheesman: Shay, give us the elevator pitch on you and the company before we dig in.

0:00:38.4 Shay Johnson: All right. Well, for those of you that don't know, I'm not with the real estate Compass, so if you're here for them, not representing them. We're the largest contract food service and facilities company in the world. So specifically at Compass Group USA, I spent the first 10 years of my career in talent acquisition, pretty much in every facet that you can imagine. Five years of that was overseeing all of our high volume and entry level hiring. And a big part of my role was all of the technology partnerships, the automation, you know, what we wanted to pursue as far as how we made that as easy as possible for recruiters and managers. And so about a year ago, I went into a role where I now kind of do the same thing, but across all areas of HR. But I would say TA still eats up about 80% of my time.

0:01:20.2 Joel Cheesman: Why do we always schedule the food people late into lunch? We always do that for some reason.

0:01:24.8 Chad Sowash: Yes. He's always hungry, so it doesn't matter. Anyway.

0:01:27.4 Joel Cheesman: That's true. That's true.

0:01:27.4 Chad Sowash: Yes. So, okay, let's get to the meat of the problem here. We all know what it is. It's Indeed. Anyway. We all know what it is. So what was the problem that you started with? Because it's not like... You weren't just going out looking for technology. You knew you had a problem. What was the problem you started with? And how did... Kind of give us a little bit of the journey on the way down.

0:01:50.2 Shay Johnson: Yeah, I mean, if I go back probably three years ago and forever before that, just so everybody has some awareness when I'm talking about our technology as we go through. We're a global SAP shop, so SAP success factor is kind of underlying a lot of what we'll talk about. And if any of you are on SAP or a large HCM, you understand the challenge and the friction that exists with anything in the market. So the biggest problem that we had was Indeed, especially post Covid. Big ramp up. Everybody competing for talent was the necessary evil at the time. And we had a huge problem in two main areas. One is that Indeed was in no way integrated with our ATS. So even though we could feed jobs to Indeed, you know, it defaulted to that career site redirect. So, you know, candidates would see our jobs if they saw our jobs and they would land on our career site, you'd have a huge drop off issue. So very, very little conversion for the amount of money and effort we were putting into Indeed.

0:02:44.6 Joel Cheesman: Put that into numbers for us. What was the drop off rate before the solution?

0:02:48.6 Shay Johnson: Oh, we were only converting about 2% of candidates from Indeed specifically that would ever even see our jobs overall.

0:02:55.4 Joel Cheesman: And these are clicks you're paying for, this is traffic you're paying for.

0:02:58.2 Shay Johnson: Yeah. And just for reference, I didn't mention it at scale, but we do between 150 and 180,000 hires a year. So 5 million candidates a year just in the US.

0:03:05.1 Chad Sowash: Shit. 2%.

0:03:06.2 Shay Johnson: Yeah. And the other big problem that we had was all of our hiring... Every hiring manager thinks they know best. You know, they undercut and undermine recruiters. So they think, I looked in the ATS, I only have like five applicants. I'm going to go post the job myself on Indeed. So then we had duplicate job postings competing against each other. We were spending as a TA team, the manager was swiping their company card. And so you had duplicative spend competing against duplicative performance and it all went to shit. So we had compliance nightmares. We had spend nightmares. We couldn't rein it in with anything. So we knew that was what we needed to solve for and that was kind of the beginning of our journey about three years ago.

0:03:41.8 Joel Cheesman: Do you want to share what kind of dollars we're talking about? No?

0:03:45.6 Shay Johnson: Well, I will say this. The market helped stabilize things a little bit, not just the tech. But I would say at the peak of the return for the pandemic, we were spending 250 to $500,000 a month on Indeed.

0:03:59.5 Chad Sowash: So you were spending 100% of the money on clicks and only getting a 2% conversion rate?

0:04:06.6 Shay Johnson: That's apply start. That wasn't even apply complete.

0:04:09.3 Chad Sowash: Yeah, that's what I mean. Apply start, which is literally just looking at your damn job.

0:04:14.0 Shay Johnson: Yeah. We've come a long way in how we now measure what conversion means. It's kind of like in the social media world, you used to fish for impressions and now it's way more about where does it really convert as a lead to a customer.

0:04:26.1 Joel Cheesman: Gotcha. Assuming a lot of people can relate to that, I'm sure they're wondering what the solution was. Talk about the journey of finding a solution, what you were hoping to achieve, what kind of changes in those numbers happened in the process.

0:04:39.1 Shay Johnson: Yeah. We actually have a few different partners in this space. So again, current state SAP success factors as a recruiting and onboarding solution. But on top of that, we added a few players that together, you know, made their own differences in different ways. One was, you know, allowing our jobs to create... You know, all be fed to Indeed and have that easy apply experience, but go directly into our ATS. That was where a partner called JobSync came into play. We had Paradox. They were already a big part of what we do, but Paradox actually took over our career site ownership and we made Paradox the default apply option on our career site. So instead of letting people kind of choose whether they were going to go through a chat to apply option or success factors, it was Paradox only. But then things really kicked up when we partnered with a company called Dalia, who... We actually didn't seek them out. They came to us in 2021, maybe during the pandemic, and said, hey, we can give you a little bit of code, put it on your career site. And the pitch at the time was like, hey, you know, when you go shopping, you know, the thing pops up that says, hey, don't go just yet, you know, sign up, just give us your information for 15% off. It kind of felt like that. And we thought, what a gimmick, you know, we'll try it...

0:05:45.0 Chad Sowash: This will never work.

0:05:46.9 Shay Johnson: And it kind of changed everything.

0:05:48.1 Chad Sowash: That little bit of code.

0:05:51.0 Shay Johnson: In two parts... I mean, yes. So from a career site perspective, yes, JobSync played a big role in helping us actually convert all that indie traffic and kind of tamp down the manager duplication effort that was happening in the field. That was a big part of it. But then from our career site perspective, we're like, we've got 30,000 people visiting our career site a day and we're hardly getting anything out of it. Even if people do apply, they rarely are the people that are converting down line because they're kind of applying and going into the ether. We weren't doing a good job with automation at that time. So when we brought Dalia into the picture, it was more like, hey, don't force a candidate to search around, you know, go through a chat experience first, try and find the job they're looking for. Just immediately ask them, hey, who are you and what are you looking for? We will present the jobs to you that match you immediately. So then it's like, oh, you're getting me right to what I'm looking for.

0:06:37.8 Shay Johnson: And even if you don't do that right then, I'm going to re engage you within these first 24 to 72 hours and significantly take your career site conversion from 1% where we started to then Paradox actually helped us get it up to more like three plus percent. And then when you add Dalia on top of it, 12%.

0:06:54.0 Joel Cheesman: Wow.

0:06:54.5 Shay Johnson: So at our volume, that's thousands of applicants.

0:06:58.2 Joel Cheesman: Huge. Help me visualize this. So I'm a job seeker. I go to your career site, do I get the pop up, for lack of a better word? Does that start my process? Or is it, hey, I'm looking around, there's nothing really that fits. I'm going to take my cursor to the exit and then like, wait a minute, before you leave, we want to keep in touch with you. Like, help me understand the visual of that.

0:07:18.3 Shay Johnson: Like all of the above. So one of the great things that we love about Dalia is that they allow us to pretty much A/B test any combination of things that you would want to say. So if we're like, hey, for the next week, yeah, let's have that modal pop up as soon as you hit the page. Like, let's see what would happen if, before the candidate has the chance to look around and produce content, what if we hit them with that sign up? What if we made it so that it doesn't come up until they've been static on the page for 10 seconds? Or if they hit X, you know, or they start to X out of the browser, let's try not doing it at all. Let's run it this way in this market. You know, so we've tested it in all different ways. But what we found is, as annoying as it may seem to some candidates or to you from your perspective, having it pop up as soon as the candidate lands on the page is the most effective way to actually capture not only the lead and get them into your talent marketplace for any remarketing that you want to do, but then a third of the candidates that sign up for that modal immediately are applying on the spot.

0:08:13.8 Shay Johnson: So the conversion is happening instantaneously. And another third of them are applying on the first re-engagement via text. And the final third is that camp that's like, hey, you know, I'm coming back and I'm looking around.

0:08:25.4 Chad Sowash: So they're helping you obviously raise conversion dramatically, which means those individuals are now in your database where they weren't before. But first and foremost, you have more options to be able to hire from, number one. And number two, you can go back to that well, because you've paid for those candidates. Right? And especially from any of the job boards out there, Indeed or what have you, ZipRecruiter. Right? Any of them. So now you can start to even more... Tell me if I'm wrong. Rely on the internal database that you've built first before spending money.

0:09:01.2 Shay Johnson: Yes. But the even better part is...

0:09:03.4 Chad Sowash: There's better?

0:09:04.8 Shay Johnson: Yeah. There is better.

0:09:05.1 Joel Cheesman: But wait, there's more.

0:09:06.8 Shay Johnson: Yeah. Wait, there's more. It's not only are they in the internal database, so yeah, any retargeting that we're going to do like event campaigns, which we do through Paradox. So you've got hireEZ where you're going to do some proactive, you know, professional sourcing and things like that. But when it's a recruiter driven proactive outreach, they're usually targeting any candidate that's been active with us in the last six months or even a year, two years. What Dalia does is making sure that they are prioritizing re-engaging candidates all within that most recent 24, 48, 72 hours. So like 80% of that conversion is from candidates that just applied. They are making sure like this person just connected, let's do everything we can to get them to convert at least one, if not multiple applications in the next three days. Whereas once someone's in your database for days, weeks, months, the opportunity to actually convert them or reconvert them into an applicant drops so significant.

0:09:56.6 Joel Cheesman: Very similar to e-commerce. Right? Like your chances of buying those shoes are better in the first 90 days of looking for them.

0:10:00.4 Shay Johnson: Yeah. You need to do all that retargeting. Don't give them time to think about it.

0:10:03.9 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. I think that's interesting because I think that's a bit of a myth that people think we can just, you know, dig up candidates from two, three years ago and put them in the system. Your experience is that's not the case.

0:10:14.7 Shay Johnson: Fresh.

0:10:15.9 Joel Cheesman: You have to keep it fresh.

0:10:15.5 Shay Johnson: I mean they happen. You're going to have success with that for one offs but not as... In the high volume space, I would say that works for us 1% of the time compared to 80% rate in the first 72 hours.

0:10:27.3 Joel Cheesman: So you mentioned the percentage rate of conversion which is 12% for Dalia...

0:10:32.0 Shay Johnson: 11.7.

0:10:32.8 Joel Cheesman: 1 and 2. Sorry.

0:10:34.8 Shay Johnson: We round up. 12%.

0:10:37.4 Joel Cheesman: What did you see with interaction with those other solutions, the chatbot or the conversational AI or the straight ATS? Were people just doing Dalia and that's good enough? Were they using all the services equally or did the usage of those go up or down or stay the same? I guess is my question.

0:10:54.2 Shay Johnson: Oh, that's a good question. It's a little bit of a mix. I mean, from an application standpoint, it's like if they engage with Dalia, they're mostly... Their application track, the conversion from application or from visitor to application is happening through Dalia. But like I said, about a third of those candidates that were not either immediate conversion or a Dalia re-engagement conversion, about a third of those were kind of coming back, perusing the career site and either coming through Dalia or maybe Paradox apply, things like that. But yeah, it's just like we still have a ton of volume come through Paradox. But it was just so interesting to me that it was like if we did a test where Paradox sat there by itself versus Dalia also being an option on the career side, it raised the conversion for both of them.

0:11:35.8 Joel Cheesman: Interesting.

0:11:36.4 Shay Johnson: Like if Dalia was there, it actually raised the conversion because of returning candidates for Paradox. Whereas if they weren't there, it was like Paradox by themselves, it was still good. It was a still strong baseline. But somehow having Dalia there as a second option, it didn't affect Paradox negatively. It actually helped.

0:11:51.2 Joel Cheesman: Wow.

0:11:54.7 Chad Sowash: It feels like if you are going to... And again, instead of going out and just spending money on postings whenever a requisition happens, right? But you have the tech to be able to literally nurture, much like customers do on... Just product websites, nurture those individuals, then you can obviously have a better NPS score, which is exactly what your CMO wants, right? Your business has a better brand. So this isn't... I don't know how much Compass Group cares about that, but there are a bunch of companies out there that really care about brand, not just for the prospective employees or the candidates, but also the buyers that are out there. Was that something that you guys really cared about, something you focused on or was it just let's get better conversion?

0:12:45.0 Shay Johnson: It's probably less about brand and more about candidate experience. You just want it to be where someone applies and they don't go into the black hole. Like, hey, we're re-engaging you, we're keeping you updated. We're trying to get you to a job versus just being like, hey, thanks for your apply. That number looks good for us and we don't care. It's like, no, we want you to convert not because it's a metric, but because that means it's a hire. Like we're trying to deliver hires to the business. But for us, you know, Compass Group, we already have a consumer brand challenge because we're a parent company to 30 plus different brands. And even those brands are not really consumer brands. They are sitting behind a client. So for example, if you work at Google and you're eating the food there, everybody thinks of like the food at Google, but that is either Bon Appetit or Restaurant Associates depending on what city you're in, which is Compass Group. So a lot of the times even our own employees do not know they work for Compass Group. That's how hard it is with brand recognition. So yeah, we're not really... It's not really all about the brand, but it is more about like we want people, if they do connect the dots and say oh, this brand is Compass Group, we want them to keep coming back to the Compass Group experience because they realize like, oh, this is consistent across all these brands.

0:13:52.6 Shay Johnson: That they take this approach. And I know I'm going to have a better chance of getting a job because it's not like a broken process for every single one of these. They're all disparate and disconnected.

0:14:01.8 Chad Sowash: This is huge for consumer brands though, right? Because if they do have a brand, you are negatively impacting them because you're throwing them into a black hole. And now they hate that brand now, you're going to...

0:14:13.5 Shay Johnson: Yeah. If you're a consumer brand, you want a positive experience to be a good consumer experience too. You want to keep the loyalty.

0:14:19.3 Joel Cheesman: What has it done for ghosting? We're hearing a lot of companies talk about candidates that ghost them all the time. Has this improved those rates for you? Got it down?

0:14:28.1 Shay Johnson: Yeah. Because when we have candidate re-engagement, the conversion not only to offer, but the offer to hire is better too. So you just... I mean in principle, if you think about it, it's just like if you have an engaged candidate, someone that has had multiple touch points and it's like you're continuously reaching out to me, I'm continuing through the process, they're more likely to come all the way through than to just say no, I'm not going to continue showing up. So when you think about a candidate that just originates organically or paid on Indeed versus one that you've re-engaged through these processes, you just have a better likelihood of them following all the way through to hire.

0:15:01.0 Chad Sowash: And you can't re engage them if you don't convert them.

0:15:04.4 Shay Johnson: Exactly. Yes.

0:15:05.6 Joel Cheesman: What types of communications platforms or tactics work best? We hear email is a waste of time, obviously. SMS, WhatsApp. How did you guys re-engage or keep that conversation going most effectively?

0:15:20.3 Shay Johnson: Yeah. Text is our priority. Again, that's something we tested with Dalia and we do it with Paradox too, where it's kind of like usually the candidates have the choice to opt in for their preferred messaging too. You know, so they can say, I'm okay with receiving text or email or both. And so you kind of start there. And then when we're running our campaigns, you'll see that the response rate though to text is insane. So much higher. So it's not that people are necessarily just opting out of emails, but they're far, far more likely to receive it, respond. Gmail does a great job of filtering out spam if it's coming from a third party software. We're not spamming people. We may be really reaching out with a real need that they ask for, but you're far more likely to be filtered out via email than you are via text. And the response rate to text is just better because we're not just texting them and saying, go visit this page. The text that they received from Dalia, for example, is like, hey, Joel, you know, you just applied to this job yesterday. Here's two more jobs that were just posted today that are close to you and seem like a great fit. Are you interested?

0:16:17.5 Shay Johnson: And if you say yes, it's like, great. Well, I already have all the information that you used to apply for that other job. So here are like the three delta questions that are different for this job. That's all I need to ask you. And now your app has been submitted. Is there anything else you'd like to do today?

0:16:31.3 Chad Sowash: And that's all via text. So literally it could be async. I mean, it doesn't have to happen right now. It could happen over there, oh, yeah, no, you know, tomorrow I get it, I apply. I mean, that's the thing, is that we're so used to... Where we've become so used to just asynchronous conversations. Right? Or at least the mail and whatnot. And this makes it so much easier to hit them and they have an opportunity really to respond when they have a chance to respond. And they don't miss the opportunity per se unless they wait too long.

0:17:01.8 Shay Johnson: Yeah. No, and I mean, like I said, the re-engagement strategy drops. Like if a candidate isn't responsive within those first 72 hours, their prioritization in the campaigns that we're running are going to drop... I mean really that Dalia is running for us. Because I don't know if I mentioned this, but this is fully autonomous from our perspective. A recruiter didn't touch anything. Most of our recruiters don't know that Dalia exists or is in the mix.

0:17:23.4 Chad Sowash: The best way to do it.

0:17:24.8 Shay Johnson: So it required no implementation, no recruiter programming, nothing. It's just like they're learning from us like, hey, what are the most effective ways to... You know, we're even adding in, like, hey, are there additional questions we could ask? So if you re-engage a candidate, even if it's not a part of the job description, be like, hey, do you have time to answer a few more questions? It will help us continuously improve how you're matched and qualified for jobs so that we can, you know, pre fill that on your application. So they're doing everything. I mean, all that we do with Dalia, the productivity that we do with them is just sitting down and looking over their results and being like, hey, you guys tried something. It's working really well. Like, let's continue to scale that. This other thing that we tried, you know, we can pull back on that. Hey, we're hitting a big hiring season. The next two weeks are a huge push for all of our, you know, campus hiring on college campuses as everybody returns to school, let's really target those top 50 accounts for the next two weeks.

0:18:13.3 Shay Johnson: That's where we want the candidate, you know, targeting to go. Don't just canvas, you know, all candidates. So we can really just turn the dials where we need them to go based off of not only what we need, but what we know works.

0:18:24.7 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. So fraud and lazy apply, fake accounts are a big problem. Does Dalia help at all with that? Are you... Because I would assume most are, like, go through the application process is what's automated, but maybe not the window that says I want to stay connected or I didn't find what I'm looking for. What did Dalia do for you in regards to fighting fraud?

0:18:46.5 Shay Johnson: That's a good question. And then I don't know the exact answer of what they've done, but it doesn't seem to be a problem. I'm going to ask them after this. Because I would just be curious to know, it's like, hey, do you just not see very much engagement or response via text from a bot candidate, or are you doing a better job of identifying that they're a bot and not retargeting them? I don't know the answer to that.

0:19:06.7 Joel Cheesman: Because you're asking for a phone number if you're texting them. But it's probably a lot less because I'm assuming fraud doesn't come up with a bunch of phone numbers.

0:19:14.0 Shay Johnson: Probably not.

0:19:14.5 Joel Cheesman: And you can't duplicate a phone number.

0:19:15.6 Shay Johnson: And like I said, when...

0:19:16.8 Chad Sowash: North Korean from Ohio.

0:19:17.9 Shay Johnson: And if... I mean, it's not been as much of a problem because like I said, your conversion downline to higher is good. So it's like, well, it's not like we're seeing a huge drop off. And yeah, you're giving us really good conversion because it's all bots, but they're never turning into hires. It's like, no, you're doing a better job of delivering hires than, you know, another source with huge volume.

0:19:36.6 Chad Sowash: It's a great point, because they literally, I would assume, especially if they're domestic, have to have a domestic phone number to be able to actually... And then that phone number in many cases has to align with the actual location in which they're applying for in many cases, I wouldn't say that's... But that's... I mean, that's a good way to at least...

0:19:53.5 Shay Johnson: It's beyond my expertise what their validation details are, but I bet they're doing it.

0:19:56.7 Chad Sowash: Yeah. Okay. Sorry, I'm just going through all this in my head. Okay, so let's go to the big number. How much did we take away from Indeed and ZipRecruiter and all those bad, bad players?

0:20:06.3 Shay Johnson: I'll phrase it this way, is that over the first six months of having kind of those combined solutions that we talked about being deployed, we spent $1.5 million less in the first six months, and we just continue to optimize from there.

0:20:22.9 Chad Sowash: You spent one point what?

0:20:23.4 Shay Johnson: $1.5 million less.

0:20:25.2 Chad Sowash: Less.

0:20:27.2 Shay Johnson: On Indeed. Now I will say...

0:20:28.2 Chad Sowash: On Indeed.

0:20:28.4 Joel Cheesman: Did he say $1.5 million less?

0:20:29.5 Chad Sowash: In six months.

0:20:32.0 Joel Cheesman: Just making sure I got that.

0:20:32.8 Shay Johnson: Now I will say what's good about that because I'm partner guy... What this has really allowed us to do is make better use of Indeed too. It's not like, hey, we're spending $0. Our goal is to be like, we want to spend $0 on Indeed. We're like, hey, here is where Indeed is now delivering the most value. So we were able to get smart too, and say, all of this spend before was on sponsorship, you guys... You know, they'll come to us all the time. Like, we were in the beta when they first launched, like, smart sourcing and other things like that. So we were able to say like, okay, let's take a little bit from those line items and try some of these new features that you all are offering. Let's use them more directly and more strategically because now we're not just throwing money at the problem. We're going to put dollars in places where we can actually control and measure and have oversight of everything. So I would say, like, even though we say, hey, there's $1.5 million less that we're spending on pure partnership, we might be like, here's a chunk of money to throw at other things that Indeed is doing that we think are valuable or events or some of their things that they come to us, we're like, this is going to be really useful in this market at this point in time and it's all going to help with conversion downline because we have these other tools in place.

0:21:33.4 Shay Johnson: So yeah, it's like that 1.5 million for the most part still gets redistributed in other things that we wanted to invest in and explore. Instead of us being like, oh, that's $1.5 million that gets removed from our budget by finance, we're like, no, no, no, let us keep that money and start to put it in places where we couldn't explore or invest before.

0:21:50.2 Joel Cheesman: Tell me about quality because I could hear people saying, oh well, yeah, a bunch of, you know, Joey bag o' donuts candidates apply because it's so easy in this pop up. Talk about the quality. Did it stay the same, improve or get worse?

0:22:02.7 Shay Johnson: No, that's what I mean by the conversion to hire has improved from both sources because of not only the re-engagement that you're getting from someone like Dalia, but where we're able to now sit down and really see what's happening inside of Indeed and kind of put the pressure on them to be like, if you want our money, the matching has to continuously get better. How you're working through us with... You know, how we actually structure our jobs and how you're receiving them and how they're being... You know, the visibility that you're giving to them. If you want to keep getting money for sponsorship like that, we need to see candidate quality improve because we no longer have a volume challenge. Three years ago it was like, volume is the problem. Now we're in the complete opposite end where we're focused on volume optimization, quality, all those things. So the quality has gotten better not only from the re-engagement strategy, but it's forced Indeed to be like, we've got to get better with quality too. They can't just look at us and be like, well, we already are getting your money, so what do we care?

0:22:53.5 Chad Sowash: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If they want their money, they gotta work for it.

0:22:56.0 Joel Cheesman: Absolutely they're returning your calls if you're spending a million and a half dollars less on their product.

0:23:01.3 Chad Sowash: No, I would say that they would be calling you.

0:23:03.1 Shay Johnson: They're very motivated.

0:23:04.1 Chad Sowash: Yes, yes, yes. So let's turn on Dalia real quick. What would you like to see more? I mean, obviously they've raised conversion rates. Obviously higher conversion rates are great. But as you take a look at your tech stack and you look at the next problem, what's the next thing you want a company like a Dalia to be able to provide so that you have even more leverage over the Indeeds and ZipRecruiters moving forward?

0:23:27.2 Shay Johnson: Yeah. Well, I would say one of the things kind of goes back to the matching conversation. And this isn't so much like a skills, you know, or an attribute conversation, but it's like I said, more of like, hey, if you already got the candidate engaging with you and if they're willing to opt in to giving us a little bit more information other than just those kind of base level requirements or those screening questions, if you want to get into a little bit more of like utilizing AI to say like, well, I see you have this experience. I see you're applying for these jobs. You're probably going to be a candidate that's strongly considered for these food service roles in the healthcare environment, because you've been in a healthcare environment for... Tell me a little bit more about that. So you start building stronger profiles for the candidates that allows you to better match them proactively to jobs. Instead of just trying to react, engage and convert them to what they applied for, you're doing a better job of re recommending to them. And this is important too, because we have a lot of people that we do hire.

0:24:19.5 Shay Johnson: They convert as an applicant and a hire, but it's just for a seasonal role or maybe it was just for two weeks working the US Open or the Super Bowl or something like that. And now we're going to have to re-engage them to try and convert them into another hire a month from now. So all of this is important to say, you know, we've moved on from the world of Indeed, where it's like, hey, it's all about buy, buy, buy. We got to get bodies in the system and through the door. And now it's like, how many times can we re-nurture that candidate and keep them coming back to us and staying within our talent pool and our system instead of being like, we always have to go out and keep acquiring new talent.

0:24:51.1 Chad Sowash: Well, and you're reinvesting in your own database to make just more robust profiles so that you can... I mean, so you can actually see, where before you couldn't, because everything was in Indeed.

0:25:02.7 Shay Johnson: That's a good point. To this point, I've talked a lot about how, like, Dalia is doing everything autonomously. We're not having to, you know, really dig into... We're not looking into a database of Dalia candidates and using them. But, like, that might be, you know, a good thing, too. It's like, hey, how can we do a better job of getting the data that you're getting from these candidates through your Dalia re-engagement and making sure that's available to us through hireEZ or through Paradox. So when we are proactively searching or running campaigns, we have access to all of that beyond just the automated re-engagement.

0:25:31.0 Joel Cheesman: Yeah. If you listen to our show, you know we beat up on Indeed a lot, and we did a good job of that today. And I think for a lot of companies, leaving Indeed is not really an option. I'd say between LinkedIn and Indeed, it's maybe 80% of what we do. There's that 20% that I think a lot of companies rely on programmatic to fill in those gaps. Were you guys using programmatic and how did it impact your usage, budget, et cetera on using programmatic once you switched?

0:25:55.2 Shay Johnson: Yeah, we piloted a couple of different programmatic solutions, especially during the peak of that pandemic, where we just wanted to drill down into, like, what are the most effective sources, where should we be spending our money? We're spending a lot of money. Where should it go? We've gone away from it both with Dalia and with JobSync when we kind of took control of here's everything that we're sending to Indeed, here's the data that they're sending back to us, and we now have full control. We stop doing campaigns. Like, every single job on Indeed is its own campaign with more data than we've ever had before. So we basically worked with JobSync and built a product that we run our own programmatic in house. We've gotten to that point where we have that level of control that we don't need to outsource, that we have two people that run the programmatic strategy for 15,000 jobs.

0:26:41.0 Joel Cheesman: Two people.

0:26:41.8 Shay Johnson: Yep.

0:26:42.3 Joel Cheesman: That's efficiency, Chad. Almost as impressive as you and I doing a podcast. Well, maybe a little bit more impressive than that.

0:26:47.6 Chad Sowash: For real. Almost nine years, yes.

0:26:48.5 Joel Cheesman: Almost more impressive than that. Do you have time for some questions, Shay?

0:26:51.4 Shay Johnson: Yeah.

0:26:54.0 Chad Sowash: Question over here.

0:26:55.5 Joel Cheesman: Chop chop. I know it does.

0:27:03.7 Amanda Wright: My name is Amanda Wright. I'm with recruitment and staffing. So it's kind of a niche question. I'm curious about the difference in how much you guys are working with staffing companies. How much you've moved away from using staffing companies? Because I've worked with you guys in previous roles that I've been in. So how has this helped you guys kind of step away from that a little bit?

0:27:25.8 Shay Johnson: Yeah. This and just market shift, especially from 2022 to now, I'd say we've reduced our dependency on staffing a lot when it comes to like those day to day roles, you know, I need two cooks in an account, you know, like a cafeteria at a corporate environment. We don't need to rely on staffing as much for that anymore. This has helped significantly. We get to just use staffing strategically now. So for a lot of our seasonal events. So for example, the US Open that just happened in New York, we've got one of our businesses, RA that does all of the kind of high end management, does all the celebrity chef partnerships, but Levy, that does all of our sports entertainment, they 100% just staffed that event using agencies. They're not going to like bring on and W2 everybody for just a week and a half, you know. So I think that's just the difference is this has made it so we're like, hey, now we just use agencies where it makes financial and business sense to use agencies and staffing and we don't need to use them because we're panicked and behind the eight ball.

0:28:19.2 Chad Sowash: So do you know percentage wise how much less you're spending or are you spending... It's more surgical. But are you spending less?

0:28:27.8 Shay Johnson: Yeah. On staffing and yeah, overall, yes we are. And we also just... This is going to sound crazy for a company of our size, but we never had a contingent workforce program, a VMS, anything period before this year. We just implemented it for the first time. So that's making a difference to just putting more structure and accountability around the managers. Because before this year it was literally just, I'm a manager, I need to hire 10 cooks for this event. I just call up the approved agencies in my area and it's all phone orders and things like that. And so we've got a lot better data now and control and parameters around it. But like I said, this all with market has helped just kind of reduce the pressure there. So again it's like we've got a great need and a dependency for staffing but we get to do it where it makes sense and how we want to instead of it being reactive.

0:29:11.6 Chad Sowash: Were there any other areas within the business where you actually saw a decrease in spend that surprised you? You're just that good?

0:29:23.1 Shay Johnson: No, I mean I would say I was just surprised. I thought the Indeed challenge, you know, with connecting that was going to take a lot more change management than it did. But it was like one week. It was like... We were like, hey, you no longer need to do any of these things. And it's not just because we're trying to convince you we as a TA team could do it better for you. It's just already being done for you. It is all automated and like it took one week. We didn't have to prove it to them. They were just like, what did you guys do? There used to only be four applicants in my inbox and now there's 150. And you know, granted, that's where we then had to turn into like how do we fine tune for optimization, quality, things like that. And then we have, we've done a lot of effort in that. They're like, okay, great, now it's settled in around 40 and 20 of those are actually really good people that I want to talk to and move forward.

0:30:11.1 Chad Sowash: Anybody else?

0:30:11.9 Joel Cheesman: Anyone else? Up here.

0:30:15.0 Chad Sowash: Chad & Cheese fan. Chad & Cheese fan.

0:30:16.4 Joel Cheesman: Slow down. Slow down, Steven.

0:30:18.8 April Williams: April Williams, I work for [0:30:26.1] ____. I would like to ask you about Indeed. You said that instead of using campaigns for like 10 jobs or 8 jobs, you individually... Every job has its own campaign?

0:30:40.4 Shay Johnson: Yep.

0:30:41.1 April Williams: Okay. So with that you're seeing how does that make any difference doing it that way? Let's say I created a system being a school, I'll have a program for registered nurse and I'll have eight jobs and then have the budget for you know, how much to pay for that Indeed. How is that differently doing that than Indeed?

0:31:01.5 Shay Johnson: Because within that campaign and those dollars that you've assigned Indeed gets to decide where the applicants are going to be targeted and which jobs they're going to get. For us, everyone is different. I might be like this is one job posting but I need eight dietitians or food service workers over here. And in this job it's still the same job, you know, job family perspective, it could fall in the same campaign, it's in the same location, but it has a different need and a different number. And we want to, for every single job, be like, this is the dollar amount that we or the hiring manager is assigning to this job. This is exactly how many people we need to hire. This is how many people we want to target and have interviews scheduled for. And this is exactly the price that we expect that to come in at. And we are going to turn it to that exact mode. If you do a campaign with a bunch of jobs in it, you're basically just putting money in a pot and being like, hey, Indeed, kind of help us out here. And you just look in postmortem and see what happened.

0:31:53.4 Shay Johnson: But you don't get to control it. We want 100... And that's the main reason we moved away from programmatic. It was partially ROI. We just want the control. We, we just, we love to be able to test. We dig into the data and we're like, we want to push the button. We want to say what we want. We're going to get it. Otherwise we're not going to give you the money.

0:32:09.3 Chad Sowash: Which is why you have a programmatic team, because you kind of lose that control in programmatic networks.

0:32:18.1 Shay Johnson: Yeah. We built what we thought was going to be a sourcing team for frontline, and It had like 20 people on it. And then through all the different automation, we're like, we don't really need a sourcing team. We just need a team to push the buttons and look at the data and make sure the machine is running smoothly. And that could just be two people. And those others got to be redeployed to fun stuff that they wanted to be doing instead of just pushing a button.

0:32:36.4 Chad Sowash: Hey, man.

0:32:36.7 Joel Cheesman: If you have any further questions, Shay, I think you're going to be in the Dalia booth, which is in that direction.

0:32:41.4 Shay Johnson: Yeah, I'm staying in the shade.

0:32:42.5 Joel Cheesman: Okay. So if you have questions, follow up. Otherwise, let's give it up for Shay Johnson, everybody.

0:32:51.5 Chad Sowash: Best hair in the tent.

0:32:54.9 Speaker 6: Thank you for listening to, what's it called? A podcast. The Chad, the Cheese. Brilliant. They talk about recruiting, they talk about technology, but most of all, they talk about nothing. Just a lot of shout outs of people you don't even know. And yet you're listening. It's incredible. And not one word about cheese. Not one. Cheddar, blue, nacho, pepper jack, Swiss. So many cheeses and not one word. So weird. Anywho, be sure to subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. That way you won't miss an episode. And while you're at it, visit www.chadcheese.com just don't expect to find any recipes for grilled cheese. So weird. We out.