Episode 313: Growing A Geofencing & AI Recruitment Technology Company (For Easier Hiring) - crooton

Speaker A: Welcome to A Better HR Business, the podcast that looks at how HR consultants and HR tech firms grow their businesses and how they help their employers to get the best out of their people. Remember, for show notes and Downloads, go to www.getmorehrclients.com podcast. That's getmorehrclients.com podcast. Okay, let's get started.

Speaker B: Hello. Welcome back. Thanks very much for joining me. And I'm really looking forward to today's conversation with two fabulous guys from a very cool company called Crouton. I'm joined by Stephen Anderson and Mark Harrison. And as I said, they're from Crouton, which I know through their background in the recruitment marketing space. So they have a very particular focus on location based targeting with geofencing, some very cool stuff. And I got to meet Steven recently in Dublin at the Disrupt Dublin event and so that's how we connected. And so I know about the recruitment marketing and the geofencing stuff, but they've also evolved and got some very cool things in the pipeline for companies who are either looking to increase the volume or the quality of their application and the recruitment process. But before we get into that, guys, thank you very much for joining me today. Great to have you.

Speaker C: Good to be here.

Speaker D: Thanks Ben.

Speaker B: I have a background, I understand we've met, we've talked and so on about Crouton, but maybe I could throw it to you guys. Two things. What is Crouton, what does it do? And then who does it help?

Speaker D: Crouton is a recruitment marketing business so we tend to work with large SMEs all the way through to enterprise type clients. A typical campaign that we might work on is an employer looking to target and reach a very specific audience, often location based. One example, Marriott hotels opening a big new hotel in the states needed 300 staff. They wanted to target people in their local area, probably currently working in hospitality or retail or similar industry. And um, we'll build a campaign based on people being in a specific place. So we have this geofencing tool that uh, we've developed which allows us to build an audience of people who are actually in a physical location. So they might be working in a particular hotel or living in a particular area. And we build an audience and then deliver uh, an employer brand message or details around a specific vacancy to that audience. Over the last six years we developed lots of additional tactics. We're doing quite a lot in terms of digital billboards in specific locations, TV now gone. The days when you need a million pound budget to run a TV campaign. We can do very localized TV ads, uh, podcasts delivered locally, lots of additional tactics. But our core market is often quite high volume, but a very specific need around location. So, uh, need to reach people in a specific place.

Speaker B: That makes so much sense. But in case it's gone over people's heads. The way I think about it is McDonald's and Coca Cola mega budgets and they're everywhere all the time and that's great for them. They can be nationwide, no problem. But when you're a business and as you said, for instance of the married hotels, they're opening a specific location, you don't want to be nationwide because your budget, your ad spend is just a drop in the ocean, it just disappears years. Is that the concept?

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. I think our focus has always been around managing and helping employers manage that recruitment, marketing, spend much more effectively. So as you say, if you're Coca Cola and you know it's a branding campaign, you're going national. But what we're talking about is that's not what a lot of our clients want. Um, they want to deliver a message in a very specific area to a really targeted audience. So it's all about us delivering a really good ROI on that campaign and, um, minimizing the wastage. You don't want to be spending money in an area an hour or commute away when actually you know, your audience is only going to travel 30 minutes for a particular role. Our core focus is ROI and minimizing wastage in terms of getting your message out there to the right people.

Speaker B: Got it. Are there certain roles or types of industries or businesses that are more likely to use this?

Speaker D: My timing in terms of launching this business wasn't great. Launched in January and then the world locked down and stopped recruiting. As a result, we had to focus on, um, those sectors where people were recruiting and actually healthcare, it was still happening. So in that first six, nine months, we were recruiting lots of nurses, lots of social carers, we were working with the NHS on those types of roles. And actually we, we started to develop a strong name for ourselves in the healthcare space. So that's continued. We do a lot in healthcare, both UK and now globally, but we also do quite a lot in logistics, retail, hospitality. It tends to be relatively high churn, high volume sectors that we operate in, but it's not exclusive to that. We've worked on campaigns when we're looking for developers in specific parts of the world and that type of thing as well.

Speaker B: Mark, can I ask you, what's your perspective on What Crouton does and how it helps.

Speaker C: One of the biggest things, Ben, is just there's a move towards hyper targeting. You know, there are traditional channels that people will use and you mentioned it earlier yourself, that, you know, if you're looking to open something in a locality, using traditional channels doesn't necessarily get eyeballs exclusively of the people that you want to engage with. So, you know, a lot of your spend is wasted. Clients will, will have us build audiences that their hope is that those audience members have the right skills and experience they're looking for. And if you deliver content to them, if you surface either vacancy adverts or employer branding to those audience members, they're going to see it. And when I say that, I say that because we all see thousands of ads a day. We don't remember them barely. We remember ones that land with us because they're relevant. If I've recently been looking at some on trainers and then I start getting surfaced, here's some deals for some on trainers, I'm going to take notice of that. When people start seeing content that says we have vacancies for electrical mechanical engineers, and the guy says, well, I'm an electrical mechanical engineer, you know, that's relevant. Oh, what are they doing? I'm curious. Let me click it and find out. And so there's real advantages to having a message that directly matches the audience and that helps greatly in a number of different ways, mainly making sure that your spend is attracting the people that you're wanting to engage with.

Speaker B: And then I know you guys are developing, I don't know what you call it, the platform, the business, the products. So it's not just geo targeting, geofencing, you've got other things in the pipeline.

Speaker D: Yeah. So there's clearly now an issue with AI driving not necessarily quality applications, but volume applications. So AI tools have made it very easy to customize CVs, customize applications and apply for dozens and dozens of jobs within seconds. There is a tsunami of applications coming in for certain types of roles. And in house teams are drowning under the weight of those applications. In an ideal world, you want to go through and spend some time reviewing every application, every CV that comes in. But that's not happening anymore because real live case studies we're hearing of clients getting over a thousand applications for a particular role. There is no way they are going to spend three minutes reviewing each of those CVs. How do you deal with that? Uh, so we've just launching uh, a new service that we're calling Crucial. And this is a tool that will look at a detailed job description, review the applicants coming in and apply some scoring and some weighting and some and undertake sort of a review of every application that comes in evaluation. And this isn't. Yeah, via job boards. This is the objective isn't to screen people out, it's just to make sure you, you can track and identify where the quality candidates are coming from. If one channel, one particular job board is giving me 300 applications that I can see. Only one of those is a quality applicant that I might even consider taking to the next stage of the recruitment process. I want to pull back on my spend on that particular channel. But there might be another one that's Maybe only generated 10 applications. But uh, I've got five good quality ones from those 10 actually. Let's try and move in real time some of the spend across to that particular channel. So this tool sits in the middle in real time, will analyze applications coming in and move spend accordingly. And it will also allow the employer to define how many good quality applicants am I realistically wanting to see, to take to interview. So once that cap has been set you can just pause the campaign. So I'm not spending hundreds, thousands on advertising a role when I've got enough good quality candidates to view now there's people in the space doing similar things. The focus has always been on application volumes and ah, moving monies to those channels that are going to give me more applications for less money. Well actually that's not what I want. That's just generating noise. I want to identify quality applications and base my spend on that because actually the metrics are quite different and focusing on volume, it could seriously drive up my cost per quality application. We're quite excited and it feels like a natural development for us because the focus still is on managing your recruitment spend more effectively and actually getting quality rather.

Speaker B: Hey, sorry for interrupting my own show. I wanted to quickly let you, the listener know that if you want some help marketing and growing your own HR related business, I'd love to help you through our HR business accelerator process. We've successfully used the HR ah, uh business accelerator to help hundreds of consulting and technology businesses in the HR ah sector from around the world to grow in an easier and sustainable way. So do check it out. You'll find all the details right there on the website at www.getmorehrclients.com. okay, now back to the show.

Speaker D: Volume.

Speaker B: Very clever. He just gave me a little flashback to I think was my first HR manager job and I thought I Was so clever putting a little code word into each job ad. If it was a newspaper or an online thing or a local job board, please quote this code. And then. But that was like for one job, a finance manager or something. But doing that at scale. And now it's all online, so all sorts of job boards. And if it's different locations or even different countries at the same time, oh man, I couldn't do that. So I love that because. Yeah, you're right. Especially with economy that may be going through a downturn or when job applications are on the rise, you've got a lot of sorting to do, a lot of sifting to do. And so this sounds like a really great way of helping you work out where the quality is coming from. So you can either spend more there or you can pause stuff. That's really smart.

Speaker D: Absolutely. There's a really nice AI generated assessment of each applicant and there are clearly risks associated with screening out people on using AI. And that's not what this is about. But it does mean that you can flag somebody. Your 999th applicant, he happens to be a star that will get flagged. And it's one, um, that you won't miss because we'll make sure that that appears at the top of your pile rather than get buried. Because there is a real risk that if I'm getting hundreds of applications, I'll spend the first few days reviewing and looking at everyone. And good quality applicants that come in later inevitably get missed. This will make sure that actually you're seeing those and they're being flagged. You know, we think just by stopping applications and stopping spend, when, you know, you've hit a threshold in terms of. Right. I've got six KWASI applicants and stopping spend. There is 50% saving to be made on your job board spend.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, Mark, any thoughts on this?

Speaker C: You've covered it off already and I think it's really important that Stephen highlighted that this process doesn't exclude anyone or reject anyone.

Speaker D: Sure.

Speaker C: One of my clients put a vacancy out and on this occasion it was a single role that needed filling and had around 500 applications. You know, uh, that took him days in order to go through those. And this tool, had he been able to use that, then that ranking would have been done in moments. And I completely get Stephen's highlighting the saving, the ROI and being able to reduce your spending. But for my day to day contacts, the recruitment teams, the priority for them is getting to the right contact as swiftly as possible. Frequently. And it depends on the sector you're in. But you can have someone who applies for six roles on their phone while they're queuing for Greggs.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: And so for them it's less important about. Yes, that's the brand I really want to develop my career at. Uh, it's just I want to get out of where I am now and I want to go somewhere else. For those, often it's fastest first that hooks them in. If the right people are showing up at the top of that list at those rankings, you and your team know that you're reaching out to those ASAP before the competitors do, who they've already applied for. Right. So to speed the process.

Speaker B: Speed is key.

Speaker C: Really useful for those types of roles. Yeah.

Speaker B: So Mark, for an employer listening to this, why should they work with Crouton?

Speaker C: Yeah, good question. And the answer is that we are a great partner, uh, when it comes to understanding what it is you're looking for, working closely with you, this is a two way street. And being able to build activity and solutions bespoke to what you need because everyone is different. Different role types, different locations and regions around the world, different tactics land differently. So being able to do that, to be able to prepare options and show how you can improve your roi, how you can maximize the return on your spend and actually save your team's time when it comes to engaging with and ultimately hiring onboarding candidates, then that's a good reason to come across to us. And I think the other thing is it's not a static thing that happens. We don't push a button, launch a campaign, and then come back at the end of the campaign and say, well, how did we do this? Is constantly being looked at, uh, the data monitored, tweaked to ensure that everything is working as optimally as possible. And all of that data and feedback goes back to the client as well. We understand how important that is.

Speaker D: So, uh, one of the things that we've also developed very recently is a product. A platform that we're referring to is calling Atlas. It's a visualization tool really. So when we're sitting down with a client, we can map out their audience so we can identify in real time with a client on a call, you want to target these particular competitors. And in real time, we build a geofence around all of those. We can then look at, uh, other data layers. Right. Let's target particular income groups in a particular location map that will out and then we can overlay different media channels so we can go, right, there's a digital out of home board at that site. And we therefore can build a campaign in real time with a client, their direct input and then we can flight the whole campaign through our platform. And the last bit of jigsaw is then we're now pulling back the reporting so we can show the client this particular channel in that particular location. We delivered X. This was the click through rate the engagement level. Nothing's really changed in terms of what we're doing. But this is a visualization tool. Clients are loving because they can see it. It's much more touchy feely and it really helps us demonstrate how we're working on a campaign and optimizing and all

Speaker B: the rest of it. That's really clever. There's so much data these days and yes, in theory we can just uh, throw it into a chatbot and it can tell us the answers but that's not how really things work at this stage. And then also like Mark you said earlier in the TA side of things, people are just so busy, it's a crazy role. So you can't just sit down and think, oh, how's the big picture going? So I love that atlas and it's a very clever approach to help the clients and get the best out of their recruitment. So a, to get the number of people, so the volume of people that they want but also to help them get the quality that they want. And then thirdly, I guess the overlay to all of that is that do that in uh, an easier, more efficient way that frees up their time.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Three big values. I uh, know you guys have got a fabulous online magazine, the Untapped, which is a magazine that covers stories that matter in the recruitment industry.

Speaker D: It's not just an online product. We actually produce it as ah, a hard copy that we tend to give out recruitment events and that type of thing.

Speaker B: That's clever. So that's one example. Yeah. For people listening, what are you guys doing to grow the business and get the word out there about Crouton?

Speaker D: Obviously we deploy some of the media channels and tactics that uh, we would be presenting to our clients. So geofencing for us works really well. If you think about where there's going to be a high density of potential decision makers in the recruitment marketing space. They might be attending a trade show. We can ring fence and geofence that particular location and if we can't be there in person then we can have a presence and we can still access those people because anybody walking into that event space we can add to an audience pool and Then serve them a digital display advert about cruise on our services for the next month. That works really well for us. Again, we can tie in some digital out of home with that. Uh, so if there happens to be some billboards outside Olympia and we know people are going to be there on a certain day, we can acquire those billboards and serve messages to people when they're physically going in and out of those places. We do actually attend quite a lot of events, recruitment related events, these types of things, blogs, podcasts I think are key. Mark is uh, our superstar when it comes to events and engaging and chatting to people.

Speaker C: Yeah. Happiest when I'm face to face with some real people. And I have to say as well, going to events or conferences or think tanks and that sort of stuff is just also a brilliant opportunity to get in front of clients who you don't get to see face to face on a daily basis or on a regular basis. So actually, you know, meeting people for real I think is something that is far more limited than it used to be. Pre Covid we got so used to the technology as we are today, being used to engage with people and to communicate with people that, you know, I really miss that. So being at events is fantastic. And when I'm talking to people about what we're able to do, how refined we're able to make audiences, and then see the look on their faces like either a, is this legal? Of course it is in every region, it's compliant everywhere around the world. Or B, this is the best thing since fire that puts a smile on my face and yeah, it's just a lovely way to engage with people.

Speaker D: I think partnerships is important as well and that's something that we're really focused on at the moment. Whether that's with another tech provider in our space who complements some of the services that we offer, uh, or R.P.O.S. we do quite a lot of work with, you know, when they're pitching to much larger clients. Yeah. So there are a number of partnership routes that we're already doing, but it's definitely a major focus moving forward for us.

Speaker B: That's an interesting one on the partnerships because I think a lot of businesses miss that. They think it's either just a formal arrangement whereby you refer us business and we give it x percent and it's just all documented in a contract, which is great. But there are so many other ways to co promote co market, even writing an article on their site or teaming up for a webinar, all sorts of stuff. So Yeah, I want to put you on the spot before I let you go. And that is the future. It's moving a lot faster than it used to. Or maybe that's just me. But particularly on the recruitment, talent acquisition side of things, what's coming down the line? What should people be thinking about advances

Speaker C: in AI, which is an unstoppable force. It's just going to continue to impact more and more of our lives. And so if that's doing more of the heavy lifting and actually perhaps some of the bits that real skilled and dedicated people were uh, doing, I think a strong position is going to be someone in TA who understands the development of their organization and they themselves can perhaps see into the future and understand where their hiring needs are going to come from down the road and start making some of those contacts early on and starting to nurture those people ahead of the need officially arising.

Speaker D: I'd agree with Mark. I think AI and the tools available are amazing and that's a really important layer. But I wouldn't underplay the value of talent acquisition recruitment professionals in the loop. There still needs to be ownership and validation. We have a small in house recruitment team who do more of a managed campaign and work directly on specific roles for some clients. Um, we're being asked now whether uh, we can get one of our teams reaching out and having genuine conversations with applicants because the AI tools, what's out there, uh, is meaning candidates or applicants can look brilliant but you actually then get them on the phone and that becomes really the only way to validate whether they are a genuine candidate with relevant skills. That's difficult to automate human beings owning parts of the process. That's not going to change anytime soon.

Speaker B: If people want to learn more about Crouton what you do and potentially could work or partner or learn more about what you do generally. What should they do next?

Speaker D: They're more than welcome to contact me directly. So Stephen Anderson, you'll find me on LinkedIn or stephenruton.com or reach out to Mark. So Mark with a C. Perfect.

Speaker B: All right, so crouton.com thank you so much. It's really impressive to see how you're helping employers with the volume, the quality and even just the time management and streamlining of their recruitment talent acquisition processes. I love the way you're going about it too, so really wish you the best and thank you very much for sharing your story today.

Speaker D: Thanks sir.

Speaker C: Thanks Ben.

Speaker A: Thanks for joining us today on A Better HR Business, the podcast that explores the world of HR consulting and HR tech businesses. For show notes and downloads, go to www.getmorehrclients.com podcast that's getmorehrclients.com forward slash podcast. Remember to subscribe and share the show with any friends who are busy growing a HR business. Thanks and see you next time.