E09: Darren Revell: We market what we attract and attract what we market

Speaker A: Welcome to the Pint with Pager podcast. The podcast that covers sales, marketing and recruitment, all while having a beer. Enjoy. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of Pint with Pager. Today I am joined by Darren Revelle of Recruiter Web, a old friend. We go way back so if you're listening you're going to hear us chat nonsense for the next 15, 20 minutes. Uh, basically two friends down the pub. Darren, how are you mate?

Speaker B: I am all good. All the better for chatting to you my fellow Oak.

Speaker A: Uh, for the people that don't know Darren means oak tree. I found this out from my uh, my fellow Darren here. So we, we taught each other oak trees. So yeah, that's a nice bit odd, but I did say it was going to be an odd episode so here we go. Darren, for the people listening and watching that don't know what you do, would you mind just give a quick intro?

Speaker B: Yeah. I have got two ventures under my belt currently. Uh, Recruiter Web. We make websites exclusively for the recruitment industry. Help them, promote them, brand them, all that type of thing. And then we just launched um, a job board for the industry called Recruitsy. Um, and that is a business aimed at trying to redress the balance uh, of power to recruiters in the, in the job board space. Because the, the big boards that are out there at the moment uh, are in my opinion and quite a few others ripping them off price wise, uh, bang for buck. You're not really getting a return on your investment. So we, we, we've got um, to kind of change the model. Uh, recruiters on recruiting can have unlimited jobs for every recruiter they've got. Uh, and it's just one single membership fee for the agency for the year of £300. Um, and the idea behind it is, you know, recruitment industry should have started its own job board 20 years ago. I mean as part of our marketing message, you know the best time to start a uh, job board by the recruitment industry was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So we've set it up as a venture uh, where it's run and operated by its members so it can't be turned into a commercial venture and sold off. And then you know, it was £300 a year, now it's £30,000 a year. That's not what it's for. But there's great safety in numbers because Google's algorithm um, picked job boards out and job board content over recruiters websites, um, nine times out of ten. And Google for jobs, the environment which was supposed to Be a level playing field for all. It still picks job boards version of the advert over the recruiter's version of the advert. Um, so they're creating unnecessary competition for themselves and we just wanted to redress that balance and you know, hopefully get a few hundred, if not a thousand recruiters on board and uh, you know, turn it into something that's a real asset for the industry basically.

Speaker A: Uh, I've no doubt that you will. Now we've been industry for a long time, right, and it feels like for the last, I want to say 10, 15 years it's been, oh, job boards are dying. Job boards are dying. So it's interesting you're launching a job board now. What's your view of that? Are job boards dying? Do you see that in the market? And why have you decided now to launch one? I know you said about 20 years ago is the right time, now is. What's your view on job boards in general?

Speaker B: Well, I think we market what we attract and we attract what we market is a well trodden philosophy. Um, and nothing is truer of the LinkedIn algorithm because you and I spend a prolific amount of time uh, on LinkedIn. Um, and if you've got the pager product, it really turns your, uh, whole business and your individuals into this kind of sticky tool, um, in social media. But you know, we get real traction obviously in LinkedIn, um, in the white collar space, um, for what we do, um, and we're a user of the product. Um, but that concept of market what you attract and attract what you market, we see like minded individuals or we see posts that the algorithm thinks, um, we, we have an opinion in common with. So if you start mentioning things like, you know, the death of the job board, then you're going to see a lot of content about the death of job boards. It doesn't mean that job boards are dying. Um, one way they are dying I believe is they are losing customers because of the cost of their platform. You know, if we take one of the majors, I won't name names, but if we take one of the top five multi sector job boards, they won £3,200 a year for 20 jobs a month.

Speaker A: Which for an agency isn't enough anyway, right?

Speaker B: Well, it's not enough. So you're compromised on the amount of jobs that you need a three, three four person agency. Well, this is the other thing about those numbers. That was for two recruiters. They went with that plan because that's what they could afford and then they wanted to add A third recruiter to their plan and then it was going to go up to £750amonth. So nine grand a year to advertise 30 jobs a month, 360 jobs in a year, that's not a lot of jobs. Um, so that's causing issues across the industry. So I think people are looking, ah, at their boards and going, if we're going to invest this size and scale of money, we need a better return on investment because I think the return on investment is relatively consistent but I don't think it's high enough for the spend and dare I say inventors of products like Pager where so much of the traffic we see on our website, I say this all the time, um, and you see my posts all the time. When you've got pager dragging users off of social media, when you've got a pager, you know, dragging users consistently on a daily basis to your website, that in of itself is creating competition for job sites because, yeah, um, so there is a, again I think a decline, uh, in, well, you know, I can spend this much on pager and get all of this traffic and the thing I say about it is like, it's relevancy of traffic. So if job boards are not targeting relevant traffic, their numbers can look really, you know, impressive from visits. So, you know, we had a million visits this week or a million visits this month, but that's meaningless if those visitors aren't the right job seekers and invariably half those visits are going to be missed. Align visits. Because the SEO strategy produces as many non targeted audiences it does. Targeted audience, that's just the nature of SEO. Um, so there are other products out there that are able to drag in more accurate users. Now I've got, I don't know, three and a half thousand people in my network which are predominantly recruitment decision makers. So if a tool like pager is putting the information into that environment for me and contact comes back from that, that decision maker base, so I can pretty much more or less guarantee it's going to be someone in my target, you know, audience type, highly targeted. So I always sound like an advert for pager. And I'm, I'm not trying to be, but I'm just trying to say think about the practical realities. So yeah, they are, they are in decline in the service level they're offering but I don't think there's a decline in the need to put jobs in front of people. You've just got to put jobs in front of people at the right cost and Again, your product and other products like that. My product, my whole product mentality is to put technology in front of people at the lowest possible cost that I can make a reasonable living from and not go bust. Right. Again, with websites, there's lots of other website vendors out there are charging a thousand pounds a month for what we charge £100amonth for. Um, so I think where the decline is coming is people are going, well, they weren't seeing the levels of return and therefore why just keep spending out that money and then when they turn that revenue off they don't ultimately get massively affected. Um, like lots of people left Total Jobs because they were unhappy with what Total Jobs did with its pricing strategy, which appears on the surface of it, is to make employers, uh, make recruiters spend as much money as employers. Now they're in a position to do that because they've now got 6,000 employers using it and 3,000 recruiters using it. When they had 3,000 recruiters using it and only a thousand employers using it, they wouldn't necessarily have been so comfortable putting the pricing up. But now they put the pricing up. If recruiters leave the platform, they got enough money from the increase in the prices to, to lose all of those customers from the recruiter side of the business. So again, I think some of the job boards out there are biting the hand that feeds them, which creates decline in demand for that. And I also think that we had a period in job boards lives where recruiters became a bit unskilled in candidate generation. So I joined recruitment in 1993 and there was no Internet, wasn't even email. Um, so we were faxing CVs to decision makers or walking them over Tower Bridge, in my case into the city and sitting down with the decision maker and showing them over a coffee or lunch type of thing.

Speaker A: You had an old school pager, didn't you? You actually used an original pager.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Uh, and um, you know, we had this period where job boards came in and they did a fantastic job to start with because they got the jobs out quicker to the masses. You know the days where you're writing your lineage advert, uh, in freelance informal or computer contract, by the time the advert come out the contract had been filled. You were then just really hoping that somebody else came in and you could market them out to somewhere else. So the job board did away with all of that issue. But then recruiters became a bit one dimensional in as much that if they, they could only find the candidate if they put a job on, on the job board. And there was a period of time where recruiters will change jobs based upon the amount of job board spend that the agency had for them. I think what inbound has done is re educated and re skilled recruiters. So because they're getting more, more skills. It's a little bit back to the, the time when I first started where you had to proactively go out and get people.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Now you're proactively going out and getting people via an inbound strategy. So again, if recruiters keep developing this inbound strategy, they're reskilling themselves in generating candidates in a way that job boards aren't.

Speaker A: Um, the job boards are the first point of call for the employers. Right. They try the job boards first and when they don't have any luck they then go to market their agencies. So if anything, the model's kind of flipped now. Right. Where job boards are going after the active candidates and clients are going to go for the active candidates first and then they go to agencies to look for their passive and people that aren't, aren't available on job boards then.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think the other thing is there's a lot of generalisms and I've just done it myself, talked about recruitment. There's certain kinds of recruiters that do well on job boards. There's certain kinds of recruiters who don't need job boards at all. There's certain kinds of recruitment sectors that, excuse me, do a whole lot better in the job board environment than others. But let's not forget what a job board is. It's a merchandising vehicle online. So if we go down the high street, Marks and Spencer's are the number one at merchandising for many, many, many years. And they have a trick of sticking stuff on the end of the aisle and if it doesn't sell out within a couple of days, they take it off and replace it with another, um, merchandising item. And when we're standing with the kids, you know, queuing up to pay in Sainsbury's and there's all the chocolate there and all of that type of stuff, um, what job boards are about is Internet footfall. And you're going to get more people walk into a Sainsbury's than you are into a fruit and vegetarian on the side of the M11, um, selling strawberries and cherries.

Speaker A: So don't stop on the M11. Anyone listening? Type.

Speaker B: You don't stop on something. But the concept is there are, they are mega stores of jobs. So they're an easy environment for people to understand whether, you know, a certain amount of jobs on. And that's again coming back to recruitsy. Our philosophy is get as many jobs on there as is humanly possible by every agency. And that's a defined strategy of, you know, we've got that covered. But instead of saying it's 30 grand or three grand, it's 300 quid because that's what I think the value should be of a multi sector job board. We can run that job board quite easily on those numbers. Um, so I think that's the future. You know, some people are going down the boards are going down the, you know, click revenue, um, so if somebody clicks your advertisement and reads it, you get a charge. But I don't believe in that model really because it's just how do you know that that person was the right person for the job when they clicked it? I just think it needs to be clean and simple and that will be the future of job boards, that they will still exist. But like everything, I mean, before I came into recruitment I sold fax machines. When fax machines first came out they were like two and a half, three grand and I'm talking like, uh, you know, a long, long time ago now because I'm as old as a fossil. But you know, when I was selling them in the nineteen, early nineteen nineties, late eighties, fax machines were like two and a half, three grand when you get a fax machine for fifty quid now. So everything that has a mass consumer appeal has a period of time where it is a huge cash cow and then it turns into a bonfire for, you know, race to the bottom for prices. And I think that's what's going to happen with the, or the job boards and dare I say needs to happen with the job boards because they're overcharging for an under, uh, performing product.

Speaker A: What's your prediction when that will happen? We've been saying it for years, right everyone, like you said, if you see posts all day, different job boards, therefore job boards, I don't see it in sight. When do you think that would actually happen?

Speaker B: Well, it's about the message being understood by the recruitment industry. We need enough people in the recruitment industry to go, you know, we need to act in the best interest of the industry, that's the best interest, um, to get the best result. You know, if the recruitment industry starts going well, actually, you know what, we've got the balance power because these are our jobs, you know, still the still, the jobs on the major job boards, they might, you know, uh, a board might have 3,000 recruiter clients and 6,000 employer clients, but the 6,000 employer clients are putting one or two jobs on here and there. The recruiter clients are still putting hundreds and thousands of jobs through these platforms a year. So the moment you start, you know, pulling that away from that environment and putting it in another environment, all you're really doing is changing the cost that you're going to spend on these things. And that's the, the pandemic did a lot for the recruitment industry to get them to think about their web presence more than they've ever done before. Both their websites and their job board spend and any other spend. So I think provided that the industry doesn't sort of like fall asleep coming out of this pandemic, then we can see that as a reality in the next three years that enough recruiters, I mean 500 recruiters get together and you know, it doesn't have to be our platform. Other people could come along with a platform on their own. Or if some of the big platforms just wake up and smell the coffee and go, you know what, 500 recruiters move to recruit. See we should do something about our pricing strategy. If that's all recruits he ever achieves is the lowering aggregate price of job boards. We did it with recruitment websites. We did it, um, when I had my recruitment training company, we lowered the cost of recruitment training um, by half, um, when we had that business. So as long as enough like minded recruiters go, yeah, we see the concept half the cost, you know, then 10 times the cost lowered and so on and so forth. But if they don't, if they don't react now and go, actually it's in our best interest to collectively use tools which are going to lower the aggregate spend relative to value and um, take control. Because we won't let employer adverts on the recruiter platform. And if they're the industry, um, and other platform, I encourage other. Somebody came to me the other day and said, oh, I was thinking of doing that, I won't do it now. And I said no, do it, you know, categorically do it. If there's 10 recruits, your products out there, happy days. Because I just want to lower the cost that recruiters spend on job board adverts full stop. Where the recruiter does or 10 other vendors do it now.

Speaker A: How can they, how can they actually help you with your calls?

Speaker B: Just go to recruitsy.co.uk and sign up. That's it.

Speaker A: I think it'd be worth just saying how to spell it, because it's an interesting name.

Speaker B: You're asking a dyslexic how to spell it. So it's recruit.

Speaker A: There we go. Recruit Z. So if you're listening and you. Sorry, guys, it's my turn to cough now. I'm done. So if you're listening and you. So you get involved, just, um, connect with Darren on LinkedIn. That might be a good point. First point of call, uh, we mentioned it's got 3,000 connection request. We want to get that up to 5,000. Come on. Uh, so, Darren Revell on LinkedIn. Uh, visit Recruitsy. Darren, thank you so much for joining me today and, uh, I really appreciate your insight, mate.

Speaker B: It's always good to talk to you and thanks for having me.