The Changing State of Talent Acquisition

#69: Recruitment Is Marketing: The Evolution of Talent Acquisition

• Graham and Marty from Change State • Season 5 • Episode 69

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In this  episode of The Changing State of Talent Acquisition, hosts Graham Thornton and Martin Predd welcome Maria Christopoulos Katris, Founder and CEO of Built In. Maria shares her 15-year journey growing Built In from a Chicago-based tech community to a global recruitment platform, offering sharp insights into why traditional applicant tracking systems (ATS) are failing to capture the full candidate journey and how employer branding has become a cornerstone of modern talent acquisition. With Built In’s latest trends report as a backdrop, Maria reveals why companies are doubling down on employer brand investments and how referrals are surging as a top channel for tech talent—while also exposing the limitations of relying on them.

Topics include:

  • The evolution of recruitment from job boards to a marketing-driven discipline
  • Why ATS source-of-hire data is only 20% accurate and how to move beyond it
  • The rise of employer branding as a core pillar of talent acquisition
  • The surge in referrals for tech talent and their potential impact on diversity
  • Strategies for improving candidate experience and treating applicants like consumers
  • The growing importance of employer branding for internal retention
  • How to educate executives on the value of employer brand investments when ROI is challenging to measure

Links:

Maria Christopoulos Katris, Founder and CEO of Built In

Tune in to discover how to transform your talent acquisition strategy by embracing recruitment as marketing and building a candidate-centric employer brand that stands out in today’s competitive landscape.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Changing State of Talent Acquisition, where your hosts, graham Thornton and Martin Cred, share their unfiltered takes on what's happening in the world of talent acquisition today. Each week brings new guests who share their stories on the tools, trends and technologies currently impacting the changing state of talent acquisition. Have feedback or want to join the show? Head on over to changestateio. And now on to this week's episode.

Speaker 2:

All right and we're back with another episode of the Changing State of Town Acquisition Podcast. Super excited for our next guest, maria Christopoulos-Katras, founder and CEO of BuiltIn. Maria, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:

Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, super excited to have BuiltIn. So you don't know this, but in 2011, when you started Built In, we started a company called Seatsync in Chicago and we went to pretty much every monthly meetup that Built In started hosting when you were growing, and so we've been big fans of Built In since, quite literally, your inception. One of my big gripes starting ChangeState is boy, I really wish in Seattle we had a tech ecosystem or a startup ecosystem that built-in helped create in Chicago. So big fan of built-in. But that said, why don't you tell us a little bit more about starting built-in from your lens? Tell us a little bit more about your career journey first, maria.

Speaker 3:

Oh, I appreciate that and that brings back some fond memories, for sure, for sure. I think you know it's just unfortunate. You know the world's evolving and we've had to evolve with it. But thinking back to those days when events were really big and in-person meetups were big and right, all the incubators, you know, everyone would huddle every day at the incubators and it was so special and it was so hopeful for companies at that earliest stage in their journey. Now it's just a lot of the events like outside of I jokingly say outside of people in sales who are really leaning into events right now and in-person meetings, and it's working really well. I'm finding that most people outside of the nine to five don't want to, you know, network and go to events and things of that nature. So it is interesting. It brings back so many fond memories. So, yeah, that was built in in the early days. Fast forward to today. We are now a global recruitment platform that helps companies, from the smallest startups to the Fortune 500, hire the hardest to find tech professionals, and we do this by branding companies so they can attract, convert and ultimately get candidates to apply to their hardest to fill roles. Why that matters today is recruitment is marketing. Recruitment was not marketing when built in first started. We really set out to promote local technology companies and in doing so, found that we were driving really high quality applicants into their funnel. And that was before employer branding was a term. It wasn't even a term. It was definitely not a role inside a company, and so it's been crazy to see how the industry has evolved and how now, for 75% of our buyers I would say, recruitment, marketing and employer branding sit under talent acquisition as a core pillar of the function. So it's been fun to watch, it's been a labor of love indeed.

Speaker 3:

As far as my career, I started my career in consulting. I come from immigrant entrepreneur parents who identified as being pharmacists. My parents and I are Greek. We were either a doctor or a lawyer. As a first generation kid of immigrant parents, they didn't know what to think of me. They thought I was going to be a lawyer. Year of college switched my major to business Glad I did that and just had some critical pieces of my journey along the way that led me to realizing I'm an entrepreneur and it was sort of like I've had these three light bulb moments I like to call them throughout my career journey. The first is when a friend took me to an entrepreneur's organization event right after I had left consulting and I was in a room full of entrepreneurs and I was like, oh, this is me, this is who I am, and I had never really identified that way. I'm aging myself right now.

Speaker 3:

But startups weren't really a thing when I was graduating from college as a finance undergrad. You either went to work for a bank or consulting firm, and so it wasn't something that was top of mind, to be honest, and my parents identified as pharmacists. It wasn't something that was top of mind, to be honest, and my parents identified as pharmacists, not entrepreneurs, but they were both, and so that was step one was just this light bulb of like ooh, these are my people, they think like me, they act like me, this is the world I want to be in, and that led me to start my first business. And then the second light bulb moment was when I ran a nonprofit for a short period of time for tech entrepreneurs, between selling my first company and then starting at Built In and realizing that everyone was complaining what the tech ecosystem in Chicago at the time didn't have and really felt like we had so much. No one was talking about it At that point. A number of founders and venture capitalists in Chicago had met and together came up with a name built in Chicago, and Matt Moog, who was one of them, launched Built in Chicago on a Ning site. And when I got invited to join that site, it was like that was my second light bulb moment of my career, where it just was like, oh, this is what I've been talking about. And so here we are 15 years later, and I would say the third was likely when I realized fairly early on with Built In that we needed to be global.

Speaker 3:

Obviously, being globally minded myself, having been raised by immigrant parents, I really saw very early how flat the world was becoming and how flat it would become in the future, and so had bought essentially hundreds of domains globally very early on in built-in days, and my co-founder, adam, always laughs about it because he's had to strip me away from a bunch of them over time. But what's funny is like it's coming full circle, back to location-based hiring, onsite hiring, locals coming back, and so it's really fascinating to see how we've gone from local to remote globally now back to local, national and global, both onsite, hybrid and remote and so yeah. So I would say those were probably like the three, you know, really critical pieces of the journey.

Speaker 4:

Wow, quite the backstory. Thanks for joining us, maria. You know there's a lot of things that I think we want to talk about today, but maybe we could start with something you said a few minutes ago. That feels a little bit provocative, but maybe you could just unpack it for us. You said, when you first started built in and correct me if I'm misunderstanding here but recruitment was not marketing. And during the time since where was that 2011,? You've seen a major shift to, I assume, a time now where maybe recruitment is more like marketing. Could you just tell us what you? Well, first of all, did I get that right? And secondly, in what?

Speaker 3:

ways.

Speaker 3:

Is recruitment like marketing and not like marketing in the current moment? Yeah for sure. No, you absolutely got that right. So the way I like to explain it is like recruitment 1.0, right Was the job board era. I mean, if you go past where it went off newspapers, like, if you really want to go back, you know it used to be the newspaper ad. Then it became online job boards and it was very simple, like you posted a job ad and someone would find it and apply to your job directly and it would come through your African tracking system. Then it became, then LinkedIn introduced the world to sourcing, like oh wow, like you don't have to just sit and wait for candidates to apply, you actually can go outbound and you know, ping people and send them in mails, et cetera.

Speaker 3:

And then we walked into the era of recruitment as marketing. And what does that mean? Effectively, it means the way you and I book our hotel reservations, look for hotels and book hotels and or restaurants is the same way candidates look for jobs. And what that means and why that happened is, if you think about it, it was like. What that means and why that happened right is, if you think about it, it was like the whole proliferation of social media, right, like influencer marketing, the rise of Instagram and Snap and now TikTok, right. And when you think about it, like I always use the analogy of like how I booked my trip to Italy. It's, you know, when we went to Italy last year, that was informed by like a couple of years probably at least, of me seeing people in my Instagram feed, hearing my friends' journeys, seeing where they were going on trips, like screenshotting images. You know that I kept in a folder and then getting research across the internet where I'm like, ooh, cool places to stay in Italy, and starting my search with Google. Well, guess what? Candidates 55% of candidates start their search on Google still to this day when they're looking for things and that's when they're active. Just like, I started that when I was active.

Speaker 3:

But, like all those brand moments, like the two years prior to me going on, that trip super influenced my short list of where I wanted to go and like which hotels I wanted to stay at, which restaurants I wanted to eat at right, and then, ultimately, for my husband and I, when we book a trip, we book it using American Express, right, and that's because it gives us insurance and it's our credit card. My co-founder uses bookingscom right and he likes it for the UI and they save his information and he has his reasons. Our CTO uses a totally different platform to book his hotels, and so I always use this story to say this is what candidates are doing today. They are seeing things about your company you know on third-party platforms. They're researching you on third-party platforms. They're hearing their friends' experiences and who they're interviewing with and what it was like and what it was like to work at said company. They're seeing articles they're reading and then, when they're active like a true passive candidate that's hard to find when they're active, they're active for like 10 days.

Speaker 3:

At that point, their decision has narrowed down to a specific set of companies they want to target right and then ultimately, where they apply well in this market. Research will tell us, like in our data that we've just released, referrals is coming in one behind job board platforms. However, why is that? It's because the market is more flooded than normal and candidates are not all getting responses to their applications, and so they're leaning in on their network. So they may go to LinkedIn see who's connected. They may send a note to all their friends come in through a referral. That way they may apply directly through your careers website.

Speaker 3:

Because now the job seekers are being told apply through the career site, you'll have a higher likelihood of being seen. Is that necessarily true? No, but so ultimately, where candidates apply isn't necessarily what informed their decision at all, right. And so we now are in a world where recruitment is marketing, where we have less visibility into why candidates discovered us, how they discovered us, what informed their opinion right. And so there is this multi-touch sort of attribution needed to really understand the story of like how a company truly finds value in their recruitment channels and their recruitment partners. And unfortunately, just the recruitment systems haven't caught up to that. But that is recruitment today. Recruitment is marketing, and it just wasn't like that 15 years ago. So that in and of itself is causing a whole host of challenges that we can get into.

Speaker 3:

But generally speaking, the more recruiters can think like marketers, bring marketers onto their talent acquisition teams, the farther they're getting.

Speaker 3:

And so now we're seeing some customers at one end of the spectrum who their entire recruitment strategy is employer branding. First, they spend all their money branding, they've cut any kind of sourcing team, they pipe in candidates into their CRM and they're nurturing their CRM, running campaigns in their CRM. They're sourcing inside their CRM, not cold sourcing, because now these are hand raisers, these are people who have some familiarity with their brand, and so we have that at one end with customers all the way down to customers who still believe ATS source of higher data is accurate, which it's not. It's wildly inaccurate Because it's essentially saying where they apply. That doesn't tell you what influenced them along their journey. And so the more we get more and more customers and more and more TA teams to embrace this recruitment as marketing, the better. But, as you know, it's going to be a long road in education because the industry, you know, we're not marketers by trade in TA, right, and so it is a fascinating challenge and one that we feel very passionately about at Built-In.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I feel like this is a walk down memory lane. So you know, 15 years ago which you know, time flies. First of all, talking about the early days of Built-In that you know, I was working on SeedSync, but I was still over at CareerBuilder back in the day, spending my decade there cutting my teeth in the job board space and everything you just walk through, maria, is spot on and quite the journey. What's interesting is we just did our trend study and we'll get into built-ins in a bit and there are some ironic pieces in there. And I think what you just mentioned kind of reinforces some of the challenges that TA folks are seeing. And that's like, hey, what's the hardest thing for us to measure? Return on employer brand messaging or employer brand investments? But if, hey, if you had 25% more budget, where would you put it? Employer brand.

Speaker 2:

And so I think what you're saying, maria, is, is reinforced by some of this data. And that's boy, the smartest recruiting teams recognize that you know what we really should be investing more in our brand. But they also are having that same challenge that you just mentioned. And that's boy, we know this is where money should go, but, boy, we just don't know how to measure it. And then the other challenge is hey, we don't know how to get budget from our executive team either to invest in. We'll call it marketing right and make it easy.

Speaker 2:

So I'm curious, where are you seeing brands, recruitment marketers, sort of turn the page? You know in that conversation and you know, is this just a matter of hey, education of executives and you know, and talent leaders that you know what we're just going to have to understand and recognize that ATS data isn't accurate. You know people are coming in through other channels and you know, accept that it's not going to be a perfect measurement. Or what are those conversations, like you know, with the TA leaders and folks that you know you're engaging with?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, oh, I love this topic so much. So how do we talk about ROI? When I speak about this to room full of heads of TA, especially throughout the last three years, as so many tech companies went through downturns, and they're like help me tell the story. My number one piece of advice is stop, when someone tells you what is your ROI on your employer brand spend, stop saying and looking at your ATS as your source of hire. So when people say, oh, what was the investment in this tool? Everyone's going, tool by tool, to see who they're going to cut, who they're going to keep. The worst thing TA teams can do is cite their ATS as their source of truth for data, because that would be the equivalent of my head of marketing coming to me as the CRO of built-in and saying, hey, we're getting all of our inbound leads, for the sales team is coming directly to our B2B website. Well, I would say well then, great, so you don't need any budget because everyone's just miraculously coming to our B2B site. And they would say you're kidding, right? So why are talent acquisition teams citing their ATS source of higher data? It will always, right now, say your career site and LinkedIn are one in two effectively in some way, shape or form, whether it's the volume from LinkedIn or, if you're still outbound sourcing, et cetera. So that's not the story, right? That's not the story.

Speaker 3:

I was on the phone with a head of global TA for a 20,000 person company last week and he said, for all intents and purposes, we look at ATS, source of higher data is about 20% accurate. And now this is a company who has the means to fully embrace the CRM pixel tracking, multi-touch attribution. So they see the whole journey and they get it and they understand it. Our goal is to get everyone thinking like this, because if we keep citing ATS, source of higher data, ta teams will never get the dollars they need to invest in the tools and infrastructure they need to measure ROI, and that's the second part of this conversation that's super critical. If we have the right conversations, educate the exec teams on recruitment is now marketing. So the same way we allocate budget to marketing is how you should think about us in recruitment. We then will get the budget to invest in CRMs. We will get the budgets to invest in things like pixel tracking right, because that really our buyers who can enable a pixel on our platform, for instance, see the highest attribution because now they can follow a candidate who discovers them on built-in or uses built-in and leverages them, but then they can see if they ultimately ended up applying through their career site. They know that we helped influence that decision and that's critical to this attribution piece, just like any other vendor you invest in, but so?

Speaker 3:

But the challenge is is the pixels and the CRMs.

Speaker 3:

They're really expensive investments, and so this is why we're seeing a lot of our largest enterprise clients doing great and have moved in this direction, but the smaller and mid-sized customers are just stuck, because they're stuck with one investment, which is their ATS, and ATSs do not do multi-touch attribution, and so we are, at the enterprise level, seeing companies jump around their ATSs and start going directly to CRMs, which I'm finding really interesting and wouldn't be shocked if that is our future.

Speaker 3:

We're seeing people separate out their CRMs from their HRIS, even because their HRIS is too complicated to work within. But I do think this how do we talk about ROI? How do we measure it? And then those two will lead to investments and tools to support measurement on the back end. So really passionate again, and really try to help our buyers at least and educate them on like, what can you do? And even if you have access to Google analytics, like, work with your marketing team. If your marketing team uses pixels, like, ask them to help you, right. And so we're really trying to help TA teams think and act like marketers so they can get the budgets and the funding they deserve.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think this is great and, like you know, you mentioned that I'll work backwards. Hey, work with your marketing team. You have Google Analytics. You know, speaking from experience, I think you know we're continually shocked how far of a disconnect there often is between, you know, marketing teams and recruiting and TA teams, just in general and what's possible. But I do love this idea of hey, we've been saying for a while we do a lot of ATS selection projects.

Speaker 2:

The headline is no one loves their ATS, whether you buy a new one or have an existing one, and I think part of the reason people don't love their ATS is because that lack of flexibility. It can't do some of the things that you'd like to do. If you're thinking like a consumer marketing team, and so we've always said for a lot of solutions, you look towards consumer marketing to see what they're doing first. And the other thing is arguably consumer marketing tools cost a lot less than recruitment marketing. You know systems and tools anyway, and so I think of when we're turning on some you know employer brand, you know testimonial videos and you know you go to an employer brand, you know video site or platform and it's hey, we're going to charge you 60 grand a year and you know you can put out a video every month and you know, go to a consumer video tool and it's hey, we're going to charge you 60 grand a year.

Speaker 2:

And you can put out a video every month and go to a consumer video tool and it's hey, 1500 bucks for the year, as many videos as you want to create, and it's like there's no difference outside of one market towards recruiting. And I do think that people see it's kind of like I'm getting married in three weeks. You want to get someone to come take photos of you for a weekend, it's a, it's a hundred bucks. So you want to go get someone to take those same photos at a wedding, it's a thousand. And I think that you know many, many times you know, just standing recruiting in front of, on the front end of it, you know people charge 10, x and that's just. You know the unfortunate nature of how recruiting maybe works.

Speaker 3:

That's such an interesting, it's such a valid point. I don't think in all the times I've been talking about this, no one has really highlighted that it's so true. It's so true. It's like sell something to parents or dog owners. You know, I would like to think the more necessary it becomes. I'd like to think costs will come down. But who knows, who knows?

Speaker 4:

Well, maria, I love the analogies to consumer marketing because that's what my back owners, folks who listen to the show for a while know that, and I've always I mean honestly we've been thinking about this question of how to measure ROI of quote unquote employer brand investments probably as long as change date's been around, and it's a tough problem, and part of it, I think, is this isn't even the right question to be asking. If you went to a consumer brand, a reputable brand, and you would go, I can't imagine asking, in a consumer brand setting, is it a good idea to invest in our brand? And expecting some immediate payoff? And yet it's so obvious when you look at TV and the amount of money that major brands that are already well established spend on advertising. Clearly this has value, but I guess do you think so, point taken?

Speaker 4:

On the one hand, there's source attribution issues. It is a journey. There's a lot of channels that have influence on a purchase, not just the one that just happens to be the final one before the application gets submitted. But more generally, how do you think about ROI as it relates to employer brand Things that we're not even necessarily looking at source attribution? There's just bigger investments. Is it a fair question to even ask you know what's the ROI of this in a dollar and cents kind of way, or should it just be understood as of course? You should do this because you know the employer brand is sort of the container for all recruitment marketing and of course you need to invest in that. That was a lot. I don't know if any of that made sense or resonated, but I was curious how you think about ROI with relation to employer brand.

Speaker 3:

No, a hundred percent. You know, I was meeting with a customer this was a couple of years back and this customer was one of the more forward thinking in embracing this whole recruitment as marketing concept. And when I said to him, how do you get investment for employer brand, he said well, easy. I basically tell my CFO, recruitment is three pronged it's referrals, it's sourcing and it's recruitment marketing employer brand. And he goes the first two I can tell you specifically their ROI I'm going to get based on our investment. The last one, employer brand, I'm not going to, and it is what it is. You're just going to have to trust me that I need to spend a certain amount on brand to get the job done and it is what it is. And so I would say that is very similar to how CMOs talk to their CFOs. Right, they're always getting a certain level of investment for specific demand gen activities where they could point a direct line to Like we're going to do an event or we're going to do something else, where they have full tracking and visibility. And then they have brand spend, and CFOs know that they're not always going to be able to track specific ROI against brand spend.

Speaker 3:

It's just a known thing in the marketing world, right. That has not translated yet to recruitment. And what I would tell you is part of this right is you have the majority. Almost nearly every global head of TA doesn't come from marketing. It's very rare and, if not, existent at best. And so until we get to the point where all heads of global TA look at their orgs and operate their orgs like chief marketing officers do, we're not going to get there. So this question of cost per hire, cost per applicant, cost for employer brandsmen, this is not going to stop.

Speaker 3:

Now we do have ways to measure it. They just aren't wildly adopted, right, and they're not foolproof, but they can at least give you directional attribution, and that's what I always say is pixel tracking, like when we see we have a couple of customers who go we could see their ATS source of higher data for an investment like built-in. We then do something called higher comparison reports where again flawed at best, but we can see if people did update their LinkedIn profile and they hired them. We can bump it up against our own internal data. It is not a light effort and it is not full, because a lot of technical candidates don't update their LinkedIn profiles and so we can give you some attribution. That way, our customers who have enabled pixel tracking in concert with a CRM tend to get the highest attribution because they can follow people around over a period of time. It doesn't matter where they ultimately apply from or how they ultimately get them.

Speaker 3:

But again, this is a multi-year journey.

Speaker 3:

At times, right, people aren't always active today when you're marketing to them, but could come in a year from now, and so, again, there is a long way to get sort of what I call full-blown attribution.

Speaker 3:

But now, when you're talking about companies who are doing employer brand investments on billboards or commercials or things of that nature, no, like it's going to be straight up like consumer brand marketing. Right, you're not going to be able to see direct attribution and grab direct ROI, but it is just part of the game now and you have no choice. And what we're seeing is it's going to be even harder and more important, because now companies are hiring globally and in an increasing volume, and the global markets are becoming more competitive. Now, whereas people used to focus on the US for employer branding, now the need to brand in international markets is becoming even more important because of the fact that no international market is the best kept secret anymore and a lot of Western brands are going into small international markets competing for the same talent, so the problem is only getting worse, which is great. It's a huge opportunity. I think we're a ways away from re-educating CFOs and heads of TA on the concept.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, I want to, you know, kind of click into, you know this idea of people investing more in their employer brand, maria, because in your trends report, I think one of the takeaways and keep me honest, if we got this wrong is more than half of your respondents are now saying they plan to either start or increase their employer brand investments in the next year.

Speaker 2:

It sounds like the winds might be changing a little bit. You know what's your sense of, maybe, why employers are deciding that. You know what it's time right, like, is this just a overall hey, the market's getting a little bit more educated. Is it a, hey? Is it a competition, you know piece where people are just a little bit more fearful? Or, you know, is this something that we're not thinking about? Like, hey, like a lot more entry level AI? You know tech roles, you know with. You know with the increase in AI, you know skills requirements, like what, you know, what do you think is driving, maybe the moment of now where people are saying you know what it's time for us to start. You know ponying up and you know investing in our actual brand?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think there's a couple of components. One is the shortage of highly skilled tech talent, right, so that's just increasing right now. And while sort of general volume of software engineering roles is going down, there are all these critical roles of the future popping up that people haven't recruited for or are going to need to recruit for, and the roles like security with cyber, sre roles, et cetera, are in such high demand right now that they are still really hard to find. So that's one is critical. Highly skilled tech roles are still super hard to find, and especially in this market where more and more companies are going to three to five days on site, back to office mandates are coming through and there's global hiring needs.

Speaker 3:

All of that feeds into kind of the first reason. I would say the second reason. What's really interesting it doesn't get as much attention, but we're seeing it a lot right now is just the workforce we're in today is exhausted. People are unhappy. The Wall Street Journal article earlier this year cited that the number of Americans wanting to switch their jobs has hit a 10-year high and the reason is especially in tech.

Speaker 3:

We've been through a rough three years since 2022. And starting this year, I think people thought it would be a little bit better. It's now volatile again in the macro, and so people are tired and people are unhappy, and so we are seeing more often than not I would say in the last three to four months I've heard more frequently than I've heard in 15 years how many employer brand leaders are starting to think about employer branding for internal retention reasons as well, and so, while it used to be really thinking of brand for acquiring net new candidates, it's now almost like hey, we don't really have the highest volume of roles anymore. It's not only for net new, but we really want to focus on retaining the team we have and making sure our team feels good internally. And so we are seeing so I think both are driving this increased investment or same investment as last year movement. So, anyways, that is my theory on and what I get from my six to eight customer calls a week, frankly, is where the investments are coming from.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, well, I'd love to talk a little bit about referrals. I know you brought it up earlier and we've so far been focused on these questions from the advertiser, the employer, the people spending the money. But I think another lens obviously is the candidate, and candidate experience is horrible. Of course, I think that's been true for a long time. Maybe there's some outliers out there, but if you think about this from the lens of the candidate and, like you said, these are often multi-year journeys you know it's not like you just sat down and said, hey, I'm going to go buy a job on LinkedIn and click something and you know it's not. It's not a really a straight line kind of thing.

Speaker 4:

And most experiences that people have with applying for jobs is you maybe you Googled a job and then you clicked an apply link and you got redirected 17 times and then you ended up on somebody's career page and you clicked apply.

Speaker 4:

And if you were to tell the candidate that the last place they ended up after those 17 directs had the biggest influence on why they applied for that job, I mean they would laugh at you, right? It's kind of absurd at face value, I think, just thinking of it through the lens of the candidate experience which brings us to referrals. Referrals have been used for a long time and the value of it through the lens of the candidate experience which brings us to referrals. You know, referrals have been used for a long time for, and the value of it for employees or employers is pretty obvious. But you're seeing also that referrals seem to work a lot better for tech talent in particular. I think I could guess why, but I'd love to hear it from you. You know, what do you think is behind the popularity of referrals from the candidates point of view?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and to clarify, I don't think we're seeing it work better. I think we're just seeing referrals jump from number four last year in terms of how are people recruiting tech talent to number one, and I think it's a combination. It's one to your point earlier candidates are not thrilled with a candidate experience today, and so they don't want to apply to jobs that they're not getting any responses to, and so they're becoming disenchanted with the whole job seeking process, and so it feels easier and faster to come in through referrals. So that's one. Two, I've also seen it from the customer side of things.

Speaker 3:

They've had to cut a lot of their investments of how they attract talent, and now they're trying to get their employees to refer right, and so I think it's happening both directions, and what I always like to say is but it's not necessarily getting them to where they need to be either.

Speaker 3:

They still need more talent and they're still not satisfied with their time to fill, even with referrals jumping to number one right. So it's not the end game, but we do need to make the job seeking process better for candidates. That's something we internally at Built-In are working really hard on, to really make the job seeking process so much better than what it is today, because candidates deserve that, and I think we need to eliminate some of the barriers that are causing candidates to feel like they either have to just jump hoops to apply to not get any responses, to connecting them directly with hiring teams and actually getting a response to their application right. So it'll be interesting to see what happens as AI continues to escalate. Right Customers are also seeing fake profiles coming through from certain platforms. We're really keeping a close watch on how will the candidate journey change and how quickly will talent platforms adjust, adapt and help hiring teams do their jobs better?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, well, you know, I think referrals are interesting.

Speaker 4:

You know if you think of I forget what guest has this statement, so I don't want to misattribute it, but one of our previous guests in the employer brand space says that you know, brands are like a relationship that a company has with an audience you know and to treat.

Speaker 4:

And so in the case of employer brand, the disappointment with these candidate experiences and I think it's related to this question of trying to do a cause and effect linear connection between an investment and a return on that investment is that it's very transactional, which is not really much of a relationship. And I think referrals are probably one of the few places, at least historically in recruiting, where it does actually begin with a relationship. In this case it's somebody you know quite well and I think good employer branding builds upon this idea that what we're trying to do is cultivate a relationship, and this is a multi-year process. There's a lot of touch points and it's not that complicated I mean, it's hard to get there, given where we've come from, I think but we're just talking about treating people like people and referrals is one area where it's an easy way to start a relationship, at least I think.

Speaker 3:

Yeah for sure. But what I always say is, then we revert back to the age-old problem that customers used to complain about, which is, oh, we built ourselves through referrals and now we have no diversity of thought, no diversity of skills. You know, we have, you know, dominance from three universities and two fraternities, and you know and need to diversify. And so there's a lot of cons to the referral piece, right, and so I. But I think what we really need to solve for is treating candidates the way they should be treated. These people are hand raisers. They deserve a response, minimum, bare minimum. They deserve a response to their application.

Speaker 3:

I tell all my customers this they deserve a response because, guess what, whether you think they're qualified or not today, they may be qualified for another role you may have in the future. And they've raised their hand, they're interested. So this goes to the whole. Recruitment is marketing. Like you know, not every lead that comes inbound to our marketing team at Built In is qualified, but you can. I'm assured that we will nurture you and we will talk to you if and when you do become qualified. Right, and so same thing with candidates, and and we actually heard, anecdotally, a candidate tell us that they did not take or no. A customer told us this. Someone declined their offer because their good friend had a terrible experience interviewing at the same company offer because their good friend had a terrible experience interviewing at the same company.

Speaker 3:

And so candidates talk in this market, and so everyone has to assume that the way they're treating candidates is the core to their employer brand first and foremost. And so the one thing that's coming up a lot right now, a trending topic and I heard it this week when I was traveling in Boston with customers is this theory of we also need recruiter enablement. So the employer brand teams really need to be spending time with recruiters, enabling them on the talk tracks how to sell like marketers right, because they're the ones selling the brand. And so it's a really cool concept of how do you take all this employer brand work and materials and then enable your recruiters, just like marketers enable sales teams right. Same thing Again. I know the recruitment marketing thing is getting old, but it's just. The analogies are never ending. It's how do we ensure that employer brand starts with the candidate journey and goes all the way through the life cycle of someone staying with your company, through retention and you know, for years. And so lots to do, lots to do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, well, I think that we can go on about recruitment marketing as a whole. I think you really helped shine a light on. You know some different ways to think about recruitment marketing. You know marketing for some of our organizations and it's nice to hear someone that thinks about things in a similar light. Right, and like, hey, attribution's hard. Like hey, ats data isn't perfect. And hey, the best and smartest companies are investing in their brand because they recognize they have to. So I think, with all the uncertainty going around, maria, it's nice to have a little bit more of an exciting take on the future of recruitment as a whole. I do recognize we didn't even get to talking about the built-in trends report, so I will say we will certainly link everything in the show notes too, because built-in is more than just recruitment marketing as a whole. So I'm going to leave with the easiest question probably of all, maria, and that's where can people find out more about you find details about Built-in online.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely. So obviously you can absolutely connect with me on LinkedIn. You can always send me an email. If I can be helpful to you, it's mariabuiltincom. And. Or if you're interested in what Built-in does and how to leverage Built-in for recruitment, you can visit employerbuiltincom. And thanks for having me Really enjoyed the conversation and love talking to like-minded folks All right.

Speaker 2:

Thanks for tuning in. As always, head on over to changestateio or shoot us a note on all the social media. We'd love to hear from you and we'll check you guys next week.