The program team was tasked with improving their sourcing efforts and increasing candidate engagement. That’s where the TechLab came in, to lend support and build a solution as part of Pontoon’s Emerging Tech Team.
First, we focused on the candidate engagement piece by implementing RoboRecruiter, a text-to-apply chatbot that engages offline and past applicants. Simultaneously, we rolled out Recruitics, a programmatic advertising platform, to improve the precision of our new candidate outreach.
This exemplifies our Talent River approach because we didn’t just “throw more in the top”. Instead, we increased speed, accessibility and precision. We also tapped into offline and past applicants who are often hard to reach through traditional methods and we improved the apply-to-hire conversion rates. We delivered a high-quality Talent River.
So how did we come to choose these technologies to solve this particular challenge?
Engaging with Talent on their Terms
RoboRecruiter enabled us to engage candidates using offline channels such as job fliers inside community-based organizations, yard signs, decals on delivery trucks and past applicants that may not have been selected at the time they had originally applied. Using a short code, candidates could text “apply” to a number we provided and apply using text functionality or join our talent community. Our “Robo Bot” enabled talent to engage with us quickly, when and where they wanted.
Precise Recruiting with AI
Meanwhile, Recruitics gave us a real-time, a.i. enabled platform, to supercharge our job advertising. Again, this wasn’t about “more in the top”. The platform monitors results in real-time and once we hit our applicant goal, the advertising instantly stopped. Meanwhile, postings that were yielding fewer applications got the same real-time support and the advertising was increased. This precision enabled us to increase quality without increasing cost. An additional benefit was increased visibility of each individual posting along with conversion rates so we could investigate whether the posting itself or other factors were influencing conversion rate performance.
Bottomline Results
The results were impressive and illustrate why our Talent River concept works: 19% increase in applicant flow, 21% increase in quality of applications/req (passed minimum qualifications), and a 9% decrease in cost per application. We continue to work closely with our technology partners and program teams to refine and improve our strategy to improve our results even more.
