Match-Click: A revolutionary approach to online recruitment advertising.

A typical online job listing:
About as interesting as watching paint dry.

Seems that the HR profession may be firmly stuck in 1990, at least from a recruiting standpoint. Online job listings rely on key word searches, long and boring job descriptions, use of cheesy jargon and bullet pointed candidate background requirements. There is a glaring lack of relevant dynamic content or streamed videos for today’s tech savvy job seekers.

No wonder that response / click-through rates to text only help wanted posts on job boards hover at 5%. A study from The Ladders showed that the average job seeker spends about one minute mulling over an online job posting. That translates to consuming about 250 words of content. All this spells poor engagement between hiring companies and potential candidates. 

Compare to this user engagement at Tinder  – the match making smart phone app that connects with the user’s Facebook profile to provide pictures and ages for other users to view. Users are presented with dating profile after profile, and they swipe left if they're not interested and right if they are. If both parties are interested, they can connect on Tinder’s chat function.

The average Tinder user spends an astonishing 77 minutes a day on the app, a spokesperson for the company recently told The Huffington Post. That's a lot of time, especially considering the app moves fast. That’s the power of engaging content.

For a more engaging approach to online recruiting enter Match-Click, the result of Maury Hanigan's frustration with staid and boring online job boards and corporate recruitment sites.

Maury has a 20-year history of working as a consultant to Fortune 500 firms on HR strategies, along with being tech savvy from her Duke computer science education. She saw the opportunity to use technology to deliver useful, relevant and highly engaging job information to candidates in a new smartphone app.

A blinding glimpse of the obvious for Maury was that people don’t go to work for a company per se -- they go to work for and with other people, within a defined corporate culture. Text-based job descriptions offer absolutely no clue for candidates to that side of the job under consideration.

Candidate’s prospective manager & co-workers and Top 3 reasons to apply are front-and-center.

Match-Click uses 20 second blocks of streamed content to introduce job seekers to their prospective hiring manager and co-workers. The job listing page also offers “Top 3 Reasons to Apply” and a one-click “apply now” navigational button.

Maury says this approach delivers a staggering 40% response rate, with user curiosity driving this higher engagement number. All it takes is about a minute of time from the prospective candidate to get great insights about a listed job.

Match-Click discourages the use of defined scripts. "Canned conversation lacks authenticity and therefore is much less engaging" says Maury. "The Match-Click service offers real people talking about real jobs in a credible way. It leverages a company or an employer's most compelling asset - it's people." That's what is missing from the traditional text-only job listing.

But it is Match-Click's simple presentation of the job online that is the big draw – allowing prospective candidates to begin to answer the big question fast: “Is this the right job for me?”

Conventional HR wisdom asks: Is the candidate willing and able to do the job with a high degree of excellence? Most candidates ask themselves: “Will I fit in?” and “What will the people be like that I would be working with?” Match Click offers specific context for them to judge the opportunity. It hooks prospects with the specifics of the job that makes sense for them.

Maury says the "secret sauce" for Match-Click is that it's scalable for larger enterprises, those hiring upwards of 5,000+ people each year. This comes in the form of a simple and highly effective back-end CMS / Content Management System.

Match-Click CMS dashboard for Employers.

Match-Click's current clients include a broad range of business sectors from Ernst & Young to Citrix and L'Oreal Paris to Cisco and these actual job listings are the best way to see this business model in action. 

Match-Click is currently in the process of seeking $ 2.0 million in seed funding. As one NYC based venture capital executive recently observed: “There is too much venture money chasing too few good ideas.” Who wants to see another 20 something with a smart phone app lacking a MVP?" (minimum viable product)

Match-Click is one of those really good business ideas that will leverage mobile technology to help redefine a multi-billion dollar industry, with more engaged and satisfied users on both sides of the transaction. 

Will ad agencies ever embrace content marketing?

The golden age of advertising. Remembrance of things past.

At Advertising Week in NYC last month, a panel of senior executives from some well-known agencies discussed the current state of affairs for the agency business. Their “big news” was the evolution of the traditional copywriter – art director team approach to ad development –  to a “tripod” approach that now includes a digital expert.

Similar statements from other traditional creative agency executives made it seem like they thought they were still in the “golden age” of advertising. This was back when a top agency would get paid a large sum of money to come up with a “killer” creative concept, executed by high production value ad campaigns in TV, print and then digital venues, supported by extensive media buys. 

The result?  Advertising campaigns created many memorable and iconic brands, and made clients and ad agencies rich in the process.

This "mad men" business model worked well when there were only three big TV networks, a few dozen prominent magazine and newspaper brands, with captive audiences willing to endure advertising in order to get to the entertainment and news content.

However, once disruptive technology in the form of  computers, the internet, social media, blogs and user-created content erupted, traditional audiences became their own programming directors and news editors, consuming exactly the content they wanted, where and when they wanted it, with the advent of Netflix, Hulu, DVRs and digital readers there was no need to tolerate intrusive advertising interruptions. 

Master of her own content realm.

Consequently, most of us today are looking for relevant content that offers a "fair value" exchange for our time and attention. In fact, we may go so far as engaging in conversation with content creators, and share “remarkable” content (as coined by Seth Godin) – that is, content worth remarking about, or at least sharing.

Savvy marketers now use content marketing to initiate a conversation, giving people a reason to come back for more relevant content. Simply blasting messages at a loud volume is no longer an effective nor motivational marketing tool, and the decreased value placed on ad creation reflects this. 

$ 90K per second just for production.

Brad Jakeman, President of The Global Beverages Group at Pepsico,  says his firm used to give agencies between four and six months to produce a single piece of marketing content (usually a :30 or :60 second TV ad) and would pay between $ 700,000 and $ 2million for each of them. “Now we need an agency that can produce content in days, with each piece costing $ 10-15,000."

Remember the 2002 Pepsi Superbowl extravaganza

 "For those who think young"  that featured Britney Spears (in her prime) and cost a whopping $ 8.1million to produce.

No wonder the agency business is suffering so badly, with shrinking margins and an inability to attract, retain or even afford the talent needed to effectively compete with the likes of Google and Facebook.

Yet, will content marketing be the saving formula for agencies?

Unfortunately it is unlikely because:

Most agencies still rely on creating the “big idea,” and have little interest in a conversation with consumers.

Agency execs respond to ROI question.

Creative agencies by and large are scared to death of accountability. Agencies like to sell “The Magic of Hollywood” and duck for cover when asked about marketing effectiveness, return on investment and use of big data mining. 

Content marketing is all about using engagement metrics (views / shares / comments / downloads / etc.) to help guide future content development, and optimize marketing spend.

Silos reign supreme: Many creative agencies disparage “direct marketing” and “digital” as a second-class tools, even sister agencies within the same holding companies like WPP and Omnicom rarely work across disciplines.

Agencies are also facing fierce competition from content marketing start-ups like Contently and NewsCred to traditional publishing companies like NY Times, Meredith and The Economist Group.

Was that a billable expense?

So it looks like the martini glass is still half full for most agency executives, though it is resting precariously on the edge of the table.

Pity, as advertising used to be such a fun, lucrative business. Then again, so was the trans-Atlantic cruise ship business before passenger airplanes came on the scene in the late 1950s.