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Improving the Quality of Candidate Traffic

By Alex Murphy, CEO JobSync

What happens in Vegas, gets talked about publicly in traffic quality working group meetings!!

On day 2 of TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum in Las Vegas last month, a group of job board operators and service providers got together to discuss the restart of the TAtech Traffic Quality Working Group.

It was a lively conversation that focused on how best to reinforce and improve the results generated by online recruitment advertising. Here are some of the key highlights from our discussion:

• The original Traffic Quality Group started working together 5 years ago to address the following:
• The absence of standards for measuring the effectiveness of job advertising media spend across publishers and analytics suites – whether purchased under a duration, subscription or pay-for-performance (CPM, CPC, CPA) payment model.
• The need for a trusted information exchange mechanism, which led to the development of the TAtech Traffic Quality Declaration, a voluntary publisher self-evaluation and reporting template, designed to bring accuracy and transparency to traffic measurement for online recruitment advertising customers.

So, what’s next?

While the Traffic Quality Declaration has helped to create more transparency and accuracy in the communications between advertisers and online publishers (e.g., job boards, social media sites, job search engines and aggregators), there are still material discrepancies in the market.

In part, these discrepancies are driven by the fact that the word “quality” itself is difficult to nail down.  Its definition isn’t universal, but instead determined by the beholder. To some, quality is simply a billing issue – advertisers are actually getting what they paid for. Others, however, see quality traffic through the lens of an employer (e.g., high caliber candidates), or a job seeker (e.g., the absence of redundant job postings), or outside agents such as regulatory agencies (e.g., diverse candidates). Determining the next direction for the Traffic Quality Working Group, therefore, will depend, at least in part, on which of these other perspectives we adopt.

We also dug into some key areas such as the impact that too many bad candidate experiences is having on the entire recruitment advertising ecosystem, These experiences undermine candidate trust and participation in the market and damage employer brands and recruiting yield.  They are caused by such factors as much too long application forms, the presence of criminal fraud in job advertising, and the appearance of fake ads that capitalize on job seeker naivete … no, Virginia, there are no $50 per hour Walmart greeter jobs!!

Starting next month on the 14th of October, we are going to reconstitute the Traffic Working Group and dive deeper into these and other topics and start the process of determining what we should collectively as both an industry and as a trade association stand up for and, if necessary, stand up to. We hope this initiative is something you will want to lean into and help shape. Please reach out to Peter Weddle (peterweddle@TAtech.org), Boris Rozman (boris@CMP.jobs), or Alex Murphy (amurphy@JobSync.io) to learn more!

For additional background on the TAtech Traffic Quality Declaration and to download your free copy, click here. Complete and return the document to TAtech and they’ll post it on the Association’s site so advertisers know your organization is committed to transparent and accurate reporting of recruitment ad performance.