Ongig Takes a People-Centered Approach to Recruitment Advertising
Webster, whose background is in recruiting, believes that a bad job ad makes for a bad candidate experience, which subsequently drives great talent away from your organization. Plenty of other talent professionals agree with his assessment.
Ongig, founded in 2011 by Webster, CEO Rob Kelly, and Lead Developer Kevin Lanik, offers a recruiting platform specifically designed to drive great candidate experience through what the company calls “people-based job descriptions.” Webster sees these media-rich, interactive job advertisements as ways to create and maintain enjoyable candidate experiences at scales much larger than the one-to-one of traditional recruiting. “I spent many years as a recruiter, and candidate experience was always something I cared about,” says Webster. “With the advent of technology, the mobile Web … I saw an opportunity to really translate that [candidate] experience at scale.”
What Does Ongig Do?
Ongig integrates with a company’s existing ATS to create branded career pages, where companies can post well-designed, inviting job advertisements that utilize pictures, videos, interactive comment sections, and social media profiles to make strong first impressions on candidates.
While Ongig may not be the only recruiting platform looking to transform schlubby job ads with engaging content — Jobcast comes to mind as a competitor — the product does distinguish itself, thanks to quite a few unique and interesting features.
To start, Ongig says it’s the first platform to offer interactive chat directly on a job posting, via built-in comment systems. As far as I can tell, this is true, and I think we can all agree that an in-ad chat feature brings obvious benefits. Candidates can engage with company representatives directly, without even leaving the page, which lets them ask questions about the position before they have to commit to applying.
Ongig also boasts impressive tracking and reporting features. Users have access not only to basic information, like the number of clicks their ads have seen, but also more in-depth and actionable data, like how many people are viewing the page and how many of those people are converting. Through Ongig, companies can gain insights into what ads are working well and which platforms drive the most traffic their way. “We’re trying to give the talent leader a good window to be able to make decisions about where they advertise,” explains Webster.
The real attraction, however, lies in Ongig’s capacity for creating and managing media-rich job ads. With Ongig, companies can upload and aggregate all of their recruiting media in one place, either by linking Web accounts, like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube, or by simply adding pictures and videos directly to Ongig. All of this media can be tagged, which lets companies easily sort through and strategically use certain pictures and videos when they’re needed. This feature is especially useful for large-scale global companies looking to localize their recruiting efforts. Webster offers a hypothetical scenario to illustrate just how this might play out:
“If I’m a global company, let’s say I’m opening a call center in Malaysia. I can tag all the photos and video ‘customer care,’ and that ensures that every candidate who is searching for that customer care Malaysia position sees that content.”
In short, Ongig is “packaging your jobs and giving you the ability to put people first when communicating what your company is about,” according to Webster.
But what exactly does it mean to “put people first” when it comes to recruitment advertising ?
People-Based Job Descriptions
We can mostly all agree that job ads, on the whole, are in need of renovation, but this consensus isn’t enough. We need to actually do something to make recruitment advertising better. Ongig is one of few companies to have what you could genuinely call a “philosophy of job ads”: namely, Ongig promotes the notion of a “people-based job description.”
“Candidates want to know a handful of things,” Webster says. “[They want to know] who they work for, who they work with, what kind of problems are they going to be solving, [and] what’s the real mission of the company.” People-based job descriptions are about recognizing what candidates want to know and supplying them with that information, as opposed to traditional job ads, which generally focus on the company’s needs and wants.
Webster points out that job descriptions have the potential to be the most powerful, far-reaching, and engaging marketing materials that a company has. “If I’m a candidate, [a job description] could be the last place that I stop before I click ‘apply,’ or else it could be the first place if I click from places like Google or LinkedIn, so when I’m on your job site, that’s the impression,” Webster explains. The people-based job description is about creating the sort of impressions that encourage job seekers to become job applicants.
But catering to candidates is only a part of the people-based approach. As it turns out, there’s another group of people in which these ads are based: employees. “Really, what it’s about is being able to show your people,” Webster says. “We want to put your people first – that’s what we see candidates caring the most about – and then put the mission closely behind, communicated through your people.”
Essentially, what Webster means is this: people-based job descriptions use pictures and videos to put company employees front and center. These employees can then give job seekers insight into what the company is like — the culture, the work, the mission, etc. Because Ongig’s job ads also utilize social media profiles and comment features, job seekers can actively and directly engage with employees. The whole recruitment advertising process, then, becomes grounded in human interaction. For Webster, that’s a good thing: “I still believe you have to have a human touch at some level to close top candidates.”
Related to this concept of a people-based job description, Ongig also focuses on making better hires by leveraging the “natural social networks” that exist around every job.
“As you look at the concept of a company’s social network, it’s like a goldmine for a company in terms of hiring,” Webster says. This is because of how valuable employee referrals are. According to Jobvite, employee referrals are responsible for 39.9 percent of all hires, and 46 percent of referred candidates stay for three years or more, as opposed to candidates sourced from job boards, a paltry 14 percent of whom stay for the same amount of time.
Webster suggests that we stop looking at the company’s social network as a whole and instead try to focus on the various smaller social networks that the company comprises. Webster notes that someone in an engineering role is going to have a different sphere of influence than a salesperson will have — that is, people in these roles tend to run in different social circles. The engineer’s social circle may offer better candidates for some roles, while the salesperson’s circles may offer better candidates for other roles. “Not that they never cross over,” Webster says, “but it’s an opportunity to really create a social sphere at a more granular level.”
Job category is only one of the ways we can categorize these smaller social networks. Webster also points out that we could organize these social networks according to other criteria, like job location. For example: the sales team in Perth, Australia, is going to have a different social network than the sales team in Boston, Massachusetts.
Ongig looks to help companies leverage these social networks by arming employees with the tools necessary to create better employee referrals. Often, referrals are just a matter of employees sending their friends bland job descriptions and links to the hiring manager’s LinkedIn profile. But with Ongig, employee referrals can be every bit as media-rich and engaging as people-based job ads are.
The Takeaway
Webster says that the most common concern he hears from clients is that an ATS is driving candidate experience. But while ATSs save time and seem, on the surface, to be more efficient than more personalized recruitment efforts, they often result in the sort of anonymous and frustrating candidate experiences that drive top talent away.
The challenge, then is, to provide a more dynamic candidate experience, one that attracts the best talent to your company. With people-based job descriptions and comprehensive media-managing capabilities, Ongig may be one way to create that candidate experience.
“If I could pick one big problem, we’re helping to solve that,” says Webster.