As we ease into the new year, I am optimistic about the future of our agency and the continued evolution of our industry as a whole.

In 2024, the dominant theme was AI and of course every vendor was suddenly an AI expert, and your tech stack had to be supercharged by AI, or you would be left behind.

By the end of 2024, AI fatigue had finally set in, and luckily human intelligence overtook the artificial hype, and we all sobered up. Don’t get me wrong. I’m certain AI will steal our jobs, take over the world, and if left unchecked, destroy us all; just not today.

So, it’s mid-January, what’s the plan besides worrying about your New Year’s Resolutions (you can do it!)? How about we all take a deep breath, hold it till the count of ten and then exhale all the over-hyped 2024 tech nonsense you inhaled last year and let’s get back to the basics of recruiting?

That’s right, don’t underestimate the power of revisiting the obvious before jumping onto the next trending bandwagon.

How you ask? Simply do the following.

• Diversify your recruitment advertising
• Use a programmatic media strategy
• Don’t forget the importance of job SEO
• Streamline your applicant process
• Incentivize recruiters to succeed
• Leverage quality analytics to make decisions (not from your ATS or from recruiter hunches)
• Invest in your Employer Brand and prove it with content
• Build relationships with candidates
• Invest in your staffing team and not an RPO
• Use AI to give you a meaningful advantage but ignore the smoke and mirrors

And finally, partner with a reputable recruitment advertising agency to help you with all of these tasks and more in 2025. Contact us today to learn how Buyer Advertising has been exceeding industry leaders’ expectations with unmatched expertise, strategy, and technology solutions for close to sixty years.

Here’s to a prosperous new year of recruiting!

Joel Glick
Managing Partner
Buyer Advertising

Buyer provides custom talent solutions that deliver the right candidates to you. We cultivate unique Employer Brands, and our industry-leading search engine optimized hiring platform, Buyer Talent Engine, empowers recruiters with a smarter way to attract, engage, analyze, and track candidates through the entire hiring process – backed by a team of industry leaders with a passion for customer service.

It’s Spooky Out There.

Imagine this: You are a recruiter well into the hiring process when suddenly a candidate abruptly stops responding to your emails and texts. It is as if they’ve vanished into thin air, wasting your time and delaying your recruiting efforts.

For many unfortunate employers, this situation is not merely hypothetical, it’s a problem known as candidate ghosting; one of the more frustrating issues facing recruiters today.

Candidate ghosting comes in many forms, ranging from an applicant skipping an interview to the extreme case of a new employee never showing up to work. While this sort of behavior was once largely restricted to unskilled labor, recruiters now report candidate ghosting becoming more prevalent in industries like technology and health care.

How To Avoid Candidate Ghosting.

A recent SHRM article by Roy Maurer outlined strategies to help offset this problem, including reducing the time spent recruiting and simplifying the recruiting process to better maintain candidate interest.

Another more meaningful approach is to promote more transparency and open communication between the hiring organization and the applicant. If a candidate doesn’t have a clear understanding of the job responsibilities, requirements, and, more importantly, your Employer Value Proposition, then the employer runs the risk of the candidate realizing too late in the process that they are not a good fit after investing too much time.

Additionally, if the candidate feels comfortable communicating with a recruiter, then they will be more apt to raise questions, clarify expectations, and be more forthcoming about concerns that could dissuade their decision to ghost a recruiter.

Finally, a hiring organization with a clear and compelling EVP is better equipped to educate candidates about their work environment early in the hiring process ensuring a mutual cultural fit and less chance for ghosting behavior. A strong EVP also highlights the unique benefits and personality of your organization, and when done right, can discourage candidates from shopping your competition.

Who You Gonna Call?

Buyer Advertising, a leader in recruitment and employee communications for close to sixty years, is here to help you bust ghosts with proven strategies to improve your hiring process, better define your Employer Brand, and open up lines of communication between you and your candidates with our Talent Engine Connect CRM. To learn more about our customized recruitment solutions, contact Natasha Cuomo, our VP of Strategic Partnerships, at ncuomo@buyerads.com or visit our website, www.buyerads.com.

About Buyer Advertising

Buyer provides custom talent solutions that deliver the right candidates critical to our client partners’ success. We cultivate unique Employer Brands that set our clients apart from the competition while creating a personal connection with their future employees. Our industry-leading search engine optimized hiring platform, Buyer Talent Engine, empowers recruiters with a smarter way to attract, engage, analyze, and track candidates through the hiring process – backed by a team of industry leaders with a passion for customer service. With a proven history of supporting a diverse mix of organizations for close to sixty years, we are confident we’ll exceed your expectations.

Attracting top talent in today’s competitive landscape requires innovative tools to maximize recruiting efficiency while promoting an organization’s unique Employer Value through relationship marketing. For more than two decades, industry leaders have trusted Buyer Talent Engine as the foundation of their tech stack, empowering organizations to achieve their hiring goals.

Never resting on past success, Buyer Advertising continues to invest in our technology culminating in our most recent version of Buyer Talent Engine, which now leverages Artificial Intelligence and greater flexibility to creatively connect with prospective hires through storytelling and employee experiences.

Talent Engine Optimize

More than 25 million job searches take place on Google each month, making Job Search Engine Optimization a vital strategy to compete for talent while reducing overall cost per hire. For more than 20 years, Buyer Talent Engine has provided clients unmatched job SEO, resulting in increased page one job search visibility while unlocking thousands of untapped candidates from Google and Google-For-Jobs.  In fact, one Buyer client experienced an astounding 80% of hires from Job SEO while spending just 10% of their overall recruitment advertising budget.

Talent Engine Attract

Traditional Pay-Per-Click Advertising if not managed independently from the job boards can waste your recruiting budget by attracting excess applicant flow while simultaneously underexposing vital jobs. Buyer Talent Engine Attract, using AI technology combined with hands-on media analysts, efficiently drives candidates to the openings that need the most exposure based on applicant conversion data and goals. This combination of analytics paired with personal insight allows for unprecedented optimization of your advertising budget resulting in a higher ROI.

Talent Engine Engage

Buyer Talent Engine career pages are custom designed to seamlessly integrate with your corporate web pages and adhere to all brand standards including fonts, typefaces, navigation treatment, page styles and color palate.  However, it also provides a level of creativity unmatched by traditional Applicant Tracking Systems including graphic based job postings, embedded job search filters across all career content pages, integrated video, blog and social media content, featured jobs and Google maps on job postings and dynamic user experiences based on candidate website behavior.  Additionally, Buyer Talent Engine provides custom job search options including zip code, proximity, keyword, category, location, type, facility, brand, and Military Occupation Service (MOS) Code job searches.

Talent Engine Analyze

In today’s ever-changing environment, accurate data is crucial to ensuring the success of your recruitment strategy. That’s why Buyer Talent Engine delivers the most comprehensive suite of data analytics available today featuring detailed auto-capture candidate source metrics for paid and organic media including:

• Applies Started
• Applies Completed
• Qualified Applies
• Offers
• Hires
• Media Cost per Apply and Hire
• Hire Details – Name, Job Title, Date – by Source
• Influencing Media Source Tracking
• And More

All metrics can be sorted by date, location/entity, job category, status and viewed comparatively over time periods.

Talent Engine Connect

Buyer Talent Engine makes it easy to cultivate candidates with our full featured CRM providing automated job notifications and other HR related news via text and email.

An integrated, third-party job board “Quick Apply” feature, a selective career site interest-capture form, “drag and drop” resume feature and bulk list upload function allow for easy candidate acquisition while robust candidate management tools provide ranking, filtering, tagging, dispositioning, internal sharing, and communicating with candidates through text and email. Additionally, AI can now automatically rank candidates against published job requirements and displays a rational for each rank.

Talent Engine Promote

Automatically promote content throughout the entire hiring lifecycle and convert more candidates with Buyer Talent Engine. Our communications platform empowers you to create, schedule and send out relationship building content via text and email, increasing candidate hires over time. You can also define unique audiences based on job categories, locations, tags, and pipeline stages and set triggers to send content based on status updates or date and time. Additionally, you can leverage built in AI to help generate fresh content for drip marketing and blog posts and track candidate outreach including campaign content, sent messages, opens, and click throughs.

Talent Engine Spotlight

Showcasing your employees as part of a robust Employer Brand campaign has proven to make organizations more relatable to job seekers. Now you can collect and share authentic employee experiences through videos with Buyer Talent Engine. Encourage employees to submit self-shot videos as part of a campaign to share their success stories.  These videos are stored in an approval queue and, if selected, are posted to a custom branded video wall. The videos are also made available to publish with embedded links on the career site and in email and text marketing at your discretion. An administrative tool allows access to manage the submitted videos, admin users, the video approval process and employee email and text lists for internal marketing.

Set Up & Integration

Setting up Buyer Talent Engine requires minimal IT resources to launch in less than 60 days. This means your organization can be up and running quickly, without presenting a major technical overhaul or compromising your brand integrity.

Buyer provides custom talent solutions that deliver the right candidates critical to our client partners’ success. We cultivate unique Employer Brands that set our clients apart from the competition, while creating a personal connection with their future employees. Our industry leading search engine optimized hiring platform, Buyer Talent Engine, empowers recruiters with a smarter way to attract, engage, analyze and track candidates through the hiring process – backed by a team of industry leaders with a passion for customer service. With a proven history of supporting a diverse mix of organizations for more than fifty years, we’re confident we’ll exceed your staffing expectations.

To learn more about our customized recruitment solutions, contact Natasha Cuomo, our VP of Strategic Partnerships, at ncuomo@buyerads.com or visit our website, www.buyerads.com.