Category: Focus on Recruitment

Everyone Wants Your Data.

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Who Should You Trust?

Even though my blog post picture is smiling, I am not in a good mood today. One, I have recently returned from vacation, and two, there are changes brewing in our industry that are troubling. As a result, there will be nothing funny in today’s post. No witty puns or clever references to early 90’s movies, just an honest heads up about an aggressive push to change the current practice of recruiting in 2025.

The job boards want your data, and they have been collaborating with the Applicant Tracking Systems behind your back to get it. They say sharing this data will enhance the candidate’s experience and will provide better matched applicants to paying customers, but there are several areas of discussion that should be considered.

Privacy and Consent Issues:
Job seekers may not be explicitly informed that their personal data, including application details and progress (e.g., “interviewed,” “rejected,” or “hired”), is shared with the job board. While many job board’s Terms of Service state that job seekers agree to data processing for job matching, candidates might not anticipate their data being shared back with the job board from an employer’s ATS, potentially without clear, specific consent.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII):
Although some integrations claim to anonymize data by sharing only timestamps, application IDs, and statuses, there’s a distinct risk that aggregated data could still be linked to individuals, especially if combined with other datasets. This poses concerns for the applicant, but more importantly, also for the employer who could fall victim to candidate remarketing by the job boards.

Security Risks:
Job board’s Privacy Policies often indicate that data may be shared with third parties for improving services or matching candidates. Without transparent oversight, there’s a concern that data could be used for purposes beyond the original intent, such as marketing or profiling, which candidates may not have agreed to.

Remarketing Threat:
There is an undeniable threat that job boards armed with candidate status data will remarket to those hires generated by their board and churn your happily employed people. They will know who you hired, into what role, and when you did it. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that job boards will step up their highly tailored messaging to capitalize on the insights gleaned from the shared data.

Employer Pressure and Dependency:
You can expect to be pressured into sharing candidate data to access benefits like improved candidate matching, higher job visibility, and access to simplified application processes, creating dependency on the job board’s ecosystem, reducing employer autonomy while increasing advertising costs.

These concerns highlight the need for further discussion, and I assure you; if you ask the job boards for their recommendation, you will not get the full picture. Contact us today at Buyer Advertising to learn more about our recruitment consulting services to help you navigate this latest push for data that could pull you down a slippery slope.

Joel Glick
President
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.

Indeed Is Updating Its Job Feed Policy

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Feeding The 800lb Gorilla Is About to Change    

I’m told Indeed will be notifying customers shortly that all new single source job feeds will have to originate from what they consider the source of truth, the customer’s Applicant Tracking System. Existing clients utilizing third-party job feeds are safe for the time being. However, this is going to be a big PITA for major job distributors, programmatic media vendors, and solutions like Buyer Talent Engine, which currently feed jobs to Indeed on behalf of their clients.

Why you ask? We function as middleware between the ATS and job boards for many reasons, including programmatic media management, comprehensive source tracking, updating job titles, pay and locations, one-click-apply integrations, and customizing and correcting brand problems that Applicant Tracking Systems are unable to resolve. With this policy update, it is our understanding we will have to wait for post-delivery to manage the job content and hope we can still make the necessary changes.

Indeed has stated that this isn’t going to be an issue because they will allow all advertising partners unrestricted access to clients’ job data via an API, but we have questions and so far have not been told much beyond “look at the supplied API documentation, and perhaps exceptions will be made.”

So why is Indeed doing this? One guess is they are cleaning up problems resulting from a massive amount of redundant and/or messy job feeds. Another guess is they are creating a closed loop system that consists of direct interaction with their customers and Applicant Tracking Systems, limiting exposure to third-party influencers, competition, and analytics not in their favor and eliminating the programmatic advantages from Indeed. Let’s hope I’m wrong about the second guess, as Indeed, being the number one job board on the planet has been good for us and is a valuable solution for our clients.

At Buyer Advertising, we are preparing for this new requirement while we continue to feed the 800lb Gorilla. Let’s just hope we don’t get bit.

Joel Glick
President
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.

Does Your Agency Have Your Back?

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Music To Our Ears.

OK everyone, put on your listening ears like my third-grade teacher Ms. Pat used to say and let’s reflect on how important backup is in life and especially in music. A couple of songs come to mind like, “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, “Brave” by Sara Bareilles and “Don’t Give Up” by Peter Gabriel. Go ahead, fire up Spotify and take a listen, I’ll wait. Now, think about how different these songs would be without their talented backup singers.

So, what does this have to do with recruiting? Well, like in music, a good agency partner brings together a talented account team supported by backup industry experts, strategists, creatives, analysts, developers, researchers and even negotiators to ensure account service exceeds your expectations. And even better agencies like Buyer Advertising take it one step further and give clients direct access to all levels of agency resources to make sure you are heard, and bureaucracy is eliminated from our relationship.

Some of you have experienced an agency with paper thin walls of support or the classic “pitch team” bait and switch when the beautiful people appeared, captured the hearts and minds of your organization, and then vanished post sale, never to be seen from again. And don’t get me started on the SaaS providers. I’ll just say good luck trying to reconnect with the salespeople when promises haven’t been met. But let’s not dwell on the negative. Let’s end on a positive note.

At Buyer, when you meet with us, you really are meeting with the team who will ensure your success, including our version of backup singers who luckily don’t sing. We promise not to disappear post sale, and that your Account Team has the resources to make your organization move like Jagger.

So, just as Sara Bareilles sings, “I wanna see you, I wanna see you, I wanna see you be brave”😊…with Buyer. Be amazing and talk to us today to learn more about our total agency approach to back up your every recruitment need.

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.

Indeed To Enforce Its $25 Posting Minimum

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Panic In The Streets, But We’re Good.

Recently there was a minor uproar in the recruitment world after Indeed announced it will enforce its $25 posting minimum effective July 1. Some “industry experts” proclaimed it was the end of Programmatic Media because it will require additional money spent every time an agency updated a job posting in a campaign.

The truth is, you will only be required to add money to a campaign if your current budget doesn’t support the minimum spend to cover the newly added jobs ($25 per unique job). Otherwise, if you have enough allocated money, you will be able to move jobs in and out of that campaign as needed.

After recently reviewing our client history with Indeed, we determined that this may require a bit more diligence when it comes to monitoring our clients spend, but it will not be a budgeting and process nightmare that some would have you believe.

While I’m told that some agencies do sponsor jobs for less than $25 a pop, we at Buyer have never stooped that low 😊 due to questionable applicant ROI, and not to mention, Indeed has had a $25 posting minimum in place for some time now. They have just decided to enforce it by tracking unique jobs.

So, to steal a quote from 2013’s totally unrelated giant robot fighting film, Pacific Rim, “Today we are canceling the apocalypse.”

For close to sixty years, Buyer Advertising has been helping clients spend their recruitment budgets to achieve optimal results. We have the insight to cut through the panic and to provide sound advice, whatever the industry throws at us next. Talk to us today to learn more.

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.

New Google AI Mode Launches

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Question Everything.

I am a weird dude. I type full questions into Google Search. Yes, I know it’s not necessary nor is it terribly efficient, but it’s a hard habit to break. I’m sure my freshman English professor is proud of me, but everyone else looks over my shoulder and mouths WTF.

Fast-forward to the latest news from Google that they are doubling down on AI Search by making it easier to search with more complex, longer, and multimodal questions. I couldn’t be happier. Luv it.

So, what’s the scoop? As of yesterday, Google started rolling out AI Mode in the U.S. with no Labs sign-up. AI Mode is their most powerful Search, with the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web. It uses something called query fan-out technique, breaking down your question into subtopics, enabling Search to dive deeper into the web than a traditional Search, helping you discover hyper-relevant content that matches your question. And for questions where you want an even more thorough response, there is a new Deep Search that is essentially the query fan-out Search technique on steroids.

So now that you are super excited about the new Google AI Mode Search, ask yourself this, do you have a technology partner who can help you navigate these changes and position your staffing organization for success? If you answered no, it’s time to contact our team at Buyer. We’ve been a leader in Job SEO for more than 20 years and have all the answers. Contact us today to learn how we can future-proof your recruiting strategy for tomorrow and beyond.

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.

Meet Ava Wirtz – Sales & Marketing Support Specialist

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Introducing Ava Wirtz, our Sales & Marketing Support Specialist at Buyer. Read her reflections and experiences after joining the Marketing and Partnerships team.

We are excited to announce the newest member of our Marketing and Partnership team, Ava! As our Sales and Marketing Support Specialist, Ava adds magnificent value and has a kind and delightful spirit, greatly supporting our overall efforts.

Ava is known for her helpful, collaborative, and supportive nature. She consistently goes above and beyond to contribute to the team’s success. Her research insights and methodical approaches undoubtedly drive our sales and marketing initiatives forward.

We asked Ava some questions after a few months of being on the team, and this is what she had to say:

Tell us about your background and what sparked your career journey.

“I graduated from James Madison University in May 2024 with a degree in Media Arts and Design, concentrating in Creative Advertising, and a minor in Human Resources Development. During my senior year, I gained hands-on experience as a social media intern, and after graduation, I completed a summer internship at a marketing consulting firm in Boston. These experiences, combined with my interests, motivated me to pursue a career that would allow me to leverage my background, ultimately leading me to Buyer Advertising.”

How would you describe your experience working at Buyer Advertising?

“My first few months have been fantastic. My team is incredibly collaborative, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to learn more about the various strategic solutions here at Buyer. I’m excited to see how the research I conduct moves through the process from start to finish and contributes to supporting my team. It’s been incredibly motivating to work at an agency with individuals who are both highly knowledgeable and deeply passionate about their work.”

What are a few personal tidbits about yourself you’d like to share?

“I grew up in Medfield, MA, just around the corner from our office in Needham. Family and friends are incredibly important to me. I love traveling, especially when it means visiting my college roommates, as we now all live in different states. I always look forward to catching up with them up and down the East Coast. I also enjoy spending time outdoors, especially when the weather is warm—whether it’s spending time at the beach or taking my Maltipoo for a walk.”

Please join us in extending a very warm welcome to Ava! We are thrilled to have her on our team and look forward to her continued positive impact.

Employee Referral Programs – An Oldie but Goodie.

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Why Do So Many Recruiters Ignore Friends and Family?

My very first job post-graduation came about from an employee referral. My friend called me up a week or two out of school and asked me what I was up to. Since I had a freshly minted English degree from a state school, I promptly replied, “Nothing” and the rest is history. I got a job through a referral.

Seems like a no brainer, but I can tell you very few companies invest in Employee Referral Programs like they should. I hear the same excuses; employees should already be referring, or it’s too complicated to track across various locations, or getting the program synchronized with HRIS is a nightmare, and the list goes on. Regardless of the perceived obstacle, there is no greater recruitment tactic with a better ROI than a well-executed Employee Referral Program.

Studies show that organizations that use Employee Referral Programs have average retention rates close to 50% and can save companies thousands of dollars per hire. Employee Referrals tap into an exclusive talent source – your people who, when properly motivated, become sales sharks, separating your jobs from the competition. In fact, a Harvard Business Review conducted a study that found 70% of “Better Candidates” were acquired from referrals.

As a bonus, Employee Referral Programs test the strength of your Employer Brand. The candidates your employees refer are typically those they see as a good fit for the organization. And an employee’s view of your culture provides valuable feedback and allows you to adjust or re-evaluate your branding efforts accordingly.

Simply asking employees to hit the streets and recruit is not enough. There are proven methodologies, incentives, technologies, promotions, and tricks of the trade that will ensure your success. And you guessed it, we’re here to help. Contact Buyer Advertising today to learn more about our unique approach to executing a successful Employee Referral Program. I may not be your friend, or your family, but you can trust the guy who started his career with the help of a referral.

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.

How Well Do You Know Your Target Audience?

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

“Bears, Beets, Battlestar Galactica”

For all the fans of the TV show The Office, I’m sure you remember the episode when Jim made fun of Dwight by emulating him for the first few minutes of the show. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then please stop reading this blog and come back after you’ve watched season 3, Episode 21.

OK, for the rest of us cultured TV consumers, let’s continue. In that episode, Jim transformed himself into Dwight with a pair of four-dollar glasses and by mimicking Dwight’s appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns, and characteristics.

Although Jim used his knowledge of Dwight to mock him, he also inadvertently utilized an effective advertising practice called Persona development while reciting one of the most memorable quotes in recent TV history.

Luckily, in our world of Employer Branding, we don’t use Personas to drive our office mates mad. We use Personas to ensure our clients’ Employer Value Proposition uniquely appeals to their target audiences. We also use Personas to personalize hiring processes for diverse types of candidates like seasoned RNs or newly minted physicians.

A lot goes into creating an effective Persona beyond combing your hair forward and donning a mustard-colored shirt. There’s conducting research, identifying patterns, creating detailed profiles, naming the Personas, and finally testing and refining the work. That’s why you need the proven leader in Employer Branding, Buyer Advertising, to help you navigate this creative process so you can be a winner like Jim.

Fact: If you know what kind of bear is best, but still not sure if Personas should be part of your next Employer Branding strategy, then contact Buyer Advertising today because bears eat beets and Buyer builds brands.

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.

Your Agency Should Be Protecting You

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

“You want us on that wall. You need us on that wall.” 

I may be dating myself, but do you remember that movie, A Few Good Men, when Col. Jessup, portrayed by Jack Nicholson, blurted that line out in a fit of rage? He was right. We all need resolute people to protect us from harm. Of course, he then went on to admit to ordering an inadvertent murder, but I digress.

Now, in no way would I compare what we do in recruitment communications with the important work of our US military and law enforcement, but in our little world of recruiting, I think one of the most important jobs of Buyer Advertising is to protect our clients from unscrupulous salespeople.

We see it all the time. A direct sales rep hammers an unsuspecting recruiter under the cloak of “providing consultative best practices” and then long story short, the final recommendation is to simply spend more money. Or my other favorite is when the salesperson pitches locking up a customer for years on end with the promise of saving money, which seldom works.

Ask any job board how to achieve better results, and the answer will always be the same: “SPEND MORE MONEY.”  So don’t do that. Arm yourself with a proven recruitment marketing agency, and let us protect you from getting oversold. We do this for a living. We know best how to spend your budget to achieve optimal results. We have the skills to negotiate the best deal on your behalf, and we are gluttons for punishment. It comes with the job like a doorman behind the velvet rope. No one gets in unless we think it’s in your best interest or they are good looking – just kidding.

Talk to us today to learn more. We’ve got protective agency people ready to block those time-killing salespeople so you can focus more on what matters most: hiring.

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.

Diversity Matters

Posted on by Buyer Advertising

Does Your Agency Have a Diverse Mindset?

Diversity matters in all aspects of life including recruitment marketing. The other day, we had a performance meeting with one of the largest job boards on the planet and they revealed an interesting stat about our purchasing history with them.

After analyzing the buying habits of their top recruitment marketing agencies, this job board revealed that Buyer Advertising was number one in consistently purchasing the most diverse collection of products offered by this board on behalf of our clients. That means while most agencies were concentrating their clients’ dollars primarily on traditional job postings, Buyer Advertising was consistently spending our clients’ dollars across all product offerings casting a wider net and increasing candidate results.

Why do this when it must have been easier to take a client’s money and to simply dump it into one product? Well in advertising, like life, diversity is good, and our metrics show that diverse media buying significantly achieves better results.

At Buyer Advertising, our philosophy has always been to develop, uncover and utilize the most diverse combination of recruiting solutions to create the most efficient way to connect our clients with quality candidates. So, if you think being ranked the best in product diversification within a single job board is impressive, just imagine what we do beyond that.

Ask around (not our competitors, they lie 😊), and you’ll hear Buyer Advertising has always been an early adopter of diverse and emerging recruiting solutions from Job SEO, Programmatic Media Buying and Track-to-Quality Metrics to Virtual Recruiting Assistants,  Behavioral Display Advertising, and AI-Powered Sourcing and Screening.

Our commitment to diverse recruiting strategies is an integral part of our agency culture, but what else would you expect from the agency with the half Irish, half Chinese, Jewish guy from the suburbs of Boston. Contact us today to learn how Buyer Advertising can infuse the power of diversity into your recruiting efforts.

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.