Chris Hoyt, CXR 
It is interesting to me because Chris, I’ve known you for years, but I did not know. You were a rugby player.

Chris Forman, Appcast 0:05
Yeah, yep,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:06
I had no clue.

Chris Forman, Appcast 0:08
Well, as my wife says it comes out relatively frequently, because I am a knucklehead. And so I think that is part of part of being a rugby player is being a little bit of a knucklehead so

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:21
Yeah, my gosh, are you you’re not running around the house with a big cup like really holding the big cup up in the house and

Chris Forman, Appcast 0:27
No, but But what is really cool is so I had this old rugby jacket from I went to this small school in Maine called Colby College. So you know, I have my my Colby, you know, rugby warm up jacket. And the happiest moment was when my teenage daughter who happened to at the time a teenager just got married last weekend.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 0:48
Congratulations, by the way,

Chris Forman, Appcast 0:50
Thank you very much. She She went out with some of her friends wearing my rugby jacket. So I said, alright, you know, that’s cool. And I’m cool again for a very short amount of time. So no cups running around. But my my rugby jacket.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:05
Chris, you have far I had a leather jacket from high school. Not quite the same, but a leather jacket from high school and the kids were doing 90s day or something when they were something that I was like, Oh, you could wear this and they’re like, we’re not wearing that dad.

Chris Forman, Appcast 1:23
That’s weird. Yeah.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:24
You want high waisted jeans, but not this really cool leather jacket? Yeah. Oh my god. All right. Well, are you ready? Chris, you want to jump right in?

Chris Forman, Appcast 1:34
Rock and roll?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 1:35
All right, let’s do it.

Announcer 1:37
Welcome to the CXR channel. Our premier podcast for Talent Acquisition and Talent Management. listen in as the CXR community discusses a wide range of topics focused on attracting engaging and retaining the best talent. We’re glad you’re here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 2:06
Okay, welcome to another fun episode of our CXR recruiting community podcast, you have found the spot where we sit and talk for a few minutes each week with an industry professional practitioner friend about what’s going on in the recruiting space. And what is top of mind for them. Now, if you have joined us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and we’re live please go ahead and jump into the chat and say hello to us. Hello, Saudi Arabia already already see we’ve got our first one in there. So But feel free to drop your profile link in there so that everyone can connect with you online or add a question as we go. And we’ll see if we can get that question thrown out to the guest and get you an answer. As a reminder, this show is really a labor of love. And it’s driven by your likes, comments and guest requests, not ads, or paying guests or sponsors. But it’s not just your subscription links that bring us back but it’s your request for us to interview somebody of interest to you. So if you’ve got a request, drop it in the chat or connect with us at CXR.works and let us know who you’d like to see on the show. Now today’s guest no stranger to the podcast. Welcome back, Chris Forman and he’s industry friend, Founder CEO at Appcast. Welcome back to the show, Chris.

Chris Forman, Appcast 3:17
Thanks so much, Chris. Great to be here.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 3:19
Hey, good. I love zooming people in from the from the greenroom. It feels it just feels so formal and technical. Yeah, very fancy. For those who don’t know you, why don’t you give us sort of an escalator pitch on on who is Chris Foreman? And why do we care what Chris has to say today?

Chris Forman, Appcast 3:37
Well, I’m unsure if I can answer the last question about why you should care diligently but I’ll tell you about who I am. Chris Forman, I’m 52 years old. I have lived for the last 30 years right near Dartmouth College. Angela and I have four kids, and we live in a little dairy farm. But candidly, it’s not. You can’t really make a living with milk. And so I go to work. And for the last 20 years, what I’ve been doing is I’ve partnered with an amazing group of people up here and around the globe to build a series of recruiting technology companies. The first business I ran was a company by the name of Ayers. So if anyone out there is Ayers trained, or used our kind of the industry’s first recruitment CRM platform. That’s us. We sold that to the largest recruitment outsourcing firm at the time in 2008, the right thing helped grow that business and then help sell it ADP. And after that, I founded an incubator called Start Date labs. And you know, we we graduated three companies out of that and Appcast is the most recent one and by far and away the most successful kind of req tech business the team here has ever built. So you know, Appcast for those you don’t know we make software that helps a lot Large organizations, specifically enterprises, and more and more everyday global enterprises, buy and optimize job ads more effectively. Because more often than not, that’s one of the biggest parts of recruiting budget outside of people. And so the idea is, software can do some things really well. And one of the things that does really well is do math. And so by doing math better, you can sometimes make your job ads give you more hires and costs less.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:27
I got Chris, I got into recruiting because I was told there would be no math.

Chris Forman, Appcast 5:33
And everything I told my kids that are like, I don’t like Well, you better get good at it. Because

Chris Hoyt, CXR 5:38
Like, I just want to say Mrs. Payne, my eighth grade math teacher, I am so so sorry, I was unforgivable. Math is a thing. And I appreciate it. I’m sorry. Look, Chris, you are you are an authority on job advertising tech. Right. It’s technology. You You mentioned, you’ve been an Appcast? I think you said founded in 2014. So that’s nine, almost 10. There’s the math again, right. So to put the topic, I think of job boards, and programmatic advertising in front of you is kind of a no brainer. So so what I want to do is, can we just let’s just jump in and talk about it a little bit? Like, let me ask you like what’s going on in the world of recruitment advertising that we should really be paying attention to?

Chris Forman, Appcast 6:21
Yeah, there’s a, there’s a couple kind of, I guess I call macro trends that are, you know, some of them are related to what we do as a business. And some of them actually are more about content and job seeker engagement. So let’s start with, you know, probably the most commercially agnostic one, and that is, is that there’s a huge push, in fact, being led by Indeed, to ensure that compensation is on every job

Chris Hoyt, CXR 6:54
Right. Yeah, well, that’s a big topic right now.

Chris Forman, Appcast 6:56
It’s, it’s a huge thing. And, you know, it’s, it’s huge, because, you know, indeed, basically made a decision that that either you’re going to post your compensation, or they’re going to estimate it, which I applaud completely. I applaud it not for any, shall we say, altruistic reason, I’m going to do going back to the math thing, job ads that have compensation, specifically market based compensation. So like, you know, if, if the market for a particular job is is $25 an hour and you’re paying $15 an hour, that doesn’t help. But if you pay market rates, putting that information in the ad, dramatically increases your apply to higher rates, and actually increases the engagement that you have on your job ads. And so, you know, I think oftentimes, the conversations that folks are having about whether or not this is good or bad, you know, gets into some kind of altruistic gee whiz, what’s this going to do the culture? Do I believe that we should be publishing these things? How are existing right? A lot of stuff, which is all real. But as a math guy, as a marketer, it’s good. It’s brilliant.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 8:04
So our leaders, right, we got about 100 or so odd leaders that are within the CXR membership, and they’re torn. Right? They’re really torn, because in Summit, and this is we actually have indeed coming on the show in a couple of weeks, where we’re going to talk about this and why they push this initiative forward. But leaders sort of struggle sometimes, and especially if the estimate is a little bit off of what they’re actually be paying that market, and it does present a little bit of a challenge for them. I think from a transparency standpoint, and it it I think it sort of flexes a little bit to tell the company might be time to step that up or get that level. But what we’re not hearing a lot of yet is that realization of well, numbers right or wrong, are driving driving the clicks driving traffic.

Chris Forman, Appcast 8:48
That’s right. That’s right. And, and so that’s what the data says, you know, and you know, at app cast, we publish a lot of this information, we got more research coming out about it, because in fact, it’s such a hot issue. So, you know, the companies have the ability to publish accurate data. So like, if your issue is the estimates are wrong, you can solve that by not relying on a third party estimate. But so anyway, there’s no right or wrong answer here. All that I’m saying is, it’s a big deal. It’s a macro trend, like this move to pay transparency. Not only is legal, you know, there’s a whole set of legal things going on in Colorado and in Massachusetts, and in New York, but it’s also kind of it’s got impacts on on recruitment marketing. So So that’s, that’s a big macro trend. The other macro trends is kind of content related on the job side, which is as a result of COVID because COVID the COVID period, really exacerbated the war for talent in the blue collar space. So, you know, everyone thinks when you’re talking about the war for talent, you’re talking about software engineers in San Francisco. That ain’t enough. But compared to hiring truck drivers and warehouse workers and people working retail stores during COVID, I mean, it was broad swords and, you know, shield reading all over the place.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 10:09
It was it was surprised a lot of people, I really think that a lot of people were who hadn’t done that type of hiring in the past. Were really surprised to see that bubble up.

Chris Forman, Appcast 10:18
Yeah well it was, you know, you know, Andrew Flowers, who I think you guys have spoken to before, is our labor economist. And he’s got this graph where it just shows demand and supply. And and especially when you get into those frontline worker situations, the law was even greater. So what that force companies to do was to try and figure out ways to, you know, sand the surfboard, and, you know, kind of figure out how to make it work a little bit better. And the reality is that, because of that, it forced a lot of AV testing in the role of content. So like figuring out how to talk about a job, and understanding the impact that that has not just on conversion rate to an apply. But you know, all the way to the higher, like, there are ways to write a job that actually improve the likelihood that your application, your applicants are going to get hired. Everything from the title to how long it is to like, we did some research with a professor at Harvard Business School. And we found that if you talk about for non cash benefits, so not like how much money you make, or non cash benefits, it increases the Apply rate by 22%. So think about that for a minute, like if 22%. So if you’re spending a buck, you will get 22% more applicants for that dollar, if you just purely mentioned, four non cash benefits. And what I’d like everyone here to to know is free coffee is a non cash benefit every major as the coffee and like, I mean, it sounds goofy, but like you can you can, if you can’t fix it, feature it, you can talk about a lot of stuff. And so you know, because at the end of the day, what that research said was, when you’re talking about non cash benefits, those ads are talking about what’s in it for me for the job seeker, we talked about what’s in it for me. And and so an organization that is thinking that way, writes much better job ads from the lens of the job seeker. And you know, that’s marketing 101, but like we got forced to do it?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 12:32
Well, yeah. Look, I wouldn’t disagree with you. But I would tell you that and this came up on another show we talked about and in one of our recent membership meeting, but job descriptions, the job ads, could be one of the lowest hanging fruit. one of the easiest things to tackle it’s volumous for the bigger corporations, right, but why are they still so shitty? They’re so bad, Chris.

Chris Forman, Appcast 12:58
But the real answer is is it goes to, in my opinion, is that a lot of the fundamental job descriptions that go into the leveling that exists in big companies end up having job requirements that are in your HR ERP systems, and the integration between HR ERP system and the applicant tracking system is like when you open up a requisition, you hit a button and clap, it comes on in. And people are like, Yeah, that’s fine. Slap it out there. Let’s go. And they don’t understand the delta. And so yeah, man, I mean, it’s, it’s a huge lift, but we’re starting to see that change. And some of that’s being driven by software, you know, some of our software and other people’s software allows you to test one version of an ad versus another version and find out oh, that one works way better. So that’s, that’s really, you know, that’s kind of a big, big thing that’s coming.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 13:44
Yeah. So the I think the AV testing for what works is pretty, pretty important. And I think it’s probably something a lot of folks are not are not aware of, sort of even exists, right.

Chris Forman, Appcast 13:56
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s also something like when you say AV testing, blank stares, you know, this is all this is all marketing stuff. And yeah, I mean, not a lot of people understand what it is the ability to run a mathematically valid, you know, test between two pieces of content, but as I mean, for as long as I’ve known you, Chris, we’ve talked about the transition from recruitment being fundamentally a sales operation, you know, operations and sales to moving towards more of you know, there’s there is a marketing skill set that’s very much involved here. And so, you mean, you got to do that type of stuff and understand it. Beyond those two things, you know, I think that there’s a big push on transparency. You know, the, the the job, the job board world’s a super interesting place. Do you know the largest buyer of of job ads in the United States who they are

Chris Hoyt, CXR 14:53
The largest buyer of job advertisements

Chris Forman, Appcast 14:56
Buyers as a category of job ads in the United States. No, APU, other job sites.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:03
I believe that.

Chris Forman, Appcast 15:04
So, Job Site A goes and sells an employer, and they get a $10,000 budget, okay? They realize that they can only, you know, satisfy 60% of the budget. And in our pay for performance model, if in fact, you don’t have enough clicks to earn, you know, the full budget, you’ve got the reality that you may have sold $10,000. But you can only deliver $6,000. And that’s leaving money on the table. So what do you do? You take that ad, you actually go buy traffic from other job sites? Like when you look at your source report, and you see, oh, I got this hire from job site X.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:44
Yeah. That’s not really job site X,

Chris Forman, Appcast 15:47
Maybe, maybe. I mean, it could be, you know,

Chris Hoyt, CXR 15:51
And that’s been going on for years and years and years,

Chris Forman, Appcast 15:53
it has been but as the war for talent, especially in the blue collar space increased, this happened more and more the growth of pay for performance ad models. And the need for, you know, in a lot of places more volume has led to this, you know, the technical work that is recent occation. And so, more and more buyers are starting to understand that say, okay, hold on a second, you know, if I’m going to buy direct, I want to know, I’m just getting stuff from your site and your site. And then I want to, if I want to basically bet the infield, which is go to everybody, which is what you should do think about this, like, imagine in your 401 K, if you only bought one stock, that’s kind of dumb, right? Even if it’s a great stock, you know, like take a look at what happened to the big tech stocks, all of a sudden, they’ve gone down, you want to bet the infield, and so you want to have mutual fund. And so this idea of saying, Alright, if I buy direct from somebody, I just want to be able to get just their traffic, boom, boom. And then, you know, whether it’s something like our webcast accelerate platform or somebody else’s, you know, there’s a mutual fund that you can buy. And within that there’s transparency about where all this stuff comes from, gives you the ability to kind of have a clear sense.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 17:04
Yeah well, so the analogy I get it, it’s it’s a beautiful analogy, but have a managed account, that I don’t have time to pick out 75 different stocks to diversify and make sure but what I think I hear you saying is saying taking that same approach and sort of diversifying gets us much more, well, safer return. Typically, we’d expect on that investment.

Chris Forman, Appcast 17:28
That’s right. You know, it’s it’s dollar cost averaging, you know, all this stuff that literally, if you go talk to a financial advisor, these are the same things that like when you’re thinking about making your, your job, bad investments, it’s important. And it’s also one of the things that, you know, I get asked this a lot it what’s the best job site? Well, I don’t know. And I do this for a living. The reality is, is that how your job operates within different marketplaces is a function of a whole series of things. And so, understanding what works and what doesn’t for you is always a function of again, going back to that AV test, try it, just try it and adjust. And so in that environment, the ability to understand what is working and what isn’t, not just from where you’re getting applies. This is this is again, going to the next macro point of transparency is the apply to hire ratio, there are huge differences, depending on brands, and between, you know, how they perform to getting a higher, and it’s like some cases, it’s not like 5%, better, it’s double. So that means like, you could see a situation where you’re paying, let’s say, whether your bank paying on pay for performance, or you’re buying a posting, it doesn’t really matter, you put $500 into a job, and you get 10 applies. So 50 bucks and apply. And another site, you put $500 into a job and you get 20 applies that if you just looked at how much the applies cost. One is way more expensive, and one is way cheaper. I’m not saying that this is always the case where when you pay more, you get more because oftentimes, it’s the exact opposite. But what I am saying is, is that data shows that like there are places where, you know, honestly, you could pay $250 and apply and it still delivers a cheaper cost per hire. And if you’re getting you know, a $5 Apply.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 19:21
I remember when the whole concept of because we’ve been doing this a while, right? I’m going on 30 years in the space, you’re on the same like I feel like we’re I think we’re the same age. So it’s I remember when the concept of PPC for ad for jobs, sort of sort of broke ground. And my biggest complaint was as as a I don’t know if I was an early adopter, but someone trying to invest in that in that tech early on before sort of been refined. My biggest complaint was my my agency kept telling me I said the links not really performing. They kept saying just put more money in it. Can you just just put a little more money into the PPC and it’ll be fine. It’ll start to perform And I just didn’t have it. So it’s that that has always stuck with me up front. But let me ask I’m not going to ask you, Chris, what your what your, you know, favorite job board is or which one performs the best. But I do want to ask you, what do you think is kind of a common misconception people might have about programmatic job advertisement?

Chris Forman, Appcast 20:25
So people often think that programmatic job advertising is different than job advertising. It’s not. So like, you know, people will say, well, I already buy from this site and this site and this site, and now I want the programmatic. Well, if you go to an advertising agency, or you go to another pure play, you know, provider, you know, like, our friends over and, you know, jovia or pandologic, or, you know, the reality is, is that, what programmatic means, at least to me, is the use of software to manage all your job ad buying. And so what that kind of inherent in that, that means that we’re using software to manage what works and what doesn’t, by tracking the impression to the click to the applied to the higher, it’s understanding what content works in what content does it, it’s understanding the cost deltas between the different places that you can go. So it’s not a discrete category. It’s basically the use of software to manage your job board budget. And, and so that’s, that’s where we spent a lot of time and finally the lightbulb goes off saying, Oh, I get it you use. We can use your stuff to make make this whole thing better. Not just like, it’s not just another source, or like, yeah, that’s it. Like, okay, cool. So that’s it. The other thing that, you know, from a transparency standpoint, you know, I think that, you know, where does the Apply come from? What what applies actually get hired, those are critical points. The other thing is that everybody needs to ask how you get paid? So like, Chris, when you were talking with an ad agency, they said, just put more money into, you know, the PPC?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 22:06
Yeah.

Chris Forman, Appcast 22:08
You know, how ad agencies make money?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 22:11
Would it be off the money I put in for the PPC,

Chris Forman, Appcast 22:14
They charge it, they charge you a fee. And then and there’s a commission is when a publisher pays an agency, because they’re bringing them the business, there is nothing wrong with having Commission’s whatsoever. As long as they are transparent. You as the buyer should know, okay, my agency gets paid 15% If they sell me indeed, or, you know, whatever it happens to be, and they get paid 35% If they sell something else, and that happens, so because different publishers want more business from different agencies, they will give them economic incentives to theoretically do it. Again, no problem. But But this issue of transparency, like if you look outside of of the, you know, kind of recruitment advertising space into the broader advertising space, over the last decade, there’s been this move to fee transparency and understanding who gets paid and how. And I think that that’s something that’s, that’s, that’s coming, you know, in our direction, and all those things are important.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 23:19
So, I want to make sure I said, so what I think I hear you saying is that, that that level of transparency, and we continue to we see this swell of this movement, right, will trickle into countless aspects of what recruiting does, and with regards to the recruiting industry, right, so just beyond how much something cost, but like, Where does all the money go, and who does it go to?

Chris Forman, Appcast 23:40
That’s right. And, you know, it’s, again, there’s nothing wrong with with publishers paying paying Commission’s, as long as you know, whoever is is, you know, hiring the agency or the programmatic provider understands, okay, that’s how you get paid. Right? You know, so transparency is this big theme, transparency, and what we pay people, transparency and where the applies come from transparency and who gets hired transparency in terms of how everybody gets paid. If what we as an industry want to do is professionalized and become more like, let’s say, the marketing technology industry or the, or the online marketing industry, all these things are critical to that, because that’s how you get more efficient is, is you got to know which knobs to turn. And the only way you can do that is by understanding what works and what doesn’t and how everybody gets paid.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 24:29
Well, and it seems to me that the more transparency, the more transparent we become, the more we level that playing field a bit. Right? And the more we see who some of the bad actors right are in front of that equation, and gives the buyers or the or the applicant, whatever side of that you may be on. Options, right? More, more, more. Yeah, more informed options.

Chris Forman, Appcast 24:52
That’s right. That’s right. Exactly.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 24:55
So look, Chris, I’m gonna ask you, because we’re right out, we try to keep these pretty snackable so run out about 20 minutes or so. But let me ask you if you were going to write a book today about the topic that we’ve just discussed, what do you think that title would be?

Chris Forman, Appcast 25:08
Recruitomics. We know like, honestly, Chris, I can answer this because I tried to write a book last year called recruiter nomics. And life got busy, and it failed, and the whole nine yards, and so we decided to launch a blog on it and the whole, but the reason why I love that word and the name for that, first off, I think it’s incredibly marketable is talent acquisition, in the environment that we’re in, where we have relatively fluid marketplaces, and we have people acting as more independent agents, right? You know, when, when our parents worked, they worked for one or two custom companies. Sure, when I work, you know, we worked for seven or eight, our kids are going to work for 20, or 25. That means it’s a much more fluid marketplace. Supply and demand is going to what really dictates how people get paid. And honestly, how like society works and how companies make decisions on talent acquisition. And that’s the combination of how good we actually are good operationally at our job recruiting. Right. The other part of it is its macro economics. And more than ever, it’s going to become more fluid. And I think that that’s, that’s, that’s something that if I had to make a bet, you know, like, again, when we first started to know each other, the bet was that recruiting organizations were going to start to have their own marketing teams. That is, yep. The bet I’m going to make is by the time our kids have our jobs, they’re going to recruiting organizations are going to have their own Economic Intelligence Unit to try and really understand talent, supply and demand in their markets.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 26:56
Yeah, I could get behind that. I mean, we already see some of that we see economist leaning over and offering intelligence to the HR teams, right. And from a talent management perspective, and talent planning. That might be here sooner than you think.

Chris Forman, Appcast 27:11
Maybe.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 27:12
All right. Well, look, Chris, you wrote the book, who gets the first sign that copy?

Chris Forman, Appcast 27:17
My father?

Chris Hoyt, CXR 27:19
Oh, you’re killing me?

Chris Forman, Appcast 27:20
Because, Sorry. He gave me the first time copy of his book. So I got to return the favor.

Chris Hoyt, CXR 27:25
Oh, that’s fantastic. I love it. Look, Chris, I want to thank you for being on show. Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to kick you over into the green room. But I’m so grateful of your time today. We really appreciate you.

Thanks, brother.

Chris Forman, Appcast 27:34
Good stuff, man. All right, I just want to remind everybody, a couple of things. cxr.works/events. That’s where you go to see what’s next. So not just for our members meetings and alumni meetings. But also for the podcast show. We throw some stuff out there. Of course, you can find everything just podcast at cxr.works/podcast. And then we have a lecture series. As we round into the last half of the year. We have done this monthly it is a big hit. You can also ask for the topics there. Those topics are chosen by our leaders and our members. When we do one a month from a lecturer or a speaker that we acquire from anywhere around the world. I want to give a quick shout out here at the end for the folks who are in the chat stream. Some of you we throw up there some that we didn’t Mohamed Michelle, Dina, David. Thanks, guys for chiming in. We really appreciate it and I want to thank everybody for being on the show and we will see you in a week.

Announcer 28:26
Thanks for listening to the CXR channel. Please subscribe to CXR on your favorite podcast resource and leave us a review while you’re at it. Learn more about CXR at our website CXR.works facebook.com and twitter.com/CareerXroads and on Instagram @career X roads. We’ll catch you next time.