Storytelling About Boostpoint With Sam Beiler

William TIncup: [00:00:00] This is William Tincup, and you’re listening to the Use Case Podcast. Today we have Sam on from BoostPoint, and we’ll be learning about the business case, the cost benefit analysis, ROI, all of these things, the use case for why prospects and customers use BoostPoint. Sam, would you do us a favor and introduce both yourself

Sam Beiler: and BoostPoint?

Absolutely, William. Yeah, we’d love to really, first of all, appreciate the invitation to the podcast. We’re looking forward to our conversation here. So yeah, a little bit of intro. So my name is Stan Beiler. I’m the co founder and [00:01:00] CEO of boost point. Is we’re a software solution for recruitment teams, TI teams.

Our platform helps organizations attract passive candidates to their open roles specifically through social media advertising. Think about, how do I get, 73% of the potential candidates out there are categorized as passive job seekers. So that means they’re not like actively searching for a job on Indeed and ZipRecruiter and other.

Online job boards, but you know how to so the big question is how do we target those, 73? percent of workers that are categorized as passive job seekers And what we found is social media channels like facebook instagram tick tock Those are the most cost effective ways to attract that passive job seeker candidate So

William TIncup: do folks categorize you in [00:02:00] the recruitment, marketing, employer, branding prior to the ATS, like you’re finding talent.

And then at one point that talent then converts into an application or something. And then that goes into the ATS. So I’m assuming people probably throw you as a CRM or recruitment marketing. How do they categorize, I should just shut up. How do they

Sam Beiler: categorize you? Yeah. Recruitment marketing solution is most typical.

So again, looking at us as a source to fill the top of funnel of, the candidate pool, our platform, since launching several years ago, we’ve evolved our platform a lot. What we went to market with was specifically just a social media advertising tool. Since then we’ve evolved that into, What You know, a light CRM, a candidate database.

And we also have a text messaging platform where, you can automatically engage with the candidates through SMS campaigns as they’re coming in to make it a lot more efficient for so we’re all about [00:03:00] building the best candidate experience. That’s what we’re really about. So it’s like, all right, someone sees an ad on Facebook for a local job opportunity.

They click the ad right within through our platform. There’s this quick apply experience right within the Facebook, Tik TOK, or Instagram platform. So you’re not sending them to another page. And when they have to create an account, to fill out a full application and upload their resume, because if you.

Force them to do that. They’re going to get too distracted and they won’t complete your application. So we’re collecting their data and then right after they apply about a minute or two later, they get a text message as if it were coming from one of the recruiters saying. Hey, Tom, thanks so much for applying for open position.

Let’s jump on a call, to connect or whatever that next stage of the applicant, journey is. And so that’s what our tool is evolved into right now. Again, staying in the vein of a recruitment marketing tool. One thing we actually just released this product and it’s in the alpha [00:04:00] stage currently.

This was, this is, we’re recording this here in June. We released this in May of 2023 is a generative AI tool for recruitment teams, helping them build, engaging content at scale. So one thing what we’ve seen being deeply involved in, talking to T. A. Teams and recruitment teams of Fortune 5000 companies like the ability to create engaging recruitment marketing content for, maybe social media, organic posts, linkedin posts or linkedin D.

M. S. Even like engaging job ads, converting just like job requirements and job into engaging them. Job ads for Indeed and, their careers pages and stuff like that. So we’ve launched a generative AI tool where instantly you could create all that content by just, uploading a job title and a brief description of the job.

William TIncup: So what I love about programmatic advertising, at least [00:05:00] in the ad tech world, but also in our limited little world over here in TA, is it helps practitioners understand. You’ve got to drive with media. You’ve got to drive a candidate flow. And what, the folks that are out there that do programmatic they basically are solving to where, how much and where.

So you want to drive, 20, 000 candidates. Okay, cool. So how much of that, media do we need to buy and then where do we need to place that? That that media, I love that about programmatic and I only bring that up in, in a sense of, do your customers have any idea how to put budget associate that with a job or traffic like front, like I said, front of funnel.

Do they, do you got a calculator? Do you have a way to. Teach them as to how much money they should put towards something.

Sam Beiler: Yeah, that’s a great question. And we have a lot of historical data within [00:06:00] our platform as far as cause a lot of that is driven by like the job type, the potential audience size.

And, if you’re trying to fill a software engineer position. Versus a frontline worker, for hospitality your metrics are going to look very differently, based on, the type of position you’re trying to hire and in what industry and then even in what area.

Yeah, that can make it a big challenge, for TA leaders, to know how to appropriately budget. Advertising for their, employer brand efforts. And so we have a lot of historical data that can help educate what a budget should look like, when you’re trying to build, what should my social media ad spend be in a particular.

The year or quarter. So often to answer your question, briefly, we’re often helping build that spend strategy with our customers.

William TIncup: And and as a recovering marketer, I would say the the idea of [00:07:00] marketing is, you throw stuff against the wall to see what works, you put on a lab coat.

And you just test test. Oh, it didn’t work in TikTok. Okay. Let’s try it. Facebook didn’t work at Facebook. Okay. Let’s try this. So do you, how do you I know that because I ran an ad agency for 10 years, but most of the people you’re interacting with might not have that life experience.

So how do you convey that? Hey, we’re going to try campaigns and you know what? Some of them are going to do really well and some of them are going to shit the bed. That’s just, that’s life that’s just what, that’s what campaigns do. So how do you, it’s an emotional conversation.

How do you get people over that hump?

Sam Beiler: Yeah. Great question. It really comes down to, first of all, going into the conversation with the right approach. All right. What’s the objective here? And for a lot of our customers, it’s, we need to expand our reach to a more diverse, audience, we need to expand from just, Canada’s coming from our career site.

And indeed, or some of the big online job boards. And so that’s usually step one. It’s like, all right, [00:08:00] let’s accomplish that. And then, the layer down is like, all right we actually need to, for this to be valuable, this needs to produce, qualified candidates for open positions as well.

And then, so that’s like the layer deeper. With our metrics and then again, being a software solution and all the data that, we’ve collected over the years really helps drive a more educated approach when we’re building campaigns. And so we’ve been able to build a really solid framework that enables a lot higher of a hit rate.

You might call it with, successful campaigns versus unsuccessful campaigns. with

William TIncup: a blank screen.

Sam Beiler: We’re not starting with a buying stream. A lot of customers we work with, they may have previously worked with more of a generic, ad agency that’s done a lot of customer acquisition and maybe employer branding, a mixture of those.

And they work with, a dozen different advertising platforms, all programmatic or Google ads, Facebook ads, Tik TOK ads. And like they. It’s hard to be where we really dialed [00:09:00] in. Hey, we’re going to be experts specifically for social media. And right now those platforms are tick tock, Facebook and Instagram are the platforms that we’re currently integrated with.

Cause that’s where you get the best results. And when you look at, you didn’t mention LinkedIn,

William TIncup: Or Twitter I’m not necessarily surprised by either of those by the way, but cause the other ones are a little bit more visual especially if you use. Instagram reels, you could TikTok, obviously Facebook, you can do video I guess you could do video in Twitter and LinkedIn, but you didn’t mention us.

Did, was that just because you didn’t want to mention every social platform or was that purposeful?

Sam Beiler: We’re not integrated with those right now. And that’s been on purpose. I’m not saying that we’ll never get integrate with those platforms, but again, the particular problem that we’re solving for organizations is, high volume hiring, right?

So where

William TIncup: the

Sam Beiler: audience is and where the audience is, and right now the we’ve tested all these platforms and where we see, the best ROI even tech doc, like that’s fairly new for us. We just, [00:10:00] launched that initiative about six months ago. That one happened a lot quicker.

Then I actually personally anticipated, it talks always been in our radar, from the beginning and we tested it here and there and the ROI just wasn’t there, so we weren’t pushing that on our customers. But as soon as we saw that tip of scale for the types of customers we’re working with and the positions that they’re trying to fill.

We integrated with that platform and now we’re very active, on that platform. So yeah we’re very strategic on the platforms that we, integrate with because we want to be experts there versus trying to be generalists

William TIncup: for all things to all people. Yeah. It’s what I like about that.

And then as the audience change, if they move from tick talk to something else, then you move with them wherever they’re, wherever they go. You want to be an expert in basically reaching them where they are. I love that. Let me ask you some by side questions. When you, on the occasion that you get to show people [00:11:00] BoostPoint, you get to demo it what’s your, or their favorite part of the demo?

Sam Beiler: It’s. It’s really the candidate experience and when you realize that, from start to finish and that, that’s usually the big light bulb moment, if I’m demoing our platform because, realizing that, Hey, you’re capturing these people, you’re best employees.

They’re spending hours per day on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, like these are the platforms that they’re spending their time on. Collectively, it’s about three hours per day, an average, the average person, average user on these platforms, the combination of hours per day on these platforms.

So they spend a lot of time here. And when you get to see Oh, this is my brand specifically targeting, the [00:12:00] best potential candidate for my position. Before they’re searching for me on Indeed, before they come across, my career site and I’m capturing them before that.

And then seeing just how easy it is. All right. They see that ad, they click on it, they get a text message. And now you have a conversation with. Your next best employee. I

William TIncup: love that. I love that. And I can see the analytics also being really addicting for them to understand what’s working, what’s not working, et cetera.

Questions that prospects should be asking you as a kind of a remote recruit. Marketing play specifically in social media marketing and driving candidate flow that front end of the funnel. What are the questions that by questions, we want to teach practitioners, what are the, what are great questions they say should be asking software firms?

So if you could script it what questions would you love to be asked? [00:13:00]

Sam Beiler: One of the first things I know this is maybe a bit more of like on the boring side, but it matters so much is what visibility do you, do I have on the metrics, like the hiring metrics? Because coming into this space, and a lot of the companies I talk to they’re given Sometimes, again, there’s value here, but in my opinion, a lot of times it’s like vanity metrics.

Clicks. Where it’s stuff like that. Like I understand, the thing that’s most important to TA teams is you need hires. Every, applicants that turn into hires,

William TIncup: it doesn’t matter how many people commented on that post. You need

Sam Beiler: like those are valuable.

We were, we’re building our employer brands. We want people to be aware of our organization and we want them to see our content on these platforms. But when it really comes down to it, our, has this solution [00:14:00] been proven to supply high quality candidate flow like that’s a big part of it.

And then also what’s the strategy for one of the one of the things that’s hardest to get right? I’ll put it this way on social media advertising in relation to recruitment marketing is the content. I always call that the X factor Of social media advertising, you have your audience, you have your platform, you have your conversion method, all these things are important, but what will give you the 10 X factor in a campaign is your creatives, the photo, the interesting thing, like with social media is you need a photo or a video is the.

Cornerstone piece of your ad versus Indeed, ZipRecruiter, online job boards, like you’re working with text. And so having very engaging photos and videos, that are being leveraged. for the campaign are [00:15:00] extremely important. And, again, that’s one of the things that we pride ourselves in is like, all right, that’s, what we have a ton of experience around is like, all right, what is going to engage with a particular audience?

What types of visuals, what are the headlines the, a lot of social media ads. Supporting a recruitment, it’s almost like a copy and paste of the job description, which isn’t going to work, on platforms like TikTok or Facebook. So those things really matter when it comes to actually being successful.

So those are the questions that I’d really dig into. It’s Hey, what’s your strategy around creatives, and what’s the visibility into the results that I’ll receive on a regular basis.

William TIncup: So success stories without brand names, we don’t need to know the, that, that type of stuff, but just.

Yeah. Maybe where someone was skeptical at first or reluctant at first, maybe didn’t believe in social media. Maybe we didn’t believe their audience was there or candidates were [00:16:00] there and tell, walk us through some of those.

Sam Beiler: Yeah. The first one that comes to mind was one of the biggest auto resellers and retailers in the U S they were In the thick of it, especially, I think this was maybe early 2022 mechanics was their hardest to fill position.

And they were really skeptical going into it. They were just like, we just don’t think mechanics are on Facebook, Instagram, and Tik TOK. That was. The perception and but yet they were really struggling with candidate flow because indeed was drying up, becoming more and more expensive for them to leverage.

And they just didn’t see the candidate flow. They saw a lot of repeat candidate flow and repeated applicants, on some of those more traditional job boards. And we launched things with them and instantly, like they [00:17:00] just. Had a flood of candidates, new candidates too. They said that was their biggest surprise is seeing.

The increase in candidate flow and it not being a big duplicate of their existing, candidates, this was a separate candidate pool than what they were getting from Indeed. So that was a big lift for them, was, it’s we’ve tapped in this whole new gold mine because that’s even other solutions like Zipper Kruger, Indeed, some of those other, more traditional job boards as you get a lot of duplication.

People are on Indeed, and then they’ll jump to ZipRecruiter and just hit apply apply, and you’re getting a lot, you’re paying double for the same candidate often, and what they saw leveraging social media through our platform, it was this whole new candidate pool that they could tap into.

William TIncup: Drops mic, walks off stage. This has been absolutely fantastic. Sam, thanks for carving out. I know you’re crazy busy. [00:18:00] Thank you for carving out time to educate us on both. But also the things that you’ve, you’ve done and you’re doing and you’ve morphed, I love, I have actually love hearing stories about companies Start with a thesis and then thesis okay we changed that when we have a different thesis and you’re always evolving and testing your thesis.

So well done. And thank you for the

Sam Beiler: time. Absolutely. Thanks so much for the invitation, William. Really enjoyed our time here. A hundred percent.

William TIncup: And thanks for listening. Until next time.