Webinar: Talent Attraction Shouldn't Be So Hard - An Overview For Your Economic Development Organization

Ted Dacko

Good afternoon everyone, and welcome to our webinar, Talent Attraction Shouldn't Be So Hard: An Overview For Your Economic Development Organization. My name is Ted Dacko, and I will serve as your host today. In a little bit we'll be joined by our presenter Michael Kling.

Before we get started just a couple of housekeeping issues. All of you are in listen-only mode to cut down on background noise. There is a question box, and you can type them in, and we will try to get to your questions at the end of the webinar. If we run out of time we'll certainly get back to you individually. Slides will be sent to participants and a recorded version of this webinar will be available hopefully by Friday of this week. We are going to be asking some polling questions during this webinar, and we would greatly appreciate your participation in those polls. If you are interested in anything you hear today we would be happy to follow up with you.

If you having trouble, then of course if you're having trouble you may not be able to see me or hear me, so you wouldn't know. If you're having trouble finding, for instance, the question box try moving your mouse to the top or the bottom of the screen to access the Zoom menu. You can check your volume and your headphone connection if you are having problems with the audio. Of course if you can see me, but not hear me hopefully you could read that message.

Here's our agenda for today. We're going to introduce our guest speaker, who's then going to provide an introduction to TrueJob. We're going to talk about the goals of economic developments organizations. The problem that we are here to address today. We're going to spend some time talking in detail about a Talent Attraction Plan for economic development organizations. We'll summarize, we'll take your questions, try to provide answers, and then give you next steps.

Let me start by introducing our speaker today. Our guest speaker is Mike Kling. Mike is the co-founder of TrueJob. He was trained at MIT, and he's responsible for both product development and customer support at TrueJob. Mike is committed to and passionate about supporting economic development organizations with talent attraction. So Mike, welcome to the webinar.

Mike Kling

Thanks Ted.

Ted Dacko

Mike, if you could just give us a brief introduction and tell us a little bit about TrueJob for the participants who may not know.

Mike Kling

Sure. So TrueJob exists to help economic development organizations do a better job of servicing their local clients and businesses. Specifically we help address this challenge of talent attraction. Now the way that we do this is using cloud-based job board software which integrates into your existing website, and helps connect job seekers with employers, all the while tracking key talent metrics.

Ted Dacko

Okay. So Mike, tell me a little bit about the background and the research involved in this webinar, because it's not going to be specifically about job boards, but in general. The participants are probably saying, so why you?

Ted Dacko

That's your MIT background I'm guessing.

Mike Kling

I guess so.

Ted Dacko

Okay, good.

Mike Kling

Then lastly, obviously we're happy to admit that we just don't have all the answers for you. Every community is going to be a little different. You're going to have your own challenges. So our goal here is just to share our experience, and hopefully inspire some ideas for you.

Ted Dacko

What are the goals of an economic development organization Mike?

Mike Kling

So obviously this is kind of review probably, for most of you attending today, but I do want to start here just so that we can all begin on the same page. EDOs exist to serve businesses and people that are part of your community. Different EDOs might serve regions of different sizes, maybe it's just at the local level, or county level, or state level. Also different EDOs have different focuses in terms of industry. Maybe one town might have more of a tech company focus, another might be focused more on say automotive companies.

Different EDOs get funding from different sources. So, if you're part of your local government maybe you get funding from public sources. Others get funding from grants, or maybe private corporate sponsors, and a combination of sources.

So when we look at these sets of stakeholders here, and we're thinking about the question of talent attraction, these groups on the left are the ones that you're going to be directly with that challenge of talent attraction. The businesses that you're trying to help find people to fill their open positions, the job seekers that are trying to get hired. Then these groups on the right, these are the ones that you have to show how successful you're being with your efforts, and provide some data on your talent attraction campaigns.

Ted Dacko

Again, as an MIT person I'm guessing you would agree that the analytics and the metrics associated with the effort is just as important, if not more important than actually the effort in and of itself?

Mike Kling

Yeah, it's really an essential piece.

Ted Dacko

Okay, very good.

Mike Kling

Regardless of the differences between different EDOs, there's this overarching goal of supporting businesses, promoting job growth to create thriving communities. So if we break that down a little bit, on the left here we have some of the goals of EDOs. Maybe retaining or attracting businesses to your community.

On the right are some tactics that you might be using right now to help achieve those goals. So maybe helping with site selection, or providing information about business financing.

Again, on the left here some goals could include finding strengths and weaknesses of the region, or promoting your community and the quality of life. Tactics around that could include data collection about your workforce, about the region. Maybe networking events for local companies, and other marketing and outreach efforts.

Obviously the focus today is on the tactics around talent sourcing and data collection as you're working on that.

Ted Dacko

What are some of the problems that are background to all of this that would be useful to the people listening in today?

Mike Kling

Sure. If you've been following the state of the economy over the last decade or so, then you probably know that unemployment is historically low right now. At the same time the number of unfilled open job openings that businesses have is at or near all time highs. So this combination of economic factors is just making it very difficult for businesses to find the talent that they need. Obviously this varies across industry, across different parts of the United States, but it is a problem.

Businesses need talent to grow. It is obviously essential for that growth. Like it or not, you are competing. Your region is competing against other regions locally and across the world. You're competing with other economic development organizations for talent, so it's critical for you to stay on the leading edge, and stay aware of what the latest tactics are to help you with this challenge.

Ted Dacko

Now for those of you on the phone, there are roughly 100 economic development organizations on the phone today, so if you're thinking about this just understand that, as Mike just said that, you are competing with each other as part of this. So tell me about that quote at the bottom there Mike. That little quote at the bottom.

Mike Kling

Yeah. This is a quote from Phil Santer of Ann Arbor SPARK. Ann Arbor SPARK is an economic development organization based in Ann Arbor, and we're going to be using them as an example for some of what we're talking about later in the webinar. I think he does a good job of summing up the situation. "Everyone agrees that talent is critical to EDOs, but most people don't know what to do about it."

Ted Dacko

Okay. So let's go to our first survey question. We ask you folks, please participate in the survey if you possible could. Have employers in your community reached out to you about their hiring challenges? So let's launch the poll, and watch the results come in. All right, give it another three or four seconds. If you haven't yet to respond, please do so. Close the poll. What's the result Mike?

Mike Kling

Okay. A pretty overwhelming response here. Looks like the vast majority are saying yes, that this is something employers are reaching out to them about.

Ted Dacko

Obviously we're not surprised. It's one of the main missions of the economic development organization. What would you say to people who said no?

Mike Kling

I mean, if you did say no then you might ask yourself maybe, why aren't companies viewing you as a resource to help with this challenge? It's an opportunity for you here.

Ted Dacko

Okay. So what's the silver bullet Mike?

Mike Kling

So unfortunately there is no silver bullet for this challenge, and that's a point we want to make before we dig in and start thinking about an outline of a talent attraction plan. If you thought you were going to come to this webinar and get our one quick tip to solve the challenge of talent attraction, then that's not going to happen.

It turns out solutions are multi-faceted to this problem. You need to be taking a long term view, and having realistic expectations about your talent attraction efforts. We've highlighted a few broad things here that you may want in a solution, want to have in place, and we'll touch on these a little bit as we go through the presentation. Things like collaboration, improved branding and messaging, highlighting quality of life in your community, and skills development resources.

Ted Dacko

Very good. So what's the talent attraction plan here?

Mike Kling

What you're looking at here is a high level plan for talent attraction, and as we continue we're going to be digging into each of these points listed with some specific examples. Before doing that, let me just pause and say, something you should consider before getting started is really ask yourself, is talent attraction a priority for my organization? Does it fit into say the charter, the mission, the reason for existence in my organization?

You know your community, you know where this priority lies as compared to other things. It's a big undertaking, so it's important for you to at least think about that before you get started.

Ted Dacko

Okay. We're going to drill down into each one of these topics.

Mike Kling

Yes. Let's do it.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Fire away.

Mike Kling

First, evaluating your community. Now why is this so important? It's essential for you to understand where you're starting, and get a baseline so that you know what you need to improve. Ideally you'd like to be able to compare yourself versus other communities on different types of metrics, so you can get a sense of your specific strengths and weaknesses.

So we're going to use Ann Arbor as an example here. Again, we've done work with Ann Arbor SPARK, which is the economic development organization based there. Ann Arbor has some key employers and key industries, which I'll highlight. We have a large university, a health system, some automotive companies, and some growing tech companies. These are reflected in the key industries in the area. So, software technology, automotive/mobility, other transportation companies, and life sciences and healthcare, which is a result of a lot of the research coming out of the university.

Ted Dacko

You might point out for the people on the phone, the Duo security is Ann Arbor's first unicorn.

Mike Kling

That's right. So some specific strengths and weaknesses of the region. We have this large university. So not only are there a lot of research dollars coming out of that, but there's also this influx of students every year that's adding to the population. Ann Abor also has a good venture capital scene. So per capita there's a lot of venture deals that happen.

Some weaknesses include housing prices. So housing prices are increasing, and fairly high relative to the surrounding region. Also limited population growth. So while Ann Arbor does do a good job of bringing in those students, the retention isn't so great.

Ted Dacko

I will point out as a former transplant from the New York, Connecticut area our housing market is a fraction of what it is in some of the large cities, but I understand compared to other mid-western towns it may not be.

Mike Kling

Yeah. The way that Ann Arbor SPARK was able to really dig in and find some of these strengths and weaknesses, was they actually conducted a benchmarking study at the end of last year, where they looked at some specific metrics, and compared themselves to peer communities across the United States. So you can see that summarized here. Again, strengths including a university, the VC activity and weaknesses including affordability of housing and the lack of population growth.

Now again, why is it so important to look at your community in detail, and understand where you're at? Well the goal here ultimately is to figure out, what are the gaps? What is it that you actually need to be attracting to your community? We'll talk a little more about that when we talk about engaging with businesses, but before getting into that I did want to highlight an interesting study here.

This is some data that LinkedIn collected by leveraging their technology, their dataset. What they did was they looked at different metro areas across the United States, and they figured out what particular skills were abundant or scarce in those different regions. These results are summarized for the Detroit area. On the left skills that are abundant, and on the right skills that are particularly scarce.

So you can take a quick look at that. Maybe see how that compares to your community. On the right, on the scarce skill side there's a variety, but you can see a number of specific technology skills that Detroit is missing right now.

Ted Dacko

Now I would say that, well there's a couple of things I would say about this. It's interesting that software engineering is always at a premium in almost any community, with the potential exception of northern to central California. The other thing that's actually not on here is sales talent. If you have growing firms, maybe technology firms in your area finding sales talent is low as well.

The other thing that's kind of interesting to me, Mike, in terms of talent acquisition is that here Ann Arbor is. They've got the university with what? 50-60,000 students. They've got a large engineering department, they've got computer science capabilities, and students come here, go to the university, and leave. The idea here is they do have the ability to retain. So I'm guessing that their talent attraction plan was focused as much keeping students who go to school here, here. As opposed to attracting people from outside the region who may have already left college.

Mike Kling

Yeah, absolutely. We'll touch more on those two audiences again later.

Ted Dacko

Okay, very good. Let's go to the second survey question. We're curious, are you currently measuring and capturing data to try to benchmark some of these issues in your community? Mike, why don't we launch that poll and see what people have to say?

Ted Dacko

Okay. Launch the poll, and please respond if you possibly could. We'll leave this open for another two or three seconds. Let's close the poll. What do the results say Mike?

Mike Kling

So it looks like it's about three quarters yes, one quarter no.

Ted Dacko

That's actually pretty good, right? It's good that the economic development organizations are spending time and effort measuring and capturing data to make sure they understand what's going on in their community.

Mike Kling

Absolutely, yeah.

Ted Dacko

That's good.

Mike Kling

Very important.

Ted Dacko

All right, so let's move on.

Mike Kling

Next, what you're looking at here is kind of the most basic view of what the stakeholders are in the hiring process, from the perspective of an EDO. So you've got your employers. They need local trained talent. You have job seekers, they're looking to find quality positions that they're qualified for. Then you have the EDO. The EDO can facilitate these connections, and then ultimately needs to show the success of those efforts to their funders.

Now if you don't see yourself as having a role in this process right now, consider just how well positioned you are to take advantage of your knowledge of your region, of the companies in your region. There really is an opportunity here for you to help make these connections.

Ted Dacko

Will you be talking a little bit later on, Mike, about attracting employers to your region, or will you be focusing only on employers currently in the region?

Mike Kling

I'll think we'll maybe touch on that for a moment, but obviously the focus here is individual.

Remember you don't have to go it alone in these efforts, and you shouldn't be duplicating the efforts of other organizations in your community. Maybe there are some of these types of organizations like you see on the left here right now, that are addressing different types of needs of employers in different ways. Maybe you have a university, or a community college. Maybe you have different types of training or apprenticeship programs, or workforce development agencies, or other economic development agencies say at a more regional or state level.

Part of your job is to figure out which audiences are these serving. Maybe students, or unemployed workers, or workers that are interested in maybe changing careers, getting into a skilled trade. It's important for you to understand what's out there, where are the gaps, so you can identify where you can fit in and make an impact.

Now it's not enough for you to just look at existing programs. It's also essential for you to engage with the businesses themselves. As you're doing so you can try to frame your conversation as an opportunity for the company to help grow the talent pool for everyone, and to collaborate with you. What is it that employers in the United States are saying right now?

This is a survey that has been conducted over the last - well I guess they've been conducting it for a long time, but this graph here shows the percentage of small businesses that have positions that are open that they're not able to fill right now. So compared to five years ago, twice as many companies, small businesses, say that they have positions they're not able to fill right now, and it's over a third of all small businesses at this point.

Again, obviously this is going to vary by region, this is going to vary by industry, and this is one of the reasons it's so important for you to engage with your local businesses, so you can understand exactly what the problems are.

Ted Dacko

I'm guessing that this is more knowledge worker than anything else. Would that be a fair statement you would think?

Mike Kling

I suspect so. I think it is a reflection of that.

So as you're engaging with these local businesses, what is important for you to be discussing with them? Well try to put yourself in the shoes of a business. Learn about their hiring process right now. Where are they posting jobs? Are they using recruiters? What kind of costs are associated with those resources that they're using?

I’ll give a quick example here. There's a company called Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, and they're a software consulting firm. They originally struggled to hire good software engineers for their business. What they did was they decided to innovate in their interviewing practice. So they changed to a longer, more interactive type of interview, where people were brought on with a kind of provisional basis, with ongoing evaluation. The result of that was greatly improved retention, and higher quality hires for them.

Now I'm not saying that you can just take an idea like that, and tell your employers to do this and they're going to have an easy time hiring software developers. What I am saying is there's an opportunity for you to, by engaging with employers, learn about best practices. Potentially find some things that can be shared. Remember the goal here is putting yourself in their shoes, and understanding the problem. What skills and what types of positions are they struggling to fill right now?

Lastly, in some cases if this challenge of talent attraction is a big enough one for the companies, and they're struggling with this enough, and you can present some program or some opportunity that can help with that it could be an opportunity for you to get funding or sponsorship for your talent attraction efforts.

OK, you've engaged with your local businesses, you've looked at what's out there, you've evaluated your community. The next step is figuring out what type of audience you'd like to target with your talent attraction efforts. I think you touched on this a little bit earlier, but we'll kind of break this down into two broad categories. There's people in your region right now, in the existing workforce, and then there are people outside of your region.

For people within your region, that could include current students, it could include people thinking about switching careers and going back to school, it could include people currently unemployed or underemployed. Then there's people that are maybe in your community that just don't know about companies that are out there. Ted, I think you can maybe speak to this a little bit.

Ted Dacko

Yeah. Well you know, my personal experience is that I actually live in Ann Arbor right now. I came here almost 20 years ago, almost 30 years ago now, but I came as part of an acquisition in a software company. It was an earn out, so I decided to come and spend three or four years in Ann Arbor. I spent five and when the earn out was over and I decided to leave, I was unaware of other senior level technical roles. I'm sorry, senior level roles in technical companies. So I ended up going back to work for a company in Connecticut, and I commuted back and forth, because I was simply unaware. There was no job board, there was no community program around that.

Then finally I was shocked to find out that there were software firms, and technology senior level, executive level positions in the area, but I spent five years commuting back and forth to Connecticut. I can tell you on that plane every Monday morning, I saw the same faces. So I was not alone in that.

Mike Kling

Yeah. It really shows you the importance of knowing what's in your community.

On the other side we have people that are outside of your region right now. This could include maybe former residents, former students that graduated and then left. There's potential newcomers. As an example, in Ann Arbor we have the university obviously. When there's new faculty members maybe considering taking a position at Ann Arbor, they might be considering offers at different universities across the United States. What is it about Ann Arbor that's going to make them choose to come here?

So are they going to be looking at the quality of life, housing prices. Maybe thinking about if their spouse or partner is going to be able to find a good job here as well. Finally, there may just be specific skills that businesses in your community need to hire for that you're not able to train for locally, and you're going to have to attract people.

All right, so you've got an audience in mind of people that you're trying to attract, or engage. You need to start thinking about what your sales pitch is going to be. As part of that, you need to remember how essential your website is. Your website is the face of your organization. It has to be up to date, it has to be fresh, and look good. If you're thinking about attracting younger, maybe more technical workers it's important that your website not look like it was built 20 years ago. You need colors, images that are fresh.

Obviously it's essential for everyone, not just those younger more technical workers, but you don't want people looking at your website and saying I don't think this is the kind of place that I really want to live.

Ted Dacko

It's always surprising to me Mike, how little time companies in general, and economic development organizations, specifically spend making sure that their messaging is right for the kind of talent that they're trying to attract to the area, and/or the poor quality of some of the tools and applications on that website to help those individuals. I guess your seeing a lot of that in some of your individual work with TrueJob.

Mike Kling

Yeah. It's very important that ... It's like any good marketing campaign. You have to have a clear concise message that really speaks to your audience. When you start thinking about the content that you have on your website, again you have these two audiences. You have the business audience, you have the individuals, maybe potential newcomers. If you've been following say the Amazon search for their new headquarters, you have to imagine that they had a team of people going to EDO websites and looking around, collecting data, and using that to compare the benefits of these different communities.

Ted Dacko

Not only the benefits, but the talent pool in those areas, because they don't want to go to an area where there is no talent. So I'm sure they're looking at the individual, not the individual company job boards, but the aggregate economic development organization job boards to make sure that they're seeing that there is sufficient talent in that region to support the Amazon initiative.

Mike Kling

Yeah. Obviously it's essential for businesses that they know there's going to be a good workforce if they're looking to open a business in a new area.

Ted Dacko

I do know that many of these economic development organizations, their business development function is primarily focused on doing two thing, well three things. Engaging the companies that are currently being engaged with them, continuing that engagement. Expanding that engagement with other companies in the area that they currently are not engaged with, and the biggest challenge that organizations have, and the biggest benefit is attracting new employers to that region, to that economic development organization.

I know that when a person gets a job in Ann Arbor nobody cares, but when Google moved here it was front page news, and that impact is what we need to focus on.

Mike Kling

Yeah. As an EDO you know the importance of getting these businesses to your community.

What you see on this slide are some examples of content that might be relevant, particularly for say talent attraction and maybe those individuals considering coming to your community. So stuff like cost of living resources, what kind of infrastructure, schools, healthcare facilities are available. Information about relocation, maybe housing prices and availability. We've seen some regions experimenting with incentives. Maybe offering to pay off part of student debt for young people that come to their community.

Finally, again what we kind of just talked about, showing the depth, the breadth, and availability of job opening that are going to be there for those individuals in this community. The way that you can do that is by having a high quality and curated job board specifically for your economic development organization.

Ted Dacko

What does curated mean Mike?

Mike Kling

Curated just means something where you can choose exactly which jobs and which companies are appearing.

Ted Dacko

Okay. So you're not looking for necessarily janitorial jobs in the job board, you're looking for knowledge worker jobs here. Correct?

Mike Kling

That's right.

Ted Dacko

You know the important part of that is the high quality curated and EDO specific, because I've seen job boards of economic development organizations that are 15 years old, don't have the right jobs on them, and they actually turn off the job seekers as opposed to turn on the job seekers.

Mike Kling

Right, exactly. We talked about that with the quality of your website. You don't want something that looks like it's built 20 years ago, you want something that looks fresh and up to date.

Ted Dacko

Because the employers then won't use it, and the job seekers won't use it either.

Mike Kling

That's right. So we're going to dig into that a little more as this kind of specific example here. I will highlight this quote from Phil. This is speaking again, showing that depth of, and breadth of opportunities to potential newcomers. “It's great to be able to say, not only come for this job, but you'll also have a career long availability of options.”

Ted Dacko

Mike, I have to say this. We use Ann Arbor SPARK, because they were the first customer, but they are not the only customer of TrueJob. Correct?

Mike Kling

That is correct.

Ted Dacko

Okay. Just wanted to make sure. So let's move to our third survey question. This one is, does your economic development organization's website currently have a job board of openings for local companies? It's a simple yes or no question. So open the poll, and please participate folks in the poll. Let's leave this open for a couple more minutes. Go ahead and close the poll Mike. What do the results say?

Mike Kling

So it looks like not too many economic development organizations are doing this right now.

Ted Dacko

Are you surprised?

Mike Kling

I'm not surprised. This is what we've seen working with, again EDOs across the US, but hopefully you'll be able to see what we see as some of the benefits of this.

Ted Dacko

I'm guessing that those people who said no they don't have one, are saying well we use Indeed, we use Monster, we use those websites for job openings. What's wrong with that?

Mike Kling

Right, what is wrong with sites that exist right now? Sites like Indeed, sites like Monster? Your local employers probably are using these to do hiring. Sorry, it looks like I forgot to close the poll. Okay there we go. Sorry about that.

What we've seen on some EDO websites is maybe you have a resources section, and you're linking directly to these sites. So you have someone that's on your website, they're engaged, they're looking around, and then you just send them off to this other third party resources. You're really losing that engagement as soon as you do that.

In addition to losing that engagement, you're also losing any branding and credit you can get for being part of the hiring process. As soon as someone leaves your website they're looking at Indeed now, they're not looking at your EDO. In addition, sites like this they don't know your region the way that you do, and they care a lot more about the quantity of jobs on their platform than the quality. We talked about curation a little bit a moment ago. Ideally you'd like something where you can highlight key industries and positions in your region, and using curation is a way you can do that to choose specifically the companies and jobs that are appearing.

Finally, again you're not only losing that engagement, losing your branding, but you're losing valuable data and metrics that you can use to see are employers being successful. Are people finding jobs? What kind of insight can I get into hiring trends in my area? We haven't seen an EDO yet that's not measured on this type of data.

Ted Dacko

So the tracking, reporting, and analytics are absolutely essential to this, and that's simply not available in the publicly available job boards.

Mike Kling

So what kind of benefits could you see from a job board like this? A job board directly addresses this challenge of talent attraction, can help you improve the perception of your brand. Can really help drive website traffic. We're going to look at the job board that Ann Arbor SPARK implemented in a moment, but right now 50% of all of their web traffic goes to their job board.

Ted Dacko

50%?

Mike Kling

Yeah, exactly. Half of all their web traffic goes to their job board.

Ted Dacko

So if you don't have one, one could assume potentially double your traffic to your website?

Mike Kling

Yeah.

Ted Dacko

Wow.

Mike Kling

This can be an opportunity for you to get content for marketing. Say new job opportunities in your area, new employers that are hiring or expanding, and also to collect contact information. To reach out to about say events, and other things that you're doing. Remember again, if people are going to sites like Indeed or Monster you're not getting any of that.

We've highlighted this in the quote from Phil earlier, but something like this can be a resource for newcomers to your area. So they can see that if their first job in your region doesn't work out, they're not going to be stuck. There's going to be other jobs there for them to move to.

This can be a resource to help attract and serve existing businesses. So we touched on this earlier as well. In terms of attracting businesses, if they see the other companies that are hiring, and see that the EDO is going to be helping them with talent attraction, then that's another good reason for them to consider coming to the region.

Finally, if you're adding a resource like this, some kind of job board resource, and it's not able to collect data and track metrics then that's not going to be useful for you. It's so important for you to be collecting that data, be measuring engagement, and sharing those accomplishments.

Ted Dacko

So you can capture how many, well you're going to cover this a little bit later, but the fundamental metric is, how many jobs did you in your EDO actually help fill through your initiative? You can do that.

Mike Kling

Right.

Ted Dacko

Outstanding. Outstanding.

Mike Kling

So let's take a look at an actual practical example of this. We're going to use Ann Arbor SPARK, and we heard a little bit from Phil earlier. They actually had a job board system on their website. An old system that had been around for a few years, but it was getting out of date, and they were being left behind in terms of features and they were losing engagement with employers as a result of that. What they realized was what they really needed was a platform that was modern, that was easy to use, that was going to be able to track these key analytics.

I think his last quote here kind of sums up what they've seen. "I've seen it become a really critical point as a tactical and impactful tool that you need to have as an EDO, and it's actionable."

Ted Dacko

You know, in discussions with the marketing department at Ann Arbor SPARK Mike, they view this as just a must have, and it has been a boon to their metrics, to all of their marketing efforts, and they actually use the job site now as part of their engagement with the local community.

Mike Kling

Yeah. Let's take a quick look at the SPARK homepage. What does that look like? Now as you can see SPARK has really made talent attraction a priority for their organization. Right on their homepage they have a place for potential job seekers to go to, and when they do they are brought to the SPARK job portal. Again, we mentioned this before, but 50% of all their web traffic is going to this resource.

Now this is powered by TrueJob. It's a curated resource of high quality, what they call, knowledge worker positions. We talked about the audience that SPARK’s trying to reach a little bit before. They want to attract these knowledge workers to their region, and show that breadth of opportunity available.

Now what you don't see here is that whole backend system collecting that data and metrics about how people are engaging with this, and we're going to get back to that in a little bit.

Ted Dacko

Good.

Mike Kling

So what is it about this system that makes it work so well for SPARK, and helps it to match the needs that Phil talked about? As you saw this was branded to the SPARK website in a seamless way. When you're adding a new tool like this you want to make sure you're getting the credit for what's happening on the platform. So it's important that the look and feel really again, integrates seamlessly with your existing brand and website.

Next is that curation, which we've been talking about. SPARK has this audience in mind of knowledge workers that they're trying to reach, but you should be able to choose the audience that you're trying to reach. Maybe you're looking to reach students, and you want to have different types of internships.

Ted Dacko

Or healthcare.

Mike Kling

Or healthcare, or manufacturing, or whatever it is.

Next, you need a resource that's easy to use and maintain. You don't want to be creating more work for yourself. So at Ann Arbor SPARK right now, managing this system where employers signup, and get approved, and post jobs, and then approve those jobs is handled by the administrative assistant to the president, and it only takes minutes a week.

Ted Dacko

Three aspects of this though Mike, because not only it has to be easy to use for the audience on the webinar today, but it has to be easy to use and maintain both for the companies in the region, and for the job seekers. I know that one of the things that was killing SPARK in the past with their old job board is companies stopped using it because it was too difficult for the companies to post the jobs.

Mike Kling

Yeah, that's a big problem. We talked before about having a website that looks like it was from 20 years ago. If you have this obsolete resource that's hard to use people aren't going to engage with it.

Next, extra support for small employers. So SPARK works with some startups, and some small businesses that may not have an HR department in place already. So as part of our system we've actually integrated a basic applicant tracking system to help those small companies manage their hiring process.

Finally, again this analytics and reporting. You need to be able to tell if you're being successful, and measuring those analytics is going to help you tie everything together and show the value of this resource.

OK, so if you've implemented a new resource, or even more generally if you're starting some kind of talent attraction campaign, remember the importance of outreach. This is kind of the next step in our talent attraction plan. Here on the left are some specific channels that you can use to do that outreach, and some of them we've seen before. Maybe you have a job seeker mailing list. Maybe you have a blog specifically for talent. Maybe you have social media campaigns, other online ad campaigns.

I'll share one example of an event that Ann Arbor SPARK runs. This is called the tech homecoming. That's hosted by SPARK, I think just before Thanksgiving each year. They advertise this for people that are returning to the community to show them the new companies, the new job openings that are available. They actually use the job board as a resource at that event to direct people to, so they can see all of that information.

Then on the right here, what are you going to actually be saying when you're reaching out? What kind of information is going to be part of those outreach campaigns? Potentially new job opportunities, new employers, or employers that are expanding. If you're tracking what's happening then you could potentially get some success stories from companies that have been able to hire, or individuals that have decided to come to the region. Then maybe milestones in those metrics that you're tracking. Say 10 new software developers hired by some company in your area.

I just want to emphasize again, just how important it is to have a promotional campaign around a talent attraction effort or resource that you're creating. These are some points here, some examples of other promotional campaign ideas, but this is how people are going to become aware of it. So it's essential.

Ted Dacko

Promotion is absolutely essential.

Mike Kling

Yes.

Ted Dacko

And you have resources to help.

Mike Kling

That's right. We kind of wrap up our talent attraction plan with again, tracking the results of your efforts, tracking those key metrics and reports. In a lot of cases this is hard to do with a lot of different programs. If you're just spending money on advertising it can be very difficult to quantify how effective that's being. So this is one of the benefits of having a resource, say like a job board. If you're driving people to that resource then you can measure how much people are engaging with it, and how much they're using it.

So I'm going to highlight a few key metrics here that might be important for you to track. First engagement from employers. Which employers in your area are signing up, engaging with your platform, and your outreach campaign? New job openings. Which companies are having new job openings? Which industries, and which locations are growing in your area? Engagement from job seekers. This reflects potential newcomers to your area. So if you have a resource like a job board, then you could measure are people viewing your jobs? Are they actually clicking apply? If you started say a new social media campaign, and you're measuring this kind of data then that could really help you judge the effectiveness of that campaign.

Next getting even more detail about that user engagement. What is it that job seekers have preferences for in your area? Which kind of companies are they interested in? Which kind of job openings do they prefer?

Ted Dacko

So for instance, in a system like TrueJob, they can actually like and dislike words, and jobs, et cetera, and you can report that back to the employer about what is actually attracting those individual people, or what they might not like about the job?

Mike Kling

Exactly.

Ted Dacko

Wow.

Mike Kling

This can be really valuable data for the employer.

Ted Dacko

Great.

Mike Kling

Finally filled jobs. We've heard this referred to by one of our clients as the kind of holy grail metric for EDOs is measuring how many jobs have they actually been able to fill as a result of their efforts. We built this into the TrueJob platform. We do followup with employers after job postings expire or are deactivated, to see and ask them "Were you able to fill that job opening?" Then sharing that data back with you, the EDO.

What kind of metrics has SPARKS seen as a result of the job board that they implemented? Again, 50% of their website traffic goes to the job board. This is a huge driver of engagement with their website. Half of all their website traffic goes to this resource. There's been over 300 local employers signing up and engaging with it. As compared to their old system, which we replaced, we increased engagement with job seekers by 60%.

Ted Dacko

Wow. That's from an EDO that already had a job board. Imagine what would happen if they hadn't had one.

Mike Kling

Exactly. So more job seekers looking at jobs, applying to jobs. It's an excellent resource. I'll read the quote here from Jenn Cornell. She's the VP of marketing at SPARK. "TrueJob has been an incredible asset to our website. It's an impactful driver of website traffic. The job portal was viewed over 300,000 time in the last year, more than double the traffic from the previous year."

Ted Dacko

That's against an EDO that already had one.

Mike Kling

That's right.

So how is SPARK actually measuring this data? In the case of TrueJob, we provide this analytics dashboard where you can view these different metrics that we shared, like employer signups. You can view them in graph form, in list form, filter in different ways, export them to use as you wish. We have all those metrics we talked about. Things like jobs viewed, job applications submitted, and jobs actually filled.

Ted Dacko

All right. So let's ask our final poll question of the day. Which of the talent metrics would you be most interested in tracking? So we're going to launch that poll, and we're giving you a couple of choices. There's a lot of metrics that we have. These are probably the most popular, so help us understand what you would think. Can they choose one or multiple?

Mike Kling

I think you can choose multiple on this.

Ted Dacko

All right.

Mike Kling

Give people a couple minutes.

Ted Dacko

Not minutes, seconds. All right, couple more seconds. Three, four more seconds folks. Keep hitting that submit button. All right, let's go.

Mike Kling

All right we're going to close it.

Ted Dacko

Well no surprise there.

Mike Kling

No surprise there. Looks like again, as we said we know how important measuring that jobs filled number can be to EDOs.

Ted Dacko

But it seems like all the metrics were reasonably important to, mostly important to all of the people on the phone. That's very good. All right, summarize, close the poll, and let's give us a summary Mike. Then we're going to take some questions.

Mike Kling

Sure. A quick summary of what we talked about. EDOs can and do play a key role in talent attraction for their region. We mentioned this at the very beginning, but there's no silver bullet here. Solutions are going to ultimately have to be comprehensive, you need to have a long term view, and realistic expectations.

Next, remember the importance of engaging with businesses. They know the problems they're having. So talk to them and find out exactly what your region needs to be focused on. Then as you're building these talent attraction campaigns thinking about what you're going to be, how you're going to be reaching out, remember the importance of your website, and think about how critical and important a resource like a curated job board could be for you to help with those efforts.

Finally, it's essential for you to track metrics and help quantify the results of your outreach, and those talent attraction efforts you're doing. You should always be striving to do this.

Ted Dacko

Okay. So let's take a couple of questions. Obviously, the top three questions that we've been monitoring are, and you understand this, economic development organizations don't have a huge excess of funds, they don't have a huge excess of people, they don't have a huge excess tof ime. So the top three questions that we got during the webinar was. What's it cost? How long does it take? And, what kind of resources ... I think you've already covered this, but what kind of resources do I need? Do I need an IT department to do this?

Mike Kling

Sure. I'll just kind of run through those quickly. Right now TrueJob has two components to our pricing. We have an implementation fee and a annual subscription fee. The implementation fee covers things like branding with your existing website, helping you with that promotional campaign we talked about, pre-populating that job board with local positions to help you get a jump start.

Ted Dacko

How does that work? You actually go out and scrape?

Mike Kling

Yeah. We collect high quality postings from company websites in your area to help initially populate that job board.

Ted Dacko

Wow.

Mike Kling

Exactly.

Ted Dacko

That's good.

Mike Kling

That costs starts at I believe $850 for that implementation fee.

Ted Dacko

One time?

Mike Kling

One time fee. Then we have our annual subscription fee. Which covers hosting. Again, this is a system with nothing to install, it's all fully hosted by us. Future releases, and features, and technical support provided to you and to anyone using the platform. That ranges between about $5,000-11,000 a year.

Ted Dacko

So for $5,000 for a smaller economic development ... I'm guessing this is size. The size of the EDO defines the price?

Mike Kling

Right. The size of the region that's served.

Ted Dacko

Okay. So basically for under $6,000 they could be up and running. How long does this take?

Mike Kling

Implementation doesn't take long. It takes less than a week to get started. There's just a small snippet of code that we add to your website.

Ted Dacko

So you don't have to have a brand new website. You're just using their existing website and putting something on it.

Mike Kling

Exactly.

Ted Dacko

And training?

Mike Kling

Yep, we do training. So we'll work with you to make sure you understand how to use the platform.

Ted Dacko

I think you said earlier that the administrative assistant to the CEO at SPARK actually manages the entire site. So this does not take an IT resource.

Mike Kling

That's right. Let me just look through, and see if there's any other. Again, we'll follow up with some information afterwards. You're going to have access to the slides, we're going to answer any questions we don't get to. Let's see. This one person asked, "Has Ann Arbor been successful in recruiting people from outside their area?" I think the answer to that is yes.

Ted Dacko

Absolutely.

Mike Kling

We can even probably put you in touch with someone that could speak to that from SPARK. I know we've heard specifically of people that have again, seen this resource, seen the breadth of opportunities available in the area, and made the decision to come to Ann Arbor as a result of that.

Ted Dacko

Yeah, and I know that when they pitch new companies who are thinking - that was the people part, the company part. This is one of the major ways that they use to pitch companies to come here.

So in the interest of time should we move on? We only have a couple minutes left. If we didn't get to your question we will get back to you individually. Let's move on to some next steps.

What you can do is you can visit the TrueJob website, www.truejob.com. There is a white paper on the site about how economic development organizations can use job boards. You can read a case study on SPARK. There will be a recorded version of this webinar, as well as the prior webinar that we did where the executive vice president of SPARK actually talked about their job board. There is also going to be an interview with him that will be up on the website. That will be in both text form, as well as audio form as well.

I think the company is offering a free consultation on how they implement a job board for job site on your current site. With that, we're trying to respect your time. We thank you. Mike, thank you for a very informative webinar.

Mike Kling

Well thank you Ted.

Ted Dacko

All right. With that we will bid you folks a good afternoon. Please follow up with us if you have any other further questions, and we will get back to you if we did not address your individual question. With that, good afternoon folks, and thank you for attending.