Change State Acquires Employee Engagement Platform Joyful Squad When we founded Change State in May of 2019, we set out to elevate the expectations of recruitment marketing agencies. To us, this means helping organizations grow in areas well beyond spending advertising budgets. We take the initiative to keep a pulse on new tools and technologies, while also never losing sight of what matters most to TA teams: finding quality, relevant candidates to fill open roles.  Ultimately, we believe the more a company knows about their employees, candidates, and recruitment experience, the more effe ..read more

Introducing Equal Opportunity Hires After several months of hard work, we are thrilled to announce the launch of Equal Opportunity Hires (EOH), our social impact initiative. At its core, EOH is a job search platform focused on connecting a diverse talent pool of job seekers directly with employers committed to equal opportunity hiring. Although we’re certainly not the first diversity-focused job board in the space (we hopefully will not be the last!), we believe we’re different than existing players in a few important ways: Only Direct Job Seeker Traffic Job aggregators have killed the candid ..read more

On a recent episode of The Changing State of Talent Acquisition podcast, we entertained a provocative question: Do employer brands exist? Our guest was Lindsay Peterson, a branding expert who has managed some of the world’s most recognizable household brands, including Clorox bleach, and now runs a brand strategy consultancy of her own. Lindsay has been thinking about branding for a long time, and teaches organizations to think of brand as a “north star”: a kind of conceptual framework that helps guide business decisions, from product design, to customer experience, and, yes – talent acquisiti ..read more

If you’re like most talent acquisition leaders, you probably pay close to a couple of top line metrics from your eSat surveys. You may be able to rattle off your latest NPS score, or perhaps you keep a close eye on the percentage of your employees who are satisfied or dissatisfied. And honestly, if you’re going to pay attention to just one or two outputs, these aren’t bad choices. They provide a pretty good 20,000-ft view of what’s going on with your workforce.  But what about the other 20+ questions in your survey? Effectively designed (and analyzed) eSat surveys should bring you much cl ..read more

In the middle of 2020, we were honored to be included as one of the Top 20 Recruitment Marketing Agencies in the United States by ONGIG. We made the list just one year after founding Change State, sharing the spotlight with many organizations that we’d worked with in our previous lives negotiating apply clicks for job board contracts.  One of the articles included in ONGIG’s list was a great read from Dr. John Sullivan on How To Assess A Recruitment Ad Agency. What amazed us is that while this article was written in 2001, Dr. John starts his article with a point that still rings true toda ..read more

When we set out to launch Change State 18 months ago, we did so after spending more than a decade listening to frustrated clients share what they were missing from their current recruitment marketing agency relationships. Again and again, we heard the same similar requests: Better attention to detail, more responsiveness, fresh ideas on marketing avenues, new tools and technologies that could add value to their organizations, and plenty more. The two common questions we heard were:  “Who do you recommend as a recruitment marketing agency? We don't like ours.”  and  “Yo ..read more

With the unexpected acceleration of remote work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, talent acquisition teams are rightly focused on new ways of using technology to promote their employer brands and enhance the candidate experience. Employee testimonial video tools like Altru, which were growing in popularity even pre-pandemic, are well-positioned to meet the demands of this “new normal” and yet, as with most technology, we remind our clients that these tools are only as effective as the strategy underpinning them. First, the good: Video capture tools make it incredibly easy to turn employees ..read more

For many good reasons, diversity and inclusion (D&I) has become one of the hottest topics in human resources in recent months, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Much has been written on the subject, and most reasonable people need no further convincing why these twin goals – (1) making sure your organization is seeking and attracting historically under-represented talent (the “D”), and (2) making sure your organization is a place where diverse talent feels welcomed and supported (the “I”) – are worthy of our collective attention as HR professionals.  At Change Sta ..read more

In an earlier post, we covered the power of generating an Employer Brand Perceptual Map as a strong foundation upon which to build your employer brand value proposition. By combining what’s important to employees when choosing an employer (also called employer brand decision drivers) with your brand’s perception on these same dimensions, you can quickly identify your brand’s core strengths and weaknesses, which are crucial inputs for answering the most fundamental question underpinning any EVP activity: Why should someone want to work for you? This question appears quite simple on the surface ..read more

Since the introduction of Google for Jobs and programmatic advertising engines, the way job postings are distributed across the Internet has changed fundamentally. Gone are the days when a few prominent job boards were “destination” sites from which the vast majority of candidates launched their job searches. In fact, some 70-80% of job searches now start on Google. For organizations with modern ATS’s and the resources to optimize their job feeds for indexing on Google, this has become an excellent new source of organic job traffic. Unfortunately, many organizations lack the technology or know ..read more