Content that is trusted delivers higher quality job candidates

In 2017, Azavea, the geospatial company based in Philadelphia’s Spring Garden neighborhood, had recently upgraded to a bigger office in a beautiful, recently renovated industrial building.

The growing GIS firm, which has more than 60 employees, is constantly in need of new talent, but now the stakes were even higher for Karissa Justice, Azavea’s People Operations Manager.

Justice advocated to sign up for Talent, Technical.ly’s hiring platform, because she was hoping to take advantage of Technical.ly’s expertise with paid content that could improve Azavea’s employer branding efforts. Plus, she was hoping to tap into Technical.ly’s vibrant audience of jobseekers.

Technical.ly worked directly with Justice and her team at Azavea to create content that would resonate with potential job applicants, like articles that featured dynamic aspects of the company’s culture, and custom story-driven job listings that explained what a role would be like, not just the dry responsibilities and requirements you’d see elsewhere.

The result?

“We get an absolutely huge value out of Technical.ly,” says Justice. “In 2018, 17 percent of our job applicants mentioned that they read about us on Technical.ly or specifically or clicked-through from Technical.ly jobs listings.”

Justice was impressed by the quality of the candidates sourced by Technical.ly. She shared that the company sees a steady percentage of Technical.ly applicants—about 15%—last through each stage of the pipeline, compared to other sources. Though sources may have a higher percentage in the initial applicant pool, fewer candidates from those sources make it through the company’s phone screens and on-site interviews. To her, this says the quality of a Technical.ly jobseeker is much higher than other sources.

Justice says that Technical.ly’s storytelling is capturing the imagination of jobseekers, and what’s special about Technical.ly is that its content is contributing to better candidate quality, and how a candidate makes decisions about where to work.

Candidates were consistently mentioning to Justice the content that had been published about Azavea on the Technical.ly platform — stories about culture, growth and employee passion projects, both in paid form via the Talent platform, and the separate editorial stories that our journalists wrote about the company — as the reason why they want to work at Azavea.

“Technical.ly’s messaging is resonating with jobseekers, and that’s why the quality [of candidates] is so high,” Justice said. “It’s helping us to differentiate locally.”

As of June, all five employees that the company hired in 2018 mentioned that Technical.ly was a resource used in their decision-making, showing that the content published is an additional tool that helps make things easier for their hiring team to close the deal, even when those candidate are not sourced directly from Technical.ly’s audience.

“They Google us, find Technical.ly articles, and want to work here even more,” said Justice.