Enhancing recruitment strategies: Stepstone taps into AI-powered talent acquisition

Stepstone is a leading global job recruitment platform that connects millions of professionals across industries and sectors, transcending local markets. Their wide-reaching network, global presence, and innovative tools empower job seekers to make informed career decisions to find jobs they love. Their commitment to providing valuable resources and their global presence make Stepstone the go-to platform for professionals worldwide, offering a win-win solution for job seekers and companies seeking top talent.

Stepstone’s marketing strategy centers around delivering a holistic recruitment experience for their talent acquisition platform. They aim to guide job seekers through every step of the job search process, providing valuable resources and personalized career recommendations offsite, enhancing engagement and driving organic return visits.

To execute this strategy, Stepstone leveraged Criteo’s expertise in AI technology and access to a vast candidate pool that extends beyond walled gardens.

Harnessing data and AI to transform the employment-seeker experience

One of the key advantages of the partnership is Criteo’s ability to tap into a new candidate pool through their extensive open commerce dataset, which draws insights from 750M daily active users. This enabled Stepstone to target and engage a wider range of job seekers, including those who may not be actively searching for job opportunities. The expanded reach allowed Stepstone to connect with a more diverse talent pool and uncover hidden potential for their clients.

With a collaborative approach between Criteo and Stepstone, the value assessment of each job listing provided a ROAS value that was used to fuel Criteo’s bidding models. By leveraging this methodology, Stepstone maximized the impact of their advertising efforts by targeting users with job listings that have high potential for success, resulting in optimized advertising outcomes.

The strategic partnership with Criteo facilitated the effective acquisition of high-value prospects, turning idle individuals to active candidates through a combination of behavioral, prospecting and retargeting campaigns. By targeting specific behavioral personas based on deep behavioral affinities and life events such as “New Parents”, “Recent Movers”, “Students” and “Young Adults”, Stepstone increased platform engagement that resulted in higher net job applications with targeted campaigns. These campaigns helped to funnel candidates through the recruitment process, capturing their attention and driving them towards submitting job applications.

By aligning their marketing strategy with Criteo’s AI capabilities, Stepstone successfully reached and engaged a broader audience of job seekers, enhanced job seeker engagement, optimized customer lifetime value, and solidified their position as a trusted and leading recruitment platform.

Driving job seeker engagement and job applications

Stepstone’s acquisition campaigns with Criteo generated a 3X increase in qualified visit engagement compared to the previous year. Stepstone also saw a 2X higher conversion rate compared to other display campaigns, surpassing their social media and Google campaigns.

The success of Criteo’s acquisition and retargeting solutions led Stepstone to double their budget year-over-year with Criteo, while scaling their campaigns by 2X and lowering their cost per application costs by 20%. Additionally, Stepstone’s substantial incremental uplift in retargeting, resulted in a significant increase in job applications that would not have converted otherwise.

Stepstone’s Performance Display and App team shared, “We’re grateful for our partnership with Criteo for our recruitment advertising. Their expertise and tailored solutions have significantly improved our user engagement and conversion rates for job listings. We’re excited to continue leveraging Criteo’s advanced targeting capabilities and expanding our reach to attract even more qualified candidates.”

In the future, Stepstone will scale their campaigns for maximum reach by tapping into new audiences fueled by the extensive and diverse data from Criteo’s dataset, the world’s largest commerce dataset. Stepstone is also looking forward to optimizing their lookalike campaigns, that uses job applicants as a seed audience to target and engage similar candidates. These campaigns aim to expand their reach and attract potential candidates who share similar characteristics with the initial seed audience.