834: LIVE from ⁠InsightsEDU⁠ 2024 - with Michelle Neumann, Digital Advertising Account Manager, HigherEdJobs

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast, where we make education your business. This is Dr. Joe Sallustio. I've done a few of these podcasts in my day, and I'm going to continue to do them here at Insights EDU from Phoenix, Arizona, the conference hosted by Education Dynamics, all about online college student marketing and enrollment. We've recorded approximately 20 or so episodes, which is a lot. I'm not gonna lie. It's a lot, you guys.

As I said to my last guest, I also ate four desserts at lunch. I feel a little heavy right now. My brain is foggy. I have to do a panel in about half an hour, so I need to get ready for that. I don't know what I'm gonna do. I'll probably just jump off the stage or something.

But somebody who's gonna keep me level and tell me about what's happening in our industry right now is going to do the majority of the talking, which is great. And I'm gonna ask her really important, amazing questions like I usually do. Ladies and gentlemen, here she is. Her name is Michelle Newman. She's a digital advertising account manager at Higher Ed Jobs. What's going on Michelle, how are you?

Michelle Newman: Good today. How are you, Joe?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I should have had three desserts now. To be honest with you, I feel like I'm paying the price right now. I would like to pour coffee into my eyeballs. That's basically how I'm feeling. You're here at Insights EDU. Tell me about why you're here with Higher Ed Jobs. I mean, I think I know, but talk to the audience about why you're here and what kind of conversations you're having.

Michelle Newman: Sure, we are one of the sponsors here at the conference. Higher Ed Jobs is the leading career site for higher education. This is actually a new conference for us. We have not sponsored before. So it's something that we wanted to check out, see this audience, and see if the people attending would have interest in what we offer. It's been a learning experience for me so far because I'm gauging the interest here for both people coming to the booth and the sessions.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Has anybody been coming to your booth? Because if not, I'm going to start calling. I'm going to get this as a mobile podcast and tell them to come see you.

Michelle Newman: Yes, we're in a good spot. We're over there right by the entrance to the ballroom. So a lot of people have stopped, grabbing the materials, asking some questions. A lot of people love to come and just tell us that they found their job on our site. So every conference I go to, that's what I hear. "I just love Higher Ed Jobs. It's wonderful." And I know our leadership loves to hear that too. We're so different than any other job board like Indeed or Monster because we're so focused on higher education. So it's just a great fit.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Amazing. So you said that people are interested in the services that you offer. Other than the obvious, because I know Higher Ed Jobs, somebody's listening that's going, "I've never heard of Higher Ed Jobs." What are the services that you provide? And why is Higher Ed Jobs so important to higher education?

Michelle Newman: Well, I come to these conferences because most people don't know that we also offer advertising solutions. We offer digital advertising and we have newsletter sponsorship, sponsored content. We offer targeted email advertising because we are able to reach 200 different academic areas. So it's highly targeted to higher ed professionals, and we're able to really drill down to that audience and help people market either with branding or hiring campaigns, promoting graduate enrollment programs. That's why I come. I'm looking for those types of people to talk to who may not know us and know that we have these offerings.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Okay, so paint me a picture of somebody who's interested and comes by. I didn't know that you have digital marketing services. Maybe I have graduate programs. And so perhaps I want to market to higher ed professionals that are looking for graduate programs? Is that kind of the way that it might work?

Michelle Newman: Exactly. So people coming to our site are looking to advance their career, and they may need that master's or doctorate degree or certificate. And so it's a natural fit for those types of programs to advertise with us because they can reach those exact people looking to advance their career.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Higher Ed Jobs, why is it so important to higher education? That was kind of the second part of my question. I think the most important part because we, well, I'm gonna let you answer it. I was gonna answer it too, because I think I might know the answer, but you go ahead.

Michelle Newman: Well, we're well aware of how higher ed has really had challenges in the last couple of years since the pandemic. Enrollment is down, there are those types of challenges. Hiring is, you know, people are really trying to find high-quality candidates. I have been on calls where they say, "We used to get tons of resumes and now we're just not seeing that type of people because the job market is so ultra-competitive right now."

So we can really help them find those high-quality candidates. And we're trying to find more information from our job seekers and trying to pull more data from them, and also even from our employers so that we can make that perfect match and help people advance in higher ed.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, as well as I do that there was an exodus of professionals from higher education too, right? There are a lot of people that left higher ed. As a hiring manager in higher education in my day job, which some people know, some don't, that I actually am a Chief Experience Officer at Lindenwood University. I hire people all day long every day. I think I have like 200 people in my division. So we're always hiring. It's super stinking hard to find anyone, and I mean anyone.

Not just department-specific, but if I was going to get department-specific, finding people in financial aid is the hardest thing known to man on the face of the earth. First of all, financial aid people don't, they're risk-averse, they don't leave the jobs that they have. It's the most secure position in the history of higher ed. It's more secure than faculty. You got to have Title IV for financial aid. So it's hard to find, but then even just finding a good enrollment representative, student success professionals, it is hyper-competitive. And so you have to have some kind of an edge.

Is this just across the country you're seeing this, that it's really hard to find great candidates?

Michelle Newman: It is. And you know, the job market is different now because of COVID. Remote opportunities are what everybody wants now. So if you don't have remote opportunities, you're definitely at a disadvantage. And if you're not promoting that, if you do have those offerings, then you're missing something because I just know for myself, if we have advertisers that promote that they have remote openings, their ads perform significantly better.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You have it in, isn't it in the description, it'll say like the job - remote or - on ground or whatever it be. So you're saying if it's remote is in the description, those job ads perform better than others?

Michelle Newman: Absolutely. And then with display advertising, which is what I do, they should be promoting that in the display ad as well. Any messaging that goes out to job seekers, they should be promoting that. Another thing that could set you apart too is employer branding. And that's something that we offer that not enough people do. Like, why are you a great place to work? You need to give people a reason why they need to apply.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Bullseye.

Michelle Newman: If you're in a great location, if you have a super awesome competitive benefits package, you need to be promoting that. They need that reason. But I definitely think the remote opportunities also are what helps you stand apart.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You think that higher education is still averse to embracing remote? And I ask that because I have suggested at certain times to my colleagues, I'm like, you know, just hire remote. And then my colleague will say, "I don't think so." You have to think. By the way, you're serving online students. It kind of makes sense. You could have online remote. You think the industry is still averse to that right now?

Michelle Newman: It could be. And I mean, I know a lot of universities I work with, I have found because we're doing Zoom calls now and people are still working at home. So I think there's a lot of that depends probably on the type of position you have at the university, but you should at least be offering hybrid, giving people the opportunity to come in a couple of days, work from home a few days to have that work-life balance. That's so important to people.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I interviewed the founder president, I think he's president. Johnny C., as I like to call him. July 20th, 2020. That was a long time ago. That was in the middle of right after the pandemic started. And since then to now, we have finally the second person from Higher Ed Jobs coming on. We've seen people leave higher education. We've seen the as I talked about, it's very hard to find good people in higher education and presidential resignations. The presidential timeline or average year is going from six to four or something like that.

And then the job ad is changing for presidents. That's one thing I noticed because we obviously interview a ton of presidents and the advertisements for presidents are changing. And it'll say something like, used to say something like, you know, doctorate preferred, great academic pedigree, understands curriculum and programs, and blah, blah, blah. And now it'll say something like financial acumen and enrollment expertise.

What are you seeing on this front, management front?

Michelle Newman: That one is, that's a little harder for me to answer because I don't work on the recruitment side of our company.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Do you think there's a trend though? Do you think that schools are struggling to find the right leader to run? I mean, that's right, because it's a cycle. You don't have the right leader, you're not making the right investments, you're not making the right investments, then you can't keep your people and if you can't keep your people, you need new people and then you're not investing money again and so on. What do you guys talk about this when you meet and talk about like the state of the industry?

Michelle Newman: Again, they probably do on the other side of my business.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So what do you talk about? What do you guys meet on the digital side?

Michelle Newman: The digital side is really trying to offer our advertisers the ability to target, highly target the right people that they want to reach so that our advertising is extremely cost-efficient. There's no wasted ad dollars and budgets are low everywhere and everybody struggles with what type of advertising is really effective, what's going to work for me. They've tried so many things and nothing sticks.

You know, obviously Google and social media is huge for every university, but we're kind of a one-off where we can really target that highly high-quality person that's highly educated. And so that's sort of what's different.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You have worked from like a database of information you've collected over the years. Is that how, primarily how this might work?

Michelle Newman: So when a job seeker comes to our site and they create an account, similar to any type of job board. You can create an account and you put the type of position you're looking for, where, what your expertise is, what are you interested in, and then we serve job alerts to that candidate for the types of positions that they're looking for. So with that information that we gather on that user, we're trying to gather more and more so that we really have a lot of information on our job seekers. And that's very valuable to the employers because we want to be able to make that match with the candidate and the employer.

But that helps me with digital advertising as well because I can tell our customers, you know, we can target just the specific audience for you. And we know that information because they're providing it to us.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So you have it segmented out. You have some kind of CRM. You have it segmented by audience, maybe by education level. How is it segmented? Give me some ways that I might be able to cut it up if I was interested in advertising.

Michelle Newman: We have several different filters available. Like I said before, we have 200 academic areas. That's all ranging in faculty administrative areas, staff executive roles. We also are able to segment by the highest degree level, which is great for say a doctorate program who only wants to target people with a master's. They may work in a specific area.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So I'm really almost like really maximizing my spend.

Michelle Newman: Absolutely because I'm only marketing to those that are meeting the profile.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Absolutely. Do you have a lot of job seekers? So are primarily the people who are marketing with you or spending money with you, institutions offering bachelor's, master's, doctoral, anything below that? I don't want to say below, but anything. Alternative credentials and all that kind of stuff.

Michelle Newman: Yeah. Certificate programs are really big right now because graduate enrollment has been down.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: True.

Michelle Newman: So certificates have become more popular certainly. And because we have all that targetability, we can target, we can advertise, help you promote that certificate to that very specific audience. So it's really very cost-effective. And it's very affordable. That also sets us apart from other types of publications.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: If I want to know how affordable, of course, I can reach out to you and we can have an individual conversation. You will learn by the numbers. I will teach you. Michelle will teach you the numbers when you get to know them. What else do you want to say about Higher Ed Jobs, the work that you're doing? What's going on? Anything to this audience? That's we're probably gonna flip your episode around pretty soon. People will hear everything that you have said. What do you want to leave us with?

Michelle Newman: Well, we really just try to be the best resource possible for anybody working in higher ed, whether you're an employer or you're looking for a job. We want to find the best match and really help people find success in their career and be able to advance, and we try to make it as easy for our customers and our job seekers as possible.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And then bad work by me by asking you questions about the other side of your business, which of course you didn't know. And I knew that. And then I asked you anyway, because I get excited. And then you're like, "But Joe, that's..." We talked about that. I'm like, I forgot. But this is the way it works. Sometimes in podcasting you get excited. You go, "Well, tell me about this." One of the things as a hiring manager, I'm always thinking about who you know, what do I need to do next? I'm thinking forward. But also I manage marketing and enrollment. So I have to think about growing the front end of the business.

You can't do one without the other. You need great employees, you need to generate information. You need to generate leads for your programs. And if you want to generate more targeted inquiries for your programs, Higher Ed Jobs is one way that you can do that. How do we find out more if somebody's interested in going okay, should I just go to the Higher Ed Jobs website? Should I contact Michelle Newman from the hours of 12am to 6am on her cell phone? What is the preferred method of contact?

Michelle Newman: Certainly you can go to higheredjobs.com. There's a lot of information right there on the site if you're a job seeker. But if you're interested in marketing, if you scroll down to the bottom, there's a little link there. It says marketing solutions. That will take you to the section of the site that I handle as far as digital advertising. But if you're a hiring manager and you want to post jobs, there's also right across the top where it says employers. And then it will give you information on posting a job or job packs, different types of upgrades that you can do as well to really give it more visibility.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, you heard it here, ladies and gentlemen. She's my guest today. No, she's your guest today. Here's Michelle Newman. She's digital advertising account manager, Higher Ed Jobs. Michelle, did you have fun? You were nervous, but I think you pulled it off very well.

Michelle Newman: Thank you. No, you make it very easy. So thank you for your time.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: There you have it. Ladies and gentlemen, you've just ed upped.