MarTech Interview with Paul Lewis, CMO at Adzuna

Paul Lewis, CMO at Adzuna chats about the increasing complexities in today’s digital marketing environment:

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Can you tell us more about Adzuna?

Adzuna is a smarter, more transparent job search engine. We help millions of job seekers access millions of jobs each month, and help them cut through the noise, zero in on the right role faster and land the right job. Adzuna gives job seekers access to every available online job listing in a single site — without giving anyone else access to their personal data — and our unique tools and salary stats help them pinpoint the perfect role that allows them to know what they’re actually worth. We love using the power of our technology to match people to better, more fulfilling jobs and keep people around the world working. This mission feels particularly relevant as we look to move forward from the pandemic and into the working world again.

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You’ve recently taken over as CMO at Adzuna. Tell us about your marketing journey and more about your new role.

Throughout my marketing journey I’ve had over 20 years of extensive experience in scaling fast growth digital businesses. I was most recently Interim CMO at gift marketplace notonthehighstreet.com, where I worked across a number of key brand and customer focused projects following the private equity backed acquisition by Great Hill Partners. Prior to notonthehighstreet.com, I spent over five years at MOO.com where I oversaw and owned the global marketing strategy, driving growth in the US, UK and key European countries. My career also includes household names such as Hometree, VoucherCodes, Ancestry and Betfair, where I leveraged the full suite of brand, customer and digital marketing channels, driving strategic growth and helping to rapidly scale and develop loved, trusted, global consumer brands.

As the new CMO, I’ll lead Adzuna’s global marketing team, driving efforts to help millions of job seekers into new roles as the world gets back to work after the pandemic. 

As a new CMO to the platform, what are some of the core strategies and martech evaluations you’ll be focusing on initially?

Adzuna’s job matching technology is already used by tens of millions of job seekers every month and I will be responsible for creating and driving core strategies to grow this audience further across the world, leveraging a diverse range of marketing channels as well as supporting the existing team.

The core strategy is providing job seekers access to almost every available online job listing in one place so they can land the right role faster, indexing job ads from over 100,000 companies and more than 1,000 unique sources, from large job boards like Monster to direct employers like Amazon, Walmart and Ford. 

What are some of the ways in which B2B marketers today need to rethink their marketing processes and strategies to drive faster goals? 

As more and more areas of marketing move towards full digitisation, performance marketing will get increasingly complex, especially with areas like the ever changing cookie rules and the ever moving world of martech available to companies.  

The drive for a single source of customer data, multiple platform tracking and complex attribution models means marketing is becoming more of a data science role. This also requires a shift in mindset to drive growth in organisations.  If you can crack the balance between being data led and having creative flair, it goes a long way towards coming up with approaches that win across the entire long list of evolving marketing channels.  It’s also why your martech choice is so important. 

That said though, if you can only work on three skills to get better in 2022, make sure it’s: Communicate, Communicate, Communicate.

Communication is different for every single person at every level of an organisation, changing on a daily – and even hourly – basis.  It’s ever evolving and to make it even more complex, it’s also about listening.  If you can focus and work on this every single day, you’ll be a better leader. A better person.  

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As a marketing leader, what are some of the common marketing challenges you still often struggle with and those that you see peers find challenging too? 

My favourite quote I’ve coined is that “I build happy teams, because happy teams deliver.”  

The idea here is that you need to communicate with your teams, the business around you and even customers – to find what their happiness is.  Maybe it’s clarity of goals.  Maybe it’s a path to promotion. Maybe it’s just salary. 

If you can find what makes people happy, especially from teams you need to rely on, it’ll make things a hell of a lot easier. That, in turn, helps with achieving the goals set out for the business and beyond.

Make 2022 the year you take my quote on and really learn what makes your teams happy.

Marketing can be a fun and exciting function that can be made scalable with the right martech. Do you have a few top optimization thoughts to share? 

To optimize, businesses can use martech to help them focus on quality over quantity. For example, next generation job boards and job search engines are leveraging programmatic advertising to make hiring better for HR leaders and job candidates. The jobs market was already moving towards smarter matching of candidates to companies before 2020, and the global pandemic has accelerated that transformation tenfold. With high employee churn, HR leaders and teams have a serious resume sifting headache, and teaming up with platforms that efficiently provide a stream of quality candidates will be key to unlocking a tricky hiring environment.  

Programmatic job advertising platforms like Appcast, Joveo and PandoLogic are using AI to allow hiring managers more flexibility and control of the recruitment process than ever before. Jobs are posted at the optimal time, across multiple sources, and are taken down as soon as enough quality candidates have entered the pipeline – saving on recruitment costs. This goes beyond real-time bidding as the AI is able to optimize the process by predicting the best time for advertising a role. 

Programmatic recruitment is also inherently trackable, allowing end-to-end recruitment measurement. This has led to a shift in focus from a ‘pay to post’ to a ‘pay per performance’ model. Gone are the days of paying a flat rate no matter how hard a role is to fill; programmatic allows hiring managers to allocate budget to priority or tough to fill roles, while easy to fill jobs can be left unsponsored and served by organic traffic flow. 

We’d love to hear a few thoughts and predictions for the global marketing and martech segment for 2022.

As we exit the pandemic, if there’s one thing that a lot of marketers have learnt, it’s about remaining agile and being able to make quick decisions if needed. The marketing landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, creating opportunities for businesses that are able to move fast and adapt to the plethora of new martech out there.  With more of a focus on the data side of marketing, martech is becoming increasingly important.  To know your customers inside out, at every touchpoint of the funnel, is a science now more than ever.

If I had to sum up what I mean here, it’s to embrace change because it’s happening faster than ever.

Help your teams fail faster so that you can learn faster.  Visit old tests, old channels, old hypotheses and test them all again (and again three months later).  And pick the right martech setup that sets you up for success.

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