The Dow Jones University Recruiting Team

Recruiting over a hundred interns for a company that’s equal parts publishing, technology, and financial news is a serious challenge. Doing it with a one-person team is an even greater one.

Rob Boehm, who serves as the sole member of the company’s university recruiting team and was responsible for filling upwards of 100 positions by himself, initially met that challenge by pounding the pavement—literally. He visited dozens of schools, followed up with candidates when he had the chance, and performed the first-round phone interviews himself. He also managed all of the applicants coming through their website/ATS.

“The first year I was in this role, I ran myself into the ground. Having WayUp as an extension of my team changed that.”‍‍

Dow Jones Had 3 Main Challenges

Administrative tasks and campus visits were taking too much valuable time and costing the business. This hindered the ability of Dow Jones to work on branding, candidate sourcing, and providing a great candidate experience.

Before partnering with WayUp, Boehm recognized three major challenges for Dow Jones:

• There were too many applicants and not enough time to review and respond to them— potentially creating a poor candidate experience.
• Dow Jones wanted to connect their brand to Gen Zers. They spent a lot of time on campus trying to create that brand, with in-person outreach, but those efforts weren’t scalable or effective. By partnering with WayUp, the goal was to “scale-up” their efforts and reach as many university students as possible.
• They wanted to expand their early-career talent pool by utilizing real-time data. Dow Jones was looking for a more efficient way to see how diverse candidates were moving through their recruitment process in real time. While they received diverse applicants, they wanted to be able to analyze candidate drop-off patterns by demographics and make impactful and strategic recruitment process changes.

The Path Forward For Dow Jones

Utilizing WayUp’s employer branding, sourcing, automated candidate screening, and phone screening solutions, Dow Jones was able to limit their dependence on in-person career fairs,  save time, and focus on strategic sourcing/diversity hiring—all while providing a consistent candidate experience to thousands of applicants.

HOW IT WORKED

• WayUp created a landing page that served as a hub for all internship candidates—without requiring a CRM and adding zero lift or tech work for Dow Jones.
• Targeted sourcing efforts attracted hundreds of qualified, diverse candidates for each role.
• Every candidate who applied to Dow Jones on the WayUp platform went through an automatic digital screen based on their qualifications and got a reply within 24 hours.
• All candidates were educated and kept warm with custom content campaigns like articles and a 360° video office tour.
• Candidates who passed the automated review were invited to schedule a first-round phone screen with a WayUp recruiting professional who would further qualify them based on culture fit, technical skills—or both—and give them soft-skills feedback.
• WayUp moved ONLY highly qualified candidates to Boehm at Dow Jones and provided detailed analytics throughout the recruiting process.

The Results:

The WayUp partnership allowed Dow Jones to save time by allowing them to focus only on qualified candidates.

1) Saved Hundreds Of Hours Per Week

With the extended team at WayUp assisting with tasks like initial resume review, responding to candidates, and coordinating and conducting first-round phone screens, Boehm saved hundreds hours per week—amounting to over 2,000 hours in a busy recruiting season.

2) Dow Jones Brought A More Robust Employer Brand Online

WayUp brought the Dow Jones employer brand online and to life with custom branded content, like a 360° video office tour and an article marketing the different functions at the company, which were then distributed directly to their target audience. With tens of thousands of page views and an average conversion rate of 30%, Dow Jones drove thousands of qualified applications with their WayUp content campaigns.

3) Increased Diversity In Applicant Pool & Prevented Candidate Drop-Off

Dow Jones was also able to increase diversity in their applicant pool. 71% of candidates from WayUp were diverse (Black, Hispanic, Mixed, Native American, Female, or Non-Binary). By reaching out to diverse candidates to apply for their jobs and using actionable analytics—like data about diversity drop-off rates for specific listings—Boehm and the Dow Jones team were able to proactively make adjustments in real time to their recruiting process to ensure diverse talent was moving forward.

Robert Boehm
Campus Recruiting Lead at Dow Jones

Want to learn more? Feel free to reach out to engage@wayup.com with any questions or comments!