Category: In the News

Indeed, opening up their applicant pools has helped the publishers to hire more people of color and to find qualified employees whose primary shortcoming may be where they live. However, although the openness to remote hiring can help diversity, it can complicate equity depending on how companies handle the salaries of employees based in and out of major cities.

Bigger net, better applicants 

Quartz opened up hiring to “all applicants everywhere” last summer, as part of the hiring policy changes implemented to improve its process as well as diversify the applicant pool and subsequently staff. “Nothing compared to how fast and strong an impact opening up our applicant pool to remote applicants had,” said Quartz CEO Zach Seward.

“The quality and diversity of applicant pools [for] most positions increased dramatically,” Seward said. People of color now make up 42% of Quartz employees overall, up from 31% last year, and 50% of its editorial employees. This improvement happened “faster than I expected,” he added.

Brian O’Keefe, deputy editor at Fortune, said hiring people in different locations “allows us to hopefully have a larger pool of candidates and find great candidates for all the hiring we are doing.” Since the beginning of the year, Fortune has hired 22 full-time employees across the company. Almost half of those new hires are people of color, and half are outside of New York, according to Mike Kiley, Fortune’s svp of HR & talent. The company recently hired people living in Arkansas, Alabama, Virginia and North Carolina.

The expanded hiring pool is not just a change prompted by the pandemic. Seward and O’Keefe cited the tight labor market and competitive media industry as reasons for casting a wider net to find talent.

While there was “hesitancy” from management at first to let people work from anywhere and hire people from anywhere — “with this war for talent, especially for our more senior level positions, it’s much easier to fill if you’re more flexible,” Kiley said. 

And it can increase the amount of qualified applicants per opening, Kiley said. Historically, a Fortune job posting might get around 50 to 150 applicants, for example. But since opening up postings to applicants around the country, Kiley has seen double the amount of applicants for some job openings. A recent job posting for the role of vp of people operations at Quartz had 800 applications from “truly qualified” candidates, Seward said.

“We were putting ourselves at a competitive disadvantage” by not hiring more remote workers, Kiley said. “If you say [a job] is New York-only, you’re really limiting who you can hire.” When a media company hires in one specific market, its staff will only look like that one market, Seward said. Business and product employees across the country may not have big media companies in their area, but opening up a job to remote workers lifts that “arbitrary barrier” and brings media jobs to other regions, Seward said.

Fortune opened up a brand new office at the end of 2019, just months before the pandemic hit and everyone was forced to work from home. When employees leave their jobs and those positions need to be filled, Fortune still gives some priority to applicants in the New York area, according to Kiley, as ultimately the idea is that they could work from the new office when the pandemic dies down.

That’s not the case at Axios. “As we hire, we hire remote. We do not have any roles that are fully based in the office,” said Axios chief people officer Dominique Taylor. “We are location agnostic for the most part.” Before the pandemic, Axios had employees living in 16 states and now has employees in 31 states.

Axios is expanding its local newsletters to eight more cities this year, in places like Austin, Nashville and Philadelphia. The company hired as many people in 2021 as it did in 2020 and 2019 — about 160 people — evenly split between business and editorial. About 75% of those jobs are new roles at the company, which has a total headcount of around 400 people this year, Taylor said. Just over 40% of them are people of color, roughly on par with previous years.

Hiring outside of major cities may mean not paying major salaries

While the expanded applicant pool can help media companies improve their organizations’ level of diversity, it risks affecting the level of equity among employees. Hiring people outside of major cities does affect salary offers. Some company salaries are adjusted based on the market an employee lives in, and employees residing in areas with lower living costs often receive lower salaries. “It’s not a lot lower,” Kiley said. 

Axios and Quartz do not adjust salaries when employees relocate to another city. This might not remain the case at Axios forever, however. “We are still trying to think about what our philosophy is,” Taylor said, adding that it “doesn’t behoove us to penalize” employees for moving right now, given the ongoing pandemic. One idea is to adjust pay based on regions, such as whether an employee lives in a city, a suburb or a rural area.

“We are trying to find the best people. It’s been one of the great things we have really unlocked in the past year,” Taylor said. “The greater access we have to more candidates, the better.”

“I have not had a client ask about cookie deprecation again,” said Snowman who works with clients ranging from car dealer groups to regional banks.

Already, publishers said they are feeling the lack of momentum behind cookieless ad products and tech they’ve spent the last year or more building. “I don’t think we’re losing steam as much as there’s less urgency to migrate to them,” said Blair Tapper, senior vice president at The Independent U.S. regarding the publisher’s new contextual audience segments built from its first-party data.

“There is a question as to whether or not advertisers are going to pull back.”

Rebeca Solórzano, svp of programmatic operations and strategy at Forbes

Publishers, in general, took a deep sigh when Google pushed the deadline for killing off the cookies they’ve relied on to bring behavioral ad dollars to their sites. Indeed, many publishers said they just were not ready to wean themselves from cookies entirely, and there was a great deal of confusion about how Google’s cookie-replacing targeting methods would work in conjunction with their ad businesses. 

Now, though publishers said advertisers remain interested in the contextual and first-party products they’ve built — and they themselves are committed to staying the course in offering them — some worry advertisers could shy away from plans to spend on cookieless advertising. “There is a question as to whether or not advertisers are going to pull back,” said Rebeca Solórzano, svp of programmatic operations and strategy at Forbes, regarding the general conversation among publishers.

“You might see agencies and brands kicking the can [because] it’s going to affect your cost [key performance indicators] like cost per acquisition,” said Snowman, whose agency works with midmarket clients who are always concerned with quarterly business results.

Testing will wane ’till they’re backed into a corner again’

With the pressure off, publishers said advertisers have been less aggressive in terms of testing ad tech that doesn’t use third-party cookies. “It’s been more test-and-learn whereas it may have all been test,” said Tapper. 

According to one large publisher who asked not to be named, before the Google extension, marketers were spending to test cookieless ad targeting, but since then, “They’ve let loose on the throttle,” and there’s been little movement beyond the “pretty low test-and-learn budgets” that advertisers had already been planning. “We continue to see widespread interest in our cookieless solutions from marketers and agencies along with requests for test and learn frameworks,” said the exec. “However, actual spend coordinated with us directly has been minimal. It remains an information-gathering process.” The exec did not provide details on actual spending amounts.

Snowman said she’s seeing low test budgets from her advertiser clients, too, despite having expected that spending to have picked up to 30% to 50% when the original cookie deadline of early 2022 had neared. “We still aren’t anywhere close to 50% cookieless testing, in general,” Snowman said.

“We’re probably only at 10% and, really, the analysis is only interesting to the trading team and account manager,” she added, noting her clients “right now seem more concerned with general business results.”

The testing pullback doesn’t necessarily result in an overall ad budget pullback, though, said Tapper. She said the majority of spending by advertisers on The Independent U.S. has remained constant, although some advertisers have asked to adjust the amount of money allocated to testing cookieless audience targeting, so it is “a line item as part of a bigger solution.”

Scott Messer, svp media at Leaf Group, which owns publications including Livestrong and eHow, agreed that marketers who had already planned to test new targeting methods won’t shut it down. “If they had a test and it was ready, they’re doing it,” he said. “The difference is that people might actually finish their test.”

While her clients have not reduced test budgets, Snowman said many have delayed tests until next year. She said cookieless approaches involving techniques — such as targeting people in a specific geography who over-index in relation to a particular brand’s product, in contrast with targeting a third-party cookie-based audience segment — will take longer to deliver return-on-investment. “It’s going to take a longer time to see the results against that cohort audience,” she said. “It won’t be till they’re backed into a corner again that they’re willing to accept the cost inefficiencies of testing.”

Shoring up data and measurement

Testing goes hand-in-hand with reliable measurement, of course. And now that publishers are not forced to transition away from third-party cookies immediately, some, such as the large publishing exec interviewed for this story, are making sure measurement capabilities associated with new ad products are dialed in.

While standard metrics like clicks might suffice, said the exec, the added time will help the publisher develop internal metrics or work with third-party measurement vendors to gauge things like brand lift and sales. Those metrics can “show that your ROI is still going to be solid in order to demonstrate the efficacy of the data,” said the exec.

Tapper and other publishers said the cookie extension has given them more time to improve the products they had in development and add enhancements that could help convince advertisers to spend on them in the future. For instance, The Independent is “working more closely” with Integral Ad Science, in the hopes of satisfying U.S. advertiser demand for ad fraud protection and brand safety features, she said. “It’s given us more flexibility in terms of our priorities,” said Tapper, who added, “We’re able to allocate more resources to other elements.”

At Forbes, the extension gives more time to strengthen audience segments the business publisher has been constructing from its first-party data, said Solórzano. “We can build more robust look-alike models and say, ‘This is what a c-level audience reads,” she said. “That’s a great thing that comes out of this extension,” Solórzano concluded: “being able not just to collect the data but to interpret the data and make it meaningful.”