Hired is the leading marketplace for technology job seekers and employers. They save product managers, data analysts, and software engineers time looking for their next opportunity. No resumes, no cover letters — just a streamlined way to connect with the right companies faster.
Their goal was to strengthen awareness with the software engineer community in select cities and reach specific CAC goals (Cost to Acquire Customer) for various stages of their onboard process. As seasoned performance marketers, the Hired team knew that an innovative, agile, targeted campaign would be crucial to getting the results they needed.
There are over 400k software engineers on Twitter in the US and in select global cities they wanted to target. While it can be a very engaged audience in specific areas and topics, it is not easy to track or target software engineers, in particular on more typical direct response channels. As a result, we needed to think very creatively about targeting, channels, and to engage an audience that is not always open to being marketing and advertising. We leveraged the great internal knowledge of the Hired web developer culture and customer insights.
Round Barn Labs built a list of highly influential software engineers and created tailored audiences based on the various levels of engagement from the Hired existing customer base of software engineers. We also layered on demographic, keyword, handle, and interest targeting testing each variable to see which made the largest impact toward efficient software engineer acquisition.
ABT. Always Be Testing. This is something we are passionate about at Round Barn Labs.
We run a test every week and often multiple tests per week. This volume and quality of testing are key for growth. Twitter saw this first hand during its period of high growth as their test volume increased so did their growth rate.
Some of the tests we ran with corresponding hypotheses, results, and learnings include but are not limited to desktop versus mobile, call out job title in copy, Ruby on Rails, city-specific creative, Mongo, GitHub, and other developer communities, retargeting to various intent stage audiences, video duration, primary value prop, and call to action. We tested multiple slices of lookalike audiences, up and down the spectrum from targeted to broad, quickly honing in on the best performing test segments.
Hired had relied on a number of digital channels from their in-house team and had not been able to make Twitter Ads work yet. They also had their hands full on a number of Growth, Product, and Marketing initiatives. The Round Barn Labs team reached over 5M software engineers using both video and static ads. Over 24 separate copy, image, bid, and targeting tests were conducted with a 65% success rate on experiment hypothesis. With all Round Barn Labs engagements, we bring a process, learnings, and impact on our growth marketing work. With this campaign, Round Barn Labs found a new channel for Hired, aligning the creative, the content, and the targeting to get Hired best results yet on Twitter Ads beating customer goal by 20% and the sign-up goal by 61%.
