What if I told you… that you could place your online job ads directly in front of the most ideal candidates?
Sounds like science fiction, right? Not anymore.
A transformation has taken place in the world of digital media buying – programmatic ad buying technology.
Today, about 96 percent of marketers are using programmatic options to buy display ads.
In 2015, digital display ads utilizing programmatic buying accounted for 55 percent of the total. In the U.S. alone, spending reached $14.88 billion.
This technology is now taking on a new form – programmatic recruitment advertising. Why?
Where advertising trends travel, recruitment follows.
What is programmatic recruitment advertising?
Put simply, programmatic advertising relies on computer software to determine who will be most likely to respond to a specific advertisement.
The process automates the buying and selling of pay-per-click advertisements while optimizing their placement in real-time.
The user inputs certain values, such as the demographic information of the ideal customer, and the computer programs perform the rest.
By employing complex algorithms, ads are enhanced to target specific areas of the internet so your job ad is placed onscreen in front of the right people, in the right place, at the right time.
It’s important to emphasize that the process is automated, meaning purchasing ad space on a webpage occurs almost instantaneously by using real-time bidding.
While your target’s webpage is still loading, programmatic recruitment advertising dictates that the candidate you’re seeking will see your job posting (even if they’re hiding in an obscure corner of the internet).
Within milliseconds, your job listing has been placed in front of your ideal candidate, and most likely at a lower pay-per-click rate.
Why you need to care
The recruitment process is historically slow, tedious, and inefficient.
Recruiters are tasked with finding and obtaining the best location to find candidates, whether it’s online or offline.
From there they wade through an administration heavy process, all the while making pricing comparisons and placing orders.
Then, if they’re using an online platform, they load the job information onto the server and wait. Throughout this process, mind you, the job is still nowhere close to being filled.
Programmatic recruitment advertising allows you to canvas a large area and target job seekers with specific qualifications.
And it does this with extreme precision across all content and devices.
The benefits aren’t confined to targeting the best candidate, though.
Using programmatic recruitment advertising software, a recruiter is able to:
- Reduce advertising costs
- Minimize per applicant costs
- Direct traffic to higher priority job positions
- Redirect spending to where it’s needed most
- Improve application conversion rates
- Eliminate wasted ad spends
As an employer, deploying programmatic recruitment advertising tactics in your hiring process will help you reduce costs.
And as the job postings have a greater reach, the pool of applicants will grow and their quality will improve.
How it works
“Performance based pricing” is music to every media buyer’s ears. Or maybe not, depending on the performance of what they’re paying for.
Promoting a job position using the cost-per-click method can prove costly.
Positions difficult to fill typically receive fewer applications. Alternatively, easily filled positions will have more applicants.
But by using programmatic recruitment advertising tools, the postings that need applicants are giving priority.
Furthermore, bidding in real time and the setting of custom parameters allows for more control of spending, eliminating unnecessary costs.
In some cases, programmatic advertising has cut the cost of finding a suitable candidate by over 30 percent.
The platforms are generally easy to use and have a straightforward progression for recruiters:
- Upload a job posting from an applicant tracking system or job site
- Price parameters are set (for ex. price per applicant)
- Total number of applicants is set
- Select target applicant demographics
The programmatic recruiting advertising software then reads the data and compares it with users on the internet until it finds a match.
Publishers interested in the ad then place a bid in real time.
In the time it takes for the unwitting applicant’s webpage to load, the ad is acquired and applied to the website they are currently using.
What the future holds
It’s projected that by the end of 2017, programmatic ad spending will increase to over $32 billion.
By the end of the decade, ads bought and sold using programmatic software will account for nearly all of targeted banners, as well.
If that’s any indication, recruiting will follow suit as it did with other advances on the internet.
Brighter days are ahead for marketers and recruiters alike as technology continues to advance, improving not only the reach of their target audience, but minimizing the costs required to do so.
Although the technology is still in the early stages of proliferation, the use of programmatic advertising recruiting is expanding rapidly.
As the technology continues to expand into areas of recruiting and talent acquisition, existing applicant tracking systems and job ad distributors will be easily incorporated, making the process more streamlined.
As with any emerging technology, improvements are made continually, further driving the increase in proliferation, efficiency, and efficacy.
By allowing for on the fly adjustments, recruiters will change the way they operate and how they recruit.
The jobs of talent acquisition teams will take on new, data-driven and analytical forms.
Above all, though, recruiting new talent will become easier, faster, and increasingly rooted in big-data.
Make sure your recruitment team is ahead of the curve and start implementing programmatic recruitment advertising to minimize the cost required to source the absolute best talent from across the web.
How to get started
There are some products available so take some time to explore and see what’s out there.
While some may be different than others, they all operate on the same basic principles.
Before you start, here are a few tips to help you find the best candidate:
- Use specific keyword targets and apply automation
- Stop advertising once a specific application or spending limit is reached
- Evaluate the campaign in the days following the initial post and adjust priority accordingly
- If the posting isn’t performing well, change the input parameters to expand reach and boost importance
The game is changing quickly, so don’t let this opportunity (and your next best talent acquisition) pass you by.
To learn more about how to implement this technology into your marketing and recruiting strategy, send me a message!