Co-founder of job search engine Adzuna. Present in 16 countries and helping 10s of millions of job seekers every month.
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The Delta variant contributed to a weak September jobs report that saw just 194,000 new jobs added. While employers are struggling to hire, quit rates are high and many workers are choosing to stay away from work. The latest OECD employment outlook report predicts U.S. employment will remain below pre-pandemic levels until the end of 2023.
The perfect storm of burnout and Covid-19 caution is keeping many Americans away from the jobs market and slowing the wider recovery. In the current complex global labor market, it’s getting harder to find the right job seekers to meet hiring needs, and this is pushing programmatic recruitment advertising (my own firm's specialty) to the fore.
Tech Needed To Meet Recruitment Budgets
The tricky market means pay-per-performance recruitment models allowed by programmatic advertising techniques are becoming increasingly important. In a candidate-short market, it can be tempting to broaden the net and take applications from a wider pool of candidates. But this can cause a headache of its own: More resumes to sift through that simply aren’t a good fit for the role.
Employers are also having to spend more attracting workers, be that by offering tantalizing signing bonuses, other benefits like childcare support or raising pay rates. This is all squeezing the recruitment budget, meaning efficiency is key. The traditional pay-to-post model is simply no longer the go-to solution for advertisers. Jobs that are harder to fill need to be assigned more budget, while easier roles can be left served by organic traffic flow.
Programmatic job advertising is rising to meet this challenge, allowing end-to-end recruitment measurement and optimization of the recruitment process. Platforms like ours, as well as Appcast, Joveo and PandoLogic, are helping hiring managers tightly control their hiring and make the most of their budgets. These platforms use AI to predict the best time to advertise each role and the best platforms to post ads to, as well as automatically taking down any jobs the minute enough quality candidates have applied.
Maintaining Quality Applications
One of the other challenges of today’s labor market is that fewer job seekers are actively looking for new roles, and those who are frequently looking don’t have the right skills. As a result, the quality of candidates coming through the pipeline is lower, roles are open longer and the cost to hire is being driven up.
In this tricky hiring environment, any steps taken to help provide quality, well-matched job-seeker traffic can make the whole process a lot easier. Beyond ensuring a flow of high volume, quality traffic, arming workers with useful insights about their career paths and market value will be key to re-engaging them with the labor market and stemming the tide of long-term unemployment.
While job seekers up and down the country are thinking harder about what they want in terms of work-life balance and company culture, employers are also weighing up what’s important. One question is whether better matching of candidates to jobs via more sophisticated skills profiling could lead to better retention rates.
Making The Most Of Programmatic
No matter which platform they choose, there are a few steps hiring professionals can take when looking to take advantage of programmatic recruitment methods.
First, make sure you're using the right job title and description. Be as precise as you can, including specific descriptors in the job title if appropriate. For example, if you're hiring for a developer, you should be specific about the programming language you're looking for, be it a Python developer, Java developer, C# developer or any other desired language. It's also important to avoid abbreviations in both the job title and description, as well as paring down lists of desired skills to required skills to help encourage more applications.
Next, take advantage of built-in technology through automation rules. These will help boost the productivity and performance of your campaign. Essentially, automations allow you to input custom rules to turn on or off certain actions when your campaign meets pre-set criteria. This may be pausing or un-pausing recruitment for specific jobs, for example, if you pass a threshold of a certain number of applications. You can also increase and decrease bids for certain jobs based on how they are performing and send more budget toward campaigns that are performing well. This optimizes your return on investment and will turn the taps off inefficient campaigns quickly.
Third, consider using expanded job titles and locations. You can make sure your job ad reaches more candidates by adding in any extra similar job titles candidates are searching for, without modifying the job title on your ad. You can also use location expansions to go after job seekers in multiple locations, for example, neighboring metros or commutable cities outside the main location of the job.
Finally, optimize, optimize and optimize again. Programmatic advertising platforms use machine learning to continually improve campaign performance. You can take this one step further by choosing a cost-per-application (CPA) goal for the platform to work toward.
The Key Takeaway
To fill open roles in this tough hiring environment, businesses need to reassure job seekers that new roles will be flexible, Covid-secure and offer a clear career path and training. Providing non-traditional routes into business and allowing more movement between industries could be one way to tempt more Americans back to the labor market — but this needs to be done while maintaining quality traffic to job ads. This will require a better understanding of transferable skills among both job seekers and employers.
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