If you’re feeling frustrated with traditional job advertising, you’re not alone. Two-thirds of companies are looking for a better option than manual job ad negotiation, posting, and monitoring. And on average, 40% of job advertising spend is straight-up wasted, according to Aptitude Research. It’s a system whose time has passed. But what is the alternative? That’s where programmatic job advertising enters the scene. With our daily work and personal lives now driven by digital efficiency and data, programmatic buying has started to revolutionize hiring and recruiting. Companies want modern job advertising options that maximize precious resources, provide real-time data that can be used to make strategic decisions, and make recruiting more effective all-around.
Programmatic Advertising Explained
Programmatic advertising gives you a consolidated digital platform that helps you manage your job advertising spend and decisions. With this recruitment technology, you can input information from jobseekers, historical data, and job information and use its predictive capabilities to find the best placements for your job ads. In traditional job advertising, you’d be releasing your job listings to the winds and hoping you’d get a solid ROI. With programmatic, you are able to monitor your results in real-time, helping you make decisions about what’s working, what’s not, and what you might need to tweak in order to meet your goals.
According to a recent survey, companies identified job ad targeting (51%), campaign effectiveness (43%), performance prediction (37%), budget allocation (27%), and job ad classification (26%) as their highest priorities with programmatic.
Job Ad Targeting
A programmatic advertising platform is able to target specific channels and platforms to make sure that the right candidates are seeing your jobs. More than half of surveyed companies identified job ad targeting as their biggest goal in implementing programmatic advertising. Getting your ads in front of the right eyes can help make your recruiting process more streamlined and effective.
Campaign Effectiveness
Strategy thrives on data. It’s nearly impossible to build a strategic plan without seeing how it aligns with your goals. Programmatic job advertising helps you build reporting that gives you real-time insight into how your campaigns are going. Understanding what’s working, what’s not, and what would better help you align with your organization’s goals gives you strategic power. It can also help you get stronger buy-in when you’re able to demonstrate how things are going right now and how the predictive analytics say they’re likely to go.
Budget Allocation
One of the bigger pain points of traditional job advertising is the trust exercise of committing to an ad spend in channels that may or may not prove effective for you. And by the time you get the necessary metrics or feedback on how successful (or unsuccessful) those channels are, you’ve already sunk time and resources into it. If it’s not a useful channel, your only choice is to start again after a set amount of time. Programmatic provides real-time information on how your ad spend is faring. Armed with instant data, you can identify trends or warning signs early enough to make a strategic decision about your ad spending.
Performance Prediction
One of the top five features of programmatic advertising for companies is the ability to see the future—or rather, take massive amounts of data and make predictions about how job advertisements are likely to perform. Driven by AI software built into the system, programmatic advertising platforms take historical and current data and use that to make recommendations about job spend. Programmatic can also take the extra step of making changes (within parameters set by you) to make changes based on those predictions.
Job Ad Classification
Another high priority for companies is having a platform that can bolster your recruiting and marketing by giving unprecedented insight into which ads are performing. Programmatic has the data—again, in real-time—to show how leads are being converted and how potential candidates are engaging with your ads. This is not only crucial for allocating resources, but also for refining your ads to reach the best possible talent.
When used strategically, programmatic job advertising helps improve a process that is often clunky, resource-intensive, and vague. Whether your organization needs a hands-off option to free your team for other priorities or a way to maximize spends to meet budget goals, programmatic should be a tool that helps you meet your goals in every way possible.