Why Employers Should Use Programmatic Advertising to Recruit

Programmatic media is the future of recruitment advertising, according to Recruiter.com, which states: “if you’ve been in the job-ad buying space long enough, you know that every now and again a technology comes along that revolutionizes the way we run ad campaigns. Today, the new kid on the block set to fundamentally reshape the recruitment advertising landscape is programmatic advertising.”

Programmatic advertising, as defined by KRT Marketing, a data-driven recruitment marketing agency, is: “A data-centric recruitment advertising process, utilizing machine-to-machine communication to purchase online job ads in real-time, based on preset rules and targeting on a pay-per-click or pay-per-app basis.”

Recruitment software and technology is constantly evolving in the HR space. While many recruiters and employers are still figuring out how to best leverage their applicant tracking system, programmatic job advertising adds another twist to HR technology — one that can greatly help employers manage their recruiting budgets and use recruitment technology to their advantage. In other words, employers can get more bang for their buck through programmatic job advertising.

As Melissa Miller writes, “Programmatic, to put it simply, is an automated ad-buying process that allows you to advertise job postings and implement rules that match your requisition-specific need.”

Mona Tawakali, Vice President of Digital Strategy for KRT Marketing, explains it further: “Programmatic advertising gives our media analysts the ability to programmatically manage PPC job ads for our clients. The platform’s data-driven, rule-based technology automates the tactical execution, allowing us to spend more time on campaign strategy. The end result has been delivering more quality applications for less cost to our clients.”

College Recruiter has been using programmatic advertising since 2014 for mobile and display banner advertising solutions. More recently it launched a process designed to save high-volume recruiters time. It takes too much time to post on a hundred job boards in order to find enough candidates; once an employer’s needs are understood, a pay-per-applicant formula drives enough quality candidates to a job posting to fill all positions.

“Many employers confuse programmatic with pay-per-click advertising,” says Steven Rothberg, founder and president of College Recruiter. “Job ads posted using programmatic technology are often priced on a pay-per-click basis, but you can also post a job using programmatic technology and pay for it on a traditional, duration basis.”

Employers should not simply buy advertising from publishers who claim they can reach their audience, says René Bolier, co-founder of OnRecruit. “You should identify your audience and then pay anybody who is capable of reaching that audience.”

Bolier also recommends:

• Pay for performance, not for “publishing” without a performance guarantee.
• Maintain control over what ads you want to show, how many times, and to which people. Campaigns paid for duration — a certain amount of time no matter the results — “are not the way to do this. But performance-based campaigns via programmatic advertising are.”

The benefit to employers, says Rothberg, is that programmatic advertising removes the guesswork from where to advertise openings. Rather than posting a job on one site because it seems well targeted, employers can post all of their jobs using programmatic technology, and the software automatically determines not just where the audience should be, but where it actually is — based on how many people view the ad, click apply, apply, interview, and are even hired. “This marketing automation greatly improves both the effectiveness and efficiency of the advertising because employers should generate better-qualified hires at a lower cost.”

Six things that happen when employers move to a programmatic PPC strategy

1. Say goodbye to cost-per-click (CPC) and hello to cost-per-apply (CPA). Tracking tags record application data produced from your PPC campaigns — the KPI used to measure apply conversions and CPAs.
2. Eliminate wasted spend on jobs that don’t need applications. Up to 80% of PPC advertising investment is wasted on jobs that don’t need applications. Programmatic technology uses apply data to determine which jobs need advertising and which don’t.
3. Generate applications for jobs that need them. Set advertising rules so you get the results you need for each job (e.g. stop advertising a job once it reaches a target number of applications — “rule-based advertising”).
4. Expand your reach to a larger pool of qualified talent. Programmatic advertising distributes your jobs to a large network of proven PPC job sites, not just one or two.
5. Receive meaningful data to expose true media performance. Real-time apply data compares PPC job site performance: how many clicks are needed to convert one apply, and the CPA for each job family.
6. Uncover new predictive capabilities for future decision-making. Use historical data of candidate actions from click to hire to build forecasting models that predict how many applications future hiring initiatives will need.

Programmatic advertising for recruiting is the future — and the future is now. Is your company ready?

Author: Matt Krumrie, contributing writer for CollegeRecruiter.com.