Programmatic recruitment advertising maximizes return on investment and improves recruiting outcomes with an automated process that takes the guesswork out of when and how to place job ads, and even how much to spend for the best results. Programmatic recruitment advertising is using recruitment technology instead of people to buy, place, and manage job ads.

According to Aptitude Research founder Madeline Laurano, traditional job advertising is expensive and inefficient. She says that all the taskwork that goes into normal recruitment advertising isn’t cost-effective and takes time and energy from recruiters that are better focused elsewhere. Aptitude Research claims that 40 percent of the money spent on job advertising is wasted.

But the Society for Human Resource Management says programmatic recruitment advertising is used less than 10 percent by recruiting teams. You may want to take a closer look at how programmatic recruitment advertising saves money on job ads and gets better results than traditional recruiting advertising.

Reduce Time Spent on Manually Managing Job Ads

Programmatic recruitment advertising cuts through manually managing job ads by eliminating the need to research and test job boards, negotiate ad contracts, and manually track ads. It cuts out long-term ad contracts and the need for manual research on the best job posting sites, eliminating guesswork and reducing costly mistakes. It provides real-time data and the ability to adjust ads and targets to provide better, faster results at a lower cost.

More importantly, programmatic recruitment advertising provides transparency and real-time analytics of recruitment advertising. This saves the recruiter time and energy and enables more data-driven decision-making with almost instant access to metrics.

Expanded Reach Means More Applicants

Programmatic job advertising lets recruiters expand the number of potential candidates reached. Quickly advertising job openings across various publishing networks means time and money saved and many more candidates included.

Job advertisements in search engines, ad exchanges, job boards, and consumer and niche sites work to attract many more candidates to your organization’s jobs than you could with traditional manual job posting methods.

Reduce Time-to-Fill

Aptitude Research reports that using programmatic recruitment advertising produces dramatic improvements in recruitment marketing and recruiting metrics. Using programmatic means being twice as likely to reduce time-to-fill and almost three times as likely to improve quality-of-hire as traditional advertising. And programmatic produces improvement in quality of source for 60 percent of companies using it.

The faster you fill open positions, the more money you save on lost productivity, and lost business without a salesperson or account manager in place. Putting someone in a position to fulfill sales goals or achieve company objectives means less time on vacancies that are costing the company money and opportunity.

Better Candidate Targeting

Save money with programmatic recruitment advertising by targeting ideal candidates for openings. Attract and engage higher-quality candidates best suited to your openings instead of placing static job posts. Getting relevant content in front of job seekers who want to see it creates interest and meaningful interaction while saving resources that might otherwise be used on less ideal or less interested candidates.

Improve Return on Investment

Allocating a fixed recruitment advertising budget over a company’s total vacant jobs is challenging for recruiting teams. The dynamic budget allocation of programmatic advertising makes recruitment advertising budgeting easier and more effective by prioritizing listings without many applications and putting less promotion on listings that have a good candidate flow.

This lets you pay for ads that get results and can save between 30 to 70 percent of your cost-per-applicant. It also prevents accidentally overspending on clicks as it automates the spend per budget.

Improve Employer Brand to Decrease Cost-per-Hire

Every organization has an employer brand, whether it is by design or by reputation. Competitive businesses spend time and money carefully crafting and promoting their employer brand to attract customers and develop their workforce. LinkedIn found that those with a strong employer brand spend 43 percent less to make a hire than other employers without a strong brand.

Programmatic recruitment advertising strengthens the employer brand with different messages targeted to different candidate groups, promoting various aspects of your employer brand. When advertising this way, you are getting an added bonus of improving and strengthening your employer brand at the same time as reaching targeted candidates.

Improving employer brand also improves candidate experience, which is another money-saving bonus of programmatic recruitment advertising.

Is Programmatic Recruitment Advertising Right for Your Company?

If your organization has complex hiring needs, has specific geographic hiring needs, or needs to expand your talent acquisition strategy, programmatic recruitment advertising helps you be more competitive and effective.

Attracting candidates through targeted advertising is an inbound marketing approach to recruiting rather than cold messaging through LinkedIn or email. It saves time (and money) on manual outreach, and attracts more engaged candidates while strengthening your employer brand and contributing to candidate experience.

With 32 percent of employers using a combination of automation and traditional advertising, 11 percent moving toward programmatic advertising, and 5 percent having a fully programmatic model for predictive data and real-time performance optimization, programmatic recruitment advertising isn’t for everyone. However, Aptitude Research founder Laurano says the companies that do use programmatic advertising don’t go back to a manual process.

One caveat: there are many tools out there for programmatic, and we'll be covering them in a later article. That said, the most effective ones can be complex to operate. Hiring is a race. The analogy might be to compare a scooter to a F1 race car. Both of them have wheels and can get you somewhere. But one of them does it a heck of a lot more efficiently and quickly. If you're going to invest in a platform, we recommend going for the race car, and hiring a skilled driver. You'll get a lot further, faster, and with less frustration. As Neil Costa, HireClix CEO and RNN Publisher puts it: "If you check the box, and you're doing programmatic, you may still not be achieving your goals. You may be spending a lot of money and seeing a low cost-per-apply, but you may not be hitting the business goals [ie: driving hires efficiently]."

‍