In today’s challenging job market, programmatic job advertising has become a highly valued tool for organizations seeking new ways to reach prospective applicants. Programmatic solutions offer recruitment teams the flexibility to target advertising according to the media channels where the most desirable candidates are active. When part of a well-executed recruitment marketing strategy, programmatic advertising enables smarter, more data-driven media buying decisions. As a result, it can significantly move the needle on the key metrics organizations use to gauge hiring success.
A data-driven mindset enables recruitment marketing teams to gain greater visibility into which tactics work and which need to be tweaked or replaced with something different. A great example of data-driven decision-making in recruitment is the application of programmatic advertising. Programmatic solutions automate digital advertising and provide recruitment teams with the analytics necessary to buy and place job ads with greater efficiency and flexibility.
Given that up to up to 40% of job advertising spending is wasted, organizations have much to gain by combining programmatic advertising with more traditional candidate attraction methods. In addition to helping organizations use advertising dollars more wisely, programmatic advertising utilizes data and analytics to help organizations accomplish the following:
There’s no shortage of metrics to help recruitment marketing professionals measure campaign performance. Whether it focuses on volume, clicks, or conversions, each metric offers real-time insights into how well job ads are performing across a range of media channels.
While this post won’t cover the entire universe of recruitment metrics out there, here are some that demonstrate the power of programmatic job advertising in helping organizations improve recruitment spending and ROI:
Conversion rate is a critical metric in recruitment because it provides insight into how many individuals saw an ad, clicked on it, and completed an application. When the conversion rate is high, it’s a sign that the advertising strategy is working and helping to fill the talent pipeline. Conversely, a low conversion rate strongly signals job ads are underperforming.
Programmatic advertising boosts the conversion rate by improving the efficiency of job ads. With programmatic, ads aren’t running on every job site or platform; they’re running across the specific media channels where desired candidates are active. Programmatic services enable organizations to spend advertising dollars on channels that convert and pause those that don’t yield enough applicants, thus improving the overall conversion rate.
Tip: An efficient application process is essential to a healthy applicant conversion rate. To limit applicant drop-off, organizations should implement “easy apply” solutions that ensure a streamlined application process for candidates.
Achieving a healthy recruitment return on investment requires staying on top of advertising spending. If job ads are running on auto-pilot across multiple channels until the job is filled, recruitment teams can easily encounter a high cost-per-applicant that results in inefficient use of the recruitment budget. However, programmatic advertising allows recruitment teams to overcome this challenge. It enables teams to implement automated rules, so they can identify which ad campaigns should be stopped or optimized to produce a lower cost per applicant.
Programmatic advertising also positively impacts a related metric, cost-per-quality-applicant (CPQA). In addition to helping recruitment teams identify the most cost-effective ad channels, programmatic advertising enables teams to focus not just on applicant quantity, but also the best-fit quality applicants they want to hire most. Similar to the cost-per-applicant metric, the result is an improved ability to pivot to ads that yield the best applicants at an acceptable cost.
Tip: High-volume hiring requires recruitment marketing solutions that can keep up with the number of ads running across geographies and roles. Recruitics’ Automated Marketing Platform utilizes programmatic ad technology to tailor candidate flow by geography and enable more efficient programmatic advertising spending.
Click volume is one of the first signs that a job ad interests the intended candidate pool. Ads with the most clicks likely have engaging job titles, job description snippets, and other messaging that resonates with potential applicants. In essence, better-quality ads equal more clicks and applicant engagement.
Performance-based job advertising models like pay-per-click have given talent acquisition teams greater autonomy in how they use their recruitment budget to increase overall click volume. They can increase or lower their bid for each job ad running in a campaign, or even pause campaigns in real-time. But with this added autonomy comes the need to constantly stay on top of cost-per-click bids and make adjustments as needed.
Programmatic automates these activities by working as a seamless extension of the recruitment team. It provides:
Tip: Increasing new hire quality is a top priority for many talent acquisition and HR teams these days. To achieve this goal, organizations can adopt proven branding and messaging solutions that boost candidate awareness and engagement.
The application-to-hire metric helps organizations understand how many applications it takes to make a hire. With this added visibility, it’s much easier to determine how much to budget for specific recruitment marketing campaigns. Using a recruitment dashboard and advanced analytics, talent acquisition teams can plan programmatic ad campaigns with greater precision and more easily predict the applicant flow required for each open position.
Gaining insight into the ratios of job applications to actual hires based on job types provides a clear understanding of the performance of various facets within the overall pool of open positions. This knowledge enables strategic planning to effectively reach and fulfill hiring objectives and understand how many applications need to be generated to make a hire.
Using a combination of automation technology, advanced algorithms, and machine learning, programmatic advertising solutions offer excellent opportunities for organizations to elevate their recruitment activities and leverage data to make every budget dollar count.
Thankfully, organizations don’t need to abandon tried-and-true recruitment and advertising tactics in favor of a more modern recruitment strategy. Rather, they can add programmatic services to their existing recruitment program, and begin making measurable progress toward meeting their recruitment goals.
For help with building a more data-driven recruitment function, the team at Recruitics is here to help! Recruitics’ programmatic advertising solutions help organizations target job seekers across a diverse mix of job sites and platforms, so they can realize breakthrough job ad performance and more cost-effective recruiting.
