If you’re a diligent recruiter, you may have heard the ‘P’ word being thrown around lately.
Odds are, even if you are one of the rare recruiters that keeps a finger on the latest trends and techniques, you probably lack an in-depth understanding of the programmatic advertising method.
And if you’ve never heard of programmatic - even better. I’m here to demystify the whole thing. Keep reading, and find out why programmatic ads are the future of all online job advertising.
Introducing the Programmatic Phenomenon
As far as what’s hip and happening in the ad world, programmatic ads are the talk of the town. Programmatic advertising is a big leap forward in helping advertisers and marketers achieve great conversions and results while spending less on their customer acquisition. Besides that, companies and advertisers employing programmatic advertising have a wider reach than those using traditional advertising methods - all while keeping their crosshairs on the target.
But how does programmatic help them achieve these results? Simply put - programmatic is fueled by technology that automates and optimizes online ad buying.
When you buy a programmatic ad package, your ad gets distributed across the world wide web. As it’s circulating the net, the ad is incrementally optimized to be as relevant to your needs as possible. This process is complicated and repetitive, and if you were to do it manually, it would likely cost you thousands of dollars, and hundreds of hours of research, manpower, and more. Programmatic lifts that burden by using algorithms to provide the best results for your business.
Programmatic advertising is already a big thing in the advertising and digital marketing industry. According to a joint study carried out by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and Winterburry Group - more than 85% of advertisers and 72% of publishers in digital marketing are going down the programmatic and automated advertising route, with those numbers only expected to increase in the future.
Recruiters are only now beginning to play catch-up to programmatic as a new way to source candidates. It’s time for any serious recruiter to take those numbers at face value and start looking into programmatic advertising as their main candidate sourcing and recruitment marketing method for 2020 and beyond.
The Basics of Programmatic Recruitment
So, let’s break down exactly how programmatic recruitment launches you into the future of hiring.
Programmatic recruitment is a dynamic recruitment management process that takes the latest technological advancements and uses them to automate and optimize the key elements of your recruitment.
Programmatic recruitment uses this technology to intelligently purchase, place, and adapt your digital advertisements and vacancies - freeing you up from handling this complex process manually.
This means freeing up your staff to handle more pressing issues and handle recruitment needs with fewer resources.
By using data driven analytics, targeted ads, and real-time bidding and campaign optimization, programmatic recruitment ensures your jobs are always seen by the right people, in all the right places all over the web.
Improve Your Targeting
Programmatic advertising uses data and algorithms that allow you to place ads with high precision and target very specific demographics. If you’re looking for middle-aged truckers in Ohio, programmatic ads can find them for you. If you’re looking for college-educated men with an interest in epigenetics, programmatic ads can find them for you.
In other words, programmatic advertising takes into account a number of factors such as geolocation, age, behavior, search terms, categories, site visits, IP addresses and more to ensure you are reaching the relevant candidates.
Programmatic ads also dynamically retarget people that have seen your ads, thus improving your overall conversion rate. Retargeting here simply means that people that see your ad in one part of the internet will be tracked and shown your ad again on other platforms and websites.
Cast a Wider Net
Finding great talent wouldn’t mean much if you were only reaching a small pool of people. Programmatic allows you, as a recruiter, to reach a wider audience across multiple platforms and websites at a lower cost compared to traditional forms of advertising. For you, this means having your job ads seen all across the web by the people you’re looking for through an ingenious use of online trackers and “pixels”.
Not only will you reaching your ideal candidates be easier than ever, but you’ll be able to reach a much larger talent pool with no extra effort on your behalf. Since programmatic is carried out by computer algorithms, and gathers large amounts of data as it does its job - the computer takes its findings and adapts its strategy to help you continue getting the best value.
For instance, if the algorithm detects that your ad spend and conversion rate is clearly better on one website, it will allocate more funds towards that method. Programmatic uses data gathered in real time to make decisions that squeeze the most value from your budget.
Develop Your Hiring Strategy
There are a lot of great things to be said about the benefits of hiring in a programmatic manner. Perhaps the greatest benefit of them all is that programmatic advertising truly saves time and frees up resources that would otherwise be spent on tedious busywork.
By helping you and your recruitment department free up that valuable time, you can finally devote all that extra energy to developing your hiring strategies and turning your hiring departments into powerhouses of awesomeness.
With programmatic, you can test your new methods and ideas on the fly, and continue striving for better and better results to ensure you always stay ahead of the competition.
Get Ad Agency Results Minus the Middleman
You want me to let you in on a juicy secret? By giving your money to an ad agency, you’re paying a middleman fee for them to run a programmatic ad campaign using software just like YouCruit to bring you results.
Unless you’re going to an agency for creative or branding work - simply asking them to help you bring in sheer numbers is a surefire way to throw your money away. Paying agencies to bring in candidates is never the optimal route, as they will pocket the cash and usually provide you with candidates that don’t fully match your hiring specifications anyway.
Beyond that, if you want to iterate, try again, and improve your strategy, that just means going out of pocket yet again. We don't want you to give your money away to middlemen. YouCruit is built with an in-house programmatic package called "The Works" and using it is as simple as pressing a button. Literally.
Hopefully, you're now primed on what you can expect from shifting your candidate sourcing strategy into “programmatic mode”. If you want to reach new heights this new decade, you need to take programmatic recruitment seriously.