Driving Recruiter Efficiency with Programmatic Job Advertising

As technology continues to evolve, it’s important to evaluate the latest developments and how they can help your staffing company. When conducting this evaluation, it’s vital to determine your company’s savings – both in money and in time.

When looking at programmatic job advertising, it’s designed to do exactly that: eliminate wasted spend from your recruitment budget and give more time back to your team of recruiters. By programming the software to deliver to meet your recruitment goals, and then allowing the software to make decisions (faster than any human could), you get greater ROI on your job advertising budget, plus more time for your team to talk to the people who want to work for you.

Now, you’re probably asking, what is programmatic job advertising, and how can it help my staffing agency? Let’s dig into it.

What Is Programmatic Job Advertising?

Programmatic job advertising focuses on automation and source tracking to make the best possible decisions. Instead of relying on “gut instinct” to make the best decisions for your recruitment budget, programmatic job advertising focuses on making data-driven decisions to drive ROI.

Here’s a quick-and-dirty overview of the two best ways that programmatic job advertising helps the staffing industry:

1. Programmatic Job Boards: Think of this as another source of traffic to compete with your spend on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, etc. Instead of buying directly from a job board, you are buying from a collection of job boards. (Picture buying a mutual fund vs. a stock.) For a programmatic job board, its differentiator is its algorithm. The job board reads your job title, location, and description to determine which job boards your candidates spend time on.  
2. Programmatic Software to Manage Your Indeed/ZipRecruiter Spend: Almost every staffing agency can benefit from this tactic. The software collects and centralizes the data from all of your job board spend. Then, you leverage the data to decide where to post your jobs, at the lowest cost, for the quality and quantity you need. 

Three Ways Programmatic Job Advertising Increases Recruiter Efficiency

Eliminate Wasted Spend

Most companies spending at least $2,000/month on job boards are wasting money. How are they wasting money?

• Spending on the wrong job boards
• Getting too many applications on some jobs and your team can’t keep up with follow up
• Not getting enough applications on enough jobs and wasting spend
• Incorrectly allocating their budget

Software makes decisions faster than any human. Programmatic job advertising helps eliminate waste by quickly and automatically executing your strategy to meet your recruitment goals. 

Data-Driven Decisions

Recruiters constantly rely on the “post and pray” method of posting jobs to the job boards and just praying the right candidates apply or the budget is correct. By using software to manage and centralize your recruitment activity, data becomes easier to collect. 

Then it’s time to take the next step and understand what to do with that data.

For example:

• Job Board A drives an application cost of $2, but you need ten applications for a qualified candidate.
• Job Board B drives an application cost of $4, but you need four applications for a qualified candidate.

By having the technology in place to track the cost and source of candidate applications, your staffing agency can make more intelligent, more accurate decisions. Instead of just spending more on Job Board A because it’s a low cost per applicant, the data shows that Job Board B brings more actual revenue to the company.

Automating that data and source-tracking to know where your money should go leads to the best data-driven decisions and eliminates the “posting and praying.”

Save Time

Think about how often your team is manually posting a job to each job board, monitoring the data on each job board, and then manually taking down the jobs (or forgetting to take them down and wasting spend). That is a lot of wasted hours and possible wasted spend.

Now, think about if all of that could be automated. Your team opens a job order, puts an “indicator” on the job to sponsor or not sponsor, and then it reaches all of the job boards. When the indicator is removed or the job closes in your applicant tracking system, it is removed from the job boards.

That is a lot of time saved. That is a lot of money saved on jobs your team may forget to close. 

Become More Efficient with Your Recruitment Spend

Recruiting was an enormous challenge before the pandemic. Even though unemployment skyrocketed in 2020, we still faced candidate shortages. The passage of the latest stimulus bill has further tightened the spigot.

Now is the time to emphasize efficiency in the recruitment spend – by focusing on the jobs you can fill and being aggressive with the spending on those jobs. Using programmatic job advertising tactics introduces automation that helps with efficiency and drives more ROI.

Increasing efficiency gives more time back to your recruiters – to talk to the people who want to work for you.