Automation at Scale: Powering Programmatic Job Advertising

Key Takeaways:

• The increase in job ad automation in recent years has driven an ongoing increase in efficiency.

• Automation allows recruitment marketing professionals to implement streamlined processes, cost-effectiveness, consistency, data-driven insights, and scalability.

• Programmatic job advertising revolutionized automation by using AI to provide better efficiency, conversion rates, and overall performance.

• New forms of programmatic job advertising show the potential to drive results that have never been achieved before.

Current market forces have compelled recruitment agencies and employers to continuously seek innovative ways to efficiently manage job postings and attract top talent. As recruitment needs evolve, scalability and an understanding of new technologies and recruiting modalities are critical. These allow you to bring streamlined processes, cost-effectiveness, consistency, and data-driven insights.

As automation has become an integral part of the recruitment picture, the resulting optimization has become crucial in programmatic job advertising, enabling effective management across multiple platforms and channels. Automation at scale equips you with tools to efficiently manage job postings across expanding platforms, maintaining efficiency and effectiveness.

In this article, you’ll learn more about the history of job ads, how automation has built efficiency over time, and how new forms of programmatic job advertising synergize with optimization systems to drive results that have never been achieved before. Also, discover the future of programmatic, what the next evolution will look like, and how it can benefit your recruitment team.

The History of Automation in Job Advertising

Automation has driven productivity and efficiency as each of the foregoing innovations have come on the scene over the years. Two decades ago, everything in the recruitment ecosystem was manual. “Post and pray” was the dominant model that paper posts used, and measures for efficiency were seldom considered in this model. To post a job, you’d create a requisition, post one job at a time (on one job board at a time), pay upfront for posting ads, and it was done directly on the job board platform. To advertise a job, it was a very laborious process.

When multi-posting came into play in the early 2000s, it made a big difference in the work lives of recruiters. At that point, while digital was quickly becoming the standard, there weren't many data models set up at the time to ensure consistency in success for meeting hiring goals. One of the major downsides to this was that companies often had to adopt large contracts for postings to take advantage of multi-posting. However, some significant benefits of multi-posting included integration with the applicant tracking system, and one could post one job at a time or many. One could also post to numerous job boards at a time, and some key automations were being introduced. The job post content was now being automatically transmitted to job boards, and there was no more copy and paste.

The automation that came out of this evolution allowed professionals to post jobs to many job boards simultaneously in their natural workflow, which was a significant time saver.

The Power of Automation

If you were informed that your application flow could be increased from 400 applications per month to 400 applications per week – without increasing your cost per advertisement – you’d probably be in disbelief. What initially sounds like a slick marketing ploy, however, actually holds genuine promise for you with the implementation of programmatic job advertising.

Job ad automation has evolved significantly over the last 25 years. At the close of the 1990s, manual job postings were still the standard, in print and even in the emerging online environment. These ads didn’t have much in the way of automation, and moreso represent the transition from print to digital.

Then in 2002, multi-posting came into being; multi-posting introduced the first forms of automation, and for the first time, talent acquisition professionals could take advantage of a technology that made it easier to do their jobs. In 2012, the first forms of programmatic job advertising were introduced by Recruitics.

The Rise of Programmatic Job Advertising

When programmatic emerged in 2012, job listings became automated and based on rules. Programmatic platforms were integrated with applicant tracking systems (ATS), which allowed for the posting and distribution of many jobs at a time on many job boards at the same time. The principal automation that came into play here was fully automated distribution. For the first time, only a bare minimum of human intervention was required to post a new job on job boards. One could post a job in the ATS, which would be picked up by the programmatic platform and fall into a rule set. That rule set determined in which campaign and on which job board it should be placed.

Another automation that arose around the same time was the first simple form of artificial intelligence (AI) in job advertising – job bidding and expansion algorithms. These algorithms drove efficiency and conversion rates. Ultimately, this saved a great deal of time and resources and drove better performance so that you could get more from their spend dollars on job postings based on data collected by the programmatic platform.

The Future of Programmatic Job Ads 

The next generation of programmatic job advertising is called objective-based programmatic campaigns. This is a new degree of automation and a new degree of efficiency that, previously, the industry has not been able to achieve.

Objective-based campaigns represent programmatic job advertising for tomorrow. Ultimately, the big difference between generic programmatic campaigns and objective-based campaigns is that the job postings will be automated based on rules which anticipate future objectives and goals.

With objective-based campaigns, a lot of the same dynamics as traditional programmatic are in play, but the key automations that are different now facilitate much more granular information about objectives, advertising goals, and marketing objectives. The way that this is enabled is that the programmatic platforms are now supplying performance data in real-time to job boards, so that the job boards can adjust delivery strategies in response to the objectives or goals set out at the beginning of the campaign. The rules and measurements can also be different within single campaigns and segments within the programmatic platform, providing more granular insights in terms of what success is.

Objective-based job boards are platforms designed to match job seekers with relevant employment opportunities based on their specific career goals and objectives. Unlike traditional job boards that primarily rely on keyword searches or job titles, objective-based job boards focus on the candidate's desired outcomes and aspirations.

An objective-based job board aims to provide a more personalized and targeted job search experience for both job seekers and employers. By aligning job postings with candidates' career goals and objectives, these platforms aim to improve the quality of matches and increase the likelihood of successful job placements.

Benefits of using an objective-based job board include the following:

• Enhanced Relevance: Objective-based job boards enable job seekers to find opportunities that align closely with their career aspirations. This increases the likelihood of job satisfaction and long-term success for candidates.

• Time and Effort Savings: Job seekers can save time by focusing on positions that match their objectives, reducing the need to sift through irrelevant job postings. This streamlines the job search process and improves efficiency.

• Targeted Employer Reach: You can benefit from reaching a pool of candidates genuinely interested in their job opportunities' specific outcomes and goals. This improves the chances of attracting motivated and engaged candidates.

•  Improved Retention: Objective-based job boards strive to create better matches between candidates and employers, which can lead to higher job satisfaction and longer employee retention.

AI, Intent, and Objective-Based Campaigns

Programmatic job advertising has historically enabled you to signal an intent to collect data and take action based on that data, as well as change the intent on job boards. How this intent operates in the context of AI is that signaling intent is analogous to deterministic AI, where algorithms are programmed with specific rules and instructions to perform predefined tasks. These algorithms follow a predictable path and generate outputs based on the provided input.

Objective-based programmatic campaigns use AI to establish two-way communication so that the programmatic platform isn't the only one getting data, but the job boards are as well. With objective-based programmatic job distribution bidding, hiring goals, budgets at higher ratios, and many other inputs can be employed to help determine total application goals. You can then put together strategies that produce bids that are geared toward optimizing CPA and achieving recruiting goals.

In the objective-based campaigns paradigm, the programmatic platform has an advertiser’s inventory with all of their open jobs. Campaigns are segmented based on the advertiser’s objectives. Within those campaigns, certain job groups or segments are being further segmented so that individual objectives can be included. This means that when a job is sent out to a job board, the job board receives a clear definition of the intent for success for that particular segment within the campaign that that job occupies. In short, this allows the advertiser/publisher to optimize at the segment level.

So, optimization in the sense of objective-based campaigns doesn’t just mean lowering costs or increasing clicks and conversions; it becomes more of a carte blanche for what you are looking for. With objective-based campaigns and the degree of integration currently available with job boards, advertising objectives are digitally transformed into qualitative communicable goals. 

If your company is ready to fine-tune its recruitment marketing with cutting-edge automation, feel free to reach out to us! The team at Recruitics is pioneering the approach to programmatic. We have cutting-edge technology to improve your recruitment efficiencies, budget spend, and reach.