Many organizations today are unfortunately facing financial difficulties due to the economic impact of COVID-19. And as HR and talent acquisition professionals, we’re doing everything we can to provide strategic value so we can help our businesses to overcome some of the challenges we’re currently facing.
Providing that strategic value isn’t always easy though. Particularly in Talent Acquisition (TA), I’m sure we’ve all been in the position before where certain individuals throughout your organization don’t understand how recruiting has changed over the years. These individuals might only see TA as a service delivery function.
Of course our role has evolved far beyond that in the past decade! We act as strategic partners to the business, helping them to develop creative strategies to attract, recruit and retain the talent our companies need to grow and thrive over the long term.
However, there are always opportunities to improve the value we provide and strengthen our partnerships across the organization. One way we can do that is through the use of programmatic job postings, because this approach lets data drive our recruitment advertising strategy.
Let’s explore what programmatic job postings are and how they can help you to be a more strategic recruiting partner to your colleagues.
Rally note: If you want to learn more after reading this blog, take a look at our most recent Ideabook: 6 Lessons in Programmatic Job Posting.
What are programmatic online job postings?
According to Appcast, a programmatic vendor (and a Rally™ Recruitment Marketing sponsor!), programmatic job postings can be defined as “the buying, placement and optimization of job ads or postings performed by software, rather than people.”
The way this works is that rather than purchasing a set number of job ad slots with a specific job site, like LinkedIn or Glassdoor, you instead rely on programmatic job postings to distribute your job ads online for you. This is a cost-effective approach that performs well because the algorithm identifies the locations where your job ads are performing best, and gradually allocates more of your budget to those channels.
Programmatic job postings can distribute your job ads online for you and reduce time, effort, and cost.
Programmatic job postings also help you to be more targeted with your recruitment advertising spend because you can set specific rules that allow the software to manage your budget more effectively. For example, the algorithm will know to pause the spend for a specific job ad when you’ve reached the applicant volume you typically need to make a hire. Conversely, it can then take that extra spend and allocate it to a job ad that isn’t receiving enough applicants yet.
Programmatic job postings are a great tool for us to turn to as TA professionals during this public health crisis because it is a particularly effective technology for filling roles at scale (for those of us urgently hiring for essential workers) and for hiring hard-to-fill or niche roles (for those of us who still have priority roles to fill as cost effectively as possible).
3 ways to be more strategic with job posting
1) Programmatic job postings provide the data and insights you need to consult more effectively with hiring partners
Programmatic job postings provide you with ample information that you can use to make strategic recommendations to your partners across the business. Over time, your programmatic job postings will provide data that can help you to better understand (and improve!) KPIs like:
- Cost per applicant
- Cost per hire
- Application to hire ratio
- Source of hire
- Source of application
- Hiring time and
- The content that will perform best in your job ads
You can then use the insights uncovered by this data to advise hiring managers on how to strategically approach recruiting for their jobs. You can consult on how much budget might be required, what job titles will see the best results and what should be included in the job description itself, based on what has performed best historically, and what other employers are experiencing in the market in real-time.
2) Programmatic job postings allow you to manage expectations and build trust
Managing expectations is a critical component of any working relationship. Understanding how long different stages of the process will take and not over promising goes a long way when it comes to establishing your expertise and forming trusted relationships.
Programmatic job postings can help here because over time you’ll receive detailed insights about how long it takes to land the required number of qualified applicants to result in an interview and offer for various role types. This will help you to advise your hiring partners, manage expectations and secure more budget when you need to move quickly.
Another way programmatic helps is by neutralizing source bias. Have you ever experienced a recruiter or hiring manager telling you where you should advertise the job, because that’s where they got great candidates in the past? With programmatic, the system is making those decisions for you based on data and results, not personal preferences.
3) Programmatic job postings deliver better results that will earn your team the respect to do even more for them
Further to that, since most companies that move from traditional job ads to programmatic job postings see a substantial increase in performance (and decrease in costs!), you’re likely to impress your partners and build respect because you’ve proven you can deliver the results they need.
This can give you a platform to show what else you can do to bring value to recruiting and the business. Your hiring partners will be more open to your new ideas for Recruitment Marketing campaigns and that employer value proposition refresh project you’ve been hoping to do this year.
The bottom line is that when you deliver consistent positive results, your partners across the business will respect you more and will be increasingly receptive to relying on your expertise to create the best recruitment strategy to grow their teams. And isn’t that what all of us are really striving for when it comes to our partnerships across the business?
Want to know more about programmatic strategies? Read more about 7 steps to programmatic employer brand advertising here.
Want to learn more about programmatic job postings?
If this article has piqued your interest, you can hear from two expert practitioners on how they’ve used programmatic job postings to up the game for their organizations. In our most recent Ideabook: 6 Lessons in Programmatic Job Postings, Adrienne Sullivan, Global Employer Brand Leader at Thermo Fisher Scientific, and Matthew Mackezie, Internet Marketing Specialist at Platinum Supplemental Insurance, share what they’ve learned along the way. Download the guide for free.
