How Programmatic Advertising Elevates Enterprise Recruiting Strategies

March 14, 2019

 

iCIMS Staff

3 min read

There are currently 7.3 million jobs left unfilled in the United States, and SHRM found that 83 percent of human resource professionals report it’s been more difficult to recruit over the last year. Adding to the complexity, over a third of employers are seeing a decrease in applicant quality among the shrinking pool of available talent.

It’s no secret there’s a talent shortage, yet there is a gap for many enterprise organizations between acknowledging that recruiting strategies must evolve and determining where to focus technology and budget to remain competitive. HR leaders feel the pressure to keep talent acquisition teams lean while providing resources to make increase productivity and support business goals.

Talent-related business challenges influence a 16 percent increase in recruitment solution and service investments this year, projected to reach $8.5 billion by 2022 according to recruitment industry analyst, International Data Corporation. Undoubtedly, sourcing is a key focus area of that spend.

Applicant Sourcing Requires a Targeted Approach

Whether recruiters are balancing high-volume hiring needs, searching for tough-to-fill roles or facing open positions that are critical to fill quickly, building a strong pipeline of quality talent is an ongoing challenge. In these instances, posting a job advertisement broadly to increase applicant traffic can not only be ineffective, but often costly to the organization both in sourcing spend and loss of recruiter productivity.

Even if a stream of applicants responds to a job advertisement, employers face a new struggle to identify which are truly qualified to identify top sources and justify future spend. Targeting job postings manually and managing multiple vendors at once can be incredibly tedious and take valuable time away from recruiters.

Sourcing is now parallel to marketing and must adopt stronger, data-driven processes such as predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to strengthen decision-making.

Data-Driven Job Posting Transforms Recruiter Experiences

Programmatic job advertising is quickly emerging as the foundation of modern online sourcing and refers to the use of software to distribute the purchase of digital advertising. Programmatic job advertising offers automated decision-making on where to focus bids for job advertising space in real time to optimal sources per unique position. The prescriptive AI behind programmatic takes employer-defined requirements from each job description such as relevant experience or a specific certification and recommends job sites that house postings with similar data points that have proved to attract and convert specific job seekers to applicants.

What really matters however, is the value to businesses:

1. Maximized productivity of existing resources
   • Programmatic job advertising targets and distributes job posting placements to return high-quality applicants and saves recruiters time to put back into high-value interactions with talent and hiring managers. Sixty-two percent of TA and HR leaders rate an improved time-to-hire as the top measure of success.
2. A competitive approach to target talent
   • SHRM also found that 43 percent of HR leaders struggle to hire suitable candidates due to competition amongst employers. A targeted, programmatic approach is unique to the employer and looks at every job on an individual level to take the guesswork out of high-volume sourcing so that recruiters feel confident that they are in front of the right job seekers.
3. Cost savings
   • The cost structure of a programmatic job advertising approach is based on pay-per-click. A tough-to-fill role may cost more to bid on, however the result is higher-quality talent. The amount bid determines how a job ranks in a candidate’s search results to remain competitive within budget and allocate spend to positions that need the most support.
4. Back decisions by data
   • As businesses change and priorities shift, programmatic advertising adds the flexibility to make tactical adjustments on the fly. Sourcing metrics provide a clear picture into which sources drive talent that convert into quality candidates to create a strong approach for the future. By backing sourcing spend with data, talent acquisition goals are easily tied back to organizational objectives. Deloitte research found that high-performing organizations are six times more likely to use predictive data than their lower-performing counterparts.

The adoption of new technologies in the talent acquisition space such as programmatic job advertising, jobs searches powered by Google for Jobs, candidate relationship management (CRM) tools and texting that integrate well into a best-of-breed applicant tracking system make it an exciting time to be a recruiter. With the right tools in hand, recruiters dramatically improve their experience and efficiency in attracting much needed talent to drive business forward.