Programmatic – it sounds like a scary word.
It sure as heck doesn’t sound like anything that would help drive job applications more efficiently to your staffing agency.
But that’s exactly what it is.
In our current digitally dominated climate, an understanding of how programmatic job advertising works could mean the difference between filling your jobs and, well, not!
What can you be doing to make sure you’re giving your jobs the best chance possible for success? Let’s jump right in and break down this strategy.
Programmatic – According to the Dictionary
“Of the nature of or according to a program, schedule or method.”
OK, we’re on to something here.
The dictionary definition talks about completing a task through the use of a program or method, or by a schedule. This helps.
Programmatic – According to the Talent Acquisition Industry
Well, this is where it gets a little unclear. As several months of digging in the talent acquisition sector has revealed, there are a couple of different definitions.
But first, we need to switch gears before digging into programmatic in the talent acquisition industry.
Programmatic – Why It’s Important
In other industries (outside of talent acquisition and recruitment), programmatic advertising is commonplace. By 2021, an estimated 88 (or $81 billion!) percent of digital display will be transacted programmatically. When I attended TA Tech Leadership Summit in June 2018, Chris Forman, the CEO of AppCast, estimated the talent acquisition industry is only around 20-25 percent.
Hello opportunity!
Programmatic Definition #1 – Rules-Based Bidding
It’s applied in a rules-based format.
What do I mean?
Let’s say you are pushing a nursing job in Denver and need 20 total applications in the next 14 days. You are going to bid $0.50 for each click.
After seven days, the job only has 2 applications. Now we need to increase that bid to $1.00.
With programmatic advertising, we can set rules at the beginning of the campaign to tell the software that, if the Nursing Job in Denver doesn’t have 10 applications by the end of the first week, we need to increase our bidding.
You could go in and manually change it, but setting up an automated bidding strategy leads to better efficiency for all parties involved.
Programmatic Definition #2 – Application Caps
Let’s expand our first example.
Your staffing agency doesn’t just have one nursing job in Denver; it has 10 unique nursing jobs in the Denver area. Some are entry level and some require more skill.
To have a successful hire for each position, let’s say we need 10 applications for each job during the next two weeks.
After the first week, Job A has 20 applications, but the other jobs have two or less applications. What can we do? We can set up a programmatic strategy to tell the software that, when we reach our goal of 10 applications for a job, we can STOP spending money on that job. This limits wasted spend, as you don’t need 40 applications for that job – you only need 10.
Let’s take it a step further. Since we can turn off the spending to Job A when it reaches 10 applications, we can shift our spend from Job A and distribute it to the under-performing jobs.
This can kickstart those jobs, eliminate wasted spend, and lead to better results – thus allowing staffing agencies to make more performance-based decisions.
Programmatic Definition #3 – More of a True Programmatic Approach
This is where we are going to get technical (sorry!)
Programmatic uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to make better decisions and serve advertisements to the people most likely to engage with the content.
Let’s jump back to that Nursing Job in Denver.
True programmatic is going to dig into the job title and job posting BEFORE serving the job listing to websites.
The programmatic platform uses its artificial intelligence to look at the job title of “Registered Nurse” and the content – skills and responsibilities, for example – in the actual job description. Through that analysis (which is done in fractions of a second), the platform will then push the job to specific job boards and websites it thinks will drive the most conversions.
Some platforms will even provide an estimate. It looks at your jobs and budget and returns an estimate of the number of views and applications, in addition to the conversion rate.
Now, we aren’t done. The AI will continue to learn. It will look at candidate behavior of your Registered Nurse job in Denver and continue to make better decisions. Maybe it showed the job on 10 websites – three of them aren’t working well, but two of them are. The software will show the RN job less often on the lower-performing websites and more often on the best-performing websites.
All of these decisions are made very quickly. The platforms provide the data for us to look at, but we aren’t going to be able to make those decisions as quickly and as efficiently as the machine learning and AI.
So, Why Do Staffing Agencies Need Programmatic?
I put this in the blog title and haven’t yet answered the question. Here we go!
It’s a competitive job market. Unemployment numbers are high, and new safety concerns add even more challenges to the job search. Now more than ever the internet and other digital technologies are crucial to hiring success.
Most businesses are struggling to find quality candidates, and programmatic technology has the potential to become a competitive advantage for your business. It’s not as common as you might think!
That competitive advantage could be enormous in trying to fill open positions. Now’s the time to consider programmatic job advertising – use this guide in learning more about the vendors in the industry and how to efficiently leverage your job openings.
And when you’re ready to get started with programmatic job advertising for your business, we’ll be here! Contact our team of recruitment marketing specialists today.
