Innovative AI News, Insights and Strategies for Job Advertising

Hire Smarter w/ Programmatic Job Advertising (and Save 43%)

Written by Othamar Gama Filho | Jul 25, 2019 9:27:48 PM

Anyone with experience in recruitment and hiring will tell you that it’s become more difficult and doesn’t look to get easier any time soon. Not only has the demand for labor gone up significantly in the last decade, but it’s become harder to identify qualified applicants and maintain their engagement throughout the interview process. That’s why programmatic job advertising has become such an important part of the recruitment process.

What is Programmatic Job Advertising and How Does it Help?

The first thing to understand is exactly what programmatic job advertising is and how it plays into your recruitment efforts.

Most recruitment happens manually. Sometimes a service is used, but at its core a job description and requirements are written, it is posted on various job boards, and in some cases companies pay a fee in order to reach out to prospective candidates.

When applications and resumes start coming in, it’s up to the recruiter or hiring manager to filter through them, try to find candidates that are likely to meet internal criteria, then start connecting with them. This process is difficult, long, and riddled with potential bias, even at this early stage.

Programmatic job advertising simplifies this process by taking hiring data and using it to search for people who have qualifications and qualities that match successful candidates who have been previously hired.

Sign up today for a free demo of the Talentify platform and see exactly how a programmatic approach to recruiting works.

How Does Programmatic Job Advertising Actually Work?

This kind of recruiting is primarily based on complex algorithms developed by data scientists and hiring experts. By studying what makes a person a good fit in an industry, taking into account factors including how long they remain in a job, how successful they are in that job, the kinds of skills they have, etc., sets of rules can be developed to look for similar job seekers.

But this data does more than just find and filter candidates. It can also help to establish when an interview should be scheduled or how often to reach out to a potential employee in order to ensure they remain engaged.

According to a meta-study published by the American Psychological Association, employers who use programmatic job advertising not only find they have higher retention rates, but their employees earn higher performance ratings. The study even controlled for ratings by computers and human managers, finding increases in both.

Eliminating Bias and Reducing Liability

Another way that relying on algorithmic solutions to job recruitment helps your company is by eliminating bias in hiring.

As human beings, our tendency is to be favorably disposed toward people who are like us in some way. We get a sense of validation from people who share our interests or traits, and that feeling can distract us from the bigger picture. As we grasp on to those things that we like about ourselves reflected in the candidate, we start to overlook issues that might otherwise catch us up.

The flip side of that is that we might also overlook a candidate who would be perfect for the job, but are not like us in any significant way.

For example, I know of one business owner who hired somebody that shared his love of self-help and business books, but the person turned out to be remarkably irresponsible on the job. He was fired after two months. He then went and looked at the other candidate that he had passed up, re-interviewing and eventually hiring him. That second candidate was a high performing member of the organization for nearly two years.

There is also legal liability to keep in mind. Even if the bias is unconscious, which it is in the vast majority of cases, a pattern of discrimination can be established if a recruiter only seems to hire people who share certain characteristics with them.

Programmatic job advertising helps to reduce these types of bias by keeping recruiters focused on relevant data about candidates.

Engaging Prospective Employees

In a job market that is increasingly favoring talent over companies, its important to keep anyone that you’re looking to hire engaged throughout the process.

That is one of the ways that programmatic job advertising can help you to secure investment at the beginning of the interview process. For example, the Talentify platform automatically generates a handful of prescreening questions based on job descriptions. This helps a candidate determine if a job will be a good fit for them before they spend their time filling out forms.

What this also does is populate the machine learning with valuable data which can then generate a snapshot of where your qualified candidates are coming from and how to reach them.

An engaged prospect is one that will continue throughout the hiring process and value the position, as well as consider offers more seriously.

See how we keep your candidates engaged with your company by scheduling a free demo now.

Is Programmatic Job Advertising Perfect?

Absolutely not. There are several things that an algorithm, no matter how complex, cannot do yet. This is not a replacement for your recruitment people any more than an oven is a replacement for chefs.

Rather, like the oven, it’s a tool that can simplify how your “chefs” do their jobs. Just like the introduction of the oven made it unnecessary to build and maintain a fire to cook a meal, ensuring faster, more consistent results, the introduction of algorithmic recruiting can do the same.

If your company is trying to diversify their workforce, this tool cannot replace well-trained recruiters. It can help sidestep unconscious biases, but it also helps avoid the conscious biases that are necessary for that kind of initiative. Hiring managers still have to keep the company’s goals in mind while working with their AI recruitment system.

Can Programmatic Job Advertising Help My Business?

Definitely.

If you search for a particular job on Google, you’re likely to find paid ads first, then Google for Jobs, and the rest of the first page results will probably be from Indeed.com. Everybody is using the same service, but they are doing so inefficiently, wasting money on easy to fill positions and making it difficult to find candidates for harder to fill vacancies. This issue means that 50% of the money spent on Indeed goes to only fill 10% of the positions.

By utilizing start/stop mechanics, anti-spam algorithms, AI prioritization, and more, a programmatic job advertising platform can help you find qualified candidates for lower wage and hourly positions through free channels so that your money can go to hiring the best semi-skilled and highly-skilled talent.

This is a partial list of qualities companies that do the best with AI recruiting tools have:

  • High volume of hourly positions
  • Distributed network of locations where positions need to be filled
  • In an industry where labor is hard to find
  • Have spent years recruiting in the same area
  • Experience high turnover

Additional benefits of programmatic job advertisement

More than all of that, there are a few other advantages recruiting companies can enjoy by going down the programmatic route:

  1. 24/7 marketing access: An additional benefit of programmatic marketing is the ability to have a team of marketing analysts working for you 24/7 so you can spend smarter and get more results from your budget.
  2. Further reach: Instead of the one to three channels that you normally get, with programmatic you can use more channels and experiment with which are the most effective. This is essential as it will allow you to reach more viable candidates for your position. Programmatic job advertising platforms use a variety of channels, including Ziprecruiter, CareerBuilder, Monster, Talroo, JobCase, Indeed, and Linkedin.
  3. More flexibility: Traditional job advertising has too much of a one-size-fits all mentality. Popular job listings typically eat up your pay per click budget, leaving you with less budget for those hard to find job positions. Programmatic job advertising allows you to be the most efficient with your job postings.

Saving countless hours and effort that could be better spent elsewhere, it’s no wonder recruiters prefer to go the programmatic route. With Talentify’s pricing model, you don’t have to worry about one type of job listing eating up too much of your budget. If you’re an employer with more than 100 positions in your ATS, then it makes sense to pull in Talentify for the process.