How Programmatic Recruitment Can Help You Make Better Hires, Faster

Employers will use any tactic to attract job seekers, but the constant stream of online job content creates intense competition. You can’t just post a job and hope for the best anymore.

Today, the hiring process has become much more proactive. With new technologies come new ways of job discovery. As an employer, you have to optimize your efforts, even without knowing the actual number of eyes on your postings.

More than that, there are costs to consider — how much do you have to pay to get in front of job seekers, and is it efficient from a cost-per-hire perspective? That’s the ultimate metric as an employer. You have to know how much you’re investing online to hire one individual. Once you’ve nailed it, however, you can repeat it in your future campaigns.

This is where a programmatic recruitment platform can give you an edge.

Media agencies have been using programmatic solutions to buy online ad space for years, but only recently has that same method been available in the recruitment space.

In 2010, I was the Head of Performance Advertising at a company called AdMob. This was where I first saw the potential for applying programmatic strategies to use cases outside of publishing highly targeted ads in front of the eyes of relevant consumers. Following AdMob’s acquisition by Google, I was the Head of Mobile Display Advertising at Google in the APAC region followed by further engagements within the thriving ad tech and digital media space. From there I took all my lessons learned and decided to found Perengo, a programmatic recruitment platform.

Programmatic recruitment, quite simply, uses machine learning to drive more applicants and hires while meeting budget goals. This includes automating job campaigns to optimize across all channels and gathering actionable business intelligence with campaign analytics tracking. This means your posting has a better chance of getting in front of the most relevant job seekers possible. More than that, a programmatic recruitment platform will take the information it learns from each campaign and apply it to future campaigns.

You aren’t just working smarter this way — you’re building a foundation for smarter campaign management. Create success in the future by looking to the past.

With an endless number of different places where people look for jobs, you’ll need help.

Job seekers visit many different digital channels at any given time.

They wake up and check job alerts on their phone, then move on to their preferred job apps or sites. Maybe they do a Google search. Even Facebook has ads for jobs now, adding to the seamless yet constant churn of platforms that the modern job seeker moves through.

An effective campaign will allow you to be in the same digital space as your job seeker at any given moment in time, regardless of their market or location. But you’ll still need to know what market you’re targeting because this will guide platform choice.

A blue-collar job seeker may not be searching LinkedIn for a manual labor job, while someone with ten years of analytics experience isn’t going to be checking Craigslist.

But meeting people where they are digitally online is only half the game. You also have to know how they’re looking.

That means knowing the most crucial details for your industry: What are my ideal candidates looking for? Where do they live and commute from?

Aside from advertising on job boards or Google, you have to make sure you’re deploying the right keyword and content strategy. People don’t simply search for the name of the job they want — they might also search for terms associated with it.

For example, someone looking for a “warehouse associate” position might also search for “forklift driver,” “packer,” or “package handler.” If you’re hiring for that position, you want to consider creating relevant content encompassing those prominent search keywords in order for your post to show up in their search.

A programmatic platform that is well-versed in SEO and Google keywords will help make your content stand out. Then, the challenge shifts and the goal becomes beating your best results.

Some programmatic platforms will take it one step further. In addition to analyzing what sites your job seekers are on, and what search terms they are using, Perengo will analyze job seeker geographic, demographic, 1st party employer data and 3rd party audience data to better distribute job ads.

This is really where the benefits of a programmatic recruiting platform kick in.

After analyzing the first new hires, you can morph the campaign moving forward to adjust for targeting, messaging, job ad content, and location.

And you don’t have to hire anyone to help with this — there’s an algorithm for it.

Managing bids and budgets for ad placement across a variety of sites used to be a job for several people. Now you can hand it over to a system, which looks at past events in order to predict future ones. It devises the best strategy for recruiting an ideal job seeker.

For example, it may know where your new hires are coming from — maybe “warehouse associate” on Indeed in Astoria is your most successful recruitment campaign. Knowing the best data points from the last campaign will give your future postings a greater level of success.

The overall goal is not only to measure data until someone is hired, but to also measure the lifetime value of the employee. Imagine what you could apply to your hiring process if you could predict how long someone would stay with your company.

With rapid advances in how job seekers are looking for work, it’s crucial that your company keeps pace. Programmatic recruitment lets you move into a smarter age of hiring.