Have you heard of programmatic recruiting? In essence, programmatic recruiting is the idea of taking the recruiting process and optimizing it through technology. It emphasizes using technological means—rather than using people—to improve efficiencies in the recruiting process. More of the process becomes automated, using data to make decisions. This includes decisions about where a job should be posted, how much to spend on promoted placement, what sites to use, etc. In programmatic recruiting, these decisions will be handled by algorithms that take into account historic and current data. The decisions are made in a matter of seconds, which greatly improves efficiency and ROI.
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The theory here is that programmatic recruiting will improve efficiency to such a degree to allow employers and other recruiters to hire people faster and spend less doing so. It’s especially useful for organizations that hire for multiple types of roles, with differing skill set requirements for each role.
Programmatic Recruiting: How it Works in Practice
The way this works is through real-time data analysis guiding decisions. Programmatic recruiting typically utilizes artificial intelligence to assess data to make recommendations based on past results combined with real-time information. The data may come from a wide variety of sources. For example, it may be from your existing CRM (past results) combined with information from websites that show current statistics and demographics of users. The combination of data allows the program to immediately assess how to proceed, based on where the job placement will be most likely to be seen by the ideal candidates. It can not only make recommendations of where to place an ad (and how to target it), but also can do so on your behalf—even going so far as to automate bidding to ensure that recruiting campaigns are updated in real time in response to the current online environment. This can mean recruiting campaign details are changed continuously to best target the right individuals through various channels simultaneously. It can be updated to reflect new ad campaigns that are targeted to places where your audience will be found.
Note: Programmatic advertising—unrelated to job ads—has been around for a while already. When you think of targeted ads you see online that reflect your preferences in some way, this is likely the result of programmatic advertising. Now this is being applied to job searchers and showing them more targeted job ads.
The end result of programmatic recruiting is that job ads are placed where they will be most relevant—a result which may change for each role, and may change moment to moment. This might mean varying where a job is posted, when it is posted, and even how it is worded. The job ad is customized in content and dissemination to be most effective, based on the required skills and experience for that role. Technology does the assessment—analyzing data to see where it makes sense to post a job that requires x skills and get the best return. Data is constantly reviewed to make changes to the process in the future and continue to improve efficiency in the process. Automation of the process includes continual feedback to improve it over time.
While programmatic recruiting does automate more of the process, it doesn’t remove people from the equation. It instead takes away the most arduous aspects—the calculations and data assessments—and gives near immediate answers and updates. The people involved still have to be responsible to work within the system to create an effective job ad and to input the right (accurate) information to allow the system to work well.
In part 2 of this article, we’ll take a look at how programmatic recruiting differs from normal job ad placement processes, and we’ll the benefits of using it.