The popular television game show, “The Price is Right”, airs mid-mornings during the weekday. The show’s premise consists of contestants guessing the right “price” of different consumer items in order to win those items or grand prizes. There are common tactics that contestants use in order to gain a competitive advantage, like bidding a “$1” higher than an opponent’s opening bid in order to get closer to the item’s price. By utilizing the game’s popular strategy moves, contestants can maximize their chances of winning over opponents who don’t use similar calculated tactics.

This type of strategic bidding and optimal decision flow isn’t just related to game shows. Popular automated workflow platforms like Zapier and IFTTT have risen to prominence as users want to become more efficient (both from a time and cost perspective) with everything from inserting CRM leads into a Google Spreadsheet to automatically turning on the porch lights when the pizza delivery driver is on the way. Similarly, the wave of automated decision making has found its way into the hands of recruiters and recruitment media buyers through the use of programmatic job advertising platforms.

Technology advancements in the job advertising space have allowed automations to be set at the job level in order to maximize spend efficiency and candidate applications. In short, this allows recruiters or media buyers to gain a competitive advantage in cost savings and application flow over buyers that don’t use automations. Never before has this amount of strategic logic been able to be set at the job level. In years past, annual contracts or basic PPC buying only allowed for a “post and pray” approach with minimal optimizations and almost no automations.

Without the ability to automate decision making in job advertising, many negative outcomes can occur within a sponsored job portfolio. Here are examples of the adverse effects of sponsoring jobs without automations in place:

    1. Manual Job Targeting – It takes time for recruiters to manually post jobs across a variety of job board sites. With intelligent keyword targeting or other job filtering methods, programmatic platforms can save time by automatically posting jobs that fall under the right sponsorship criteria.
    2. Runaway Jobs – Without a job level budget set, popular jobs are likely to run away with the budget resulting in a small number of jobs taking a majority of spend. With job level budget or apply caps in place, this uneven budget distribution is mitigated, and popular jobs become unsponsored when caps are hit. This allows more budget to flow to “hard-to-fill” jobs once popular jobs have met their budget or application goals.
    3. Sponsoring the Wrong Jobs – Some jobs will get enough organic traffic where they don’t need additional paid sponsorship. By tracking total applications (sponsored and organic), intelligent platforms can recognize which jobs need additional budget and which ones will receive enough organic traffic where paid candidate acquisition isn’t necessary.
    4. All Jobs are Treated Equally – We know that not all jobs need the same advertising treatment. An Entry Level Customer Service role should have different budget and bidding goals than a Senior Level Software Engineer. Programmatic advertising platforms can collect historical data to know exactly how different jobs should be sponsored. This allows different job types and categories to have dynamic goals based on their ideal performance outcomes.
    5. No In-flight Optimizations – Before programmatic job advertising it was difficult to make real-time optimizations based on in-flight performance. Typically, a campaign had to end before analysis and future changes could be implemented during the next sponsorship run. This has changed with the introduction of programmatic job advertising has evolved from a manual to automated tactic. Now, if a job was struggling to gain traction, an automated rule could be put in place that would state something like “If a job has 0 applies after 3 days, then increase the CPC bid by 20%.” This allows continual optimizations to automatically occur during the flight of the advertising campaign, and in turn should help jobs meet their budget and apply goals.

By utilizing automations, organizations are seeing efficiency in their recruitment media planning, and cost savings in their advertising KPIs like CPA (Cost-Per-Application) and CPH (Cost-Per-Hire). One example of this is a global staffing firm that used in-flight optimizations to bid based on the CPA and the application volume. Prior to using Joveo, this client never had the tools to use automations in real-time for their campaigns. As a result of implementing automations, the staffing firm was able to see a 32% overall cost savings in their recruitment advertising. At Joveo, we have built our platform with an automated decision-making approach in mind. The common problems listed above are all addressed by logic and rules built within the platform that help leverage data-driven decision making. With this emerging technology becoming more prominent in the industry, organizations should be seriously considering how these types of custom rules can maximize advertising ROI on their jobs portfolio.

If you are a part of an organization that isn’t yet using automations or are interested in learning more about how automations can make the most of your recruitment advertising, feel free to say hello to me at [email protected] or connect with me on LinkedIn.

ABOUT JOVEO

Joveo® delivers the most relevant hires in the shortest time to companies around the world. Providing real-time insights at every step of the job seeker journey from click to hire, our AI-powered job advertising platform dynamically manages and optimizes sourcing and applications across all online channels. Powering 15M+ job postings every day, our machine learning continuously identifies success, learns and improves to reach the talent you need, when you need it.

Built for ease of use, Joveo replaces the guesswork, complexity, and inefficiency of today’s recruiting with intelligence, transparency and efficiency, delivering more relevant candidates, more certainty, more success.