[Recruitment Advertising Essentials]: How Automation Can Help Improve Job Advertising Performance while Boosting Productivity

Recruitment marketing teams today are tasked with sourcing more qualified talent, while cutting back on their budgets and resources.

While direct employers that hire in large volumes certainly have their work cut out for them, many staffing agencies, Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firms, and recruitment marketing agencies, which rely massively on effective job advertising to deliver expected client outcomes and run a successful and viable business, are in dire straits. A lot of them are operating with almost half of their pre-COVID recruitment marketing teams or resources.

In order to reach, attract, and convert ideal job seekers and meet their hiring goals in time and within budget, recruitment marketers often deploy a multi-channel strategy – one that targets both active and passive candidates across a variety of talent sources. 

However, manually setting up, managing, and optimizing tens or hundreds of recruitment advertising campaigns across multiple job sites and publishers – for thousands of jobs – is far from easy. It can be a significant resource drain, time-consuming, and prone to human error. Ultimately, it takes a big chunk out of your bottom line. 

Programmatic job advertising solutions like Joveo offer an extremely powerful way to address these challenges – job ad automations. 

What are job ad automations?

Joveo’s programmatic job advertising platform enables recruitment marketers to set up custom rules to optimize their campaigns – by automatically carrying out specific actions when certain conditions are met – in order to accomplish their goals.

Automations largely consist of a series of if-then statements that can be compounded to create a robust automated trading strategy. With the ability to control performance and optimizations down to the job, campaign, and publisher level, automations empower the user to reach their hiring goals in the most efficient manner while maximizing ROI.

As needs change over time, automations can be easily reconfigured for dynamic campaign management and optimization.

Why do job ad automations matter?

In a nutshell, job ad automations save time and money and reduce manual intervention.

Without job ad automations, recruitment advertisers would typically spend several hours each day enabling/disabling publishers and jobs, manually allocating and adjusting budgets, and optimizing bids, in order to achieve the best possible ROI on their media spend.

A programmatic job advertising platform, such as Joveo’s, automates most of these activities based on pre-set rules and algorithms, thus enhancing their overall productivity and freeing time up to focus on other things (that require a human touch) such as candidate relationship management.

Job ad automation use cases

Joveo’s platform offers recruitment marketers the ability to create three types of automation rules:

1. Administration rules: Administration rules allow users to enable/pause/resume certain jobs, job groups, or campaigns when particular conditions are met (or not met).

For example, you can create a rule to automatically pause a campaign once you receive a certain number of clicks or applications, or reach a certain spend limit. You can also pause poor-performing jobs, job groups, campaigns, or publishers, if they receive fewer clicks or applications than expected, or are spending their budgets too quickly.

2. Bid strategy rules: With these rules, users can increase or decrease their bids for specific job groups and publishers based on their performance, in terms of the number of clicks, applications, conversion rates, or spend.

For instance, you can drive more traffic to your ads by increasing your bids by, say 10%, if your number of clicks or applications falls below a certain threshold within a specified period of time. Similarly, you can decrease your bids by a predefined margin, in case your number of clicks, applications or spend crosses a certain limit.

3. Performance rules: Performance rules help users to automatically allocate more of their budget to high-performing campaigns or job groups, or reduce budgets for poor-performing ones.

For example, if your number of clicks or applications exceed a certain threshold and your spend or cost-per-applicant (CPA) is lower than expected in a given duration, you can increase your budget for a certain job, job group, or campaign by a specific amount.

Benefits of job ad automations

• • Time savings and higher efficiency: Manual monitoring, management, and optimization of a large number of campaigns is time-consuming and prone to human error. Delayed decisions and actions over a period of time can result in poor campaign performance and sub-optimal hiring outcomes.
    Job ad automations save a tremendous amount of time in campaign management and optimization. They also help reduce inefficiencies in the process, so you can source more relevant candidates on time, while maximizing ROI.

• • Reduced cost per hire (CPH): Inefficiencies and delays in campaign management and optimization not only impact agility, but also your costs per hire when budgets are allocated or utilized sub-optimally.
    By enabling data-driven and pre-set rules to guide campaign decisions and actions in real-time, recruitment marketers can rely on frequent, instant, and optimal changes to their campaigns, to drive down cost per hire and ensure their budgets are spent where they need to be, when they need to be.

• • Do more with less: When you can set up, pause, and resume campaigns automatically based on specific conditions being met, a single recruitment marketer can achieve the same output as a large team working manually. In other words, you can scale your recruitment advertising efforts massively while operating with a smaller team. This can have a dramatically positive impact on the bottom line for a staffing agency, RPO, or recruitment marketing agency.

• • Wider reach in less time: By eliminating the manual rigor involved in constantly monitoring and managing dozens or even hundreds of publishers, job ad automations enable recruitment advertisers to confidently scale and leverage a wide range of publishers on the World Wide Web, without compromising on the performance and quality of their campaigns.

• • More time for creative tasks: When mundane, repetitive tasks are automated, recruitment marketers and recruiters have more time in their days for things that are more strategic, creative, or require a human touch, such as personalized candidate communication.

• • Plan ahead: With job ad automations, it becomes easier to stay organized and plan ahead. With simple changes to the job feed, your job ads can run automatically with the machine (or system) optimizing them to ensure you’re always meeting your performance and ROI goals.

To learn more about how Joveo can help you automate, manage, and optimize your recruitment advertising at scale, sign up for a demo here.