[Recruitment Advertising Essentials]: Understanding and Leveraging a Job Ad Exchange

Say you’re a recruiter. 

There are over ten thousand jobs you need to fill this year. A large majority of the applications you usually receive are via the recruitment advertising campaigns you run across the dozen or so publishers you have contracts with at the moment. However, based on the prior performance of these publishers, you’re not certain they’ll help you hit your hiring goals. So you set out to seek partnerships with a fresh set of publishers to widen the top of your recruitment marketing funnel and attract more candidates. You choose the publishers you reach out to from a 6-month old industry report listing the top job sites in your country.

You then follow multiple rounds of conversations and negotiations with each publisher, resulting in annual contracts with several of them – all of which takes you over a month to initiate and conclude. Another month goes by, and as things go sometimes, you see that many of these publishers haven’t delivered good enough results, and you’re falling drastically short of your goals. 

The clock is ticking. 

In the end of it all, you’ve lost a good portion of your budget (with little to show for it), locked yourself into long term contracts with publishers that don’t yield reliable results, and perhaps most importantly, lost valuable time. 

It’s surprising that the scenario described above isn’t uncommon among today’s recruitment marketing teams. Managing relationships with a large number of publishers individually is complex and time-consuming. Manually allocating your budget across all of them while tracking their performance individually is highly inefficient and lacks the data-driven rigor needed to attract high quality talent cost effectively and predictably.

However, there’s a solution in sight that addresses these challenges: advertising your jobs via a job ad exchange.

What is a job ad exchange?

A job ad exchange is a virtual marketplace where you, as a recruitment advertiser, can instantly access a select and varied collection of premium publishers – job sites (including niche and diversity sites), job aggregators, social media sites, and search engines – to buy recruitment media (to advertise your jobs) on a performance basis.

In the world of consumer advertising, ad exchanges have been around for several years now. These exchanges expose their ad inventory (hosted on publisher websites) for advertisers to bid on in real-time, based on supply and demand patterns. In the recruitment advertising world, however, real-time bidding capabilities do not exist today and are unlikely to emerge anytime soon. 

Still, a job ad exchange is a huge technological leap forward compared to traditional (read, manual) advertising approaches. It enables the buying and selling of job ad inventory based on performance (clicks or applies, CPC or CPA) instantly and at scale. This is done by leveraging programmatic job advertising technology, which automates recruitment media buying and management based on performance and costs. As a result, you can significantly expand your reach, run job ad campaigns with more predictable outcomes, and/or reduce your cost per applicant (and cost per hire).

You can also look at a job ad exchange as a “publisher” on steroids. While it provides you more relevant candidates across a large number of publishers, it simplifies your advertising operations as you engage and transact with a single business entity (the exchange provider). In addition, you buy only as much ad inventory (based on outcomes – clicks or applies) as you need, for as long as it suits you.

What are the benefits of using a Job Ad Exchange?

Instant access to multiple high-performance publishers via a single contract

With a job ad exchange you achieve an immediate amplification of reach by tapping into a publisher pool of hundreds of the best performing general, niche, and diversity job sites as well as social and search channels worldwide. The selection of publishers for your job ads is purely data-driven and automated, and so are your campaign management and optimization decisions. 

Joveo’s MOJO^TM Ad Exchange enables you to tap into an exclusive pool of publishers spanning hundreds of the best performing general, niche, and diversity job sites worldwide – via a single contract. Therefore, you attract more relevant job applicants much more swiftly and cost-effectively than usual.

Higher performance and ROI

Job exchanges enable you to leverage a truly data-driven approach to job ad distribution and media management. The exchange, powered by programmatic technology, automatically and continuously monitors your media mix and optimizes it based on a huge repository of data as well as down-the-funnel metrics (such as number of applicants/ hires, CPA, and CPH) –resulting in error and bias-free selection of publishers and supercharged performance. The MOJO^TM Ad Exchange leverages machine learning to create a self-learning, continuously improving loop that consistently maximizes ad performance and ROI across your recruitment funnel, ensuring you achieve significantly improved campaign outcomes.

Unprecedented transparency

The MOJO^TM Ad Exchange is the only fully transparent job ad exchange in the world. With our intuitive and centralized dashboard, you can easily compare media performance and costs across sources in the exchange in real time. You stand to gain incredibly actionable insights into which job site, search engine, or social channel is performing the best at any point of time. This 360° visibility extends across the entire candidate journey as well – from click to application and finally to hire – at the macro (campaign) as well as micro (individual job) levels.

Reduced operational and billing complexity

Quite importantly, job ad exchanges help you minimize operational as well as billing complexities by enabling you to allocate your budget to a single source or business entity. This also effectively consolidates your previously multiple invoicing efforts (across individual publishers) into a single process. In other words, with a single contract and single invoice, you gain the power to advertise your jobs with a slew of high-performing publishers and reach hitherto untapped audiences at a fraction of the cost you used to incur earlier.

The world of consumer advertising has pioneered and profited heavily from the use of ad exchanges powered by programmatic technology. In comparison, job ad exchanges still have some distance to cover. Yet, they deliver immense benefits to recruitment marketers today – enabling them to reach the best and most relevant talent easily and quickly, while making sure that they retain the control and flexibility to do it at the right time and price.

To learn more about the world’s only transparent Job Ad Exchange, request a demo today!