What is programmatic recruiting and how does it work?

What is programmatic recruiting and how does it work?

If you’ve never heard of programmatic recruiting and think it’s something you’re completely unaware of, that’s only half true, because many of us who for one reason or another regularly surf the net have to deal with the world of programmatic, although it’s more likely to be programmatic advertising (or programmatic buying), the automated process of buying online advertising space based on user data collection and advanced profiling.

Before delving into the various aspects that characterize programmatic recruiting, let’s take a step back and try to clarify some key definitions often used to describe the types of online advertising and the technologies that characterize them.

Marketing and Recruiting marketing

A short while ago we talked about recruitment marketing and how it is a discipline close to marketing in its way of adopting very similar strategies, tools and analytics.  If for several years, in digital marketing, the use of advanced banner and advertisement delivery systems such as programmatic buying has become increasingly common, in the same way in recruiting, for the past few years, job advertisements can be delivered with the help of programmatic technology.

Are programmatic buying and remarketing the same thing?

No, programmatic buying and remarketing are not the same thing. Remarketing is a technology based on the use of cookies and at the same time an online marketing strategy that allows advertisers to profile the habits and behaviour of users or customers, in order to reach them again with banners or advertisements that are as much in line with their preferences and wishes as possible. So, for example, if we browse on a website and then go to Facebook and find ourselves in front of a sponsored post after a few seconds with content that is perfectly similar to what we just saw on the previous site, we are talking about remarketing. Programmatic buying can include (or certainly almost always includes) remarketing dynamics.

So what are we talking about when we use the term programmatic advertising (buying)?

We refer to a technology based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of processing large amounts of data and processing immediate responses. “Programmatic is the automation of the process of buying and selling media space […] it is a way of using platforms that complements classic planning processes […] the great advantage of programmatic is the management of data, which can take place in real time and always in an automated way, to deliver the right message to the right person” (Riccardo Guggiola – Programmatic Advertising – EPC Editore)

“What does advertising have to do with recruiting?” you may be asking yourself. A lot, because if we remove the word advertising and replace it with recruiting, we are in a process with very similar characteristics that, however, fits in with the way of doing personnel research and selection in today’s world.

What is programmatic recruiting

Going by the definition, we can say that with programmatic recruiting or recruitment we mean the use of technology to acquire, insert and optimise job advertisements. With one goal among all: to make sure that that particular job posting is seen by the right group of candidates at the right time in order to generate the maximum return on investment.

programmatic recruiting how it works

In other words, while with traditional recruitment you have to choose where to place your adverts, i.e. identify the most suitable aggregators and social media, depending also on the type of job you are offering, with programmatic recruitment this whole process is automated.

This type of recruitment, thanks to data analysis and technology, allows an optimisation of the process that leads to targeted ads, real-time offers and campaign optimisation. And this is done by analysing the context (message boards, sites and social networks) and all other factors based on numbers and algorithms. In a word, ‘programmatic’.

Choosing to run recruiting campaigns in this way can guarantee greater effectiveness, time savings and the fact of ensuring that the target is reached.
Of course, programmatic recruiting does not replace the work of the recruiter because it automates a phase that can often be costly, such as finding the right place for a job posting, all the research phase that precedes it, but also the ex post phase.

How programmatic recruiting works

OK, but how does programmatic recruitment work in detail? There are 4 key elements: Big Data, job posting targeting, dynamic budget allocation, campaign optimisation.

Big Data

Big Data in programmatic recruiting is very important and it is thanks to Artificial Intelligence that we are able to understand how to use it in the best way to obtain the best results in terms of time to hire, candidate quality, but also cost to hire. And all in real time.

Yes, but where does this data come from? If you use ATS software such as In-recruiting which tracks all your recruiting activity and at the same time, like a CRM catalogues all the candidates you have seen so far, and this information is combined with other information from websites, you will have comprehensive statistics and current demographic data on your users. This allows the program to understand how to proceed and to choose where to place the job posting, also with a view to multi-posting, as well as to understand how to target it.

In this case, programmatic recruiting can act in two ways: it can give you advice, based on the ideal profile, on where to post the ad or it can do it on your behalf, even going so far as to automate the offers so that the various recruiting campaigns are always up to date and always go to the right ‘places’. Let’s say that in this way we start from data-driven recruiting and move towards an increasingly automated process.

Targeting job advertisements

programmatic recruiting retargeting

Linked to the above, there is another crucial aspect of programmatic recruiting: getting job postings to the people who really fit the profile we are looking for. But not only that: placing these ads in the most ‘relevant’ places.

To be clearer, thanks to targeting, possible candidates can be intercepted through personal and geographical data (proximity to the workplace is not a detail) as well as on the basis of skills, interests and online behaviour patterns. The content of the ad can also be customised in the light of these characteristics.

What if the ideal candidate initially sees the ad but does not interact with it? We can think in terms of retargeting, i.e. accompanying the user as he or she surfs the web, reminding him or her what he or she is missing, thus showing the ad again, making him or her curious and ‘recapturing’. If it is an interested profile, this ‘insistence’ will not do any harm, but will act as a kind of reminder.

Dynamic’ budget allocation

Thanks to programmatic recruiting, as you can imagine, you can monitor conversions in real time and these tools can be perfectly integrated with ATS platforms such as In-recruiting. This will ensure that the budget is really allocated to the most suitable channels and that there is no waste of resources. And this also allows you to better understand what expenditure a campaign may entail in order to manage it effectively for different jobs and platforms.

If, for example, an algorithm detects that advertising spend and conversion rates are better on one platform than on another, then automatically, thanks to programmatic recruiting, more resources will be allocated to that platform. This is because, as we said, programmatic recruiting uses data collected in real time to make decisions in the shortest possible time.

Campaign optimisation

We can therefore say that, thanks to this type of recruiting, we are moving towards optimisation and consequent re-use of the budget that companies allocate annually for research and selection of personnel. The difference is that in this way a recruiting campaign becomes more effective and perhaps even sustainable. With several advantages that we see in detail.

The advantages of programmatic recruiting

There are several advantages to programmatic recruiting. In addition to campaign optimisation, there are savings in terms of both costs and time. On the cost side we have already talked about this when we referred to the dynamic budget allocation.

On the time and human resources side, recruiting of this kind is very important for an employer because it allows the HR team to devote themselves to activities where more ‘human’ skills of analysis and involvement are required.  What do we mean? That if a recruiter is less engaged in the recruitment campaign he/she can devote more time to screening candidates’ soft skills as well as technical competences, he/she can devote more time to designing and building a relationship with the candidate person, thus improving his/her candidate journey especially in the final stages. They can also pay more attention to the interview phase.

Other advantages relate to CV screening: if it is true that ATS software helps in this respect, thanks to programmatic recruiting, requests should be received from more profiled professionals. As well as in greater numbers.

On the candidate side, receiving adverts in line with their characteristics (although they may not know exactly why) can improve their experience.

Such a choice, as we mentioned at the beginning, therefore, does not replace the recruiter, on the contrary: it helps him to focus on activities where human intelligence is important. From the moment in which the company’s need to insert new figures is analysed, to the moment in which the recruiting campaign is created, with job descriptions and so on, up to the final moment in which the candidate ‘arrives’ at the company.

Artificial Intelligence and programmatic recruiting

Programmatic recruitment is closely linked to Artificial Intelligence: without it, we would not have all the decisions and actions that lead to autonomously choosing the best place to publish a job posting, choosing the best price for sponsorship, real-time analysis of trends and everything needed to intercept the ideal candidate.

This, for example, already happens with LinkedIn: recruiters can dynamise the ad and show it only to people looking for identical and similar positions. And on the candidate side it is very much appreciated that the more they fill out their profile and the more ads of a certain type they look at, the more they will be offered similar ones in line with what they are looking for.

In order to get the most out of programmatic recruiting it is important to integrate with the ATS to give you a way to understand which are the best channels and which have worked before. And if it is true that programmatic recruiting proceeds in an automated way, it is also true that thanks to Artificial Intelligence, it is accountable for the choices it has made, constantly learning.