Technology has radically transformed talent acquisition strategies, enabling recruiters to source with greater speed, precision and cost-effectiveness. One of the key elements of modern talent sourcing is programmatic job advertising – a term ported over from the marketing realm – which automates the job ad buying process and offers HR teams data-driven decision-making and real-time adjustments. As the recruitment landscape becomes more performance-driven and transparent, programmatic job advertising is increasing in popularity and utility.

How Programmatic Job Advertising Works

Prior to programmatic job advertising in the pay-to-post era, recruiters were required to manually post job sites to individual job boards – a time-consuming and inefficient process. Programmatic job advertising reduces the complexity of manually uploading job listings to career sites by leveraging a consolidated platform to manage your advertising spend. Your selected programmatic vendor will use AI, predictive analytics, job-seeker information, and other historical data so that your jobs are automatically distributed to the career sites containing your target audience. Performance is then monitored and adjusted in real-time, ensuring recruiting goals are achieved.

In an ideal world, programmatic job advertising gets your open positions in front of the right candidate, at just the right time and in the most cost-effective way. And while programmatic job advertising offers employers one of the best returns on investment when it comes to job posting, it must still be managed closely, as overall performance depends on candidate quality and conversion. And it should be leveraged as part of a holistic recruiting strategy that also educates potential job seekers about your employer brand.

Whether you are already using programmatic job advertising as one of your talent acquisition strategies, or are thinking of getting started, here are four common mistakes and how to avoid them.

• Automatic does not mean autopilot. Although programmatic job advertising automates many of the once manual tasks associated with job advertising across many different sites, it still requires oversight, especially for employers with many open positions. Constant oversight is necessary to make sure the budget is being allocated across the various positions optimally so that certain job ads are not using up the budget faster than others. In addition, talent acquisition teams are always juggling constantly changing internal factors when it comes to which roles or categories take top priority. The only way to make sure the programmatic campaigns and budget are being allocated accordingly is manual intervention and adjustment. Constant campaign oversight is critical for employers to get the most ROI for their programmatic job ad spend.

• Bots are a costly problem for job postings, even in programmatic. Bots continue to plague the wider programmatic display advertising industry as a whole but due to the volume of ads, technology vendors have emerged to help advertisers identify and prevent fraudulent traffic from being counted as clicks and eating up ad spend. For job advertising, it is up to the job sites and programmatic job advertising platforms to audit campaigns regularly and filter out bot traffic. Employers should select a programmatic vendor that takes action against bot traffic, otherwise they will be throwing their ad spend to the wind.

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