Is your staffing agency using programmatic job advertising?

Firms resist adopting new technology for lots of reasons. Unfamiliar technology has a learning curve, and it requires your staffing agency and team of recruiters to manage their monthly recruitment budget differently. 

Change is hard – but sometimes NOT changing is even harder.

Manually managing postings on multiple job boards is time- and labor-intensive. And contracts can handcuff you and waste your recruiting budget. 

How can programmatic job advertising help?

Programmatic job advertising promises to bring these three benefits to each staffing agency that implements the tactic:

No Annual Contracts

Automated Posting

Data to Make Better Decisions

No Annual Contracts

There are benefits to a 12-month agreement. It guarantees a service for a defined period. However, it doesn’t guarantee the results from that service.

Let’s walk through an example.

Your staffing agency signs a 12-month contract with a job board in March. It works well for March-June, but in July, something happens. That job board stops delivering. Candidate quality decreases. Candidate quantity decreases.

Your staffing agency is stuck. Less than halfway through a 12-month agreement, and you’re regretting it every day until the end of February.

And job boards make it very easy to lock into those 12-month agreements. Yes, there are benefits. But mainly, it benefits the job board more than your staffing agency.

Avoiding the long-term contract and staying in a month-to-month position maintains flexibility for your staffing agency.

Let’s walk through another example, one that just happened with one of our clients:

A construction staffing agency experienced the down season for job orders in its industry during December. However, they wanted to be aggressive because they wanted to fill their pipeline immediately, so candidates would be readily available when they received more job orders in March and April.

For their recruitment team, we increased the budget for a period of four to six weeks. At the end of that time, we reduced the spend back to its normal level.

No contracts. No difficult conversations. And plenty of candidates available when their busy season hit.

Automated Posting

Someone in your office spends a lot of time posting jobs and then taking jobs down on each sponsored job board. It could be a recruiter. It could be a member of your admin team. They must copy job titles and job postings for each sponsored job. Then, at some point, they take the job down.

There are multiple problems here. Let’s tackle each of them:

The Time It Takes to Post and Take Down Jobs: It’s a repetitive task. It’s a boring task. It’s a task that has no direct value to your staffing agency. You are literally paying someone to copy and paste from your ATS to Indeed, ZipRecruiter, or another job board. 

Couldn’t their time be spent better on another task?

Having to Post Jobs on Multiple Job Boards: What is the number of sponsored job boards for your staffing agency? That same person who is manually posting jobs must do the same task on multiple job boards. The right software program distributes to all job boards where you have sponsorship with the click of a couple of buttons.

When to Take the Jobs Down: This is a big one for me. Is that same person monitoring all the data? Are you hoping they are logged in at the right time to take the jobs down when you have enough applications? And are they available to stop the sponsorship when a job is eating the budget and not delivering candidates?

With programmatic advertising, both of those problems get addressed head-on. The software imports the jobs automatically, eliminating the copy and paste task for that member of your team. Through your staffing agency’s custom strategy, the software reads your parameters and analyzes the real-time data from your audience to make instant adjustments.

People get sick. People have other commitments. People make mistakes. Software doesn’t take days off.

Data to Make Better Decisions

Making decisions based on gut instinct or how a team of recruiters “feels” about the results makes me cringe.

By using software to manage all the sponsorship, the data all comes into a centralized location:

· We get data broken down by job board (Indeed vs. ZipRecruiter vs. Talroo).

· We get data broken down by campaign (high priority vs. low priority or staffing vs. security vs. medical).

· We get data broken down at the actual job level (Job A spent $57 for three applications while Job B only spent $10 and had 0 applications.)

With all that data, then we can make data-driven decisions to allocate the budget to the job boards providing the best ROI.

For example, let’s say we are sponsoring on three job boards.

· Job Board A: $5/Application

· Job Board B: $7.50/Application

· Job Board C: $10/Application

With that data, we know that Job Board A is our cheapest candidate source.

Now, we might even be able to take that one step further: The real goal is to take that to the next level and determine the cost per quality applicant. It’s great to know the lowest cost per applicant, but if we can determine the cost per submission to the hiring manager or cost per job interview, that helps us make even more informed decisions:

· Job Board A: $50/Quality Application

· Job Board B: $75/Quality Application

· Job Board C: $40/Quality Application

When looking at the cost per quality application, Job Board A and Job Board B are producing ten applications to get one quality application. But Job Board C is producing one quality application for every four applications.

That’s our source where we need to put most of our budget.

Three Guaranteed Benefits of Programmatic Job Advertising

Taking the control of the job spend from your staffing agency to programmatic software is a big shift. I get that. But implementing this tactic delivers three big benefits for your staffing agency:

· No Annual Contracts

· Automated Posting

· Data-Driven Decisions

Think about the pain points that we can solve from those three benefits. Avoid being locked into a contract you regret. Give time back to your recruiters or admin staff. Make the best decisions possible based on data from your candidate audience. And get more qualified candidates, right when you need them.

Editor's note:

Since social media burst onto the scene, Matt has found a passion for knowing as much as he can about the always-changing industry. Graduating from the University of Notre Dame with an undergraduate degree in business and working for nine-plus years in intercollegiate athletics, Matt enjoys being a part of a team that helps everyone come out with a win at the end of the day. Outside of the office, Matt is always working on his golf game (even in a Northern climate), though not as much since the birth of his energetic daughter.