Job advertising made easy: Insights from a CMO

While automated software is good, intelligent software is even better. Find out why in an exclusive interview with Jenn Ravalli, VP of Marketing at PandoLogic.

• With the current state of the job economy, we’re seeing broad adoption of recruitment marketing tech and it looks like the next big wave of adoption is programmatic.
• With marketing leaders having experienced this same adoption around 10 years ago, we secured an exclusive conversation with VP of Marketing, Jenn Ravalli to get her to weigh in on how talent acquisition leaders can harness this technology to succeed in their job advertising.
• As HR and recruitment professionals strive to come out on top, revamping hiring systems and capturing today’s top talent by investing in technology like programmatic advertising is critical.

Uniquely positioned, Jenn Ravalli, VP of Marketing at PandoLogic sat down with UNLEASH to give her insights on the value of programmatic job advertising technology.

The attention around programmatic tech is still fairly novel in the recruitment space, however, the revelation of the data-fueled change that it can offer HR leaders is an epoch that marketing leaders experienced for themselves 10 or so years ago.

Given Jenn’s experience in her own career of being responsible for building brand awareness and creating integrated marketing programs, the parallels and lessons that she brings to the space of recruitment marketing and job advertising are compelling.

Who is Jenn Ravalli?

Jennifer Ravalli leads marketing at PandoLogic, where she is responsible for building brand awareness and generating revenue through integrated marketing programs. Jennifer has over 15 years of experience in the HR Technology space. Prior to Pandologic, Jennifer led Planning and Product Marketing at iCIMS where she built the function from scratch, introducing scalable systems around launch planning, integrated campaign planning, and sales enablement. Jennifer also spent eight years at ADP where she held multiple executive roles across marketing and operations.

While at ADP, Jennifer grew their Small Business health insurance brokerage business from $4M to $20 in three years, led the most successful product launch in the company’s history, and was the architect of their evolution of work narrative. Passionate about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, she is a member of Chief, a network for women executives focused on connecting and supporting women leaders. Jennifer is a graduate of New York University, where she studied mass media communications and entertainment marketing.

The goal of programmatic job advertising

For those still unfamiliar with programmatic job advertising, this description from TechFunnel is helpful:

The goal of programmatic job advertising is to automate and steadily improve the sourcing of applicants. Programmatic advertising technology uses A/B testing, AI, and algorithmic decision engines to make job advertising easier and more effective. Easier, because it buys job ads on channels all over the internet automatically. More effective, because it constantly tests the ads and channels to make sure that your budget is spent on the ones that perform best.

At UNLEASH we’re seeing broad adoption of recruitment marketing tech and it looks like the next big wave is programmatic. So we asked Jenn, as a marketing leader, what she thinks the advantages are for a talent acquisition leader to start leveraging this technology sooner rather than later.

Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation:

The state of job recovery

As job recovery gains momentum and lockdowns ease further across the world, businesses are evidently becoming increasingly confident, and have increasing needs for hiring new staff.

Trend trackers such as the Recruitment and Employment Confederation’s ‘Job Recovery Tracker’, are reporting record highs of job advertisements posted per week, since the start of the pandemic. And in the US, Reuters reported job openings increased 268,000 to 7.4 million in February 2021 alone.

Jenn commented on the realities of what this means for recruitment leaders.

You can’t peruse any major news outlet or even take a trip to your local downtown, without being bombarded by the hesitancy of applicants to return to work. And traditional channels are not necessarily doing the job that they were pre-pandemic.

With the high volume of advertisements and the need for candidates to really be won over, cutting above the noise and reaching the right talent is tough! This is where programmatic comes in. “Using this method of job advertising, means that you’re targeting your ads and able to understand where the ideal applicants may be,” said Jenn.

It also means that you can open up new channels without having to go through the risk of doing so, and without the time you would normally have to take to research them in the first place. “Your ability to think through where these people are is just aided by being able to bring that technology forward, and because the market is just so unpredictable right now, the ability to make those changes in real-time is just not something talent acquisition leaders can do on their own. So, programmatic helps them to see what’s happening and make those adjustments and alter your strategy as the market is actually changing,” explained Jenn.

Trying these broad approaches, even with just a portion of your budget, will help you understand where you need to go in order to recover faster.

What a TA leader needs to be thinking about with their job advertising:

• Contracts and Channels: Who is managing them? How are they structured? Do you really need them? How do you find the right, most effective channels for your organization?
• Transparency: Are you able to see the level of detail of how each of your channels is performing at the job-site level?
• Budget: Do you understand the relationship of cost to performance?
• Job Spend: Who makes the decision? Do you have recruiters advertise per job or are multiple job openings thought about and advertised like a campaign series?
• Automation: Are you still spending time manually planning every advertisement across channels and spending time to choose those channels in the first place?
• Candidate Quality Pipeline: How do you find where the best candidates are and advertise to them at the right time? What is your conversion rate like? Who is tasked with the first stage qualification of candidates based on skills and job requirements? How do you know who a quality candidate is and how long does it take you to assess that?

With programmatic advertising you should see a direct correlation between cost and performance. You may think that you have a good point of view on what’s being spent and how that’s working, but really when we see folks dig in it takes them about 2 weeks to really understand that. So, that’s a rate change – having analytics at the drop of a hat.

Not just for high-volume job advertising or large organizations

We asked Jenn what types of organizations and hiring types can benefit from the use of programmatic.

“Programmatic is transferrable across all industries and hiring types. A couple of great areas, when you think about being able to leverage up-to-the-minute supply and demand data, really thinking about hard-to-fill roles and knowledge base workers, is where programmatic can be a fantastic solution. You’re able to target and find those geographies and places where those folks might be, without canvasing too much of your spend. That same approach can really work for remote work. With remote work, you can end up advertising directly to the entire US and Canada, and that immediately brings up costs, but that doesn’t mean those workers are in every nook and cranny. So, we’re able to look and understand what nooks and cranny the applicant and the ideal candidate might be in – that way we can direct the spend very specifically, which will then help reduce the costs overall,” Jenn told us.

She also noted that it’s not just for large employers either, but that they’re seeing some incredible results in the franchise and small business space given their needs, as a result of high turnover and part-time workers, as well as the intense state of competition for staffing in those areas.

Think like a CMO

Just as CMOs like Jenn recognized the enormous benefits of leveraging programmatic technology and automating their advertising and marketing strategies a number of years ago, recruitment leaders can clearly reap the benefits too.

Programmatic can help connect employers with the right candidates, on the right sites, at the right time.

For any HR leaders interested in improving the efficiency of their job advertising spend and impacting the quality of their candidate pipeline, and candidate experience, check out more from PandoLogic at UNLEASH.