Using programmatic recruitment to drive quality candidates and hires

UNLEASH sat down with Terry Baker, CEO of PandoLogic, to take a closer look at programmatic recruitment’s potential and what it could mean for the future of work. Read on for some of the key takeaways.

• Talent Acquisition leaders are wanting transparency, control, and predictability from the technologies they use.
• In order to keep pace with ever-changing demands in talent, recruitment marketing must finally catch up with consumer marketing.
• HR needs to embrace automation to take full advantage of programmatic tech as a way to eliminate the waste associated with traditional advertising and in turn improving ROI.

Mitigating waste and doing more with less post-COVID are top of mind as the world gets back to work and competition for talent is fierce. As HR and recruitment professionals strive to come out on top, revamping hiring systems and capturing today’s top talent by investing in technology is critical.

One such tool that will maximize ROI and enable a targeted approach to the best talent leverages AI and machine learning to buy advertising in real-time, instead of going through human negotiations and pre-set prices. This tech called ‘programmatic’ affords recruitment leaders the ability to streamline their ad processes and centralize spend in the same way that their CMO is.

Just as CMOs recognize the enormous benefits of leveraging programmatic technology and automating their advertising and marketing strategies, recruitment leaders can too. Programmatic can help connect employers with the right candidates, on the right sites, at the right time. There’s real promise for CHRO’s when they start thinking like their CMO’s.

Your CMO should be your role model

When hunting for new role models and ways to better their strategies and processes, HR professionals will perhaps have been advised to look at their marketing leaders.

In fact, UNLEASH recently published an article by Adam Yearsley (Global Head of Talent Management at Siemens Energy) which looked at how HR could leverage marketing techniques to drive adoption.

Indeed, HR can look for guidance and out-the-box thinking in many areas different areas. One area we know HR is keen to build upon is how to find ways of automating processes and strategies to get back to the ‘human mission’ — aka taking care of people and not manning their computer screens.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if recruiters could focus on the more important things rather than concentrating on picking the right job board for the right job?,” Baker questions.

Using programmatic, CMOs and marketing teams have been able to focus on what matters; the data, the analytics, and the insights they both provide, without getting held up by the process. Another reason CMOs are able to focus on outcomes is that they are not inundated with the vendor management and posting process that HR folks are.

Part of the reason CMOs were able to focus on the data in the early days of programmatic was that they had analytics within their teams, whereas HR does not. But with a fully-automated, AI-enabled programmatic recruitment platform, the solution is doing that work and providing the decision, so that is no longer a barrier for HR adoption.

The power of prediction with programmatic recruitment

“Our promise is a 90% confidence interval on what we predict, before you actually ever run a campaign,” Baker says.

One of the most powerful tools programmatic recruitment can give HR is the ability to predict the optimal budget needed for recruitment advertising spend.

PandoLogic’s platform gives its clients confidence that they can go to them with the jobs, the markets, and the roles they need so they not only get a recommendation of optimal budget but a prediction for the entire year.

Minimizing waste, maximizing ROI

When we live and work in times of such uncertainty, having transparency and a sense of control over ROI, is extremely powerful.

HR and recruitment leaders aren’t just looking for transparency, control, and predictability in their job advertising. “While 41% of employers say that tech stack ROI is about improving quality of hire, the service providers of this tech view the ROI focus as reducing cost per hire. In fact, 30% of service providers cite cost as the key factor in determining ROI.”

And, PandoLogic is the market-leader in ROI, Terry told UNLEASH.

Prior to a recent Chad and Cheese Podcast, with Madeline Laurano, PandoLogic stated “pandoIQ provides a programmatic job advertising platform that delivers a significant increase in job ad performance without any waste spending to maximize the ROI on your recruitment spend. And their AI-enabled algorithms use over 48 job attributes and more than 100 trillion historical job performance data points to predict the optimal job advertising campaign.”

The key to adoption is automation

Programmatic marketing technology went from zero to 90% adoption in just seven years, but 10 years into programmatic recruitment tech, we are still at just 15% adoption, commented Terry.

Why is this the case? And why is it so much harder for talent acquisition to utilize the tools of programmatic and reap the rewards of the same fast adoption that consumer marketing took advantage of?

“The real key is automation” Baker said. “Talent acquisition not having automated programmatic is analogous to driving a 2010 Ford, compared to a series S Tesla, with the 2010 Ford you got cruise control but with the Tesla you have self-driving,” he added.

Now that is a big difference! Not only does the Tesla get you from A to B without any human interaction but it allows you to go from zero to 60 in just two seconds, allowing you to scale at a rapid pace.

And for TA you’re going to enjoy the ride a lot more if you’ve got that level of automation.

In a 2010 Ford, the cruise control setting is only evaluating and optimizing one metric — speed. Like a series S Tesla, PandoLogic’s programmatic recruitment platform controls, navigates, and drives the entire experience for you. Yet at the same time, it also provides continuous feedback. Giving you unprecedented visibility into the decisions being made, the budget being spent, and the value of the outcomes it’s producing. So you can set it and forget it or jump in at any moment to reprioritize your initiatives, budget, or campaign flights — maximizing their efficacy and keeping the “human” touch essential for success.

By embracing automation in programmatic tech, you are going to eliminate the waste, get to where you want to go faster and ultimately, enjoy the ride much more.