Automated job board postings, sophisticated algorithms and a “right place / right time” reach mean your ad placement is always optimized. It’s right for the job, candidates, and even the device that candidates might use to search for work. That’s the promise of programmatic advertising: it lightens the load and ramps up performance.

Seasoned talent acquisition veterans have seen great change taking place in the industry over the past few years. Results are getting better and more processes are becoming automated. And that’s not a warning sign, it’s a welcome mat that can usher you into the next phase of recruitment.

Why Focus on One Job Board When the Whole Internet is Accessible?

You probably don’t question how your mobile phone functions, but you certainly know how to use it. The same can be said for programmatic advertising. And it’s just as much of a game changer.

In the days when giant job board behemoths ruled, it was natural for a recruiter to find a process and stick with it. When a position was vacated, the recruiter would post an ad. In some ways, it wasn’t much different from buying a print ad in a newspaper.

Unfortunately, the results were good but not great. That’s partly because analytics to assist with ad placement were virtually unheard of outside the tech industry. And although there were plenty of job boards available, the sheer volume of time and budget allocation to use them to their fullest advantage wasn’t feasible.

But technology isn’t just for techies, it also bridges gaps for everyday talent acquisition professionals. Using programmatic advertising, you can automatically place job ads throughout an expansive network of job boards without any special knowledge of why or how it works. Even better, ad optimization means the right ad is posted at the right job boards at the right time.

Optimization Fine Tunes Ad Placement Automatically

With so many different major job boards as well as niche options, the whole Internet may seem like one enormous job ad possibility. It can also seem overwhelming. Chris Forman, CEO and founder of StartDate Labs, Inc., writes at Greenhouse that programmatic can turn the “entire web into your own “help wanted” sign. But optimization ensures your ads land where they’ll get the best results.

Programmatic technology pairs the wide expanse of a massive job board network with the simplicity of automation. And ad performance is always improving because optimization isn’t a destination, it’s a pursuit.

By definition, to optimize means to improve and make the best use of something. With job postings, it means sorting details such as how you spend your ad budget, which ads appeal to certain candidates, which job boards will likely have the most effective reach, and even which platform – mobile or desktop – serves the campaign best.

Optimization is an evergreen process, and it applies to every step of the programmatic approach. Even ad spend is affected. If analytics reveal that a campaign isn’t performing well, a shift in ad spend allocates more money to where it will do the most good. The more data you have, the more visibility and the smarter decisions you can make.

Programmatic Ad Spend Grows as Performance Improves

Examine any major change in the talent acquisition industry and you can see how ad spend gradually shifts in that direction. But with programmatic, it’s growing at triple-digit rates. And that’s over the course of a few short years.

We’re still in the early stages, and the technology is improving quickly, too. The RealMatch network powers over 600 publisher sites and over 125,000 employers rely on it to make those critical job matches. There have been over 78 million of those in North America so far.

But all of the hype in the world doesn’t matter if it can’t deliver as promised. To be a viable alternative to the processes that you use now, it should:

• Distribute jobs to all sites in the network
• Offer dynamic control over job ad performance and visibility
• Target the audience – any audience – that the job requires
• Predict job ad results accurately compared to the market
• Enable efficient job ad spend
• Provide total job ad spend and performance transparency

Programmatic advertising gives you better results with less effort and consistent access to a thriving job board network. That’s the brass ring in talent acquisition. It’s also why this forward-thinking technology is gaining such a devoted following.

There’s no other option that brings job ad optimization into the hands of recruiters in such a meaningful, cost-effective and approachable way. It reduces overall job ad cost and time to fill while improving the quality of job candidates. And the fact that it happens automatically means you have more time to focus on other talent acquisition goals.

If you’re less than thrilled with a lackluster recruitment strategy, maybe it’s time to find out what’s making waves throughout the industry.