The rumble of the next generation in recruiting solutions was felt a few years ago, and it’s starting to take shape. Some theories wash themselves out, such as the rush to adapt a mobile app. Most people don’t download them at all, and the ones who do rarely use them. But some theories really stick. And four of them are gaining both a following and a lot of momentum.
What gives technology staying power boils down to this: whether or not it works and makes the job better instead of merely different. These solutions work. They help you reach more of the people you want to reach using less effort while spending your ad budget in the best possible way. That’s the recruiter’s trifecta, and it’s all available now.
RELATED: Lacking Talent? Break out the Creative Recruiting Solutions
#1: Talent Acquisition Trumps Ordinary Recruiting
They’re the seemingly interchangeable terms that a lot of people mix up. It’s unfortunate because recruitment alone misses out on numerous additional benefits. There’s a world of difference between approaching talent from a recruiting standpoint and approaching it as a talent acquisition strategy.
Recruitment typically refers to finding a candidate to fill a new job opening. It can be a piecemeal endeavor, and it often is. Or it can operate in small chunks of activity. For example, if you have a few jobs to fill, you might activate a recruitment campaign.
Unfortunately, recruitment still overlooks the bigger picture, which is filling jobs with the best people and the least amount of time, expense and effort. Every company will need to fill jobs quickly sometimes. Or maybe oftentimes. But with recruitment, you start from scratch every time, or nearly so.
Talent acquisition is what’s happening now, and it’s been building up for a while. This approach is the continual effort to source candidates and bring them into your pipeline. The fuller the pipeline, the better your chances of finding a great match for the job.
With talent acquisition, you network, build relationships and strive to find the best-qualified people for any job that might open up in the future. You source the top talent, even when they aren’t looking for a job, because those highly desirable professionals are rarely unemployed.
Recruitment limits your efforts to finding a person who is either very interested in finding a new job or already unemployed. Talent acquisition expands your efforts to reach people who would likely never see a job posting.
#2: Big Data is a Very Big Deal
You’ve heard about Big Data so many times. And even if you were a technology resistor instead of an early adapter, chances are the benefits are becoming clearer every day. What’s new in recruiting solutions isn’t the emergence of Big Data. It’s the broad acceptance of its worth.
Virtually everything that you would want to know about a candidate is out there in the form of data. What time of day or day of the week does a person usually respond to emails? And is there a type of communication that always falls flat but you can’t figure out why? Big Data knows. And it can tell you if you know how to ask. That’s data analytics.
If you discover that links in an email never get clicks, you might learn that graphics are frustratingly slow to load. And if you realize that a lot of applicants never follow through the whole process using a mobile device, it might be too clunky or not intuitive enough. But that’s still only part of what Big Data can tell you.
Imagine knowing whether a candidate is actively searching for work and where they’re more likely to look. Talentor also explains that data shows subtle indicators. For example, a prospective candidate who updates their LinkedIn profile and visits different job sites might be more open to a new job than someone who doesn’t. Internally, data can spot signals such as attrition, says Recruiting Trends. And that begins to tap into predictive analytics, which uses data to get the jump on what’s likely to happen next, both in your company and with job candidates.
Analytics is the link between all of that data and what it can do for you. It’s still being developed, but what’s already available has made incredible strides. Much of it is automatic now, so you don’t need a data scientist on staff. It still needs humans to give it direction, though. Otherwise, the data is overwhelming and useless.
Programmatic draws together all of the threads of recruitment and ad buying.
#3: Programmatic Advertising Rules
Programmatic advertising has been working its way through the newspaper industry for a while. Time, Inc. uses a programmatic model now, and other publishers around the world do, as well. It streamlines the ad-buying and placement process while making it work better for the advertiser and the publication, not just faster and with fewer hands on the wheel.
In short, it automatically directs advertising dollars toward a specific publication that’s pre-determined through data to be the most efficient buy with the best-predicted results.
As it applies to talent, programmatic recruiting solutions are only scratching the surface of their capabilities. Imagine if you could know in advance that placing a job ad at one job board would yield the results that you need in a short amount of time. That’s what this technology does with very little human intervention.
Circling back to data and predictive analytics, they’re what make programmatic work. Data is mined about the type of candidate that you’re looking for. It reveals where this candidate looks for work, when they look for work, and even whether they might be open to a job offer even if they’re not looking for work. Predictive analytics can then reasonably determine the best place and time to spend your advertising dollars to reach that candidate, and the programmatic ad buy comes to life.
For such sophisticated technology, it’s designed to make the life of a recruiter much easier. And that’s because the complex analytics and decision-making happen automatically. Not only that, if an ad fails to perform like it should, that data goes into the collective pot for further analysis and a better decision next time. It’s always improving.
#4: The Internet is the Job Board
The days of major job boards aren’t entirely in the past. But the heyday of a central job board where everyone posts ads and looks for work has probably come and gone. Even Monster couldn’t sustain itself on its own, and it was once the go-to location for all things job-related. But job boards haven’t disappeared. They’ve just diversified and specialized. And there are a lot more of them now.
Some big names still survive, including the newly-sold Monster, but there are also many small and niche job boards across the Internet. RealMatch has a full network of job boards at its disposal, for example. And the trick, as always, is knowing where to place the ad. This new era in talent acquisition transforms the Internet into a massive, interconnected job board. But only if you use the right technology.
Programmatic advertising is capable of distributing your job ads across all sites. But that doesn’t mean throwing some of your advertising dollars to the wind in the hopes that some of them might stick. It lets you select with precision which job boards in the network are the best suited for the job and candidate that need to make a connection. And of course, the decision is automatic.
This approach results in a more efficient spend with the best predictable results. You get Internet-wide exposure that’s targeted. So while every site in the network is available to you, only the ones that are most likely to hit make the cut.
Now, the best ad placement across the Internet doesn’t take a team of analysts who still might miss important data. It’s done automatically, which frees up your time for more pressing matters, such as building relationships with the candidates in your pipeline. Technology might be moving ahead almost at the speed of light, but relationships are still vital. Some things never change.
New technology for the recruiting industry is developed every day and some of it is definitely worth the effort. The trick is finding the right bandwagon to jump on, not just anyone that rolls through town.
Talent acquisition works better than ordinary recruiting because it addresses the issue from cruising altitude. You can still place an ad and hire an applicant. But with an ever-growing pipeline of candidates, you’ll have more of the right people available when you need them.
Big data works because it knows everything that you want to know. The information might be complex and difficult for the average recruiter to analyze. But that’s why analytics is built in with the next big thing: programmatic.
Programmatic advertising also works. It makes the decisions that you would make if you had the right data available 24/7. And as for the internet as a job board? Who wouldn’t want access to every imaginable site and ad placement based on which one of them is the most likely to produce? The future of recruitment solutions is smarter than it’s ever been and it’s also a lot more effective. For less effort and in less time, you get better results. That change is worthy of any cutting-edge recruiter.
Learn more about how programmatic is changing recruitment. Download our webinar: The Emergence & Impact of Programmatic Advertising on Recruiting.