When it comes to recruitment, you may have thought you knew it all—but there’s a powerful new tool available that’s quickly disrupting traditional job advertising strategies. It’s programmatic recruitment, and if you’re just finding out about this game-changing resource and want to quickly get up to speed on what it is and what it can do for your business, then keep reading.

The Basics

In a nutshell, programmatic recruitment is a dynamic campaign management process that utilizes recent advancements in technology to automate the key initial steps in your organization’s recruitment pipeline. It intelligently handles the purchasing, placing, and optimization of your digital job advertisements and replaces the need for human involvement in these crucial phases—thereby freeing up your HR staff to handle other important tasks and making it easier for lean organizations to respond to recruitment needs with less resources and effort. The entire process is handled at maximum efficiency and minimal cost to your business—by using Big-Data-driven analytics, targeted ad placement, real-time bidding, and ad campaign optimization, it ensures that your job ads are always seen by the right people, on the right sites, and at the right times.

Why It’s Gaining Steam

Programmatic recruitment advertising was born out of a need for greater precision and automation in job advertising, something that was missing from independent and aggregate search engines, as well as human-run recruitment marketing sites. It’s the next step in the evolution of job advertising and takes industry efficiency and effectiveness to the next level.

Programmatic recruitment has witnessed a rapid evolution in just a few years, thanks to seismic shifts in technology—while just a few years ago it relied on process automation and hit-or-miss predictive analytics, today’s tools use cutting edge AI and algorithms for truly intelligent and autonomous decision making, allowing for automatic scaling based on need (while simultaneously driving down cost).

In comparison, traditional human-driven recruitment advertising—with overworked HR staff juggling multiple vendors, struggling to slowly analyze data from multiple sources, and hazarding guesses regarding where to place your company’s job ads—looks tedious, ineffective, and error-prone. Are those words you want attached to your business in today’s ultra-competitive job market? Of course not, and perhaps that’s why industry experts predict that next year over 80% of all recruitment advertising will be based on programmatic campaigns and that over the next decade programmatic recruitment will experience a multi-billion-dollar hyper-growth phase. Those who fail to incorporate it into their recruitment strategies will be at an extreme disadvantage.

Why It’s Vital for your Organization

What makes job advertising so important is the ability to quickly drive results. If you look at the marketing funnel and conversion process to produce a qualified candidate, the right ad at the right time and in front of the right person can immediately turn a passive job seeker into an active one—and a direct job applicant. Job advertising starts with candidate intent, as opposed to awareness or other recruitment marketing activities. Programmatic recruitment empowers you to cut through the industry noise and lead the pack with automatic ad distribution across local and industry-focused sites, job aggregators and social networks; dynamic control of visibility via real-time bidding at the best available cost-per-click rates; and the ability to widen or narrow your target ad focus in real-time and as you see fit.

Here’s the bottom line: The predictive data and AI tools in programmatic recruitment help facilitate real-time campaign optimization with fully automated algorithms that work together seamlessly to deliver optimal performance for your business. It manages, optimizes, and automates the job ad processes, which saves you time, money, and potential headaches, and also helps improve your candidate experience.

Companies who choose to embrace this powerful technology are setting themselves up to remain industry-competitive and attract the best available talent for their open positions; those who ignore it do so at their own existential peril. When it comes to determining your forward-thinking recruitment strategy, it really is the only option worth considering.