The handshake. The meeting. The phone call. Talent acquisition is very much in the business of people, but as a new generation of millennials enters the workforce (a generation that has grown up with the internet) the talent sourcing ecosystem now also relies on clicks and likes and a web presence more than ever before. And to keep up, new tech is evolving to connect people to their jobs.

Recruitment managing & tech

One new fold in the talent sourcing landscape is the increasing importance of recruitment marketing, which is vital to laying the groundwork to engage prospective candidates before any new position even opens up. As talent sourcing teams incorporate a company’s brand and effectively market themselves, making sure candidates know who you are and why you’re desirable is vital to capturing future applicants-especially to stay on par with companies that engage in strong recruitment marketing.

However you’re considering making recruitment marketing an active part of your talent acquisition team, technology will be crucial in this area. As millennials will soon be the largest applicant pool, using social media, web-based search capabilities, and job boards efficiently will be the best way to reach out to this tech-savvy generation. Tech will also be vital to leverage and analyze how effective the process is: from how applicants search and employing target marketing to application programming interfaces (APIs) and recruitment marketing analytics.

Programmatic capabilities-use them or fall behind

The evolution is clear-it’s a movement towards full automation. Job ads on websites started off simply enough, with price negotiated site by site manually, but as the web grew more complex with more options and targeted audience technology for ads, adtech was born. We went from independent job sites to job search engine and aggregator sites, to job ad distribution through platforms like ZipRecruiter or Recruitics to now fully-automated programs like PandoLogic. Programmatic job advertising is where we have evolved and where the landscapes are increasingly moving toward. With programmatic, everything involved in a job ad campaign is fully automated, and decisions are made with AI.

In 2012, 25% of digital advertising was transacted through programmatic. In 2017 that jumped to 75%. We currently have a technology that efficiently analyzes where job seekers are and how they use their searches while maximizing how dollars are spent seizing upon that information. The efficiency that this technology creates is not only about saving money; it is also truly becoming the norm. If a company chooses to post ads through guesswork and haphazard spending, they will get left behind with the rotary phone.

Without programmatic hiring processes, you will swim in a sea of unstructured data; behind each aspect of the talent sourcing process (from the season of hiring to the ”hard-to-fill” index, to the number of apply clicks a particular ad gets) there is a number or factor that can be analyzed and leveraged to your advantage. And all of this data that has evolved with the complexity of the internet requires a Big Data solution. Programmatic job platforms like those offered by PandoLogic classify jobs, predict the best campaign strategy, allocate budgets, target the best place and time for a particular ad, and optimize the ad spend while providing an analytical assessment of the campaign.

Smart tech is time spent wisely

It’s not just about automation; it’s really about optimization. Why pay more for traffic on Indeed when it’s not necessary? Why pay for more job slots than needed on LinkedIn? More automated processes have led to a lot of data, which can be daunting to consider. Programmatic is the way to fully understand the talent sourcing landscape as it evolves with new sites and new platforms that connect to new talent and hires for your organization. And the great thing-as the landscape changes, programmatic job platforms analyze, predict, and adjust to all these changing factors, evolving alongside it. In ad spending, programmatic creates budget allocation strategies, cut off strategies when it’s time to stop spending, and target key strategies which all lead to a better ROI.

As the talent sourcing ecosystem grows more complicated, so does the tech, which can seem daunting. But the bottom line is that fully automated programmatic job platforms have now evolved to make things much easier and more efficient for talent acquisition teams.