Programmatic Advertising is something that seems to strike confusion into the heart of many employers around the world. However, there are a growing number of talent acquisition teams who are using already programmatic techniques to drive some excellent results. So what techniques and technologies are they using and how does programmatic advertising even work?
To get the definitive answers to these questions, I have not one, not two but three guests on the show this week. Jon Hull, Head of Resourcing Delivery at Nationwide Building Society and Ben Gledhill, Head of Talent Acquisition at Yodel will be sharing their experiences as practitioners. I’m also joined by Rob Prince from Talent Nexus who will be acting as our programmatic expert and helping to demystify what is fast becoming a significant area of talent attraction.
In the interviews, we discuss:
- Two different types of programmatic advertising and their benefits
- The unique nature of programmatic job board advertising
- Technology and platforms
- Data, results, and expectations
- Advice for getting started
- Selling programmatic to internal stakeholders
- The future of programmatic advertising for talent acquisition
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Talent Nexus. Talent Nexus are a performance marketing agency who help you get better results from your recruitment advertising. Whether you’re advertising on job boards, social media or search, they can help make sure that it’s working as effectively as it can be so you can hit your recruitment goals. To find out how you can get better results from your recruitment advertising, book a free consultation call by going to www.talent.nexus.com. that’s www.talentnexus.com.
Matt Alder [00:00:55]:
Hi, everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 245 of the Recruiting Future Pod. Programmatic advertising is something that seems to strike confusion into the heart of many employers around the world. However, there are a growing number of talent acquisition teams who are already using programmatic techniques to drive some excellent results. So what techniques and what technologies are they using and how does programmatic advertising even work? To get the definitive answers to these questions, I have not one, not two, but three guests on the show this week. Jon Hull, head of Resourcing Delivery at Nationwide Building Society, and Ben Gledhill, Head of Talent Acquisition at yodle, will be sharing their experiences as practitioners. I’m also joined by Rob Prince from Talent Nexus, who will be acting as our programmatic expert and helping to demystify what is fast becoming a very important area of talent attraction. Hi, Rob, and welcome to the podcast.
Rob Prince [00:02:06]:
Thanks very much for having me.
Matt Alder [00:02:07]:
My absolute pleasure to have you on the show as our resident programmatic expert. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Rob Prince [00:02:16]:
Yeah, of course. So, my name’s Rob Prince. I’m the Client Services Director at Talent Nexus. So it’s my job to be out in the industry as much as possible, speaking to new partners and clients and kind of talking about what we do and how we do it. Talent Nexus, we’re a performance marketing agency working exclusively within recruitment. So our job is to sit in between organisations and the places that they can advertise for candidates. And it’s our job to make that process more efficient and more effective. So we work across the industry, work with direct employers, job boards and recruitment agencies, but everything we do is about kind of helping them attract and engage candidates in a more effective way.
Matt Alder [00:02:53]:
So let’s start by setting the scene with our first practitioner interview, and then we’ll come back and get your thoughts. Rob, here’s Jon Hull. Hi, Jon, and welcome back to the podcast.
Jon Hull [00:03:05]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:03:06]:
Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Jon Hull [00:03:09]:
Sure, yes. I’m Jon Hull, I’m head of resourcing delivery for Nationwide Building Society. So effectively that includes all of the customer facing recruitment, branch network, contact centers, etc. Graduate and emerging talent and then head office roles.
Matt Alder [00:03:24]:
Could you just give us maybe a sort of a quick overview of some of the sort of key recruiting challenges you guys face?
Jon Hull [00:03:30]:
Yeah, sure. So we have about 650 branches across the UK, so recruiting customer reps, or member reps as we call them, into those branches. Then we have five strict six contact centres dotted around the UK who are normally kind of a major interface for our members. And then obviously our emerging talent and graduate recruitment which includes apprentices, interns or work experience as you’d call it, and industrial placements which totals about 200 hires a year. And then the various challenges of things like risk, audit, finance, marketing into the head office centres in Swindon and Northampton mainly.
Matt Alder [00:04:20]:
So I know that you personally have been using Programmatic advertising as part of your strategy for quite some time. Before we sort of get in and talk about that in more detail, how do you explain Programmatic to colleagues and other people in the industry? What’s your definition of what it actually is?
Jon Hull [00:04:37]:
For me it’s a really simple concept. It’s uber targeting of your target audience really. So imagine I was using analogy. Imagine you’re shopping for a pair of trainers or a handbag online. That ad will follow you. If you’ve clicked on something that’s made you aware of it, that ad will follow you for a period of time every time you log on to your device. And that gives you, it basically gives the candidate in this the opportunity to lease part of resistance. So you can define your Persona, target the audience and if you’re not hitting the mark, you move on and reshape it.
Matt Alder [00:05:19]:
And how are you using Programmatic advertising at the moment?
Jon Hull [00:05:22]:
So nationwide? We’ve just used it as part of our graduate campaign. And that’s been really interesting because again, you know, quite easy to target those people in terms of age and demographic and arguably geography. But it’s really resonated well in order to get our messages, you know, the specific messages we want to target these people with. It lands on their Facebook feed or Instagram feed or Snapchat feed and we get instant feedback. So you can on a daily, but we take it weekly, weekly report on what’s worked and what hasn’t and then where to, you know, where to pull or where to dial up the investment into Those channels and what kind of.
Matt Alder [00:06:06]:
Results do you, do you get from it?
Jon Hull [00:06:08]:
I mean they’ve been phenomenal. I mean for the graduate campaign, phenomenal. We’ve had something like, for a very low level of spend, something like 600 applicant real applications into our process. In a previous life when I was at Carillion, we used this for what we’d call engineers and maintenance engineers. So plumbers, electricians, people who fix the air conditions in buildings, who are traveling around, who are very mobile, so wouldn’t have a laptop or anything like that, but had their mobile devices. And we could target them by creating that Persona and geography to almost a kind of a radius of where they work or live. And that was phenomenal. Was a really cost conscious business. And we, we filled 95% of those roles through the Programmatic route for probably about 30% of the budget we would have normally spent on job boards or other media.
Matt Alder [00:07:04]:
It’s quite interesting because there are a number of organizations using various forms of programmatic advertising out there but, and using it really successfully. But there are lots and lots of employers who aren’t using it at all. We’ what would your advice be to someone who wants to get start, started with Programmatic?
Jon Hull [00:07:24]:
Well, I think engage an expert. I guess there are plenty of experts, too many to mention in terms of who can help guide you through the process. But more importantly, you’re in control as the customer. The vendors are no longer in control. So you can set aside as much or as little budget as you want and try it, you know, and if it, if it doesn’t work first time, you can then move that money somewhere else. And I think that’s the important thing. It’s not, no longer is it a job board saying this piece of inventory will cost you X and you’ve got to trial it for a month or period of time or whatever that is. This is now in the hands of the client trying out what really works for your particular organization or job profile.
Matt Alder [00:08:11]:
And do you think the, I mean, do you think. I mean, I think I know the answer to this question already but I mean, do you think that the market is doing a good job? The vendors and the experts who provide programmatic services, do you think they’re doing a good job of explaining, explaining what it is and what it does and if not, what could they do differently?
Jon Hull [00:08:29]:
Well, I guess not probably given the conversation we had before we went on air, Matt, you know that I guess we were using Programmatic three, four years ago and the uptake is still not that deep. Into the. I think the advice would be to the vendors would be to get away from the hype. It’s not a shiny new tool in that sense. It’s not something that takes a lot of input from the client and it’s to break it down into its manageable pieces. Because I think people get frightened by any kind of HR or recruitment tech because they think it will cost them a fortune. Whereas, you know, with programmatic, it’s the opposite. I mean, you can spend a fortune, but you don’t have to. And you can try and, you know, try almost try as you go and set your own budget. And I think that’s the power. It puts the power back in the hands of you. And it doesn’t mean you put all your eggs in one basket. So it doesn’t mean you’re going to cut off job boards or LinkedIn or whatever immediately. It just gives you a broader mix and arguably more leverage.
Matt Alder [00:09:37]:
Jon, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jon Hull [00:09:39]:
Thanks, Matt.
Matt Alder [00:09:40]:
So, Rob, programmatic, it seems to be a topic that causes a lot of confusion. Could you give us your definition of the term and also why you think there is so much confusion out there around it?
Rob Prince [00:09:53]:
Yeah, sure. So I think programmatic is one of those words that has suffered somewhat from being a bit of a buzzword. I think very often it gets grouped up in that batch of sort of conference speak words. So, you know, AI, blockchain, machine learning, all those kinds of. The reality is that the word itself, programmatic is actually a very simple term that just refers to something that can be programmed. So that just refers to a process with a high level of automation. Very often you could swap the word programmatic out for automatic and you wouldn’t lose a huge amount of meaning there. But programmatic obviously sounds much sexier. So if you’re speaking at a conference or you’re trying to sell something to a client, programmatic tends to get a bit more of an impact in marketing. The word programmatic is really used as shorthand for what. What we actually mean, which is programmatic advertising. And that’s any advertising that works automatically. So all social media is programmatic. Any Google advertising is programmatic. And what we mean by that is it’s set up once with a set of rules and criteria and then runs automatically. There’s no manual impact. There’s nobody sitting at Facebook or Instagram and kind of manually serving adverts to people. It’s all kind of set up and left to run. And then what we do is we manage the results kind of the outputs of that rather than on a sort of ongoing manual basis within recruitment that there is a further type of programmatic advertising which, which Ben will go on to talk a lot more about. Within recruitment we’re actually doing two types of programmatic advertising. We’re doing what Jon’s talked about, which is on social media and on Google pay per click advertising. But then within recruitment we’ve got an extra form of programmatic advertising we can do which is unique to the only channel that we use within recruitment that nobody else uses and that’s job boards. So we’ve also got this layer of programmatic advertising which is programmatic job board advertising. That is the highly automated placement and management of jobs to job boards and the resulting applications we get. So that form of programmatic is really just like a really advanced multi poster like a Broadbean or an idaboo where we’re posting up to lots of channels and then managing what comes back. In answer to your question about why that’s caused so much confusion, I think it’s because we’re using a term to mean several things interchangeably. It’s used as a buzzword a lot and has been applied to lots of different products and bits of tech really it’s describing an approach. And there’s also two approaches within recruitment that we’re describing at the same time. One is the one that Jon’s talking about which is sort of display programmatic and social media programmatic. And another is what Ben’s talking about which is job board advertising being managed automatically.
Matt Alder [00:12:40]:
Before we listen to the interview with Ben, another question around all this confusion. Jon mentioned that the industry is not very good at explaining what’s, what’s going on here. Would you agree with that?
Rob Prince [00:12:53]:
I’d absolutely agree with that. I think we, we’re on a real mission at the moment to make programmatic as accessible as possible. I think as an industry we’ve been really bad at doing that so far. I think we need to be more rigorous with people using buzzwords for the sake of it. I think that’s really not helping. But generally speaking I think we all need to commit to helping the industry upskill and learn more about this new area of advertising because what’s easy to forget on the supplier side. So as an agency, this is our, our day job, right? We’re doing this all day, every day for our clients. This, this will likely be sort of less than 5, 5 to 10% of their, their role. Like they’re managing a lot of other stuff alongside this and we need to set the bar much higher in terms of making that as easy for people as possible. There’s quite a lot to understand. There’s a lot of new, you know, kind of metrics and ways to measure things and different technologies to learn. So I don’t think it’s surprising that people have been confused so far. But I do think it’s an area where sort of the whole industry needs to kind of raise the bar a bit going forward.
Matt Alder [00:13:58]:
So let’s dive into our second interview to get some practitioner perspective on programmatic job advertising. Here’s Ben Gledhill. Hi, Ben, and welcome back to the podcast.
Ben Gledhill [00:14:09]:
How are you doing, Matt?
Matt Alder [00:14:10]:
Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just quickly introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Ben Gledhill [00:14:15]:
Yeah, of course, Councillor. Hi everyone. My name’s Ben Gledhill, I’m the head of TA up at Yodle. Just come off our peak, hire lots of new drivers to deliver all our festive parcels. Yeah, it’s been quite a. Quite a busy few months.
Matt Alder [00:14:31]:
Absolutely. And I mean, tell us a little bit about what the recruitment challenges are in terms of doing that kind of recruitment.
Ben Gledhill [00:14:38]:
Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, it’s a little bit of a volume based, to be honest with you. So we hire anything up to two and a half, even maybe 3,000 in some years. Additional people over peaks. That could be drivers, it could be operators in our distribution center, it could be additional customer service staff, for example. And one of the tiny, teeny, tiny problems that we face is everybody else is doing the same. So not only are competitors in the courier or logistics space, it could be brands like Argos, it could be other kind of retail brands. And on top of that, if you add your other kind of short term, albeit gig opportunities as well, it’s a very, very, very crowded space and it’s like a lot of people, you know, it’s moved away from the war for talent. Apologies for saying that. And it’s almost like the war to get people’s attention in such a, such a crowded space.
Matt Alder [00:15:36]:
So one of the subsets of programmatic advertising, or performance based advertising, you know, might be a better way to describe it, is what’s going on with the job board market. Talk us through what you’ve done in terms of programmatic job advertising.
Ben Gledhill [00:15:51]:
Yeah, sure. So obviously if you take Yodle as.
Ben Gledhill [00:15:57]:
A bother, a provider of permanent opportunities.
Ben Gledhill [00:16:00]:
And obviously providing self employed opportunities from time to time, there will always be vacancies that we need a little bit of help or a little bit of a kind of a push on. So if a vacancy is fairly, fairly standard, we’ll put a job on Indeed or we’ll put a job on Total Jobs if it’s an indeed organic or just let the kind of traffic come naturally or if it’s on Total Jobs or Read. It’s part of our kind of our monthly subscription, which is probably what a lot of the listeners will refer to or what we would refer to as kind of old school advertising, if that makes sense. Because of the sheer kind of tenacity and the kind of competitive nature of the industry, we do quite a lot of kind of paid advertising. So probably the first example is what I would say is one of the most popular is Indeed. So we will actually sponsor either a job or certain words to appear either both higher than our competitors on Indeed or on Google, for example. Because let’s be honest with if you are sponsoring words on Google, if it’s not in the top three, let’s be honest with you, it’s never going to happen. I think there’s actually a quote of something like nobody actually now actually visits page two on Google because it’s a bit of a nothing environment when it comes to the kind of the performance based and programmatic area, we struggle in all the popular logistics areas. So the M1 corridor around Rugby, Northampton, Peterborough, those kind of bits and pieces and in quite rural areas as well, such as the southwest south Wales, etc. So we will pay a certain amount of money against a certain type of job until we get say 20 or 30 or maybe even 40 applications based on previous data analysis. So for example, we will know to fill a job in say Torquay, we need at least eight to 10 applications to kind of convert to an offer, shall we say. The added bonus of a lot of the kind of platforms, both obviously impaired and programmatic means that using AI then I hugely apologize, using kind of automation and machine learning that the system will actually know based on previous performance when it’s kind of cut off traffic. So I think for me it’s a blended approach. You rely on what we would call your old school job board versus actually sponsoring a specific job that is Employee delivery driver, nat guru or delivery or driver or something along those lines.
Matt Alder [00:18:40]:
These are platforms where the jobs appear on multiple job boards to help you fill them. How does it work?
Ben Gledhill [00:18:47]:
Yeah, so basically we will sign a budget, say it could be 5k, could be 10k, it could be 20k, it could be a little bit more if it is a rolling campaign. And basically if you look at any platform. So for example, we use Upcast quite a lot through our media partner. They will have a predefined, almost network of job boards that they can kind of rely on. So it could be specialists, it could be your job boards that you have already. So they might look after total jobs or indeed for you, or it might be specialists, but what it really, really does is through one single channel, that is the platform itself, you’re getting access to candidates on all those various job boards whilst having to not sign up for individual agreements, if that makes sense. And because yet again, it uses things like algorithms, machine learning, all of the bits and pieces like that, you can actually really optimize how your budget is spent against the specific job advert, if that makes sense. And because it’s learning all the time in regards to kind of past performance, future performance, you’re getting a lot more kind of bulk for your money rather than if you just say put a job advert on, say on the traditional job board, because you have to pay for that job advert. Regardless if you use performance based advertising, you’re only really paying for the results you get, if that makes sense.
Matt Alder [00:20:25]:
Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like once more, sort of data is absolutely, is absolutely key here. How have you sort of got to that level of data intelligence where you know exactly how many applications you’re going to need for each type of role. So how are you sort of measuring that? How are you getting access to that, to that kind of data?
Ben Gledhill [00:20:43]:
Yeah, so I think you really have to start with the basics, really. So whenever you’re looking to set up any form of attraction, whether it’s social media, whether it’s a job board, whether it’s programmatic, you need to make sure that everything is connected in terms of integration so you can track individual activity. The good thing around performance based advertising, because it is built on data that is previously this happened. So if you are going to do it again, this will probably happen again. With these variables changing, you can get really clinical with your kind of plans on how you are to advertise. So when it comes to budgets, we know roughly to hire somebody in South Wales it will cost this amount and for this amount we will get these many hires, these many clicks and we can work on percentages and all the rest of it. And that is why it’s really, really important. You need a solid connection between all channels and your ATS or CRM. So you can say, you can really. I know a lot of people talk around the funnel or conversion like it’s a Little bit of an outdated thing and to be honest with you, I think it is. But you still need to say for this advert, we had this many people clicking on it to see what it was. We have this many people clicking through to the main advert, we have this many people applying than this many people getting the job. So for me, get the basics right in terms of, of connecting together all your various channels and then each one of those channels can become a data source and you can get really, really kind of intensive in terms of evaluating which are the best kind of traffic sources, where do we get most candidates from? And then you can even rightly so look into things like dni, what channels perform well, what channels perform badly and how can we improve other initiatives like that. So I think it’s kind of just making sure that you’ you’ve got those data sources, you understand them and then you can kind of take them away and kind of play them to, you know, to whatever you try to achieve.
Matt Alder [00:22:53]:
So what would your advice be to people king at sort of performance based job advertising for the first time? Other than obviously data which you’ve just been talking about, what else should people be bearing in mind?
Ben Gledhill [00:23:04]:
I think it’s one of those whereby you can’t. And I know sometimes in TA we do get a little bit excited about cool tech and write this up, but I think it’s really important to understand where you, you where you currently are at with your current attraction channels. So I know a lot of people always discuss the war for talent but you know, we really now are in an age of the war for attention. You know, there are more job, more job adverts out there than ever. There’s more content out there than ever. You know, every week there’s a new careers website, every week there’s a new kind of campaign taking place. So it’s really vital that, that you understand where your current attraction activity is taking place, how it’s performing and clearly what is the ROI on it. So I would look at where your spend is currently going. I. E say if you’re spending 50k on a job board, how many hires did you have? What was the activity? What was the quality of hire? And I think as previously discussed, Matt, in another podcast we did around tech, you know, have an open house conversation with media agencies, programmatic organizations, you know, organizations that provide recruitment marketing platforms and just have an honest and open conversation because they are, you know, it is possible to get demos, it is possible to trial campaigns using something as small as 100, maybe 200 pounds and just, just see what those kind of results might bring you. Because actually it might just be a case of, you know, you might need to tweak your Google for settings, I might need to tweak your tracking, etc. But you know, don’t always throw the money at the problem. Look, look where you are, see where your attraction black holes are and then maybe look at things like performance based advertising where you know what it says on the tin. You will literally only pay for the results that you get.
Matt Alder [00:25:02]:
Final question, what does the future look like? I mean what is the, what do you think the future looks like for programmatic in general, but also what does your future strategy look like?
Ben Gledhill [00:25:11]:
I think now that we’re this performance based advertising role, I don’t think there’s, I can’t, personally I can’t see myself turning around and saying, you know what, I want to go back to just throwing out job adverts. We pay a certain amount per month and we don’t really care about performance. I think everything now will be performance based. So you’re probably going to move from your classic pay per click model where it pretty much says what it says on the tin to, you know, you will only pay dependent on the performance of the campaign or even cost per applicant or cost per campaign or whatever. And I think that obviously the costings behind that will become really clinical. So you will literally know how much it costs to get say 10 software developers or 50 project managers or 100 drivers. I think that’s probably the first thing. I think as well a lot more decisions will be based around data, as it should be anyway. But I think the data is going to get way more finite. Will we ever get to the bottom of attribution? Who knows in terms of where exactly did that candidate come from? So yeah, again I think it will follow sales and marketing in terms of really drilling down on the detail and really truly understanding A what our audience is, B how do we work with them and C, how do we get the final out the kind of the wanted outcome which is better hires, more quality hires and I guess more candidate for our book really.
Matt Alder [00:26:54]:
Ben, thank you very much for talking to me.
Ben Gledhill [00:26:55]:
Cheers Matt.
Matt Alder [00:26:57]:
So we’ve heard from Ben there about effectively about programmatic job board advertising and hopefully by this stage people are clear that there are sort of two different types, programmatic advertising or two different models that are using that are being used in recruiting. What’s the, what’s the key differences as far as you’re concerned in terms of what people can expect to get out of them or indeed how they should be using them.
Rob Prince [00:27:21]:
So I think the first thing to appreciate is that programmatic advertising, in the sense that Jon’s using it, is really, it’s a really important part of the marketing mix, but it’s not unique to the recruitment industry in the same way that Jon Job Board Programmatic is. So when you’re competing for people’s attention on social media and on Google, you’re competing alongside all other industries, all of your competitors, all of the different places where people might be trying to get those people. Job board Programmatic is a much more specific, targeted way of engaging with active candidates and to get the most out of your job board advertising. It’s become especially relevant in the last sort of couple of years where in a post indeed world where indeed kind of introduced this new way of buying and selling candidates, Indeed have now got over 30 competitors. Right. So there’s a real reason to be using automatic job ad placement rather than trying to do all of this manually. Lots of recruiters don’t have enough time to be sitting and manually sort of managing these kind of campaigns. So you need a, a sort of approach that allows you to get all of the benefits without the downsides. Both types of programmatic advertising are about engaging with candidates, which is great. And there’s definitely a place for both. It’s really about understanding the differences between the two and kind of splitting them out in your mind as to what you’re trying to achieve with both.
Matt Alder [00:28:44]:
I guess let’s sort of dive deeper into programmatic job board advertising. You mentioned indeed there Ben mentioned indeed in the interview. So it’s an example that comes up time and time again. Are there other options or other, other other ways of doing it?
Rob Prince [00:28:58]:
Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, indeed, I’ve got probably in excess of 30, maybe 40 competitors in the UK now. ZipRecruiter, Adzuna, Novo, who rebranding as Talent.com are probably some of the biggest. But you’ve also got a whole host of niche job boards that work in the same way. A recent example, I know Sonic Jobs have been winning awards recently as they’re a sort of like a mobile first aggregator, they prioritize that side of things. So like with traditional job boards where you’ve got lots of different players in the market who kind of specialize in different ways of getting their candidates and different ways of serving their clients, you’ve now got exactly the same thing on the other side of the job board market with indeed and their competitors what.
Matt Alder [00:29:40]:
Kind of reasons sit behind people wanting to use job boards in this way rather than say the more traditional time based way of advertising?
Rob Prince [00:29:49]:
So I think there’s lots of reasons that people come to explore kind of programmatic approaches. That one we’re seeing a lot of at the moment is that there are certainly within the recruitment agency space, there’s, there’s a rumor going around at the moment that indeed will be switching off their organic traffic. Now whether or not that happens sooner or later, what it has done is refocus people’s minds on their candidate acquisition and thinking about what the most effective way to do that is. So where there are opportunities to not just use one job board, but actually to use, you know, 15, 20, 30, that’s appealing to a lot of people because it’s about kind of de risking, diversifying, increasing scope and sort of breadth of recruitment. There’s also an opportunity there to improve time to hire without massively affecting budget. So if you have the opportunity to advertise across 15 job boards rather than one, you could keep those adverts live for a day on 15 job boards rather than for 15 days on one and you’d be spending the same amount of money but really increasing how quick you’re getting those candidates. So that’s another reason people look at it. I think there’s a lot of talk at the moment about it being quite a candidate. Poor market people are quite comfortable at the moment and where there’s fewer candidates, you, your opportunity to get ahead of your competition and find new ways of finding candidates has got much more benefit than it does in a relatively kind of supply side market. I’d say those are probably your sort of top reasons. Mainly it’s about competition, being sort of competitive player in the talent space and finding new ways to get candidates as effectively as possible possible.
Matt Alder [00:31:35]:
Now Ben talked about using platforms to do this and also AI and machine learning to optimize what’s going on. Talk us through the mechanics of it all a little bit more.
Rob Prince [00:31:46]:
Yeah, so I think for most people the simplest way to think about the mechanics of programmatic job board advertising is to think about it as a bit like a supercharged multi poster for this new breed of job boards which allow you to buy individual clicks and applications rather than a sort of 30 day job credit. So what the experience of most people will be that they take the feed of job that’s currently going out to all of their job boards or to their multi poster. That same feed will then plug into a bit of technology. So I know, Ben mentions he uses appcast and we’re on the same platform while we kind of build our own bespoke version. And the client experience is that that feed goes out in exactly the same way. And then what that platform does is that facilitates sending that feed out to all of the different paper performance job boards, managing the placement of those adverts. So you’re spending the right amount of budget and advertising in the right locations and also monitoring the amount of applications that come back in. So what you don’t want is for your campaign to have some runaway jobs which are getting hundreds and hundreds of applications and spending all your budget it really fast while other jobs go left completely untouched. So one of the jobs of that platform is to monitor applications and make sure that once you’ve received enough applications, regardless of how many that is, for some organizations that will be five or 10 applications. For others, you know, you might need hundreds, but you’re monitoring how many applications you get back in and then sort of managing and tweaking your advertising to match. So you’re always prioritizing the right jobs, spending, budget effectively and that’s all being managed in one place.
Matt Alder [00:33:25]:
What about sort of data and performance management and all those, all those, all those kind of things, what sort of metrics are available? How do people manage optimization? What’s your sort of take on all of that?
Rob Prince [00:33:36]:
So I think data, as ever, is really important. I mentioned we’re working with a lot of recruitment agencies at the moment and actually what agencies are really good at is for focusing the mind on roi. Because the end of the day for an agency, if you’re not making placements, your sort of ROI evaporates and they’re very focused on the kind of success focus side of things. But I think for everyone, there’s some key things that you’d want to find out before you, or at least in sort of part of the trial process of getting set up. An understanding of how many applications you need to fill a role can be really important. So there’s no point setting your campaign up to receipt 10 applications per role if actually on average you need 15 to make a placement. And also vice versa. A lot of these platforms are capable of delivering you far more applications than you could ever possibly need. So being able to balance your budget versus what success would look like is really important. Being able to track as far through the process as possible as ever. And I’d actually make this point about any sort of recruitment marketing, but being able to track as far through the process as possible is Important. We’re working with Broadbean at the moment to kind of bridge that gap from traffic source through to, through to hire and to placement. So I think that’s quite helpful. A lot of the other metrics are very similar to if you’ve done any other sort of online advertising, it’s very similar. So you’d be talking about cost per clicks or cost per applications rather than your. The total cost of an advertising sort of credit or placement on a board. So in that sense it’s very, very similar. It’s worth remembering that this stuff is really, really flexible. So you want that data to be feeding back into your campaign so you can tweak and amend as you go. It’s not the case that you have to run a full kind of six month campaign and then sit on a load of data and work out what to do next. A lot of this is very moving, movable and very malleable. So not just having the data, but being in a position to kind of actually look at it, analyze it and reflect on it, I think is probably the most important bit.
Matt Alder [00:35:44]:
You mentioned getting more applications than you could ever deal with. What kind of results should people expect from programmatic job board advertising? Is it a magic bullet that’s going to solve all their recruiting challenges?
Rob Prince [00:35:55]:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, nothing’s ever the magic bullet, right? But I think, I think the first thing I would suggest is that to not expect or to not even make as an objective to increase the overall number of applications, that can be a bit of a red herring for a lot of organisations because actually most recruiters would tell you that they’d rather five or six excellent applications than they would have 50 or 60 really average ones. So one of the things that we do is we look to improve the distribution of applications across roles. So avoiding that situation where 10% of your roles are getting 90% of the applications and the rest are looking pretty barren. So improving distribution is really important. So getting more relevant and quality applications rather than just quantity to give you a marker of what that improvement might look like. When we take on somebody’s, let’s say we take on their, indeed ZipRecruiter and Adzuna campaign campaigns, just by putting that platform and that management in place, we’d guarantee to improve results by about 20%. So rather than getting 10 candidates, you’d expect 12. But we wouldn’t be at all surprised to see that number be more like 40 or 60% over the first two or three months. So you’re talking about serious numbers for impacting the effectiveness of your recruitment. But equally it’s not, you know, this doesn’t increase results by 1000%. So there’s a, there’s still plenty of work for recruiters to be doing. This is a way of just getting you more candidates that you can work with.
Matt Alder [00:37:31]:
Now you’ve already sort of mentioned lots of things that employers should be bearing in mind and both Jon and Ben did this as well. But what, what other advice would you give to employers who want to get started with programmatic job advertising?
Rob Prince [00:37:45]:
I think, I think Ben referred to this idea of kind of dipping a toe, like starting a small scale stuff. I’d be a real advocate for that. So I think we always refer to the first few months of any campaign as a trial, even if it’s just of a nominal one, because we, what we want to impress upon people is that this, this isn’t the sort of thing that you need to sign off for 24 months commitment. It doesn’t need enormous budgets to trial it and to start experimenting. We would never suggest, and I don’t think any, anyone should be suggesting, that people are cutting all their traditional job board inventory and giving it all to new programmatic approaches because the market isn’t there yet. What definitely is important is making sure that you’re not in a position where you’ll get left behind when the market moves on. You never want to be in a situation where you’re hoovering up all the inventory that nobody else wants in 24 months time because you missed the boat. Working now to get your tech set up and to get your tracking and analytics set up will make it much, much easier for you to start adopting these things in earnest when you’re ready to. It’s very possible to run a programmatic trial for sort of £1 or £2,000 across, you know, a small subset of your roles. So it really, I think it’s really unwise to kind of dive in headfirst. I think you’re much better to go for a small trial, take those really positive, hopefully really positive results to your managers, to the hrds and those kinds of players and say, look, we’ve proved that it works on a small scale. Can we consider rolling this out with a bit more oomph? And at that point you’re fully set up for success, the risk is massively reduced, you can be much more confident, the team’s much more comfortable with the process and the slightly new way of doing things. So, so for me, that would be my biggest advice. With all of these things, with so much of recruitment marketing, it can sound very daunting until you just get started. And a lot of this is built to be as easy to adopt as possible. So starting on a small scale and then going from there, I think is the best advice I could give.
Matt Alder [00:39:54]:
So, final question. What does the future look like? How do you think this is all going to pan out over the next two to three years?
Rob Prince [00:40:00]:
Yeah, it’s interesting that I think, I think increased sophistication is a pretty certain but slightly vague answer. I think the more detailed tracking and integration gets, I think overall campaigns will continue to evolve and the difference between a regular campaign and a programmatically managed campaign, I think that gap will only get wider as the process gets a bit more sophisticated. I think in terms of the market, it’s almost inevitable that the biggest traditional job boards will start to offer more and more programmatic options. So, you know, your reads, your CV libraries, your total jobs. They will, you know, I think, I don’t think it’s a trade secret to say that they’re, they’re already, you know, kind of looking at this stuff and seeing where the big opportunities for themselves are. If the same thing happens in the UK has happened in the US once the two models sit, sit next to each other, you know, when, when you can either buy a job credit for 30 days or you can buy a campaign programmatically, programmatic tends to win out quite quickly. So I would expect to see something along those lines. I think, you know, in 24 months time, I don’t think we’ll have to delineate between traditional job board advertising and programmatic campaigns. I think it’ll all be programmatically managed and we’ll just all be thinking in those terms all the time.
Matt Alder [00:41:19]:
Rob, thank you very much for talking to me.
Rob Prince [00:41:21]:
Me, thanks for having me.
Matt Alder [00:41:22]:
My thanks to Jon Hull, Ben Gledhill and Rob Prince. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow us on Instagram. You can find the show by searching for recruiting future. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.on that site. You can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
