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Is Asia ready for programmatic job advertising?

programmatic job

Recruitment teams around the world are always figuring out ways to meet aggressive hiring goals with short timelines as well as uncertain budgets. 

Never before has this been more true than in the last 18 months – one of the most turbulent periods in the history of the global labour market. Employers around the world were forced to lay off or furlough workers in large numbers in reaction to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – most of them downsized their recruitment efforts.

Now, jobs have opened up at record levels and we’re seeing a severe shortage in the supply of candidates in the market. These shifts and challenges are unprecedented. 

Traditionally, recruitment teams manually advertised their jobs on sites such as Indeed, LinkedIn, Jobstreet, Beam, Naukri, Monster and many more, to source their candidates. Ongoing decisions on where to post the ads, how much to spend on each source, and how to optimise the performance of the ads were based on intuition.

Such an approach is resource-intensive, time-consuming, inefficient, error-prone, and lacks the data-driven rigour required to consistently attract high-quality candidates quickly and cost-effectively.

In addition, many of the most popular online talent sources in Asia are pay-per-post job sites, which means talent acquisition teams need to pay for their job ads to be displayed for a certain period of time only to hope that they would deliver relevant candidates. In a market as volatile as today’s, committing to invest in “post and pray” ad inventory that may yield little return is not prudent.

The only way they can be effective is by using technology that leverages data and automation to optimise the performance of their campaigns in alignment with the market dynamics. 

Programmatic job advertising technology does just that. 

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What is programmatic job advertising?

It is a data-driven way of buying and optimising job ads automatically across the most optimal talent sources, the ones most likely to deliver hires.

A programmatic approach enables recruitment teams to attract the most relevant candidates at the right time and cost.

The technology does it all on simply clicking a button. If you’re a recruitment marketer, all you need to do is select your jobs, input your goals (hires or applies), and let the machine drive your talent sourcing.

Using automation and machine learning, the technology drives continuous optimisations in the performance and cost of job ads. These optimisations are enabled by tracking the performance of recruitment advertising campaigns across all online sources, along the candidate journey– right from when job seekers click on an ad to when they get hired.

This data is then utilised to ensure that the ads are automatically placed on job sites or talent sources where they would have the most success within the available budget. 

The best part? As the market forces evolve, the ad campaigns will automatically be optimised in response to the latest dynamics.

Adoption levels vary across the globe– is Asia ready?

The adoption of programmatic job advertising technology has been rising consistently in North America, where the job site ecosystem is relatively fragmented and pay-for-performance models in recruitment advertising are quite prevalent.

This uniquely positions programmatic job advertising solutions to deliver significant value and ROI, as the technology can automate the placement of job ads across the best performing talent sources while saving recruiters valuable time to focus on other essential activities like candidate engagement. 

In contrast, employers in Asia (along with those in other regions like Europe and the Middle East) are still in the nascent stages of adopting this technology. In these markets, recruitment teams are still attuned to working with job sites on a pay-per-post model and the transition to pay-for-performance has been sluggish.

However, this is quickly changing. A number of employers are moving to an outcome-driven, pay-for-performance approach using technology. For example, Indian IT giants like TCS, HCL Technologies, Wipro, and Hinduja Global Solutions (HGS) have adopted programmatic job advertising technology to power their global talent sourcing efforts at scale. 

Employers from other industries that recruit in high volumes, such as BPO and Gig businesses, also have a huge opportunity to leverage this technology to boost the quality and speed of their recruitment efforts.

Ultimately, recruitment teams care about three things: meeting their hiring goals, increasing the speed-to-hire consistently, and achieving a predictable cost-per-hire (or cost per applicant, as the case may be). 

Programmatic job advertising uses data, automation, and machine learning to deliver all of these and more – such as, end-to-end visibility across the candidate journey and predictability of outcomes.

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The unique demands placed on businesses during the last 18 tumultuous months have accelerated their adoption of technology by several years. This is true for data-driven recruitment technology as well.

So it’s only a matter of time before recruitment teams across Asia go “all in” on programmatic!

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Image Credit: serezniy

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