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Recruitment Automation: How to Automate Applicant Sourcing

Data-driven technologies have become the backbone of competitive recruitment strategies. Just as programmatic has changed the advertising industry, so too has it begun to transform the way recruiters source quality job applicants.

The automated aspect of programmatic recruitment is not only beneficial for saving time; it’s also a tool for increasing the accuracy of hiring efforts. Real-time data analytics allow recruiters to reach more relevant audiences, faster, and with higher budget efficiency.

Programmatic Recruitment: An Automated Method of Generating Results

Let’s take a moment to identify the potential tangible effects of programmatic. The data that’s funneled into analytics and automation can result in:

  • Formation of, and access to, quality candidate pools. Through data-fueled processes such as retargeting and audience modelling, programmatic quickly expands and improves an organization’s candidate sourcing channels.
  • Optimization of the recruitment funnel and performance. It doesn’t get any more efficient than algorithms, and those found in a powerful Demand-Side Platform (DSP) can improve performance in a funnel from top to bottom.
  • Creation of personalized, effective candidate experiences. Recruiters have the capacity to get creative in enhancing their specialized content, gearing it towards unique audiences.
  • Ease of ad buying decision making through automation across channels and devices. Whether in display, search, social, mobile or video, ads campaigns are standardized and displayed with minimal friction or human intervention.

Setting Up an Automated Workflow

The best way to achieve success with automation while putting in minimal human effort is by first mapping out an automation workflow, so that the data can begin to generate value on its own. 

Automation can begin boosting hiring efforts from the very top of the recruitment funnel at job feeds, all the way to onboarding and employee retention. An end-to-end, automated recruitment workflow – which can be achieved with a DSP as part of a Unified Management strategy – might include the following:

  • Job feed generation. The pulling of structured job feeds from existing platforms (e.g. the ATS of choice) into a programmatic platform.
  • Media buying/placement. The distribution of job ads across a variety of channels, going beyond the usual suspects of Indeed, ZipRecruiter or Monster and into niche boards. Unparalleled access to open ad exchanges.
  • Campaign management. Activation and pausing of campaigns based on budgeting parameters (e.g. max. spend of $10k/month) or recruitment goals (e.g. stop campaign after 100 applicants).
  • Campaign optimization. Easymulti-touch attribution, which allows for the correct weighing of traffic sources by performance. Steady improvement of CPC bids for job boards to get better ranking in search results. Automated content enrichment – such as the optimization of job ads – to generate more traffic and increase conversion rates.

The Benefits of Automation

Automation is so powerful for today’s recruitment, that its absence in hiring organizations puts them at an immediate disadvantage. It’s easy to see why that’s the case when we look at the real benefits of automation for recruitment teams:

  • Ability to complete more tasks. Smaller teams can use automation to handle more tasks. With the same input, they can amplify their output.
  • Centralized interface. Unified collection and analysis of all recruitment-relevant data helps to establish a correct tracking and attribution baseline.
  • Unbiased attribution. Recruitment teams don’t have to rely on a single source of publisher analytics data, which has long been the case. Instead, they can benefit from their own unbiased tracking infrastructure, which typically includes a suitable attribution model (i.e. multi-touch attribution).
  • Reduction of errors. Once an automation is properly set up, it delivers consistent and quality results 100% of the time. Human error no longer stands in the way of accurate performance and actionable insights.
  • Ability to process more signals for optimization. Automated systems have more bandwidth to ingest and process data. This is particularly important for eliminating friction in any aspect of a recruitment funnel, and for managing a continuous process of optimization.
  • Time savings. With automation in place, recruiters can focus their precious time on high-value, impactful activities (e.g. interviewing, strategy, personnel and process improvements).

Bottomline: In 2019, recruitment automation can set your organization apart from the competition.

Over the last several years, the benefits of programmatic have proven undeniable. Automated processes and workflows not only increase the potential volume of job applicants, but also the quality of campaign performance and overall budget efficiency.

Selecting the right programmatic recruitment tool (i.e. a DSP) that boosts data-driven capabilities is an easy way for teams to excel in their hiring strategies and source top talent within their industry.

About Spencer Parra

Spencer Parra is the VP of Product Management for advertising and data products at Radancy. In that capacity, Spencer and his team of product managers, program managers, data scientists, and data analysts work to develop products in a data driven mindset. As the leader of Advertising products, he works to bring a holistic full funnel approach to Radancy’s advertising technology stack with Programmatic Jobs at its foundation. Through data products, he tells the story of media performance via Radancy’s Metrics Gateway and helps ensure data is democratized through Radancy’s unified platform. Spencer came to Radancy from the Perengo acquisition in mid 2019 where he served as Lead Product Manager and a member of the founding team. With Perengo, he worked towards the vision of leveraging the same rigor and concepts from ecommerce advertising technology to the recruitment advertising space. Prior to Perengo, Spencer launched and supported in-app advertising products at Criteo as a solutions engineer. Spencer holds a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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