This week I got an upgrade (!) with Clare Ryder, our brilliant Operations Director, taking the helm in my place to explore ‘Advertising on a Budget’.
We called in programmatic advertising expert Thomas Prince, Co-founder at Talent Nexus, who are a recruitment marketing agency specialising in performance-based candidate attraction.
For many in recruitment and talent acquisition, recruitment advertising can be seen as something of a dark art and so we we’re grateful to have Thomas on hand to demystify it.
WATCH IT BACK - Advertising on a budget
Many companies are in the middle of 12-month contracts with job boards. It is important to understand that help and flexibility is available if your needs or requirements have changed. The job boards have been supportive and there are options you can explore including deferred payments, additional flexibility, and swapping credits for other types of inventory. Talk to your job board partners or get in touch with experts like Talent Nexus for support and a helping hand in discussing and arranging options.
The media buying landscape has remained broadly unchanged for 15 years now and recruiters have built up a general knowledge of what job boards work for them for different types of roles. However, there has been a general sense that advertising has been delivering less value over this period.
The last 3-6 months have seen a huge shift in the market, in part down to the likes of Indeed and the growth of programmatic advertising (more on that later) and most recently COVID. The result is that hiring companies have more buying power than at any time in the last 15 years!
Now is the perfect time to maximise the value you realise from advertising by hitting reset on what has previously worked and take a fresh approach. Job boards all have differing audiences and the job seeker landscape looks very different to 6 months ago. Now is the time to reassess what we are buying and how we are using it.
The most important thing is to use data to accurately understand what is and is not working. It’s not efficient to spend 6 months assessing what does and doesn’t work; we need to move beyond a feel for what we think is delivering results. This doesn’t require a big tech investment, especially if you have an ATS integrated with Broadbean or Idibu multi-posting tools, you just need to start measuring performance more closely.
The best advice is to restructure the historic approach of purchasing several 12-month job board deals. Buy yourself some flexibility, buy smaller credit options and top-up based on what you need and the results you are seeing. This will allow you to pivot your budget allocation through the year.
Minimise contract values and keep some budget back in a flexible pot of spend. Haggle hard and use your buying power. Finally, put robust source reporting in place by job type and location. Consider exploring performance-based advertising as a new approach.
Programmatic is just automatic advertising using data.
To make it easy to understand, think about the process of buying milk.
Manual advertising is equivalent to buying milk from the shop, automatic would be buying the milk online and having it delivered to your house and programmatic would use technology like a smart fridge to work out when you needed more milk, how much and then ordering it for you via the Internet!
Programmatic is more about the approach. Data is used based on the job type, location, salary etc and what sources have previously delivered the best results to determine where to advertise. Based on data, it can determine how much spend should be invested and on what kind of adverts or credits to deliver results.
Performance based advertising differs from traditional job board postings in that you pay for clicks on your advert or even applications, not just the advert itself. How much you pay for each click or application should differ based on the job type, salary, etc and programmatic uses rules and data to automate this and ensure your budget is being allocated efficiently.
On average, programmatic will deliver between 30-40% more applications with greater relevancy for the same spend with traditional advertising. It also increases speed as you can advertise on multiple job boards for a much shorter period, with the same spend and simply end the advert as soon as the required volume and quality of candidates has been received. The results can deliver a reduced time to hire from 3 weeks to 3 days!
Thomas explains that although it might sound complicated, now is a good time to dip your toe in the water. You don’t need to invest in tech, just run a trial and measure the results. Alternatively, engage a partner like Talent Nexus to manage a trial campaign for you.
Talent Nexus offered to help review your existing job board contracts at no cost. If you want to run a programmatic trial with them, they will do this and charge no management fees for the trial and there’s no minimum budget.
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