Top Programmatic Job Advertising Platforms — June 2020

Most programmatic job advertising platforms will charge a percentage of the spend you deploy ranging from 10-20%. So, if you spend $1 million on job boards and have a 15% fee from your programmatic vendor, then you're looking at a $150k/yr charge. Many of these offerings will also come with an annual SaaS fee for using the product.

While these expenses can get large, they more than make up for it when you look at your overall cost per hire before and after using one of these platforms. If you're spending significant (>$100k) amounts of money per year on job boards and not using one of these vendors, you are either concentrating it all in one place that you've highly optimized, have a very sophisticated internal mechanism for understanding where to deploy job ad spend, or are wasting a lot of money by not having a programmatic vendor.

As we’ve mentioned, job ad platforms are great tools to improve your overall efficiency when it comes to recruiting and hiring. These platforms offer a host of other features that will keep your job campaigns running smoothly. Here are some of those features:

• Landing Page Builder: Many of these platforms, let you build your own landing pages for your job openings. You can include your employer branding and still direct candidates to a unique email address or ATS so the process remains seamless for the applicants.
• Performance-Based Model: You only pay when someone interacts with your job ad. Some platforms charge by clicks, while others charge by applicants. 
• Spend Tracking: Only pay for what you need. You can set your budget to a specific amount, typically a pay-per-click or pay-per-application. When your ad gets the max number of applies according to your budget, the ads will stop. Not only that, you can specify which jobs to apply spend to, so easier-to-fill roles can run without spend while you invest your budget where it’s really needed.
• Campaign Analytics: Keep track of how your campaign is performing with analytics that look at the number of views, clicks, applications and spend for each job ad across the web. You’ll be able to see, in real time, what’s performing well and what isn’t, allowing you to make any necessary changes to improve performance.‍
• ATS integration: Connect to your ATS or other CRM so applicants are automatically delivered to your recruiters in their normal workflow.‍
• Social Recruiting: Extend the reach of your job ads to the social media platforms your ideal candidates are using. This is particularly helpful if a job ad isn’t performing well on job boards.‍
• Recruiter Usage: Your recruiters can plug in to your job ad platform and designate spend for their requisitions as well.

As you’re booking demos to see which vendor is right for you, prepare a list of questions that cover more general topics like features and integration capabilities as well as specific questions about the platform itself. Here are some examples:

• How will this solution fit into the rest of my tech stack? What integrations do I need?
• Does your system integrate with my ATS?  What is the specific process to integrate and how long does that take?
• Does your system integrate with the main job boards we currently use?
• How do I prioritize roles to put spend behind?
• How do I set budgets?
• Do you have an agency component that can help me strategize my budget?
• Does your system track spend all the way through to hire or is it just cost/applicant?
• How do you attribute spend to applicants?  Is it people who saw an ad, clicked on an ad, how long after do they need to apply for it to count towards a specific campaign?
• How will others in the organization use this solution?
• What are the key features I want to ask about?
• What are the things that would make me nervous about buying this sort of solution?
• How does pricing work?
• What implementation guidelines do they suggest?

Once you get your account up and running, you should be able to quickly post your job vacancies and start getting quality candidates. But you might have to engage with engineers and/or IT to get fully implemented. 

Here’s what you can expect from the implementation process. 

• Integrating with your ATS usually requires engineer time. Try to get a sense for how much time is required, then give your engineering time a head’s up so you’re all on the same page.
• You might need to share your current contracts with job boards. Platforms might also accept XML or API feeds, ATS or job distributor postings. This can actually take a lot longer than your ATS integration given you need these third parties to cooperate.
• Training your team can also be a key consideration here depending on if recruiters will be using this tool directly to ask for spendfor a given req or not.

If you have more specific implementation questions, be sure to ask them during your demos.

Implementation Pro Tip: Once you’ve made a decision that you’re going to make the switch to programmatic, put together an implementation team that includes any colleagues who will have a hand in the implementation. In this case, that would be recruiting and engineering or IT. Create a timeline and have regular meetings to go over status reports and expectations so everyone is on the same page.