The future of recruitment advertising is programmatic. But the word 'programmatic' is often quite hard to get your head around. Like many buzzwords, it gets thrown around all the time and quickly starts to lose meaning. So here's how we like to explain programmatic - it's like buying milk.
Manual buying
For most of us, the way to buy milk looks something like this.
We go to the shop, we take some milk from the shelf, pay for it and take it home.
That's the manual way of buying milk and it's been the way people have done it for years. Many of us still do it now.
Automatic buying
Shopping online is another way to buy milk. You go onto the website, order some milk, and it automatically arrives at your house a few days later.
It's convenient and takes out some of the manual effort that's required from going to the shops.
Programmatic buying
Right, here's the big one. What if you bought a fridge that could see when you're running out of milk, and automatically order more?
Kind of like a smart, tech-enabled refrigerator (yes, they really do exist).
So you could set it up to know "whenever I have less than 2 pints of milk in the fridge, order me some more".
That's what programmatic buying looks like. You set up a rule, and then the milk just arrives when you need it. You never pay for more milk than you need, and you never run out.
In a recruitment context
Recruitment advertising has the same three levels as buying milk. Manual, automatic and programmatic.
Manual is posting to job boards yourself. Automatic is posting to job boards using a multiposting tool. Programmatic is using data to post to job boards, to make sure you get the right number of candidates and don't spend more than you need to.
With a programmatic approach, you'll always have the right amount of milk.