We’ve heard the story of the evolution of job advertising… first there was the classified section in the newspaper, then there were online job boards, offering job slots for a fixed price, then job aggregators, then programmatic advertising came along to automate job distribution and bidding. Everyone scrambled to understand what exactly this new way to advertise was, and how it could help them avoid paying to post jobs that yielded no applicants.

Programmatic advertising in its essence is automated buying and selling of online advertising using bidding rules. Once the ad is distributed to a job site, advertisers got something even better: the pay-for-performance model. Whether it was pay-per-click or pay-per-application, you only pay for what you get. Sounds great! And a quantum leap from the days of static destination job sites that candidates had to know by name.

So everyone’s happy and fully staffed with qualified candidates, right? Not so fast.

Are these candidates a good fit?

One recruitment marketing pain point that programmatic doesn’t quite solve on its own is reaching the right candidates. Even if your ad spend is more efficient and you get more candidates, they may not be qualified. You may find yourself still needing a new, fresh audience, of more qualified candidates. Or if you’re hiring for volume, you may need to scale way up – quickly.

Of course, getting qualified candidates, and plenty of them, at a price that works for your business, is the seemingly-impossible challenge. To answer that challenge for our clients, we looked at how other industries leverage Google and Facebook to fill their pipeline of prospects. How does a realtor find people looking for houses? How does a car dealer find people looking for a new car?

Consumer marketing technology wins 

Two of the biggest tech companies in the world have built their fortune based on providing value to advertisers that they can’t find anywhere else. Google has used their breadth of search data to be extraordinarily successful in matching businesses and consumers on and off of Google. Facebook followed a similar approach by leveraging social data.

Both Google and Facebook leverage their data across their proprietary ad network to make it easy for businesses to scale their ad campaigns using the same matching algorithm to reach the right audiences. The ads consumers are seeing are relevant and timely, creating a more pleasurable experience.

How it works for recruitment advertising

Talroo has built similar technology to enhance the match between employers and job seekers.

Traditionally, job ads have found a primary home on “destination” job sites that candidates know by name. Talroo uses the consumer advertising approach by powering over a billion searches per month and normalizing job market data to help employers reach the right candidate audiences actively looking for a job.

We’ve focused on developing technology that finds candidates from across the web, from all different sources, on the sites, communities, and devices they use every day – whether they know Talroo’s name or not. No matter where users see Talroo’s job ads, they are seeing them because of Talroo’s technology. This means that Talroo can find unique candidates with high intent that other job sites aren’t reaching.

Profile-driven programmatic

Whereas job distribution services and programmatic vendors use buying rules to determine which sites to appear on, Talroo’s AI-driven recommendation uses candidate behavior, job requirements, and bidding rules to help reach the right candidates.

We customize job search results based on interactions and behavior, and then we unify this behavior into a profile. The more that user interacts with Talroo’s job ads, the smarter the technology gets at connecting with that job seeker driving a more relevant experience. Talroo’s technology learns which candidate audiences drive a higher conversion rate – and scales up. This approach results in more unique, qualified candidates, with a 20% reduction in cost-per-application.

If you’re currently working with a programmatic partner, that’s great – adding Talroo will amplify the performance of those systems and enhance your results.

How do we find the right candidates?

So let’s get under the hood a little and see how it works. First, we need to see how job seekers behave. Talroo receives over one billion job searches each month. That’s enough data for our technology to identify patterns in those job seeker signals. We’re able to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to classify the searches into hundreds of micro-categories.

From there, we use an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm to match the job seeker activity with the jobs available. This means we can show job seekers the best results specifically for them – in real time. This search-and-match technology creates a feedback loop that means that the job seeker signals and our data processes are always being used to enhance the quality of match between candidate and employer.

This produces significantly better search results for the job seekers, and higher quality applicant matches for the employer.

Want to try it?

Learn more about how we incorporate this technology into Talroo Pro to lower our customers’ CPA by 20%.