A Complete Guide To Programmatic Recruitment for Staffing Agencies

Staffing agencies, in their quest to servicing the most clients, are facing difficulties in finding the right candidate. The recurrent market has become highly competitive with many players jumping into the foray to take a pie of India’s huge human resource. This, coupled with the declining talent pool, is making things difficult for staffing agencies.

Not just that, it has been observed that major job sites try to cut down the flow of organic traffic to the job listings to gain more in ad listings. Therefore, recruiters are in a dilemma, on whether to spend more to gain more traffic or let the listing run organically and risk reaching out to the best candidates. This is exactly where programmatic recruitment comes into the picture.

Programmatic recruitment will not only help you find better candidates, but also streamline and automate your recruitment process by giving you much favourable ROIs in comparison to manual recruitment. So, let us understand more about programmatic recruitment and how it can help staffing agencies with effective hiring.

What is programmatic recruitment?

Programmatic recruitment is defined as the method of optimising the recruitment process with the help of technology. It emphasises on utilising technological methods, instead of human resources to improve the efficiency of the recruitment process. In programmatic recruitment, the process becomes more automated, and decisions are driven by data.


In simple terms, programmatic recruitment is about using technology to purchase, distribute and optimise your job ads. It makes sure that your job advertisements are viewed by the ideal candidates on appropriate websites at the appropriate time. And programmatic recruitment can achieve this with its four pillars of technology, which are:

• Big data analytics
• Job advertisement targeting
• Budget allocation
• Campaign optimisation

Programmatic recruitment helps eliminate unnecessary spendings and inefficient processes commonly observed in traditional job advertising. Therefore, by implementing programmatic recruitment, you would no longer have to manage multiple ad vendors, gather data from different sources, spend time waiting for the results, or spend money on unproductive job sites ads.

How programmatic recruitment works

Programmatic recruitment eliminates unnecessary spending and other inefficiencies that are prevalent among staffing companies that don’t possess the required workforce to enhance or optimise job ads effectively.

So, how does this work?

Let us discuss each pillar of programmatic recruitment in detail.

1. Big data analytics
Unlike normal job advertising, big data doesn’t operate on guesswork. Rather, it is a compilation of structured as well as unstructured data. When the data is properly analysed, it generates insights and trends on the ideal job candidates, i.e. it provides information on when, where, and how to post the job advertisements to get the most traction from candidates. This will positively impact your candidate quality, the period to fill job openings and the hiring cost.

2. Targeted job ads
All job sites are not created equally — some cater specifically to a particular kind of job openings. So, random job ads won’t reach your targeted job seekers, nor will it create the desired impact. Targeted job advertisements will help you target the right candidates on the job sites they visit at the optimal time.

The algorithms analyse the historical data according to various attributes, such as job type, job location, skills required and work experience to design a specifically targeted advertising campaign for your every job opening. These job ads are next promoted on appropriate job sites that have performed well historically as per the targeted factors. This way, a staffing agency can gain more traction from ideal job-seeking candidates.

3. Dynamic bidding and budget allocation
Manul advertising budget allocation can become an issue, especially when you are left with finite resources to fill multiple job roles. This will make your simpler tasks even more daunting.

On the other hand, most dynamic bidding and budget allocation platforms apply intelligent algorithms and utilise predictive data to manage the spendings as well as the CPC rates for every job per website across all your listings to gain the best ROI. It will help you place your ads strategically at the appropriate locations despite the limited sendings, resulting in a cost-effective and highly efficient ad campaign.

4. Campaign optimisation
Finally, the vital piece of the puzzle — campaign optimisation. A programmatic recruitment campaign doesn’t help much if it doesn’t contain the campaign optimisation feature. Ad campaign and their relevant strategies should be monitored regularly. It detects the flaws or loopholes in your ad campaign, which could be adjusted or amended at the right time to derive the desired performance from the job ad campaign.

For instance, you have two clients with different job openings and different levels of specialisation and job openings. In this case, you will have to customise your ad campaign strategy for each job opening, to make sure that each job opening gets the desired attention.

This process is difficult to execute and time-consuming, especially when there is a second client that you also have to cater to. Campaign optimisers in programmatic recruitment automatically manage this requirement. It applies artificial intelligence to monitor, adjust and enhance each job opening depending on their performance on job sites.

Programmatic recruitment does not just automate your recruitment process, it also shortlists high-quality candidates for the job. Plus, this automation helps to provide the best candidate experience. This is crucial and is of utmost importance, especially in this competitive recruitment market that we experience today.

After all, the main emphasis of the staffing agency should be to establish a strong connection with the candidates, exactly like building a long-lasting relationship with clients. This will help you enlarge your talent pool, and this established relationship will immensely help you fill future job positions.