What are programmatic ads?
Programmatic ads are ad placements bought by software rather than by a person negotiating with a publisher. The buyer sets a target and a budget, and an automated system decides which placements to bid for and how much to pay. In recruitment the thing being bought is usually a click on a job or an application to a job, rather than an impression.
What is programmatic advertising in recruitment?
It is the same buying method applied to job advertising. You supply a feed of open roles and a budget, and the platform distributes those roles across job boards, aggregators, search and sometimes social, bidding against a target cost per click or per application and moving money away from sources that do not convert. It replaces choosing job boards one at a time and paying to publish.
What are examples of programmatic ads?
In hiring, the everyday examples are a job appearing on an aggregator you never signed a contract with, the same job showing up on a small regional site for two days and then stopping, or a promoted posting whose budget shifts to a harder role once an easier one fills. Outside hiring, most display and video advertising you see on the open web was bought programmatically.
What are the four types of programmatic advertising?
General advertising usually names four: open real-time bidding, private marketplaces, preferred deals and programmatic guaranteed. They differ in who can bid and whether the inventory and price are agreed in advance. Recruitment programmatic mostly does not work this way. Most job-ad platforms run their own auction across publishers they have direct relationships with, so the four-type taxonomy is worth knowing for context and is rarely the vocabulary a job-ad vendor will use with you.
Is Google Ads considered programmatic?
Not usually, in the sense the industry means. Google Ads is an auction you operate yourself on Google's own inventory. Programmatic normally describes automated buying across third-party inventory through a demand-side platform, which for Google is a separate product. In recruitment the distinction blurs, because several job-ad platforms buy Google search inventory on your behalf as one source among many, and that is programmatic by any practical definition.
How much does programmatic job advertising cost?
There is no list price. You pay a cost per click or per application set by an auction, plus in most cases a platform or agency fee on top, and every major vendor in this category prices by quote with no published figures. What you actually pay is driven by your job titles, your work locations and who else is hiring the same people. Work out your own number from your click price and your apply rate rather than from anybody's national average.
Do I need a programmatic platform if I only hire a few people a year?
Probably not. Optimisation is arithmetic over outcomes, and a handful of hires does not produce enough outcomes for the arithmetic to say anything. Below roughly continuous monthly hiring you are paying a platform fee for a rounding error. Promoting individual postings on the one or two sites your candidates already use, and putting the money you save into better creative, tends to do more.
Does programmatic job advertising create the ads?
No. Every platform in this category takes your existing posting or your supplied creative as an input and optimises where it runs. Some vendors sell creative production separately as a managed agency service, billed on its own terms. The distribution product and the creative product are different purchases, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in this category.
What is the best platform to advertise a job on?
There is no single answer, and a page that gives you one is selling something. It depends on where your last fifty hires came from. If most arrived through job boards, an exchange that spreads one feed across many sites and moves budget toward what converts is the right shape. If most arrived through referrals, your careers page or social, the inventory that matters is a feed rather than a board, and the tools that buy feed inventory are a different shortlist from this one. Check your own source data first. It settles the question faster than any comparison table, including ours.
How do I choose a programmatic job advertising platform?
Work out which of the four shapes you are buying, then run seven checks: whether your hiring happens on job boards at all, the minimum spend and contract term, which unit you are being quoted in, who owns the performance data when you leave, how it reads your ATS and how fast spend stops on a closed role, whether reporting goes down to source and role level, and who is making the ads. The first two end some conversations before you have spent an hour on the rest, which is why they are first.
What are programmatic platforms?
Outside hiring, the phrase usually means a demand-side platform buying display and video inventory across the open web, and most of the widely asked questions about programmatic platforms are about those. In recruitment it means something narrower: a platform that takes a feed of your open jobs, buys advertising for them automatically across job boards, search and social, and shifts budget toward whatever produces applications. The word describes the buying method, not the channel, and the two markets share a technique rather than a set of vendors.
Do programmatic vendors publish their pricing?
Almost none of them. Of the 6 platforms in our own verification corpus, 5 publish no figure of any kind, and the one exception publishes a commercial model rather than a number, with the only hard figure appearing in a partner's help centre rather than on its own site. The strongest independent buyer guide on this topic gets one monthly band out of the five vendors it reviews. What you can pin down before a call is the model rather than the price: cost per click, cost per applicant, a fee on managed spend, or a per-outcome charge. Ask for the model and the monthly minimum in writing, because both are negotiated and neither is published.
