Programmatic job advertising is software that places an employer's job openings on hundreds of job sites at once and decides automatically how much to pay each site for each application. The word "programmatic" means that software, not a person, buys the advertising. It is used mainly by large employers and staffing companies in the United States, where many job sites charge per click or per application.
The old way was to pay a job site a flat fee to list a job for 30 days. The employer paid the same fee whether the listing brought 2 applicants or 200. With programmatic buying, the employer pays only for clicks or applications. The software moves the money every day to the sites that produce the best applicants. This is the same method by which online display advertisements are bought, explained on the page on real-time bidding.
Take, for example, a home-care company in Texas that needs 300 caregivers a month. It gives the software a budget of $30,000 a month. The software sends the openings to hundreds of sites: large job boards, local news sites, social media and sites for nurses and care workers. For each site and each job, it sets a bid, such as $0.80 a click. In the first week, it sees that applicants from one local site often get hired. Applicants from another site rarely finish the application. So it raises its bid on the first site and lowers it on the second. If one town already has enough applicants, it stops spending there.
To learn which sites produce hires, the software needs to know what happened to each applicant. So it reads the results back from the employer's applicant tracking system (ATS): who was interviewed, and who was hired. Its model then predicts, for each site and each job, the cost of one hire, not just the cost of one click.
The software resembles the demand-side platform (DSP) that advertisers use to bid for advertisement space. But it buys job applications, not views of an advertisement. It also uses data on how many people with each skill are looking for work in each area, called labour market analytics.
In India, many employers still buy job advertising as listings and database access on job portals. Freshers are often reached in a different way, through a campus recruiting platform. The page on advertising channels shows the other places where advertisements are bought in the same automatic way.