Employers of all sizes throughout the world continue to embrace the “recruitment marketing and advertising revolution.” This revolution has enabled talent acquisition teams to mimic in employment branding and job advertising what their counterparts on marketing teams have been doing already for several years.
The major components of this digital advertising revolution have been programmatic advertising, pay for performance recruitment media models, search engine optimization (SEO), and mobile advertising/marketing. To the average recruiter, these concepts are just a few of a whole lexicon of new digital advertising buzzwords that are becoming more prevalent on a daily basis, making it difficult for recruiters to keep track of it all.I happen to be a recruiter. I too was once confused on the importance of these new concepts. As a courtesy to my fellow recruiters, I have created a simple glossary-dictionary that translates digital marketing terms into practical explanations and definitions for the regular individual recruiter who is an end user and/or beneficiary of many digital recruitment advertising tools…often without knowing it.
Digital Advertisement Term & Definition | Practical Translation & Definition For Recruiters |
Programmatic Advertising – The use of software or machines and pre-programmed rules by an advertiser to purchase digital advertising. This is in contrast to traditional advertising purchasing processes that involves RFPs, human-to-human negotiations, and manual order taking. | Programmatic Job Advertising – Rules-based job advertising through the use of software and data. Programmatic job advertising for recruiters can mean working smarter – rather than harder – to attract the right candidate on the right site, wherever they live, work, and play. This translates to quicker time to source and time to hire, lower cost-per-hire, improving quality of hire, and improved hiring manager satisfaction. Recruiters, often unknowingly, can benefit from programmatic advertising though greater quantity and quality of online applicants and reduced advertising or media spend. |
| Pay for Performance – A digital marketing pricing model where an advertising agency or advertising platform receives compensation from a business for each new lead it obtains for the business. The agency creates campaigns and promotions to garner and convert sales leads. Pay for performance marketing is payment for getting results. | Pay-Per-Applicant – For recruitment advertising purposes, pay for performance translates into pay-per-applicant. Traditionally, talent acquisition teams have paid for web traffic, for clicks and posts, etc. to their employer’s career site. In other words, recruiters are now only paying job advertising tools and services for providing verifiable quality results (ie job applicants). For individual recruiters, this also translates to lower cost of hire and prospectively higher quality of hire and hiring manager satisfaction. Under pay-per-applicant, your advertising partners or vendors interests and incentives are aligned with your own. |
| Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Search Engine Optimization is the combination of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the number of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. | Online Job Seeker Attraction Optimization – For recruiters, SEO translates to using the optimal keywords in job titles and job descriptions placed online so that prospective well-qualified job applicants are well positioned to find the job postings online when looking for jobs on search engine’s such as Indeed, Glassdoor, and/or searching job boards and career websites. Improved SEO/Online Job Seeker Attraction Optimization should demonstrate clear and measurable value to recruiters through increased applicants per job opening, improved job applicant quality, lower cost of hire, and improved quality of hire. |
| Mobile Advertising – Mobile advertising is a form of advertising on mobile devices (a subset of mobile marketing). Marketers and advertisers increasingly are prioritizing mobile advertising – greater than 50% of all web traffic in the U.S. in 2016 will be on a mobile device, and this percentage is increasing rapidly. In 2015 Google changed its formula so that mobile-friendly websites would be prioritized over traditional/desktop friendly websites. That means that organizations are now heavily incentivized to take a “mobile first” approach to online advertising and SEO strategy to make sure they appear near the top of relevant search results. | Mobile Recruitment Advertising – For recruiters, mobile advertising is a straightforward translation to “mobile recruitment advertising.” It is increasingly likely that prospective job applicants are viewing your job advertisements and/or visiting your employer’s career page while on a mobile device. This is important because much of your advertising spend and effort will be wasted if your website and application is not mobile friendly for prospective candidates to view the site, and, more importantly to apply to jobs using a mobile device. For recruiters, websites that are not mobile-friendly means inefficiently using job advertising and recruitment spend, resulting in an increased cost of hire, lower number of job applicants at a higher cost per applicant, and decreased quality of applicants and hires. |
I hope recruiters find this digital marketing language to recruitment language translation dictionary helpful. Please feel free to contact myself or an Appcast representative with any questions.
This post has been written by guest blogger Evan Herman. He is a salesman, business partnering consultant, & digital content marketer who recruits. Since 2015, Evan has freelanced, among other things, by writing on all topics related to recruiting advice for corporations, career advice for professionals, and HRTech. Connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
This post was originally published in 2016, and has since been updated.
