A job ad exchange is a two-sided marketplace where people who have jobs that they need candidates for and advertisers who have access to candidates converge, through technology, to match those jobs with those candidates.
If you pull back the curtain a bit more, you’ll discover that a job ad exchange is two layers: 1) a job ad exchange and 2) programmatic technology.
The job ad exchange is quite simply a platform that hooks into hundreds or thousands of different sources where candidates might be found. The advantage to a company needing candidates is massive reach but with the simplicity of one vendor, one payment. Job ad exchanges are like mutual funds – access to everything, without having to think about the details, but rather focus on the outcomes.
Layered on all job ad exchanges is programmatic technology. Programmatic technology can be thought of as a control layer that solves for a number of challenges facing recruiting organizations:
- Allows you to stop massive fluxes of candidates on some of your jobs
- Understands your goals and adapts the bidding strategy to hit them (do you need low cost, high volume, high velocity)
- Leverages a massive repository of data to make good bidding decisions
- Moves budget around to hit those goals
If a job ad exchange is a mutual fund, programmatic technology is the automated terminal that sits on the stock market floor. It consumes all the data on every stock on the market, interpreting market trends, and using this information along with individual targets and goals to make buying and selling decisions.
When you put these two together, you end up with the best of both worlds – the ability to reach every candidate you might be intersecting with, while having the control to make sure you get the right candidates for the right jobs at the right price.
To understand more about how job ad exchanges got their start and how they might be helpful, take a read of our whitepaper What Is a Job Ad Exchange.
