You know how job postings tend to deteriorate over time? When jobs first get published, there’s no lack of applicants. After a few days and weeks, traffic sometimes falls off a cliff. This is the problem a new solution from the folks at Toronto-based Recroup, a recruitment marketing and analytics provider, are hoping to solve with JobAdX.
“The platform ensures a more consistent applicant flow,” said Chris Russell, marketing consultant to the company. JobAdX says it is the first-ever job advertising marketplace with real-time bidding. Employers bid for placement on partner job boards across the web, similarly to Google’s AdSense, which places ads on publisher web sites, such as blogs.
“Unlike other job advertising exchanges that exist today, JobAdX claims dedicated slots on the search pages of our publisher site,” said JobAdX CEO Amit Chauhan. “This allows us to dynamically place jobs when a job seeker requests them.”
As an employer, you give JobAdX an XML feed. Then, you select how much you want to pay for an applicant and the platform promises to do the rest. The company says its model is highly efficient and will maximize job board spend. “Job advertising has changed more in the last five years then it did in the previous 10. More employers are seeking out programmatic solutions and calculating return on investment,” added Chauhan.
All job-seeker behavior is recorded to create a highly detailed user profile to serve them better job results. “We track the jobs they have applied for and make sure they don’t see the same job again in our entire network. We also identity when a candidate moves from one site to another in our network, and serve them job ads based on their click and apply history. These are just a few features but the power of our platform is that it uses the same concepts and tech used by the ad tech giants of the world.”
Competitors such as Recruitics and AppCast offer very similar business models, but JobAdX thinks it offers a point of differentiation with its secret sauce and publisher payouts.
For publishers, such as job boards, JobAdX pays out a cut for each click that occurs. The technology sits within the job results feed and displays jobs according to a searchers keyword or key phrase. Publishers can choose to be paid on a cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand (CPM) or cost-per-acquisition (CPA) basis. The company says typical payouts for CPC run around 15-20 cents, compared to 7-8 cents for others like ZipRecruiter.
Of course, in this model, having high-quality partners is key. If there isn’t enough traffic going to jobs or the quality of candidates is subpar, employers may lose interest, along with publishers who won’t see profits to make their participation worthwhile. Simply Hired’s Jobamatic, for instance, had a similar model and wasn’t able to make it work long term. Additionally, many backfill programs, such as Indeed, restrict publishers from using competition services, which makes the whole publisher acquisition game pretty competitive.
Chauhan doesn’t fear the competition though.
“There is no real-time bidding or dynamic auction when using an XML Feed or API,” he said. “The publisher or job board is responsible for taking the feed, optimizing it, refreshing it regularly to make sure no jobs are expired. Smaller publishers do not have the resources to track and optimize the results for their job seekers which leads to a poor candidate experience.”
Click here for an example of how JobAdX’s content shows up on job boards. Note the “Sponsored by JobAdX” next to the jobs listing.