Gal Almog, Founder & CEO of RealMatch

More than a decade and a half ago, destination job boards revolutionized the recruiting industry, providing one-stop shopping for job ads and giving jobseekers a place to post their résumés and connect with recruiters and employers. Today, that model no longer works efficiently – for hiring companies, recruiters or jobseekers. Typical online job search and recruiting tools are too fragmented, with thousands of jobsites competing for attention and ad dollars and with employers, recruiters and jobseekers all relying on ineffective keyword searches that yield poor matches in every direction.

As for digital job ad distribution, until very recently, this sector of the $6 billion online recruiting industry resembled the early days of online display advertising. Back then, managers of major brands knew they had to reach customers online but found that the networks selling media services could offer little control over where ads would be placed and even less confidence in the network’s ability to generate true value. The online display ad industry has come a long way since then: A new science has evolved around the ability to target messages to reach key demographics and manage campaigns in real time.

Similar principles are now being applied to the online recruitment ad industry, allowing publishers of online job sites representing those who need to fill key positions to deliver online ads to the right candidates at the right time. Like successful online ad campaigns, an effective online recruitment strategy is one that leverages online ad distribution techniques – complete with real-time analytics – and integrates social media tools into its approach, in this case, LinkedIn, which is an increasingly prominent stage for recruiting, job seeking and job fulfillment activities.

A truly effective recruitment ad strategy requires a platform capable of optimizing job postings by leveraging the entire Internet as a single, massive job board and then drilling down into the smaller communities that make up the Internet to deliver qualified applicants. It has to go beyond keywords, which lack context and thus return irrelevant results, and leverage advanced artificial intelligence, algorithms and taxonomy to boost applicant quality.

An effective recruitment ad solution also provides real-time campaign management tools modeled on online display advertising distribution techniques, automatically monitoring results, factoring in past performance of ads across hundreds of web properties and mobile communications hubs to deliver a response rate that is two to four times that of the leading national job board sites and up to 20 to 30 times more effective when compared to the average performance across all job boards in the U.S.

An important principle to keep in mind is that while the Internet as a whole is large and diverse, it comprises millions of smaller communities. Those communities have characteristics that can be leveraged to connect potential employers with job seeking community members. The more micro-level the definition of the right skill set, the more targeted online job advertising has to be to produce qualified applicants.

To find jobseekers where they are, employers should no longer think in terms of just casting the widest possible net: That model is now outmoded. The key to finding the right people at the right time lies in using the science of targeted distribution. The tools are available. Now it’s up to publishers, advertisers and employers to access them to find the quality candidates they need, and recruiters can help show them the way.

Gal Almog is Founder and CEO of RealMatch, provider of the largest recruitment advertising network in North America. Learn more about RealMatch, which enables newspapers, trade publications, associations, broadcast media and job board companies to reach tens of millions of jobseekers through advanced distribution on third-party sites and social networks, at www.realmatch.com. Follow RealMatch on Twitter @RealMatch.