Another programmatic job distributor just started up, but this one’s European.

Create, manage, and work with Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces.

Each week, Steven Rothberg, Founder and Chief Visionary Officer of College Recruiter, and Peter M. Zollman, Founder of the AIM Group, along with guests from the world’s leading job sites, analyze news about general, niche, and aggregator job board and recruitment marketplace sites.

In today’s episode our hosts are joined by Dennis Van Allemeersch, COO of Aimwel – a DPG media company. Aimwel is an AI-powered, programmatic, recruitment advertising platform designed to deliver high-quality lead generation for employers, staffing companies, and other job advertisers across paid performance media channels such as job boards and recruitment marketplaces.

All things programmatic

This episode is dedicated to tackling all things programmatic. Dennis discusses the state of global programmatic advertising, some of the trends and demand for programmatic, and how performance-based pricing models can help organizations source more and better quality candidates.

Listen to the full episode here:

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Transcript:

Steven Rothberg 0:09
Welcome to the inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces Podcast. I’m Steven Rothberg, the founder of college recruiter job search site. At college recruiter, we believe that every student and recent grad deserves a great career. And I’m Peter Zalman, founding principal of the AME group, the leading global business intelligence service for marketplaces and classified advertising companies. We consult with recruitment marketplaces, companies, and publish aim group recruitment intelligence and a free weekly digest. We also host the annual global retros conference. This is the podcast for you to learn more about how to create, manage and work with general niche and aggregator job boards and recruitment marketplaces. Hey, Peter, good to be with you again. today. The weather is getting cold, which means only one thing it’s ice hockey time.

Peter M Zollman 1:02
It is ice hockey time my favorite team has started playing and we love the solar bears in Orlando. We absolutely love them their minor league team, the hockey is exceedingly mediocre. But the fun factor is extreme. And for 1516 bucks, I can buy a ticket I can leave my house at 615 at night and be there at seven and enjoy. Enjoy the game I can even leave at 630 It’s just I love the solar better. So and I love the name to

Steven Rothberg 1:39
today’s guest is Dennis Vaughn, Allah Marish, the Chief Operating Officer of aim well, they were new SAS programmatic recruitment advertising platform, say that 12 times fast owned by DPG media DPG, for listeners who don’t know is one of the largest media groups in northwestern Europe, which for those of us in America, where we hardly know where Europe is, let alone Northwestern Europe, we’re talking Belgium, the Netherlands countries in that area. And DPG delivers a wide variety of content. They do news, sports, entertainment, and job ads, primarily to readers in Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark. Dennis, welcome to the Inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces podcast.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 2:31
Thanks, guys. Right to have me.

Peter M Zollman 2:34
It’s good to have you. We saw you last at the Rec buzz conference. And man, that was a great time and your presentation was well received. And we enjoyed hearing about ame. Well, we’ll hear about it again today. So thank you for thank you for joining us. Are you in the Netherlands I presume? Or are you in Belgium? Or do you happen to be in South Africa today? I mean, it can be anywhere, right?

Dennis Van Allemeersch 3:07
It’s all online. Yeah. So it doesn’t matter. I mean, physically I reside in the Netherlands. Yeah. So we have our our main offices in Amsterdam. Yeah. Now I live. I live nearby. You know, it’s around 5060 kilometers from from the office for you Americans. That’s you know, that’s around the corner. For us in the Netherlands. That’s you know, that’s a lot.

Peter M Zollman 3:29
And I presume you live if you live in Amsterdam, you live next to a canal. But no,

Dennis Van Allemeersch 3:35
yeah, print. Yeah. I mean, I have I have actually water at three sides of my house. Actually. Yeah,

Peter M Zollman 3:42
let’s talk about programmatic because I think that is of great interest to our audience. Before we get to aim, well, programmatics is pretty solid in the US now. Still kind of just getting it’s getting going in Europe, and not much at all in Asia, Africa, etc. I think you’re much more of an expert than I am. Fill us in on what’s going on with programmatic and why it’s so important and why and how it works.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 4:21
Oh, wow. We have a 20 minute kind of.

Peter M Zollman 4:27
Yeah, and I said we’ll keep the questions short and the answers short. And here we are going crazy with the first question. Sorry.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 4:36
Oh, my God, I heard three questions in one. Okay. I’ll I’ll do them one by one. Yeah, so programmatic globally. I mean, I think roughly You’re right. I mean, solid, of course in the States, nascent in, in Europe, and I slightly tend to disagree with your remark on Asia and Southeast Asia mean we’re seeing trends actually starting to come also and demand in Southeast Asia as well. Not not so much in southern Latin America or Africa for the simple reason that you know, due to the high levels of unemployment over there, there’s not much need for extra sourcing, you know, if you’re ready. I mean, like we are in Amsterdam, if you already have, you know, on average, 50 to 200 supplies per job, there’s not much need for programmatic. Yeah, but Asia is definitely coming. Europe is underway. It took a while, mainly because I think, you know, the traditional big job boards in Europe, as we all know, we have fixed pricing models, which makes the switch to programmatic, a bit of a financial cumbersome exercise. But I think, you know, driven by client demand, live driven by labor shortages. You know, Europe is turning as well. And also, that’s, of course, why we got it.

Steven Rothberg 5:58
We’ll be back right after this break. Welcome back to the inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces, podcast. TPG media was really focused until starting aim well, or kind of going down that path to powering its own local job boards. Right, right. And then you started offering programmatic job ad distribution, you’re now doing it in multiple countries, including with job boards operated by other companies through ame. Well, maybe you can help the listeners sort of better understand that journey from being, you know, running your own job boards to also doing just distribution to other job boards programmatically.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 6:46
I mean, the journey was, I mean, it was not a premeditated one, I would I would have to say, we first developed a programmatic software for our own job boards. Because we were facing strategic challenges. As a job board ourselves, you know, we were being disintermediated, we had an outdated business model with fixed fixed pricing. So we kind of came to the conclusion that in order to as a job board to survive, we needed programmatic capabilities, programmatic capabilities, which would enable us to also switch to more performance based pricing business models, and which would enable us to also source more qualified candidates, it was kind of a switch strategically from being, you know, platform to being Network, Network centric. And I think that also ties to Peters earlier question, you know, what, what kind of benefits does it bring, in essence is around, you know, effectiveness and efficiency of sourcing? If I would, if I would summarize it in one in one sentence

Peter M Zollman 8:07
that that makes sense, efficiency of sourcing is something everybody’s interested in a lot of job boards, work with multiple providers for backfill and job distribution. What about programmatic if somebody’s working with App cast or pandologic, job ad X, Joe VO? Can they also work with aim? Well, or is it a kind of pick your pick your programmatic sort of thing,

Dennis Van Allemeersch 8:37
we do see that I mean, independent of independent of a wall, we do see that job boards are, for example, you know, I would argue any large volume recruiting company, whether you’re a job board or a staffing company, mean usually is not married to one or the other programmatic platform, you know, they tend to switch. And however, if you have chosen one, you tend to stick with a certain platform for at least you know, two to three years, you know, because the barriers are switching are quite are quite large. And you tend not to work together with multiple programat. At least that’s not what we’ve encountered with multiple programmatic platforms. At the same time, however, what we do see and that’s one of the reasons I think one of five, I would argue to do to consider for a job or what we do see is that the current set of programmatic platforms or recruitment marketing platforms, tend to be rather, I would argue, a mono channel players. So we do see players having to work together with different types of suppliers, if they want to cover the full specter of have media channels. And I think that’s something that we try to solve for is to have, you know, a properly integrated one stop shop for all media channels, not only aggregators, but also a programmatic display. I mean, that’s our core DNA as a media company. But also, for example, as social, you know, and those are all separate specialisms.

Steven Rothberg 10:23
The job boards that are doing programmatic already, probably understand that, that they at times are sitting on one side of the desk, they’re a publisher, they’re receiving jobs, and getting them in front of their users at other times. They’re what we expect College Recruiter would call a customer, where they’re receiving jobs from an email or an app cast or pandologic. And and we at college recruiter, we do both of those with, you know, with a unwell for example, we’re receiving a feat right? Are you saying, dentists that job boards? Should it when they’re buying traffic that they should be sending their jobs to app cast to aim well to some of the other players? Or are you referring to them on as publishers where they’re receiving jobs from multiple sources for both?

Dennis Van Allemeersch 11:22
So at AIM? Well, we do it one one way, I mean, like, we work together indeed, with you, Steven. So at Angel, we facilitate one way, so we facilitate job boards, you know, large staffing companies to send on their content to a media network to buy traffic or, you know, we optimize or buy on apply starts on applies. So that’s, that’s the way we do it. And we tend to see that, you know, for as I said, from a job board perspective, instead of, you know, having to work with several suppliers, you know, it might make sense only to have to work with one. Yeah. Also, because, you know, as a, as a job board, as you know, you know, you want to have a kind of single view on, you know, on your job performance, and from what channels they’re coming from, and you want to able also for that single job, they have a tool that enables you diamond if not to, to kind of influence the performance of that single job. And if you will be working for every channel with a separate supplier. Yeah, that’s going to make a life quite quite hard.

Peter M Zollman 12:29
Then, as you mentioned, social media, and job boards participating in that in some way. Do a lot of job boards you work with and recruitment marketplaces, really, we call them because it’s much more than just a job board. But do a lot of the ones you work with. And a lot of the job boards, you’re seeing work in social media and video with their employers, and even their job seekers.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 13:01
Yeah, good. Good question. Actually, almost all of them do some form of or facilitate some form of social recruitment marketing, either enough for themselves, but usually, indeed for for their advertisers. And, you know, some of them actually employ quite a large number of social marketeers to do so. But I think it goes to my point that every channel has its own specialism I think social, for example. For example, next week, and MATA is is going to you know, sunsetting, their special ad audiences, which impacts social recruitment heavily. So, you know, as a, I mean, a, you should know that and be, then it should also have kind of strategies and knowledge in place to kind of circumvent that change, otherwise, your social recruitment is going down the drain. So, it’s really hard to find a partner who has the knowledge of all those channels, and can also combine all those channels into one. And that’s something I think, you know, one of the one of actually one of the couple of things that are missing from a job board perspective, if you’re looking at, you know, proper job boards strategy execution, I would argue,

Peter M Zollman 14:25
let’s talk about recruitment in general recession in Europe, either there or coming soon, probably there by now, recession in the United States, although it’s the most bizarre recession, I think ever in the United States. We keep adding new jobs and the unemployment rate hits a record low even with a lot of tech layoffs. How will recruitment marketplaces come through this recession? Is it going to have a significant negative impact, just a minor negative impact or positive impact. Luckily, removal

Dennis Van Allemeersch 15:07
marketplaces have, have weathered through several recessions in the past as well. Yeah. So they’ll, they’ll remain there. On the other hand, if you look at I think it can go both ways. I mean, a recession is never good. Yeah. Because you know, but I mean, you know, there will be higher freezes, there will be budget cuts, which can, which will impact our boards as well, how it will pan out, given the fact certainly in America and in Europe, that there’s still a huge labor shortages, and how those two will balance out. I think that’s, that’s anybody’s guess. So if I would make a guess at the moment, I would say, a minor negative impact,

Steven Rothberg 15:49
that isn’t the minute or two that we have remaining. Quick, quick question for you. If I’m a job board, and I’m already working with one of the programmatic vendors to distribute my jobs, or perhaps I’m exploring working with one for the first time, what would be the reason that I would work with aim well in to send my jobs out to other job boards, etc. Instead of one of your competitors? Like, what are your competitive advantage? Advantages?

Dennis Van Allemeersch 16:20
Good question. I think there’s a five. So one I mentioned already, yeah, being able to mean being able to act as a kind of one stop shop for for media. Number two, from an architecture point of view, we’ve built up our platform so that you know, we can and we automate or we launch campaigns, marketing campaigns for every single job. Meaning that you know, we’re able to combat the Pareto distribution a problem and being able to steer job performance for every single job. I think number three, would be that we’re able for job boards to support multiple use cases to one platform, not only you’re always on campaigns, but also your much needed b2b product innovation, you know, launching media upsell products, where advertisers getting into performance based pricing, all those three use cases we can support to one on the same platform. I think the fourth reason would be that we do all of the above in a fully automated way. You know, it’s it’s a circus, it’s perfectly scalable. You don’t need Mark theaters to you know, to tweak the bells and whistles on a programmatic platform. And last but not least, you know, we don’t limit ourselves at media distribution itself there but also cover the data garbage in as data garbage out of principle, meaning that we’re able to help chalkboards also with you know, job taxonomy, classification, service site tracking, and measuring correct channel performance, you know, filtering out the bots, the the duplications and what have you not? Yeah, so, I think five, five, in my view, at least five, five good reasons.

Peter M Zollman 18:02
So we want to thank you for joining us today. And we want to ask you, if people want to get in touch, what’s the best way and spell aim? Well, because any logical person spelling it would spell it ai m w e LL, and they won’t get you there. So as you tell us where to find you spell it right.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 18:25
Yeah, it’s the correct it’s the correct spelling, but with one L. Peter, so that’s the easy one. To find me personally. Dennis. fanola. Mas LinkedIn. I think that’s the that’s the easiest one. And for

Steven Rothberg 18:37
the listeners. It’s Dennis. And then V A n a l l. E M. e. R S. C. H. Dennis. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing.

Dennis Van Allemeersch 18:51
Thanks for having me guys. And good luck with the with the other updates that are coming out chairs.

Peter M Zollman 18:59
Inside job boards and recruitment marketplaces is a co production of evergreen podcasts, college recruiter and the AME

Steven Rothberg 19:07
group. Please subscribe for free on your favorite app, review it five stars are always nice and recommend it to a couple of people you know who want to learn more about job boards and recruitment marketplaces.

Peter M Zollman 19:19
Special thanks to our producer and engineer Ian Douglas. I’m your host Peter Zalman of the AME group, the leading global consultancy in the field of marketplaces, and classified advertising. Find out more about our reports on recruitment marketplaces, job boards and classifieds, including our new recruitment marketplaces annual at ame group.com/reports.

Steven Rothberg 19:44
I’m your host, Stephen Rothberg of job search site college recruiter. Each year we help more than 12 million candidates find great new jobs. Our customers are primarily fortune 1000 companies, government agencies, and other employers. to hire at scale and advertise their jobs with us, you can reach me at Steven at college recruiter.com