Discover the real story behind how one public sector agency transformed recruitment with an automated job advertising tool integrated with NEOGOV's Insight applicant tracking system.
For the City of Portland, managing job advertisements was a painstakingly manual and expensive task that overwhelmed staff and budget resources and provided no solid insights to justify improvements.
That all changed with JobTarget, a job advertising platform integrated directly with NEOGOV’s applicant tracking system, Insight. With the ability to advertise jobs across more than 25,000 job boards – ranging from popular sites like LinkedIn and Indeed to industry-specific and regional job boards – the City of Portland’s recruitment potential transformed overnight.
“Before JobTarget, it took a lot of tedious, manual work to place outreach for our recruitments,” explained Loan Tran, a Senior Recruiter for the City of Portland. The recruiting team of just 8–10 people serves 29 bureaus, each bureau with its own hiring needs, timelines, and expectations.
Keeping up with this complexity was a galactic task. Recruiters often spent up to 20 hours per week just making job placements, using P-cards to manually pay for every job posting – sometimes requiring 10–15 separate entries per recruitment effort.
The entire process was overwhelming and expensive, especially when outreach requests totaled $2,000+ with little insight into how those dollars were performing. “Hiring managers always just wanted us to post ads on the same sites. I didn’t have data to justify trying anything new,” said Loan.
And during the busy season, tight budget cycles meant outreach would grind to a halt. “We’d run out of budget altogether and couldn’t post for weeks,” Loan shared.
In a few cases, even after extensive outreach, some positions simply went unfilled – especially hard-to-fill roles. This wasn’t just inefficient; it had real consequences.
“When we had failed recruitments, that meant someone was doing two people’s jobs,” said TroyLynn Craft, also a Senior Recruiter for the City. “That’s not a good feeling.”
JobTarget’s seamless integration with Insight brought a tidal wave of relief. Recruiters can now set up and post job ads in under five minutes using both programmatic and targeted board placements. And with automated invoicing, the days of juggling P-cards are over.
Ad costs went from $1,000–$2,300 per recruitment to just $499 – resulting in 50–78% more budget savings!* |
“Having everything in one area is so nice,” said Loan. But the real impact doesn’t end there – the City of Portland’s savings were dramatic in more than one way. Ad costs went from $1,000–$2,300 per recruitment to just $499 – resulting in 50–78% more budget savings!*
What’s more, some ads received double the applications* using automated, programmatic tools that optimize each listing’s allocated budget spend across the most relevant job boards. With better reach and higher-quality applicants from the start, this means recruitments are more successful the first time around, relieving pressure on teams.
The flexibility of JobTarget’s campaign options also allows recruiters to tailor advertising strategies to each bureau’s goals and budget – without the manual burden.
“We don’t have time to create 25 different ad placements manually,” said Anna Morgan, another Senior Recruiter. “So, having something budget-friendly with different options for bureaus has been truly remarkable.”
With JobTarget, recruiters don’t have to work late hours to catch up on their tasks anymore. Now that tedious tasks are automated, recruiters can prioritize what can’t be delegated to technology – such as mentoring, hiring manager collaboration, and engagement with new employees.
“We can finally focus on one-on-one time with candidates, one-on-one time with hiring managers,” TroyLynn shared. “We can concentrate on the people part. That’s something AI can’t do.”
The ability to spend more time on higher-value tasks that improve the candidate and hiring manager experience has restored a sense of purpose and balance to the recruiting team’s daily work.
“I even get to meet with people we’ve recently hired, which we never had time for before,” TroyLynn added. “It’s really exciting. It’s changed the way we work for the better.”
Perhaps one of the most powerful outcomes of using JobTarget is the ability to back up recruiting strategies with real data.
Recruiters can provide real insights about views, application volume, diversity insights, and more – giving them the clarity to refine and defend their approach. And hiring managers who once questioned ad placement decisions now see tangible outcomes: better reach, better applicants, and faster fills.
“It’s dramatically different,” TroyLynn explained, “and that data has changed minds.”
One job placement only had 4 views after posting to job boards chosen by the hiring manager. TroyLynn suggested trying JobTarget’s programmatic ads – and when they did, the placement got 239 views.*
"The results have been stunning." |
This visibility has redefined the recruiting team’s role: no longer just executors, but advisors with valuable insight.
“The results have been stunning,” Anna shared. “I just talked to a hiring manager for a recruitment we filled, and she could not be more grateful and happy because it was a very hard-to-fill job.”
The City’s hiring processes include built-in equity safeguards, like a 14-day re-evaluation window, but JobTarget has helped streamline what’s possible.
Using programmatic ads, diversity hiring saw a significant boost: the City’s recruiters found 50% of applicants were from diverse backgrounds,* compared to a previous average of 25–30%.
More recently, these numbers have grown even more. “For the last five to six jobs I’ve worked on, our diversity application numbers have been between 50-65%,” said Loan.
This aligns with the City’s diversity goals to support more inclusive and equitable hiring across their 29 bureaus. And it’s only the beginning – with so much untapped potential left to explore in JobTarget, Loan, Anna, TroyLynn, and the rest of the recruiting team feel empowered to keep testing new, innovative outreach efforts that can improve recruitment and promote the City’s values.
For the City of Portland, JobTarget didn’t just save time or cut costs – it gave recruiters a voice in the larger conversation around leveraging advanced technology and data-informed hiring strategies to shape the future of recruitment in the public sector.
*The data in this article represents a limited effort with select hiring managers at the City of Portland who agreed to pilot JobTarget.