In the years since the pandemic, recruitment marketing has become more efficient, more data-driven, and easier to measure success in—as long as you’re tracking the right metrics. But, how do you know which metrics to track or understand what success looks like? Some of them are straightforward (apply rate), while others are a bit more complex (the definition of quality can vary from job to job).
This blog breaks down the top metrics to watch in your recruitment marketing strategy, and how to determine if the figure indicates success—or should prompt a strategy edit.
First, a recruitment marketing review
Recruitment marketing refers to the various methods used to attract, engage, nurture and convert both active and passive job seekers into candidates. It’s evolved from newspaper advertising to online job boards and now social media advertising quickly. That transition has generated buckets of data that can unlock efficiency if considered correctly.
Here, we’ll focus on three main recruitment marketing advertising channels: Job boards, search and display, and social media. These channels build upon each other to create a flexible, holistic recruitment marketing strategy that attracts and engages talent wherever they may be online.
Understanding recruitment marketing spend
How much does acquiring a candidate cost? We’ll start with the basics of the programmatic model.
The goal of an advertisement is of course, to attract eyes and spur enough interest for the user to want to learn more. That is no different for a job advertisement; Understanding and quantifying the cost of initial interest in a job advertisement is important. The cost-per-click is, therefore, our first metric to highlight.
Cost-per-click (CPC) is the total number of advertising dollars spent per click received on search, social, and job board advertisements. It’s measuring initial interest, the cost to find interested eyeballs. Cost-per-click varies across platforms and fluctuates with time, size of audience, and market forces. It is relatively low and has recently been in the dollar range—though of course it will also depend on the job you are advertising. But as you all know, not all eyeballs convert to applications.
The apply rate measures the percent of completed applications-per-click.
Together, the apply rate and cost-per-click determine the cost-per-application (CPA): the total (channel-specific) number of advertising dollars per individual application. This metric varies widely depending on the job type and channel, so it’s imperative to benchmark the performance based on those specific constraints.
What if my costs are too high?
Cost-per-click and cost-per-application are the baseline recruitment costs, building up to create the recruitment marketing cost-per-hire (but we’ll get into that a bit more later). If your cost-per-click is too high compared to benchmarks, it will impact that CPH. But why would it be too high? There are several potential explanations:
- You’re hiring in a competitive industry: While the demand for labor has fallen across the board, there are still very competitive industries (think: healthcare). If you’re struggling to attract eyes to your jobs or employer brand advertisements, you may be in one of those more competitive industries or job types.
- Your job advertisement needs some work: Specifically, your job advertisement and title may need some adjusting to better attract active job seekers. Is the title too long or too specific? Is it something that people will actually search for?
- You’re using a costly job board or search and social platform: At the end of the day, there is only so much that you can do to directly impact CPC. Different job boards and platforms will have different pricing structures. Finding a partner with wide recruitment marketing industry knowledge can help you navigate those shifting price barriers.
- And more: Many factors can impact any given job seeker’s decision.
In a similar vein, a high cost-per-application could also indicate a competitive hiring landscape, but there are other key issues that may impact cost-per-application:
- Disconnect between title and description: Job seekers mostly decide to click because of the title, so if the description is wildly different than what the title would suggest, it may be converting at a lower rate. A manager-level employee won’t be interested in an entry-level job description, regardless of the title.
- Mismatched pay expectations: Job seekers bring in a lot of expectations into the job search. Of course, not all of them can be addressed, but there are some fundamentals that rarely change. The most critical factor for many job seekers is always pay. If you are therefore advertising a job that is paying below the market average, expect to see higher recruitment marketing costs.
- And more: Factors from the day of the week posted to the language used in the job advertisement can impact a job seeker’s decision to apply.
Top KPIs for quality — and why it matters
The theme of this year has been efficiency: Rapid shifts and uncertain budgets have made it a necessity. But you cannot determine what constitutes efficiency unless you determine what constitutes success.
That’s where quality markers and the cost-per-hire come in. Further down the funnel from a click or an apply, a quality marker is usually determined by the individual company or hiring manager by asking a short but pivotal question: What makes a candidate “quality”? Is it a candidate that makes it to the screening round, or perhaps further? How you measure quality is up to you, but being consistent across jobs and over time can make it easier to examine budget and the difficulty of hiring at any given moment.
Here at Appcast, we have been working with our partners for several years to track all the way to the hire. That effort has culminated in a comprehensive and trustworthy measure of cost-per-hire—total advertising dollars spent per hire (does not include recruiter or source expenses, training costs, etc.).
As a metric, the CPH can help companies and talent acquisition teams project budgets and understand the full scope of their spend. It’s important to remember, though, that the CPH is built from CPCs and CPAs; decreasing spend would require changes to those key costs.
Where to track your metrics
So, how do you know what success looks like for any given metric? This is where Appcast can help. Our 2025 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report includes benchmarks for all of the data points listed above, overall, by state, and by occupational group. Knowing what kind of costs to expect (though there may be some variation, depending on role and location), will allow you to flag when costs get out of hand or gain a sense of accomplishment when all goes as planned.
