In today’s talent-competitive landscape, recruitment professionals are faced with the major challenge of reaching the essential talent they need to drive their organization forward.
As recruiters continue to allocate more of their budgets toward online recruitment advertising, understanding the performance of spend becomes increasingly important to drive better ROI.
Having a clear strategy for recruitment advertising means you have a ‘game plan’ to address what, where, and how you will attract new candidates to your organization. Additionally, it provides a framework for agility and being able to iterate on the strategy as your hiring needs evolve or as the market and technology changes.
To build a solid strategy, one which can be measured for performance across your corpus of open jobs, you need to use data. Identifying the benchmarks you will use to measure the success of your strategy is key to decision-making, forecasting, and understanding the ROI of your recruitment advertising.
Read on as we share 3 tips to drive better performance from your job ads based on industry-leading benchmarks from the 2019 version of our annual Recruitment Media Benchmark Report.
Where am I hiring?
Understanding the hiring conditions in the places you are hiring is paramount to ensuring you receive candidates from your job advertising. Getting a clear picture of the hiring landscape means you can then tweak your ads for better results. That could include implementing title or location expansion (Appcast can help you with this!), altering your job ad messaging, or potentially bidding higher for locations where competition is high.
Below we look at average apply rates across the United States but keep in mind, within those states, there will be nuances as well. As an example, recruiting in northern California would be less competitive than in southern California, so you could expect higher apply rates in some northern areas. This is why expanding the radius of the targeting of where you post jobs can yield better results. How do your apply rates stack up in the states where you are currently hiring?
CTA: Want to look at average CPCs or CPAs across the US? Download the full 2019 Appcast Recruitment Media Benchmark Report!
What industry am I in?
Similar to where you are hiring, you should have an understanding of how your target audience behaves. If the benchmark for apply rates is relatively high, then maybe you don’t need to spend so much to acquire candidates for a given role. Or, if you need a consistent pipeline, knowing your apply rate will allow you to forecast how many candidates you are likely to receive for a given role.
In the chart below, we break down the average apply rate for a number of major industries – this is based on an analysis of over 93 million clicks and 5 million applies that we conducted for our 2019 Recruitment Media Benchmark Report.
How much should I spend?
Spoiler alert: there is no single right answer. As you may have noticed, it’s helpful to have a multi-faceted approach to determining the right conditions to get the candidates you need. This will help you to understand ‘if I need X applications to make one hire in X industry, then how much must I spend to post that job, given the average apply rate and the market conditions that exist?’
Below we show cost-per-apply ranges across many major industries. The low median (25%) is shown in the bottom point on each bar; the top point indicates the high median CPA (75%). Do you fall within the range?
This is just the beginning
Benchmarking your performance is a great way to build a solid foundation for your recruitment advertising strategy but at the end of the day, it’s a science and you must continue to test your strategy for various jobs, various locations, and other variables. It is your strategy, your jobs, your hiring locations, your budget — use these tips to get you started and then continue to tweak your strategy to posting jobs, to achieve your goals and grow your organization.
Want to see more Recruitment Media Benchmarks? Download the full report!
