Why Your Recruitment Advertising Sucks.

If you’re in talent acquisition, you’ve probably been told that your job ads need to be more “programmatic,” that “employer branding” is your silver bullet, and that dumping more budget into LinkedIn or programmatic job boards will magically solve your pipeline problems.

Here’s the thing, though: it won’t. They’re lying to you. That’s because recruitment advertising is still stuck in 2004, using Google to drive unqualified traffic to Craigslist style landing pages and pretending that’s innovation.

It’s a world where “programmatic” just means “automated spend across the same shitty sites,” and where “branding” means posting photos of your office dogs on Instagram and hoping candidates apply.

Let’s get real: if recruiting wants to be treated like a strategic business function, we have to stop buying media like it’s still classified ads in the back of a trade magazine.

It’s time to think, and buy, like marketers.

“Programmatic” Isn’t Actually Programmatic

In digital advertising, real programmatic media buying is based on a complex mix of real-time bidding, user-level data, dynamic creative optimization, and cross-channel audience targeting. It’s predictive. It’s iterative. It’s built on intent signals and behavioral data.

In recruiting? Programmatic means pushing your job post to more job boards, faster, through the same vendors with the same keywords and the same “post and pray” mentality (only now with a dashboard and a CPM model) that hides how inefficient it is.

Programmatic in recruiting isn’t programmatic. It’s just “spray and pray” with a SaaS valuation.

According to Appcast’s 2024 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report, the average job seeker clicks on 3.8 jobs per session but applies to just one. That’s because we’re buying impressions, not outcomes. 

And unlike true programmatic adtech, recruiting platforms rarely optimize for intent, much less conversions (or even track them meaningfully).

Lost and Found: Craigslist in a World of Crypto

Let’s talk everyone’s favorite subject: good old job boards. 

Despite the industry’s obsession with LinkedIn and Indeed (which together took in over 70% of job ad spend in 2023), there’s no denying the reality: most of these platforms are bloated, overpriced, and riddled with irrelevant traffic.

Glassdoor is now just Yelp for disgruntled employees and HR plants. LinkedIn is a pay-to-play feed of vanity posts and recruiter spam – with some mediocre blog posts from fake influencers thrown in for good measure (sorry bout it).

And ZipRecruiter? Might as well be shouting into a void filled with bots and boomers – unless you’re looking to hire bots or boomers, in which case, Facebook is probably still your best bet.

Don’t believe me?

According to market data, the average cost per applicant via job boards in 2024 was $23.85. That’s compared to $4.17 per applicant using targeted consumer display ads across platforms like Google Display Network or Meta’s Audience Network.

Even worse, only about 11% of those job board applicants met basic qualifications, according to proprietary internal benchmarks from a multinational staffing and recruitment process outsourcing firm.

That means you’re paying more to get less, and you’re also clogging up your ATS and workflows with noise that your recruiters waste hours sorting through.

Why Recruitment Advertisers Fail

Pour one out for Monster and CareerBuilder, but also understand that for both entities traded the benefits of early adoption with the constraints of being limited to only job inventory for much of their existence. 

Both were born as digital equivalents of newspaper “help wanted” ads, and their ubiquity and inevitable collapse closely tracks that of classified ads as a whole, outpaced by the emergence of lower cost and more effective tech enabled platforms. 

Monster, for example, “acquired” HotJobs in what amounted to buying tens of millions of dollars in Yahoo! referral traffic every month; its inventory of job advertisements that it bought to sell on Yahoo were largely driven by newspaper alliances (eg white labeled classifieds branded under the name of local media publishers). 

The company’s decline wasn’t hastened by the rise of LinkedIn, as the narrative goes, although it probably didn’t help. More so the disintermediation of their traffic by job aggregators, although that wasn’t necessarily the death knell for the industry.

It was caused by the decline of print media and traditional classifieds in geneal, and its huge existing commitment to a third party traffic source with diminishing returns that eventually could no longer cover the gap between demand and supply. 

Ditto CareerBuilder, which started off as the online job classifieds for the Tribune Company, at the time a publishing powerhouse eventually sold off for scraps during the slow decline of print media and the rapid rise of paid search. Both companies tried diversifying their offerings through acquisitions like TalentBin (Monster) or Broadbean (CareerBuilder, then owned by PE firm Apollo, which divested Broadbean to Vertione back in 2023).

But the fact is, these were HR Tech plays by companies that were in the ad business, but unfortunately, didn’t have the business models or market positioning to effectively extend their advertising offerings to other verticals beyond jobs – and that spelled the beginning of the end, the final chapter of which will be played out in bankruptcy courts.

Even when the companies inexplicably combined forces to drive economy of scale in late 2024, the writing was already on the wall that the end was nigh. Less than a year later, the inevitable – unthinkable a decade or so ago – finally occurred – a damning indictment for a category that has become not only irrelevant, but also, largely unnecessary, too.

Even industry behemoth Indeed, originally an attempt by early investor New York Times to make up for declining print ad revenues by getting in on the digital job ad gold rush, only reached viability not by outperforming traditional job boards, but by deduplicating job ads from other sources so that they would rank higher for search, then charging companies for essentially hijacking what would have otherwise been direct traffic. 

When their job board competitors (or other erstwhile emerging job aggregators) caught up with the search engines and started deploying similar tactics, Indeed simply started outspending them on Google ads, eventually becoming one of their top customers in terms of annual spend. 

The scale of this massive traffic leasing agreement is such that Google for Jobs, which would have quickly killed off the entire job board category, was quickly abandoned by the tech giant because the loss in advertising spend by job boards trying to acquire Google traffic was far greater than the potential revenues generated by selling job ad inventory directly. 

This should tell you quite a bit about the inefficiencies involved in the world of recruitment advertising, and the margins that are built into its inventory.

If it’s more lucrative to sell ad space than publishing the ads themselves, and the company in question has a business model built on selling those ads, then you don’t have to be a genius to figure out who ends up footing the bill for those hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend a year.

Are you getting screwed? Indeed. Is that going to change their business model? 

It already has, actually. Indeed must know it sits in a similarly precarious position to Monster and CareerBuilder a decade ago, although its ownership by Recruit, offers a bit more cushion than if it were to remain a standalone entity. 

This is why you see the company making investments in non-core capabilities like their Smart Sourcing product or contingent workforce management through Indeed Flex (neither have captured much buzz or market momentum, fwiw). They know they have to remain in the TA vertical because they aren’t equipped to expand their product to advertise anything other than jobs, and also, that the cost of doing so is becoming untenable.

Winning market share is a pyrrhic victory when that market no longer really exists. 

Employer Branding Is Just Display Ads Without the ROI

Here’s a dirty little secret: most employer branding campaigns function like display advertising, only without the benefit of actual performance metrics or audience targeting.

I know that’s probably a bit controversial for those who work in the specialty, but the fact is, it’s more PR than HR – and should fall under external comms, since the only time it’s really relevant is in markets like the one we’re experiencing today, where optics matter in driving investor or customer sentiment in the face of widespread RIFs and waves of layoffs.

But as a TA discipline? Employer Branding is basically like a Hollywood studio, continually regurgitating the same content and characters in a way that’s both overly familiar and cliched. You know what I mean. Career site video loops of smiling employees.

Even the most innovative tech companies still rely too heavily on trite taglines and, likely, NAS or Shaker, to come up with cutting edge creative that wouldn’t make it past the first brand review meeting if it were coming out of marketing’s budget.

Stock photography of “diverse” teams in staged meetings. EVP taglines like “Empower Your Future” or “Together, We’re Stronger.”

It’s not branding, and it’s certainly not advertising (although mostly, it’s just PR masquerading as HR, like DEIB or ESG programs).

Employer branding in its current state is essentially display media without attribution. You’re spending money to make people feel something vague about your company, but can’t tie it to a single qualified application or hire.

Meanwhile, a well-targeted carousel ad on Instagram, with actual salary info, a “quick apply” button, and location-specific targeting, gets higher engagement and conversion at a fraction of the cost.

Recruiting leaders need to stop confusing aesthetics with effectiveness. You’re not selling vibes. You’re selling jobs.

Let’s Talk About Ad Tech That Actually Works

The consumer marketing world has already solved many of the problems recruiters are still complaining about, mainly, reach, relevance, intent, and attribution.

The tools exist. Recruiters just aren’t using them. And as a basis of comparison, shoutout to the good folks at Google Gemini for helping us with this handy, dandy chart (current as of publishing):

Metric	Job Boards (avg)	Consumer Ad Platforms (avg)
Cost Per Click (CPC)	$1.76	$0.59
Cost Per Applicant (CPA)	$23.85	$4.17
Qualified Applicant Rate	~11%	~36%
Conversion Rate (to apply)	4.1%	12.7%
Targeting Options	Keyword, Location	Demographic, Behavioral, Intent, Retargeting
Optimization	Manual	Automated/AI-Driven

Want to find nurses in Texas who recently clicked on health-related content, follow influencers in travel nursing, and live within 20 miles of your facility? You can do that: with Meta, Google, TikTok, or even Spotify. In other words, end user adoption matters. You’ve got to fish where the fish are, after all.

Job boards, not so much. You get “Registered Nurse + Dallas” and hope for the best, after scrolling through the 16 sponsored results from every TA Tech vendor spending way too much money on getting you to give them your recruitment marketing spend and pad their margins.

Stop Driving Traffic. Start Driving Conversions.

Recruiting doesn’t have a top-of-funnel problem. It has a conversion problem.

Driving more clicks to your job ads is easy. You can brute force that with budget. But driving the right clicks, the ones that actually convert into interviews and hires, is where recruitment marketing breaks down.

Every unqualified applicant costs time, money, and resources. But most job ad platforms reward volume over quality. The more clicks, the better your campaign looks; even if every one of those applicants gets filtered out by your ATS.

That’s the digital equivalent of paying for people to walk into your store just to use the bathroom.

The better approach is intent-based advertising: serving job ads to people based on their behavior, interests, and actual likelihood to apply and accept.

In other words, the way consumer marketers have done it for years.

Job Ads Aren’t Dead. Just Different.

If you want to see the future of recruitment advertising, don’t look at LinkedIn. Look at Flockity. Look at CollabWork (both recently funded, and with good reason). Look at where job seekers actually spend time online. Unless they’re really desperate and applying for every job out there (er, “active candidates), then it’s probably not spent reading job ads, in as much as anyone reads them before finding the “apply now” CTA.

Flockity isn’t a job board; it’s a creator platform that lets companies tap into influencers to promote open roles. You’re not buying clicks. You’re buying credibility. That Instagram nurse with 50k followers? Her endorsement drives more qualified applicants than a billboard in Times Square.

CollabWork does newsletter sponsorships for job ads. That’s rightl jobs embedded in curated content sent to people who opted into very specific niches, from cybersecurity to climate science. These aren’t passive job seekers. These are people who trust the source, open the emails, and engage.

What do both have in common?

They’re treating recruiting like consumer marketing. They’re going where the audience is. They’re matching the medium to the message.

And they’re outperforming your $100k LinkedIn contract by a mile.

There are manifold other competitors bringing in consumer marketing techniques and strategies to boost cost, quality and speed of hire metrics; Boostie, Joveo and even X come to mind as companies with dedicated career products that feel, and perform, like D2C tools.

Unlike, say, everyone’s favorite “professional network.”

LinkedIn: A $30 Billion Job Board is Still a Job Board

Speaking of LinkedIn: can we stop pretending it’s anything other than a very expensive job board with a news feed and more spam than Hawaiian food?

Sure, it has some benefits: intent data, passive talent, a business audience. But with CPCs ranging from $2.00 to $9.00 and CPMs over $100 in competitive markets, it certainly isn’t a competitive place to park ad spend, much less effectively convert passive candidates into active applicants.

Flashy, overpriced, and mostly a status symbol. In fact, proprietary data has shown that the average cost per hire on LinkedIn Recruiter at most enterprise employers, in fact, exceeds the relative cost of even the most white glove agency searches. Of course, LinkedIn’s data tells a very different story.

The fact that they consider anyone who clicks on the “apply now” button as an applicant, even if they immediately bounce off your Workday log in screen, probably boosts those number. Their QBRs and renewal presentations, full of their “proprietary data,” similarly suggest results that not only stretch credulity, but are often completely fabricated, based on first person experience and a large volume of anecdotal evidence.

But it’s pretty hard to audit a black box of self-reported analytics and an algorithm that may or may not exist beyond basic keywords and SNA.

The platform’s targeting capabilities are laughable compared to Meta, Google or any platform built by an advertiser that handles more than job ads and the occasional “sponsored post” (which is what they call banner ads or infomercials) .

You want to target by job title and industry? Cool. So can everyone else.

Hope you enjoy spending your whole budget in three days. Meanwhile, on TikTok, you can run a geo-fenced video ad targeted to retail workers who watched videos about “quitting your job” and “how to get hired fast”—for pennies on the dollar.

Guess which one gets more views and applications, on average?

What Recruiting Can Learn from DTC Brands

If you’re in recruiting, you’re not selling jobs. You’re selling outcomes. The same way a DTC brand sells skincare, shoes, or sugar-free protein cereal.

You need to:

• Identify your ICP (ideal candidate persona)
  
• Build audience segments based on behavior and intent
  
• Optimize your funnel for conversion, not just clicks
  
• Use A/B testing, landing pages, and remarketing
  
• Think in terms of cost per hire, not cost per post
  

This isn’t radical. It’s marketing for dummies, and a handy guide for the rest of us who don’t work at Shaker.

Plus, it’s not that hard – marketing, like HR, isn’t rocket science. But don’t fall for the fundamental fallacy that “recruitment is marketing.” 

It’s not. So, shut up, already. Seriously.

The fact that this sentiment is so widespread kind of proves recruitment marketing doesn’t need new vendors, or even the overwhelming majority of incumbents.

It needs new thinking.

The Bottom Line: Buy Direct and Save!

I wrote in my past post about how all tech is HR Tech, and talent orgs have no real business justification for siloing their tech stack that stands up to event superficial scrutiny.

Recruitment advertising is the most clear cut example of this need to reframe the conversation and reposition our thinking so that we’re buying the best solutions, not the best ones explicitly designed for HR use case

The real issue isn’t that recruitment advertising doesn’t work. It’s that the way we buy it doesn’t. 

The platforms that work for ecommerce, SaaS, and consumer brands, those same platforms will work for recruiting. In fact, they already are. You just have to stop treating job seekers like they only exist in applicant tracking systems. 

Job seekers are people (most of the time). People browse YouTube. They scroll Instagram. They waste too much time on Reddit and TikTok, too.

They read newsletters. They follow influencers. They respond to ads that don’t feel like ads, and require multiple touches to effectively convert qualified leads into active candidates.

And they deserve better than a job description, which is a compensation document, not marketing collateral.0

So maybe don’t post another “We’re Hiring!” Canva template for LinkedIn or pay a boatload of money to have an agency build a generic landing page with some videos about your company culture with CTAs to “Join Our Talent Community” (which is called a pipeline, fwiw).

Maybe go build a real campaign, instead.

Your hires, your metrics and your budget will thank you.