Transforming Recruitment Marketing: From Data to Insights

Let’s be honest: if you’re still reporting recruitment marketing performance in spreadsheets, you’re not “data-driven,” nor does this constitute anything resembling “talent intelligence.”

You’re just stuck sometime in the era where Clippy was the most advanced answer engine on the market, Monster was still part of the S&P 500 and on-premise vs. cloud was still a real debate in the esoteric world of HR Technology.

If you’re still relying on spreadsheets and third party reporting to inform your recruitment marketing strategy, then no matter how great you might be at creating v-lookups, macros or pivot tables, you’re getting an inaccurate, incomplete and most importantly, ineffective snapshot of historical numbers without context or benchmarks. 

That’s great if you’re OK with your ‘reporting’ being speculative, but not so much if you actually want to demonstrate ROI, attract and convert qualified candidates or even accurately track something as simple as source of hire.

These inefficiencies are a big reason why recruitment advertising is still a big business; this archaic approach to data driven recruitment is how they monetize media margins. Spreadsheets are great for reporting results – but pretty crappy at generating anything resembling predictive, let alone prescriptive, data. 

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a “programmatic” ad campaign with some big name vendor, export those numbers into spreadsheets, then again to build pretty dashboards in Lookout or Tableau, only to show you volume numbers or vanity metrics. 

But if you’ve ever spent hours reverse engineering why those thousands of clicks and hundreds of applicants didn’t result in any actual hires, but, say, someone randomly posts the job on Reddit and it ends up bringing in 10 qualified candidates, 6 interviews and 3 hires without spending a cent, then welcome to the chaos of recruitment marketing.

 It’s a discipline where “insights” are abundant, intelligence is an oxymoron and the only thing that’s predictable is the lack of reliable attribution or performance data.

There’s a reason that at a time where most agencies are having a full blown existential crisis around how to justify their monthly retainers, US employers spent an estimated $3 billion dollars on recruitment marketing agencies in 2025 – a number that’s projected to rise to over $6 billion by 2033. 

That’s a CAGR of around 10% a year, which means recruitment ad agency spend alone – independent of the budget required to actually buy paid media, which is multiples higher at most organizations – is projected to grow over the next decade at the same approximate rate as fintech, clean energy, or AI. 

This speaks less to agencies’ efficacy or the relative effectiveness of job advertising as it does to the fact that talent acquisition’s adtech stack just doesn’t stack up – particularly when it comes to data. 

The good news is, there’s a way to fix this endemic issue that doesn’t involve changing AORs, diversifying sources of hire, increasing spend or buying more software. 

Think of recruitment marketing like interview intelligence: getting better insights, and better results, really all comes down to asking better questions.

Like, “what are you doing December 2 at 2 PM ET (11 AM PT)?” Because if the answer isn’t taking an hour to join me for an exclusive webinar powered by Joveo titled “From Insights to Intelligence: Redefining Recruitment Marketing Analytics with AI,” then here are two more good questions for you:

Why? And, what do you have to lose besides more blown recruitment marketing budget?

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of spending inordinate amounts of money on a campaign that sounded like a sure thing, only to get left with zero hires and even fewer answers, this is one webinar you can’t afford to miss (and your LinkedIn rep doesn’t want you to know about).

The KPI Trap: What We Think We Know vs. What Actually Matters

Most TA teams have been taught to obsess over “vanity metrics.” Time on site. Click-through rate. Completed applications. Maybe, if you’re lucky, a cost-per-application metric gets thrown into the mix to feign some semblance of fiscal accountability.

But none of that tells you the only data point that matters: where your hires are really coming from. Because too often in this industry, “source of hire” is an oxymoron, indeed.

Yeah, sure. You can complain all day about having too many applicants – or fake candidates – but unless you can actually tell how many of those applicants got interviewed, made it past the hiring manager, and last longer than 90 days, then you’re focusing on the wrong problem. 

You don’t have too many applicants. You have too much noise, and not enough signals.

The webinar Tuesday is going to take a deep dive into this disconnect. We’ll be diving into which recruitment marketing KPIs are actually predictive of success – and which ones are just slide fodder for TA to CYA. Spoiler alert: if “impressions” are still present in your reporting deck, you need an intervention.

The good news is that we’ve got you. 

Advertising Isn’t An Art. It’s Data Science.

Let’s be crystal clear: AI has a lot of limitations, and most purported use cases should be met with a degree of healthy skepticism (particularly if they’re being sold by HR Tech vendors, if we’re being honest).

AI isn’t a magic bullet. It won’t fix a broken hiring process, improve your company culture or get your hiring manager to give you timely or actionable feedback.

But what “AI” is actually pretty good at, honestly, is taking all of those disconnected and disparate data sources that TA generates – things like clicks, visits, last touch attribution information, CRM signals, aging reports and ATS actions – and turn them into a cohesive narrative that’s actually usable.

And by “usable,” I don’t mean another crappy “native” dashboard with some basic filters and generic data visualizations. I mean, actual, predictive insights into:

• Where your highest-quality candidates really come from
  
• What spend is wasted, and where to reallocate it
  
• Which campaigns will convert based on past performance
  
• What to expect in terms of time-to-hire and cost-per-hire before you launch

That’s intelligence. 

According to recent research from McKinsey, high-performing organizations are already using AI to optimize marketing spend across every other business function.

Talent acquisition, however much it seems to be embracing AI, remains a stubborn holdout when it comes to spend optimization – as evidenced by the fact that you’re buying AI point solutions for isolated (or non-existent) TA use cases.

Maybe it’s because recruitment marketing is siloed, and effectively isolated from the larger marketing organization. Maybe it’s because our tools and tech stacks are fragmented, our data is a mess, and our vendors are too busy pitching “solutions” to fix our most persistent problems.

That’s why, if you’re in TA today, you need to register now for this upcoming webinar. While it’s being presented by Joveo, it’s not a vendor pitch. I promise. It’s a wake-up call. 

That’s what makes this webinar different. It’s not a vendor pitch. It’s a wake-up call.

Not Another AI in Recruiting Webinar

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. The last thing the world (or your busy schedule) needs is another webinar on “AI in Recruiting.” Chances are, there are like a dozen scheduled at the exact same time on Tuesday. But trust me: this won’t be another generic exercise in category creation or a thinly veiled sales pitch.

I’m being joined by Carrie Corbin of Hope Leigh Marketing, who, in addition to being a total badass, is also one of the best in the business when it comes to analyzing, optimizing and converting potential applicants into actual hires . Unlike most recruitment marketing leaders, has the data to prove it.

We’ll be going deep on use cases. We’ll be calling out the best – and the worst – performing sources of hire, and yes, we’re naming names (and no, not all of them are vendors you’d expect).

We’re showing real results from real organizations that made the shift from insights to intelligence – and how those analytics actually impacted not only recruitment outcomes, but also, the bigger business and bottom line.

And, naturally, we’re going to challenge some longstanding assumptions most recruiters still have about data. About ROI. About what performance actually looks like in “performance marketing.” Could it get a little uncomfortable? Indeed.

But you’ll also walk away with a clear roadmap of what you can fix, what to stop focusing on, and actionable tips and tricks for hiring success that you can use right now – no matter what you’re hiring for, where you post your jobs or what systems are in your stack.

Register Now, Or Guess Again.

If you’re tired of spending your budget on campaigns that look good on paper but don’t deliver, tired of dashboards that raise more questions than answers, and tired of getting ghosted by your own data, join us.

Register now. It’s as easy as clicking on the link in the box below. And if you can’t make it live, no worries. Fill out the form, and we’ll send a full copy of the recording straight to your inbox.

Insights to Intelligence: Redefining Recruitment Marketing Analytics with AI

It’s free. It’s smart. It’s not another AI hype fest. And it might just save your 2026 hiring plan from the same cycle of budget burn, performance denial and perpetual job insecurity.

Let’s stop pretending we’re data-driven and actually start acting like it.

See you there?