Solving Talent Acquisition’s Conversion Problem

Here’s a secret that few talent acquisition organizations are aware of, and even fewer would admit to: most every recruiting strategy is predicated on a fundamental fallacy (or a “big lie,” if you’d prefer). See, most TA leaders today – at least when asked about their most pressing hiring challenges – are likely to respond with some vague approximation of what’s been called the “TA Capacity Crunch.”

Even if you’re not familiar with the term, if you’re a recruitment practitioner or talent acquisition leader, you’re probably overly familiar with its implications. Since 2022, recruiter headcount has dropped by an estimated 25%; meanwhile, the average number of reqs per recruiter has more than doubled to 56%.

This means less recruiters handling more roles – and, perhaps most pressingly, a dramatic increase in application volume, too. In the past 48 months alone, the average open role receives a whopping 3x more inbound applicants (currently estimated at 242 applications per opening). 

There are many potential culprits driving this trend, of course – the rise of ostensibly “fraudulent” applicants enabled by AI; higher unemployment and widespread job instability, particularly amongst knowledge workers; and, of course, a seeming disconnect between hiring managers and recruiters, as evidenced by YoY declines in qualified candidate to interview and interview-hire ratio; longer times to fill and the prevalence of AI use by hiring managers (around 3 in 4 say these tools enable better hiring decisions than human recruiters, according to recent Greenhouse data).

Yet, TA leaders continue to identify pipeline health and candidate volume as among the most critical challenges to hiring success. There are, inevitably, too many applicants, but somehow, never enough qualified candidates – in fact, only .4% of all applicants will end up as successful hires. 

Every minute, in fact, 11,000 new applications are submitted via LinkedIn alone, despite the fact that the site only generates between 2-3% of all external hires a year at enterprise employers, despite the fact that the site constitutes around 40-50% of annualized talent attraction spend for enterprise companies.

Other job boards, like Indeed, continue to push increased applicant volume while seeing diminishing returns when it comes to actually converting applicants into hires.

Why High Intent Candidates Never Actually Apply

With increased applicant volumes, less qualified candidates, fewer recruiters and less resources, logically, you’d expect for talent acquisition to more critically examine – and optimize – these sources of spend, looking for alternative ways to pack their pipelines and fill their funnels. 

And yet, most enterprise employers seem to double down on what’s already a losing strategy – throw more money at job boards, increase talent attraction spend, implement “AI” powered (and pricey) point solutions for sourcing and investing in “programmatic advertising,” which essentially shifts the exact same spend amongst the exact same sources, leading to, unsurprisingly, the exact same hiring outcomes.

Responding to too few qualified candidates and too many unqualified applicants by flushing more money down the job board drain evidences a fundamental fallacy that’s clearly counterintuitive. They say doing the same thing over and over again is the definition of insanity. It’s also the definition of recruitment advertising. Which makes sense, because if we’re being honest, the way most organizations approach talent attraction is friggin’ nuts.

In fact, it’s not only counterintuitive – it’s completely backwards, too.

Your Pipeline Problem Is Really A Conversion Problem.

That’s because, as most recruiters would tell you, the problem has nothing to do with not having enough applicants or, by extension, qualified candidates; in fact, this volume remains the source of a ton of frustration and unnecessary angst for those tasked with reviewing the hundreds of resumes flooding into their ATS.

So, it’s clear that the “TA Capacity Crunch” isn’t being driven by a volume problem. 

The biggest challenges in TA today, instead, stem from conversion problems. And fixing those pressing, persistent and pervasive problems around candidate conversion is imperative to improving recruiting efficacy and hiring success.

Here’s the crazy part: for as much money as we spend on optimizing job ads, building employer brands and blasting every job opening to dozens of paid job boards, data from Dalia shows that fully 95% of all career site visitors do not, in fact, complete an application at all. 

That baseline suggests that the biggest challenges in talent attraction have absolutely nothing to do with sourcing, talent scarcity or market conditions. It’s not a platform problem. Instead, it’s very clearly a process problem – and one that’s actively pushing away top talent and qualified candidates (the kind that don’t need to leverage AI to finesse their experience or expertise).

Think about that for a second: many employers spend upwards of six figures on talent attraction efforts designed to drive qualified applicants to open positions. This isn’t a significant issue, since funnels are largely full, while existing pipelines continue to expand faster than employers can activate them.

As much as we spend on job advertising and employer branding, though, we rarely pay attention to the most critical factor driving hiring success – or failure. It’s not that sexy, but it’s pretty simple and straightforward: your career site is almost certainly costing you qualified candidates, while doing nothing to preempt the influx of unqualified applicants. 

Dalia data shows that applicants originating from company career sites are a full 3x more likely to end up with an offer than those who come directly from paid job advertising.  This means that the candidates who are actually interested in your company, or who have done more research into your open roles than simply getting redirected to an application workflow, are ostensibly much higher quality, and much more likely to be amongst the .04% of applicants who actually get hired.

But when companies lose 95% of those more qualified career site visitors before they even click apply, then it’s apparent that we’re compounding the applicant volume problem, while ignoring the process issues largely responsible for creating the “capacity crunch” in the first place.

The pattern is pretty common across all roles, functions and markets: a real candidate who’s really interested in your company sees one of your job ads, but instead of blindly clicking apply, decides to do a little bit of research, however perfunctory that might be. 

According to heat map analysis, one of the first things those interested candidates do after viewing a job description is to land on your career site. The average career site visitor looks at around 4 different pages before deciding to click apply; by this point, fully half of these would-be applicants have already abandoned the process. 

By the time those candidates move from your career site to finishing your actual application process, another 40% or so self-select out of the application process. This leaves a paltry 5% of all career site visitors that actually convert to applicants, as Dalia data shows. And yet, for some reason, recruiters are still baffled as to why their conversion rates are in the cellar, and there never seem to be any good candidates applying for their posted positions.

Plainly: you can’t improve recruiting results unless you fix your career site, first.

Garbage In, Garbage Pipeline: Why Job Description Quality Is a Hiring Outcome Issue

It’s not just career sites that contribute to the endemic conversion problems plaguing employers. As discussed before, while most companies overinvest in job advertising, few take the time to optimize their JDs to increase qualified candidate flow, preempt the deluge of AI resume slop, and, most importantly, turn passive candidates into active applicants.

Research from SquarePeg, a leading recruitment platform which leverages both AI and behavioral science to better source and screen qualified talent, reveals the disconnect between job ad spend and recruitment-related ROI. It also demonstrates that, when it comes to leveraging AI in the hiring process, job description optimization delivers real ROI to real companies (unlike so many theoretical and edge use cases).

According to SquarePeg, job descriptions that leverage LLMs that have been specifically trained on historical performance data, coupled with industry best practices around job ad optimization and conversion, can convert up to 45% of qualified applicants who would otherwise have abandoned the process before ever hitting your pipeline. That’s a pretty significant lift, and a pretty compelling proof of concept, too.

Given the proliferation of AI tools and technologies within the talent acquisition space, one would assume that job description optimization has become a critical component of most employers’ talent attraction strategy; however, most recruiting teams fail to do anything to optimize job descriptions for conversion, much less leverage machine learning or AI in the process.

The problem here is that most job descriptions are basically compensation documents cut and pasted into job ads – full of the same generic language, ambiguous requirements and content that’s designed more for compliance and less for conversion. This lack of specificity, bland copy and job descriptions that don’t really describe anything are key culprits behind inefficient, ineffective hiring processes.

According to one example from SquarePeg’s platform data, one high volume employer received over 800 applications for a critical opening; of these, only 39 were truly qualified – and only 2 resulted in actual offers. This demonstrates the dramatic disconnect between application volume or hiring results. If you’re forced to search for the proverbial needle in the ATS haystack due to a lack of a screening process, or non-existent infrastructure for dealing with applicants at scale, your funnel is effectively futile.

From Interest to Hire: How High Performing TA Teams Convert the Right Talent At Scale

So, how can companies close the gap between recruitment marketing performance and real hiring outcomes? It’s a critical question – and one that we’ll be exploring in depth on Tuesday, March 31 at 1 PM ET/10 AM PT  as Dalia and Squarepeg join forces for an exclusive recruiting roundtable, “From Interest to Hire: How High Performing TA Teams Convert the Right Talent At Scale.”

I’ll be joined by Dalia founder Sam Fitzroy and SquarePeg founder Claire McTaggart – two of the most experienced, engaging and forward thinking leaders in the talent technology industry – as we discuss where your talent funnel is actually leaking (and why), and what real recruiters and real companies are really doing to plug their candidate pipelines while fixing their hiring funnels.

I promise, this isn’t just another demo thinly veiled as a “best practices” conversation. It’s a real, practical and strategic conversation that explores career site drop off rates, how to turn conversion data into meaningful metrics and actionable analytics, and how high performing teams are more effectively capturing and converting inbound applicants without adding headcount or advertising spend.

Hiring outcomes live or die directly in the gap between demand gen performance and conversion rate outcomes. Once you close that gap, hiring the right people at the right time, all the time, becomes an exercise in selecting top talent, rather than screening unqualified applicants at scale.

Space is limited, so register now for this candid conversation today by registering here:

From Interest to Hire: How High Performing TA Teams Convert the Right Talent At Scale.

This is one candid conversation that no TA pro can afford to miss. And don’t worry – if you can’t make it, go ahead and register, and we’ll send a copy directly to your inbox. 

See you there?