Recruitment and staffing
You are running two businesses with one budget. Candidates and clients want different things, cost different amounts, and are almost never measured apart.
You run a recruitment or staffing agency, permanent or contract. You need candidates on one side and clients on the other, and a placement requires both to arrive at the same time.
Advertising spend goes out across job boards, search and social, and nobody can say what a placement costs to produce or which half of the market the money went to.
What we keep finding
Four things that make recruitment marketing hard to read.
Two markets share one budget and one report
Candidate attraction and client development have different costs, different cycles and different success measures. Merged, neither can be judged, and the budget drifts toward whichever produces more raw volume, which is always candidates.
Applications are counted, placements are not
An application is cheap, abundant and frequently irrelevant. A placement is the only event that produces a fee. Very few agencies can connect one to the other, which means job board renewals are negotiated on faith.
Job board spend is renewed rather than assessed
Large annual commitments, signed because they were signed last year. Cost per placement by board is calculable in most agencies within a fortnight and it changes the negotiation completely.
Contract and permanent are one number
A contractor placement earns a margin every week for months. A permanent placement earns a fee once. Treated as one conversion, the advertising cannot tell the difference and neither can the budget.
The split
Two businesses that should be measured as two.
Candidate side
- Measured on applications
- Job boards and social
- Days to fill as the target
- Success: a shortlist
Client side
- Measured on vacancies won
- Search, outreach and reputation
- Months to first instruction
- Success: a repeat client
The fee is earned here and the marketing that produced it happened on both sides of the desk, months apart, usually paid for from the same untracked budget.
What we measure here
The numbers a staffing business runs on.
- Candidate and client activity separated at every level, from budget to report
- Applications, interviews arranged and placements as three separate events
- Cost per placement by source, including every job board individually
- Contract and permanent split, with contract valued over its expected run
- Client acquisition measured over a realistic cycle, not a thirty day window
- Repeat client rate, because the second vacancy from a client costs almost nothing to win
- Candidate database reactivation measured as a channel, since it is usually the cheapest one available
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Can you connect to Bullhorn or our ATS?
Usually, and what we need out of it is modest: applications, interviews and placements with dates and values. Where a direct connection is difficult, a scheduled export does the job perfectly well.
Our job board contract is up for renewal.
Then get cost per placement per board before you sign. It takes about two weeks of work and it is the single highest return thing you can do this quarter, whichever way the answer falls.
Should we be advertising on LinkedIn?
For the client side, sometimes, and it is expensive enough that it needs measuring properly rather than running on principle. For candidates it depends entirely on the sector. We would run it as a bounded test with a stop date.
Is employer branding worth spending on?
For your own agency, yes, and it is slow. If a client is asking you to do it for them, that is a different service and we would be straight about whether it is one we should be involved in.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
Another sector. It is the proof for one specific idea that applies here directly: an enquiry counted without an outcome attached will send your budget the wrong way.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.