Snippets of Recruitment Marketing Wisdom

The TAtech Leadership Summit on Recruitment Marketing was held a week or so ago and provided its corporate and industry attendees with a jam-packed day of remarkable insights and ideas. The following is a brief (and admittedly random) summary of just some of that thought leadership. You can also view the PPT slide decks from selected presentations here.

On the economy and labor market:

Supply and demand are now nearly balanced in the U.S. labor market.
• The gap between the number of job seekers and the number of open jobs stands at less than 1 million.

What produced this shift from an unbalanced market of just a year ago to the balanced market today?
• The number of job openings reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics was revised down for the last several months of 2024, while the supply of job seekers has gone up due mostly to immigration.

Bottom line: “the labor market is frozen.”
• Roughly 70% of hiring is now backfill – replacing departed workers.

On recruitment marketing among enterprise employers in 2025:

The greatest area of expense right now is programmatic ad buying in the U.S. and posting openings on job boards elsewhere around the world.

Companies are also working on:
• Refining job postings to reflect the company’s employment brand
• Aligning the employment brand with the consumer brand
• Customizing brand communications depending on the distribution channel
• Educating the c-suite on the value of recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing budgets are flat this year even if a company is hiring.

On the impact of AI:

Companies are introducing AI into their TA processes to automate select tasks, generate content quickly and provide a more personalized candidate experience.

The big problem right now is the number of unqualified applicants.
• Anecdotally, this is being driven in large part by AI application bots, although not everyone buys that explanation (other sources, of course, could be demographic factors and changes in job seeker behavior).

The expectation is that there will be more troublesome AI powered products because the cost of getting into the market is rapidly falling.

On the latest Appcast benchmarking report:

Apply rates (applications-per-click) were up in 2024 because there were fewer jobs posted and more people looking for jobs.

Oddly, despite the fact that there was less competition (i.e., fewer job postings), employers’ cost-per-click went up 27%.

Cost-per-application rose a modest 4.8%.

Best Practices:
• Prioritize mobile apply for standing jobs and desk top apply for sitting jobs
• Post remote jobs in states with low GDP
• Post mobile-friendly job ads early in the week and day

On communicating the ROI of branding:

The problem is that there is no standardized way to measure ROI
• Where you sit determines the metric

For example, from the HR/TA Department perspective, the following are appropriate measures of merit:
• Application volume
• Quality of hire
• Offer acceptance rate

Whereas from the Marketing/Communications Department perspective, the following make sense:
• Social media engagement
• Brand perception surveys

To maximize your ROI:
• Leverage your employer brand platforms and ambassadors
• Leverage internal and existing resources
• Lower time to apply – treat time saved as an opportunity to generate revenue
• Embrace employee advocacy

On the concept of “convergence”:

Despite the fact that worker demand is (relatively) easy to measure and worker supply is easy (for some firms) to quantify, time to hire has not changed in 10 years and the cost per hire has actually gone up.

There are 3 reasons for this phenomenon:
• We don’t have insight on what happens after the apply (i.e., disposition date)
• People are slow and irrational
• Our process hasn’t changed since we were using buggy whips

This is all about to change because thanks to AI agents and a change in mindset, we are going to be able to acquire disposition data.

It’ll start among SMBs and high volume standing up jobs move to enterprise employers and seating jobs.

When will it happen? Within the next 5 years. And, it will change everything in recruiting.

P.S. If you’d like to know more about “convergence,” join us at TAtech North America & The World Job Board Forum (June 3-5, Oceanside, CA) where our Opening Keynote Speaker will be the concept’s author, Chris Forman, Founder of Appcast.