In the world of performance job advertising, the ROI of your spend is attained when a vertex between applicant volume and efficiency is reached. With the various performance models available in the market, knowing how and where to spend your job advertising dollars to get the outcomes you need is no easy task. Read the guide to optimize your pay-for-performance job advertising media.

1. The Guide to
Performance Job Advertising
7 Best Practices to Boost ROI

2. Contents
Introduction Define and set an apply goal
for each open job.
Stop advertising jobs that have
enough applicants.
Monitor the jobs that don’t have
enough applicants, and adjust your
strategy.
1 2 3
Measure the performance of all
your recruitment advertising
sources against the same metrics.
Cast a wide net. Experiment with your bidding
strategy… and beware of mobile
application drop-off.
Use automation software to adjust
your bids & optimize performance
for cost and volume.
54 6 7

3. Introduction
Nearly $4 billion is spent on job advertising in the US each year—representing, on average,
33% of an organization’s overall recruiting budget.1
Unfortunately, due to ineffective ad buying,
we have found that 50% of that spend is typically wasted — meaning, 50% of your spend on
recruitment advertising is most likely wasted, as well.
The causes for this “waste” are varied. The constant desire to decrease advertising budgets
leaves many organizations looking for silver bullet solutions, overlooking total business costs
and unsuccessful outcomes that can arise from cutting corners.
This wasted spend can easily be minimized or limited with some basic blocking and tackling. In
a performance advertising market, the ROI of recruitment media spend will be attained when
a vertex between volume and efficiency is reached, forcing optimization at the micro level of
each job on all your advertising channels.
This guide cuts through the general misconceptions in the industry and provides practical
strategies that anyone can implement. Take a spin through it and walk away knowing how to
optimize the performance of your job advertising for lower costs and better volume so that
you can attract the best talent to your organization.
The Guide to Performance Job Advertising
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1
Gavan Blau, “IBISWorld Industry Report OD4590: Online Recruitment Sites in the US,”
https://www.ibisworld.com/industry/online-recruitment-sites.html, (February, 2016).

4. An apply goal is the average number of candidates, based on your historical hiring data, that
you need to drive for each open requisition to achieve a hire. Typically, this number varies by
employer, job type, location and hiring manager requirements. For example, one employer
may need 40 applicants to generate a hire for a field sales position while another employer
may only require 10.
Action: Defining your apply goal for each open job is a foundational metric you will need
as you begin to optimize your recruitment advertising performance. Setting it effectively
will enable you to identify when to stop spending on the jobs that already have enough
applicants, therefore creating two opportunities: the availability of extra budget to
advertise your other jobs, and a better candidate experience from eliminating applicants
you don’t have time to disposition.
The Guide to Performance Job Advertising
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#1 Define and set an apply goal
for each open job.

5. 3
Ibid.
#2 Stop advertising jobs that have
enough applicants.
Every employer has ‘runaway jobs’ – positions that attract hundreds (sometimes even
thousands) of applications. Most employers don’t need nearly close to the number of
applicants that runaway jobs receive. If you stop spending advertising budget on jobs once
you have hit your apply goal, you can radically improve the ROI of your job ad spend.
But, by how much?
From an Appcast study of application flow at the individual job level, we found that 6% of
sponsored jobs become ‘runaways’ because they receive more than 30% of the total applies.2
2
Appcast data gained from a 2016 study of pay for performance recruitment media utilized by more than 200 companies
throughout every major industry.
Action: By limiting spend on these runaway jobs to a proportional rate, you could reduce
or reallocate advertising budget by close to 20%.3
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

6. #3 Monitor the jobs that don’t have
enough applicants, and adjust
your strategy.
A recent study from SHRM reported that 51% of organizations cite “low numbers of
applicants” as a reason for difficulty in finding candidates for their open positions.4
When
advertising your jobs in the online ecosystem, it will become apparent that only a proportion
of them will perform in terms of delivering the right volume of applies you need to make a
hire. Appcast’s research also found that 50% of jobs generate approximately 2% of the
applicant flow.5
When combined with the preceding 6% of jobs generating 30% of applicants,
you can begin to see a picture of an imbalanced ratio of applies to jobs.
To solve this volume issue of under-delivery, you first need to look at the jobs that don’t have
enough applicants. More often than not, you’ll learn that these job requisitions break down
into one of the three following categories:
4
“The New Talent Landscape Report: Recruiting Difficulty and Skills Shortages,” SHRM,
https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/trends-and-forecasting/research-and-surveys/Documents/SHRM%20New%20Talent%
20Landscape%20Recruiting%20Difficulty%20Skills.pdf, (June, 2016).
5
Appcast data gained from a 2016 study of pay for performance recruitment media utilized by more than 200 companies
throughout every major industry.4 / 11
The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

7. Under-performing:
These are the jobs receiving a steady flow of views, clicks, and applicants, but the click-to-apply
rate (CTA %) is lower than your company average (too many clicks, but not enough converting
to applicants).
Broken:
These jobs get adequate numbers of views and clicks but generate few to no applies. There
are several reasons why this may happen:
• A major discrepancy between the job title and job description;
• A poor job description that is too long to read, doesn’t compel, or deters a candidate with
unclear or unreasonable expectations;
• A bad application process that takes too long to complete, requires the unnecessary
creation of an account, or doesn’t function on a mobile device;
• Foreign or unexpected characters in the job title or job description;
• A title that candidates typically would not type into a search bar;
• An incomplete or unidentifiable job location.
Action: To generate more applicant volume, increase your cost-per-click (CPC) or
cost-per-applicant (CPA) media prices to ‘out bid’ your competitors and get in front of the
best matched candidates. You can also use additional performance vendors or acquire a
one-off duration posting on a targeted niche site to get your job ad in front of more
candidates that are likely to find interest in your opportunity.
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

8. 6 / 11
Hard-to-fill:
These jobs are not getting a steady flow of views and clicks, but are also not broken. These
are genuinely hard-to-fill positions that could require finding either very few highly qualified
candidates, or incredibly high numbers of candidates due to strong market demand to fill the
job.
Action: Ensuring you have an engaging, accurate job title and description, and a
functioning apply process will help address this major sourcing and candidate conversion
problem.
Action: Allotting more budget towards these hard-to-fill roles by increasing your CPC and
CPA bids on your performance media job sites will help them get premium online
visibility. However, you will most likely need to consider other channels as supplementary
sources in finding enough quality candidates to reach your apply goals.
The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

9. #4 Measure the performance of all
your recruitment advertising
sources against the same metrics.
When you start to run multiple recruitment advertising campaigns across different sources,
the data you receive back from your job sites may appear slanted; metrics such as
cost-per-applicant, apply time, cost-per-click, and more. Knowing this, it becomes particularly
challenging to run comparison reports across all your sources with the increasing number of
types of performance models available to recruiters.
With an even playing field, you can start to implement changes to your job advertising strategy
that will impact your overall performance across all your sources.
Action: To understand your performance media from various sources accurately, start
by separating out your free sources from your paid sources. Free is free. It’s important to
not let free traffic confuse the success metrics from the real budget you are pouring into
the market to generate candidates for your jobs.
Then, from your paid performance media sources, regardless of if you are buying per
click, apply click, or applicant, you should choose a common metric and run the math so
that you’re measuring all your sites on the same performance metric. Ideally, you will
want to measure performance as close to a hire as possible. Cost-per-applicant or
cost-per-quality-applicant are the two most consistent metrics to utilize when measuring
performance across all your sources.
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

10. #5 Cast a wide net.
Every publisher in the job site ecosystem has a different performance profile for how well they
will be able to deliver you the right candidates. A job site that returns high volumes of quality
sales positions might offer terrible returns for financial services, and vice versa. Since it is hard
to tell from the outset which publisher performs well for each job type, it is essential that you
start by working with as many publishers as possible.
The industry wide shift to performance driven job advertising models facilitates this strategy of
casting a wide net. You can set a budget for each job or job group…and distribute them to
several different sites while only paying for performance in the form of clicks, apply clicks, or
applicants.
A performance media model is flexible; use that to your advantage. You will uncover new,
better talent by casting a wide net.
Action: By casting a wide net, you can collect data that determines which sites perform
well with your job inventory and which sites do not. The baseline results are a starting
point for winnowing publishers and targeting your advertising budget on the publishers
that deliver the conversion rates and quality that makes sense for your organization.
To continue optimizing your overall budget, reduce the number of publishers you use by
5 to 10 percent each quarter, eliminating the sites that have the lowest quality scores.
Use that open space to experiment with new sources.
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

11. #6 Experiment with your bidding
strategy… and beware of mobile
application drop-off.
Run as many CPC and CPA bid tests as possible to determine the impact that lowering or
raising a bid has on your applicant volume and conversion rates. When presented with a
well-performing job ad, some recruiters may adopt the tendency of lowering their bid as much
as possible until they start to see the volume of traffic fall off. Ironically, while this strategy may
be successful in some cases, it also can have the opposite effect. For some publishers, if you
bid too low, the amount of traffic will stay the same but the quality of the traffic will drop
radically.
Since mobile traffic converts at a significantly lower rate than desktop (only 1.5% of candidates
complete an application on a mobile device), when a conversion rate decreases, your cost per
application increases.6
Thus, by bidding down, you can increase your overall advertising costs
due to lower quality traffic and higher abandonment rates.
Action: As part of your bidding experiments, pay careful attention to the variability of
your job sites in relation to conversions on mobile and desktop sites. Dive deeper into
the percentage of traffic you are receiving from each of your sources. If you have a
mobile friendly apply process (a click to apply rate over 6% on mobile would be very
strong), the best mobile job sites can produce a plethora of candidate traffic that none of
your competitors can reach. If you don’t have a mobile friendly site, double down on the
job sites that drive more desktop traffic.
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising
6
Appcast data gained from a 2016 study of pay for performance recruitment media utilized by more than 200 companies
throughout every major industry.

12. #7 Use automation software to
adjust your bids & optimize
performance for cost and volume.
The time, cost and human error associated with manual bidding in job advertising is inevitable.
It’s important to find a solution that allows you to scale your bidding strategy for your target
goals, but easily manage across all your requisitions.
Similar to your investments in applicant tracking systems, job distribution platforms, vendor
management software, and paperless onboarding, performance job advertising software pays
dividends in a number of ways by:
• Removing dependencies on an employee to watch, notice and aggregate various data
inputs to make good advertising decisions;
• Computing massive amounts of big data to make decisions faster, better and with more
extensive candidate information than humans;
• Making real-time micro changes to bidding strategies that can greatly impact output.
Action: By using performance job advertising software, you will be able to start
optimizing your media for lower cost and better volume. Software like Appcast solves for
the billions of dollars in wasted spend in today’s recruiting landscape and simply makes
job ads work. Through automation, the advanced algorithms leverage programmatic,
rules-based ad buying to identify, sponsor, and increase quality traffic to your jobs –
importantly, only the jobs that need more applicants while automatically un-sponsoring
the ones that already have enough.
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising

13. Summary
Organizations that rely on performance job advertising to run and optimize their recruitment
media buying decisions find that this software serves as a strategic lever of increased
candidate volume, for lower costs.
Recruiting leaders at any employer have one main objective: to quickly hire impactful
employees into their organization. Today’s online recruitment scene is an intense competition
to find talent; your job ads must be seen by the right candidates, at the right time. This is done
by spending advertising budget in the most effective fashion, to drive high-quality candidates
to apply for your jobs.
By making a few simple tweaks to your ad buying strategy, recruiters can radically improve the
ROI of their job advertising spend and eliminate all those wasted dollars.
And now, it’s up to you!
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The Guide to Performance Job Advertising