Smart Spending on Job Boards TRN x Talent Nexus

Recruitment businesses remain under pressure to manage margins carefully, but reducing candidate attraction budgets is not necessarily the answer. In this TRN World session, James Osborne was joined by Rob Prince, Chief Revenue Officer at Talent Nexus, to explore how recruitment leaders can make job board investment work harder and generate a clearer commercial return.

The underlying principle is simple: candidate attraction should not be managed purely as a cost. Recruitment leaders need to know where they are spending, what that investment produces and where money is being wasted.

Spending less and spending better are not the same thing

When costs rise, an understandable response is to reduce the amount being purchased.

That can become counterproductive when the activity being removed is already generating a strong return.

Job board prices are increasing, particularly across major platforms such as Indeed and LinkedIn. At the same time, these platforms are introducing new functionality and increasingly sophisticated technology.

The question for recruitment leaders is therefore not simply whether a supplier has become more expensive. It is whether the investment continues to produce enough value to justify the cost.

Candidate attraction should behave more like a growth engine. If additional investment reliably contributes to placements and revenue, cutting that investment indiscriminately can limit growth rather than protect profitability.

Headline application numbers do not tell the full story

One of the biggest weaknesses in job board reporting is an overreliance on averages.

A recruitment business may know its total spend and total application numbers. It may know how many recruiter licences it owns or how many CVs have been downloaded.

Those numbers provide some visibility, but they do not necessarily explain where the return is coming from.

A platform might produce excellent results for a particular sector, desk or job type while consistently underperforming elsewhere. Looking only at the average can make the entire investment appear healthy.

Recruitment businesses therefore need to break performance down in greater detail.

Which vacancies perform best on each platform? Which produce almost no response? Which channels generate candidates that ultimately contribute to placements?

Without that level of segmentation, a business can continue spending on roles that have very little realistic chance of generating a return.

Stop waiting until renewal time

The timing of job board reviews creates another problem.

If performance is only discussed a few weeks before a contract renewal, the business has limited time to analyse data, test alternatives or challenge assumptions.

The result is often a decision based on what happened last year or on informal feedback from recruiters.

Neither is a strong basis for significant investment decisions.

Candidate attraction should instead be incorporated into the normal management rhythm of the business.

For some recruitment businesses, that could mean including top-level media spend and ROI in a monthly board pack. More detailed operational reviews could take place quarterly, with larger strategic decisions made quarterly or every six months.

The exact frequency matters less than creating a consistent process that is independent of supplier renewal dates.

Focus on visibility, conversion and spend efficiency

Job board ROI can be considered through three connected areas: visibility, conversion and spend efficiency.

Visibility determines whether the right candidates are seeing the vacancy.

Conversion determines whether those candidates engage and ultimately move into the recruitment process.

Spend efficiency determines whether the available budget is being directed towards the vacancies and channels where it can make the greatest difference.

Of these areas, spend efficiency is often where the fastest opportunities can be found.

For example, recruitment businesses can find themselves buying large packages that encourage consultants to post every vacancy regardless of whether that platform is appropriate for the role.

The same problem can occur within individual campaigns.

When several vacancies share the same campaign budget, some jobs may generate significantly more applications than required while others receive so little budget that they barely generate a response.

The objective should not be to distribute money equally. It should be to direct investment towards activity that has a realistic opportunity to create commercial value.

Treat every platform differently

Candidate attraction is deceptively simple.

Platforms are intentionally easy to start using, but basic access is not the same as expert usage.

LinkedIn, Indeed and traditional job boards each have different functionality, audiences and optimisation requirements.

Even within one platform, seemingly small decisions can affect results.

On Indeed, for example, advert visibility can be influenced by factors such as location information. Broad location descriptions may feel commercially safer for recruiters, but providing a more precise location can improve the way the platform understands and displays a vacancy.

Job titles matter too. Unusual or vague titles can make it harder for platforms to categorise a vacancy correctly and connect it with relevant candidates.

Recruitment leaders should therefore avoid assuming that one standard advert or workflow can simply be copied across every channel.

Advert quality remains a major opportunity

The quality of recruitment advertising is still inconsistent.

Talent Nexus analysed around 100,000 historic job adverts through an optimisation tool and found that 80 per cent failed a basic spelling, grammar and formatting check.

That is significant because job adverts are effectively one of a recruitment company's key products.

Most businesses would apply clear quality controls to important external marketing material. Job advertising should receive the same attention.

Strong advertising is not only about avoiding spelling mistakes. It includes appropriate job titles, accurate locations, clear formatting and content that is structured for the requirements of the platform where it will appear.

The positive side of inconsistent standards is that recruitment businesses do not necessarily need to do something revolutionary to improve. Doing the fundamentals consistently well can already create a meaningful advantage.

Build repeatable workflows with AI

AI can help recruitment businesses introduce greater consistency into candidate attraction.

Rather than expecting consultants to remember every requirement for every platform, businesses can create workflows that check or restructure vacancy information before publication.

A job specification could be turned into different outputs for different platforms, rather than being copied and pasted unchanged.

The same principle applies to newer recruitment technology.

LinkedIn Hiring Assistant, for example, can work from a vacancy brief to support candidate shortlisting. Its effectiveness can be improved when the information fed into the system is structured specifically for the way the product works.

The important point is that AI workflows also need ongoing management.

Building an agent or template once is not enough. Processes need to evolve as platforms change and as performance data provides new evidence about what works.

Make sure expensive technology is actually being used

Technology investment only creates value when recruiters know how to use it.

LinkedIn's newer RPS Plus proposition includes Hiring Assistant and additional functionality. The businesses getting the strongest experience from these products are more likely to be those that invest time in implementation, onboarding and team capability.

Purchasing advanced functionality without helping people use it effectively is another form of wasted budget.

Recruitment leaders should therefore assess technology adoption alongside supplier cost.

If the business is paying for premium functionality, can users explain how it works? Are they using the available features? Have workflows changed as a result?

If not, the problem may not be the technology itself.

Centralise investment around business value

Candidate attraction budgets are often easier to track when they are assigned to individual recruiters. That does not necessarily make it the most effective model.

Centralising investment by sector, vacancy type or commercial priority allows the recruitment business to make decisions based on overall ROI rather than immediate individual demand.

A consultant with several new vacancies will naturally want those jobs advertised. The more important question for the business is whether those vacancies justify the investment compared with other opportunities.

Central ownership makes it easier to allocate spending based on evidence.

Look for the warning signs

Recruitment leaders should pay attention to the language being used internally about job boards.

Comments such as "we are not using what we already have" or descriptions of platforms as "hit-and-miss" can indicate a deeper issue.

Effective candidate attraction should become increasingly predictable.

A recruitment business should understand which channels tend to work for particular roles and which do not. If consultants repeatedly post jobs without knowing whether the platform is suitable, spend is being treated as an experiment rather than an investment.

Another warning sign is operating job boards in much the same way as several years ago.

The major platforms are changing quickly. AI, matching technology and new products mean workflows that were appropriate in the past may no longer represent the best use of the available tools.

Job boards are increasingly competing on audience, not just technology

AI will continue changing search and matching, but the long term value of job boards still depends heavily on their audiences.

Building technology that compares a vacancy with candidate information is becoming increasingly accessible.

Building a large, relevant and engaged candidate audience is much harder.

That distinction matters when considering the future of established platforms.

LinkedIn benefits from the size of its professional network and the connection between recruitment products and its wider social platform.

Indeed continues to invest in both recruiter and candidate technology, including tools designed to help people explore potential career options.

Traditional job boards also retain value where their audiences are strong for particular sectors, locations and levels of seniority.

The question for recruitment businesses is therefore not which platform is universally best.

It is which audience and product combination is most appropriate for the recruitment requirement in front of them.

Start with the data

For recruitment businesses wanting to improve job board ROI, the first step is diagnosis.

Understand where money is currently going. Gather contract information. Identify which vacancies perform well and which underperform. Look at the candidate profiles that remain difficult to source.

From there, reduce waste and invest more deliberately in what works.

Indeed, LinkedIn, CV-Library, Reed and Totaljobs can all have a role depending on sector, geography, seniority and vacancy type.

The objective is not to use every channel. It is to understand which channel has the strongest opportunity to create value in each situation.

Smart job board spending is ultimately not about shrinking the candidate attraction budget.

It is about making every part of that budget more accountable, more deliberate and more commercially productive.

Speaker: Rob Prince - Chief Revenue Officer, Talent Nexus
Host: James Osborne - Co-founder and CEO, The Recruitment Network