How long before a recruitment campaign delivers candidates?
The question everyone asks and almost nobody answers properly. Below is the full timeline: from sign-off to first application to steady state, plus what makes that timeline shorter or longer.
The first applications typically arrive within 3 to 7 days of the campaign going live. At Leadstars that is fixed as a 7-day delivery guarantee. Before that sits a setup phase of roughly one week to ten days: audience, offer, creatives, landing page and tracking. After go-live comes a learning phase of 10 to 14 days in which the algorithm and creatives are adjusted; cost per candidate swings hard in that period. A stable, predictable volume usually appears in weeks 4 to 6. For scarce or certified profiles that can stretch to 8 weeks.
Last updated: 4 September 2026
Key takeaways
- Setup: 7 to 10 days for audience, offer, creatives, landing page and tracking.
- First candidates: 3 to 7 days after go-live. Leadstars fixes this as a 7-day delivery guarantee.
- Learning phase: 10 to 14 days in which cost per candidate still swings hard.
- Steady state: weeks 4 to 6, or week 8 for scarce profiles.
- The biggest delay is not the channel but the follow-up: leads left sitting for days go cold.
Phase 1: setup, 7 to 10 days
Before a single euro goes to ads, there needs to be something to send people to. In this phase we lock the audience, sharpen the offer, produce the creatives, build the landing page and set up tracking and follow-up. A week is realistic when the job copy, terms and imagery exist. When they do not, setup is rarely the bottleneck: waiting for your sign-off is.
Phase 2: first applications, day 3 to 7
As soon as the campaign is live, traffic arrives within days and the first applications follow. For us that is not a promise but a 7-day delivery guarantee. For broad function groups such as logistics, production and hospitality the first responses often arrive within 48 hours. For engineering, healthcare and IT it usually takes a little longer, simply because the audience is smaller and the offer weighs heavier.
Important: the first candidates are not a representative sample. Do not judge a campaign on three applications in week one.
Phase 3: learning phase, day 10 to 14
Over these two weeks the ad platform gathers enough conversions to learn who responds. Cost per candidate swings hardest here: €6 one day, €40 the next. We adjust creatives, audience and the offer on the landing page. Campaigns that get paused or overhauled every few days in this phase never finish learning and stay expensive.
Phase 4: steady state, weeks 4 to 6
From week four the inflow becomes predictable and the cost per candidate settles into a band you can plan against. Only here can you do serious maths: how many candidates per week, at what price, with what progression to intake. For scarce or certified profiles this point moves to weeks six to eight.
What makes the timeline shorter or longer
The variation rarely sits in the channel. It sits in the offer, the audience size and the speed of your team.
- Response speed: calling within an hour demonstrably yields more intakes than calling after two days. This is the biggest lever you control.
- Audience size: a 50 kilometre radius delivers faster than a 15 kilometre radius.
- The offer: salary, travel time and rosters drive conversion harder than the ad itself.
- Season: December and the summer holidays slow both inflow and follow-up on both sides.
- Number of changes: every major intervention restarts the learning phase.
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