What does recruitment marketing cost?

How our price is built up

There are three components. You pay the implementation fee once, at the start: audience research, offer, creatives, landing pages, tracking, setting up the follow-up and the first campaigns. The retainer is paid monthly or annually and covers running, steering and expanding the system. Ad budget sits outside that and is paid straight to the platform, so you can see exactly what goes to media and what goes to work.

On top of those three sits a guarantee on the agreed lead volume. We agree a volume up front. If a campaign does not hit that number, you do not pay for the shortfall. That is deliberately different from a no-cure-no-pay arrangement: the retainer is the base, and the guarantee sits on the volume we promise. We also publish no fixed price list, because the honest price depends on function group, region and volume.

• Implementation fee: one-off, at the start, for building the system.
• Retainer: monthly or annual, for running and steering the campaigns.
• Ad budget: paid straight to the platform, no markup through us.

What pushes the price up or down

The spread is wide. In our own campaigns the cost per candidate sat between €8.96 to €30.51. The bottom of that range belongs to function groups with a large supply and a broad geographic reach. The top belongs to scarce, certified or highly educated profiles in a small region. Anyone quoting a price without asking for that context is guessing.

• Function group: logistics and production are cheaper per candidate than engineering, healthcare or IT.
• Region: a campaign in a dense metro has far more reach than a 20 kilometre radius around a village.
• Volume: more vacancies of the same type make the learning curve and creatives cheaper per candidate.
• Competition: the more agencies advertising to the same audience, the higher the media cost per click.
• The offer: terms, travel time and shift patterns drive conversion harder than any ad ever will.

What is and is not included?

The line sits at media, and at everything that happens after the lead inside your organisation. We build and run the system up to and including the follow-up we can automate. Calling, running intakes and convincing the client stays your team's work, and that is exactly where most campaigns fall apart.

• Included: strategy, audience research, creatives, landing pages, campaign management, tracking, reporting and weekly optimisation.
• Included: automated lead follow-up and the messaging that goes with it.
• Not included: ad budget, which you pay directly to the platform.
• Not included: calling back, intake interviews, placement work and the commercial close.
• Not included: a guarantee on placements or won clients. We guarantee lead volume, not what your team does with it.

Compared with the alternatives

Every buyer weighs three things: doing it yourself, hiring someone, or engaging an agency that charges per result. All three are the better choice in certain situations.

A recruitment marketeer on your payroll is cheaper per campaign in the long run as soon as there is structurally enough work to keep someone busy, and that person will learn your market better than we ever will. The downsides are ramp-up time, a single channel preference and the risk that the knowledge walks out with the person. A no-cure-no-pay agency invoicing per placement is attractive if you have one hard vacancy and no appetite for fixed cost. The downside is that you build no system: when the engagement ends, you keep nothing. Doing it yourself is by far the cheapest in money and by far the most expensive in time, and works mainly when someone on your team genuinely enjoys building ads and reading data.

We are the better choice when you have several vacancies at once, need repeatable volume and want to keep the system in house. Outside that situation, we will say so.

When we are too expensive

There are situations where the maths does not work. A call with us is then a waste of your time, and we would rather say that here than in month three.

The line sits at what one placed candidate or one won client is worth to you. If that value is low and your volume is small, you will not earn back the fixed cost, however well the campaign runs.

• You have one open vacancy and expect no second one this year. An agency charging per placement is then cheaper.
• Your margin per placement is too small to carry a retainer plus ad budget. Do that maths before you start.
• Nobody can call back within a day. Leads left sitting for three days are wasted money, regardless of campaign quality.
• You are looking for one highly specific profile of which a few dozen exist in the country. That is search work, not campaign work.
• You want to be able to stop within a month and still have guaranteed volume. Those two do not go together, with us or with anyone.
• Your offer is not competitive and you cannot or will not change it. Advertising only makes a weak offer visible faster.