Setting up a recruitment campaign
A recruitment campaign is not a job opening with budget behind it. It is a defined audience, an offer that appeals, ads on the channels those people actually use, a page built to convert into applications, and follow-up that starts within minutes.
A recruitment campaign is a time-boxed, measurable hiring effort for a specific function group in a specific region. The structure is always the same: define audience and offer, produce ads and visuals, build a landing page geared to applications, automate follow-up and adjust daily on cost per candidate. At Leadstars first delivery happens within 7 days of launch; in our own campaigns candidates came in at €8.96 to €30.51 per candidate, depending on function group, region and volume. Ad budget sits outside the retainer and goes straight to the ad platform.
Last updated: 22 September 2026
Key takeaways
- A campaign covers one function group in one region. Five roles in one campaign means five half campaigns.
- Follow-up speed is the biggest lever: reply within minutes and the same ad euro produces more.
- Cost per candidate in our own campaigns: €8.96 to €30.51, depending on function group, region and volume.
- First delivery within 7 days of going live, fixed as a delivery guarantee.
The five parts of a recruitment campaign
Every campaign that works has the same five parts. Miss one and you see it in the numbers immediately: plenty of impressions and no applications, or plenty of applications and nobody you can reach.
- Audience: one function group, one region, and the question whether these people are actively searching or only open to being tempted.
- Offer: hourly rate, shift, travel time, speed of payment. This decides more than the creative concept.
- Ads: several variants per audience, so you can choose on numbers instead of taste.
- Landing page: a page with a short application form of a few fields, not a job board with ten steps.
- Follow-up: an automatic confirmation plus a real phone call, preferably the same day.
Which channels do you use for what?
For hands-on roles such as production, logistics and technical work, paid social usually delivers the most volume at the lowest cost per candidate, because it also reaches people who are not actively searching. For scarce specialists and higher-educated roles, sourcing and targeted outreach usually beat advertising, simply because the audience is too small to advertise against.
Job boards and job distribution add the people who are actively searching. The mistake we see most often is putting everything on one channel and then blaming that channel.
What does a recruitment campaign cost and how long does it take?
There are two amounts: the ad budget that goes to the platform, and the work around it. With us the latter is a retainer with a one-off implementation fee, with a guarantee on the agreed lead volume. In our own campaigns cost per candidate ranged from €8.96 to €30.51, heavily dependent on function group, region and volume.
On timing: building takes days, not weeks, and first delivery lands within 7 days of launch. A reliable read on cost per candidate only comes after a few weeks, because in the first days a campaign is still learning which audience and which ad perform best.
Why campaigns fail
In nearly every case it is not the channel. It is an audience that is too broad, an offer that does not compete with the agency down the road, an application form with too many fields, or applicants who only get a call after three days. Together those four cause most of the disappointing results we come across.
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