Challenge:
“How many jobs should I sponsor? What should my budget per job be?”
Those are common questions that staffing agencies ask and think about with their recruitment budget. It’s natural to be unsure if you need 10 jobs, 20 jobs, or 50 jobs for a $2,000 budget. It’s OK to be unsure if you need 50 jobs for a $5,000 budget, 100 jobs, 200 jobs, etc.
What’s important is trying to figure out what that correct jobs-to-budget ratio should be. By jobs-to-budget ratio, we mean, how many jobs should be in that budget?
For a professional placement company in Florida, the jobs-to-budget ratio shows a vital impact on the cost per application on the accounting division of the company.
Solution:
Monitoring the jobs-to-budget ratio requires active communication between the professional placement company and the team at Haley Marketing. Testing different amounts of jobs with different amounts of budgets is the best and most effective way to determine the best jobs-to-budget ratio for each company.
With this company, it’s looking at different ranges of jobs. We tested different ranges of 1-4 jobs, 5-9 jobs, and 10-14 jobs. Then, we looked at a couple of different metrics (cost per click, cost per application, and conversion rate) to determine which range delivered the best results.
Results:
We saw a significant difference in cost per click and cost per application depending on the amount of sponsored jobs. There is a clear trend in the data.
| # Jobs Sponsored | Cost Per Click | Cost Per Apply | Conversion Rate |
| 1 to 4 | $0.73 | $5.12 | 14.33% |
| 5 to 9 | $0.37 | $2.79 | 13.19% |
| 10 to 14 | $0.22 | $1.74 | 12.96% |
When sponsoring 10 to 14 jobs vs. 1 to 4 jobs, the cost per application decreased by 66 percent. To put that in perspective, when spending $1,000, the lower cost per application ($1.74) would deliver 194 percent more applications compared to the higher cost per application ($5.12).
What’s really interesting is the conversion rate (percentage of clicks that leads to applies) wasn’t very different. With the smaller number of jobs sponsored, putting more dedicated money on the jobs was just increasing the cost for each click. That just leads to a higher cost per application.
With this data, the company knows what the jobs-to-budget ratio needs to be on the accounting budget for sponsored jobs. They know to get the best results, they should sponsor 10-to-14 jobs with this budget on the accounting side.
Does your company know the ideal jobs-to-budget ratio for its recruitment budget? Do you know how to conduct some tests and determine that ideal ratio? For this company, it was 10-to-14 jobs on the accounting side.
For other companies, that will be different. Industry and geography come into play, as well as local competition and which jobs you are trying to fill.
The recruitment marketing team at Haley Marketing manages the job spend for dozens of clients and accounts for millions of dollars of budget for companies in the staffing industry. We are here to help eliminate wasted spend for companies and to increase the ROI on their budget. Contact our team today to learn more on how we can help with your recruitment marketing budget!
