More applications sounds like an obvious recruiting win. But a recent Indeed study suggests that the relationship between application volume and hiring success is not quite that simple. In a survey of 300 U.S. hiring managers, 71% said higher application volume has made it harder to find qualified candidates, while 93% said they have lost top talent because their hiring process took too long.
Our take? The problem isn't too many applications. The problem is treating application volume as the goal.
Every role has a different hiring challenge. Sometimes you genuinely need more applicants. Maybe you are hiring for a large number of positions, entering a new market, or competing for talent that simply does not know your organization exists. In those situations, increasing awareness and expanding your reach can be exactly what the campaign needs to do.
But sometimes the opposite is true. If you are recruiting for a highly specialized role, a campaign that generates hundreds of applications from people who do not meet the requirements may create more work without getting you any closer to a hire. In that case, the better strategy may be to put the opportunity in front of fewer people, but make sure more of those people are actually qualified and interested.
That is where targeting matters.
Recruitment marketing gives organizations the ability to influence the size and makeup of the applicant pool. You can broaden your audience when you need to build awareness and drive more applications. You can narrow your targeting when the challenge is reaching the right people. You can change the message, the channels and the audience based on what the role requires.
The mistake is assuming every open position should be marketed the same way.
A high volume role might need a broad awareness campaign designed to put the opportunity in front of as many potential candidates as possible. A specialized role might need a much more focused approach that identifies where qualified candidates spend their time and gives them a compelling reason to consider the opportunity.
Neither strategy is better. They are solving different problems.
And that distinction becomes even more important when recruiting teams are already stretched. If recruiters are spending hours sorting through applications that are unlikely to result in a hire, more volume is not necessarily creating more value. It can make it harder to identify the candidates who deserve attention.
The goal, then, is not to maximize applications or minimize them. It is to understand what the role needs and build a campaign around that need.
At Harger Howe, we help organizations do exactly that. Sometimes that means increasing awareness and expanding reach to drive more applications. Sometimes it means using more precise targeting to find the candidates who are most likely to be a fit. The strategy depends on the role, the market and the hiring objective.
There is no magic number of applications that makes a recruitment campaign successful.
For one role, 500 applications might be exactly what you need. For another, 50 well targeted applicants could be far more valuable. And for another, success might mean reaching a small group of qualified people who were never going to find the opportunity on their own.
The question is not simply, “How many people applied?”
It is, “What does this role need to get hired?”
That is the question recruitment marketing should be built to answer.