Summary
A senior practitioner shares the lessons learned running recruitment marketing for a company where the jobs are genuinely undesirable: low pay, long hours, and slow progression. Applications have risen substantially year-on-year. Here is what the data taught them that the usual employer branding canon does not say.
Key points:
- Tangible job details (pay, location, hours) consistently outperform culture messaging in driving applications.
- Social engagement metrics are a distraction. Conversion to careers site visits is the number that matters.
- Paid social and search outperform expensive channels like job fairs and out-of-home for hard-to-fill roles.
- Talent communities are not viable for roles candidates do not actively seek.
- Salary expectations out of step with the market cannot be fixed by recruitment marketing. That is a different conversation.
Most of what gets written about employer branding focuses on companies people are already lining up to work for. Tech firms at high valuations. Consumer brands with cult followings. Companies with large budgets and a ready supply of candidates who apply before the campaign even runs.
That is not my world.
The jobs I market are not desirable. They do not pay especially well. The hours are long, and progression is slow. My company is large, its consumer brands are well regarded, and there is a reasonable chance you have been a customer. As an employer, though, we are nobody's first choice.
Your employees know the truth. Does your EVP? At Fathom we measure the "Credibility Gap" between your promise and their reality.
And yet: applications have gone up substantially year-on-year, and the correlation with my investments is strong. Something is working. Here is what I have learned along the way.
Tangibles beat intangibles. Every time.
The best-performing job ads I run focus on specifics: what the role pays, where it is, what the hours look like, what the actual benefits are. Not the vibe. Not the culture. The precise details of what someone is agreeing to.
HR instinct often runs in the other direction. Culture, values, and purpose tend to dominate internal conversations about what to lead with. I have extensive data showing that these messages do not drive people to our careers site at the same rate as concrete job information. I am not talking about anecdote or impression. I am talking about traffic attribution and conversion rates.
This is not a criticism of culture as a concept. It matters for retention, engagement, and everything that comes after someone starts. But at the top of the funnel, for roles that are not glamorous, candidates are asking a practical question: is this worth my time? Answering that question with tangibles works. Answering it with intangibles does not.
Engagement is a metric worth interrogating
I have been told many times by people in senior positions that my content is not engaging. What they usually mean is that they do not like the tone or creative direction. That is a valid opinion, but it is not a measurement.
On Facebook, engagement has a specific definition: likes plus comments plus shares. That is the number. And for most brands, it is worth very little. The idea that people meaningfully engage with employment advertising on social media in the way they engage with content they actively seek out is, to be direct, optimistic.
The metric that matters for my objectives is conversion: how many people does a given piece of content move to our careers site. Engagement, as commonly discussed in marketing reviews, correlates poorly with that in my experience. Running conversion campaigns, and retargeting site visitors where allowed: these are the mechanics that move numbers.'
The lesson is not that social media does not work. It does. The lesson is to be precise about what you are measuring and why.
Channel economics matter more than most people admit
One career fair, once you account for the vendor fee, booth investment, and staff hours, costs a significant amount. For roles that are genuinely hard to fill, the cost per application from that channel is hard to justify when paid social and search are available.
Helping HR, talent acquisition, employer branding, and company culture professionals find careers worth smiling about.
Out-of-home, television, and direct mail can build awareness in ways that digital cannot easily replicate. But for an organisation with a constrained budget and a specific hiring problem, the affordable, scalable, targetable channels win. Facebook, Instagram, Google, TikTok for certain audiences. None of these companies are particularly easy to like. But they are effective, and effectiveness is what I am measured on.
Talent communities are not for every employer
The talent community concept, as typically described, is an email list that candidates subscribe to in order to hear about future roles. The implicit assumption is that people want to stay connected to your brand because they might work for you one day.
For roles that candidates are not actively seeking, and for employers who are not in the consideration set, this mechanism does not work well. Building and maintaining it costs money. The return, in my context, does not justify that investment.
This is not a universal statement. For employers with strong brand desirability or a specific professional community that values connection, talent communities can make sense. The point is to match the tactic to the reality of your hiring environment, not to adopt it because it appears in the playbook.
Candidates are transactional. So, historically, have employers been.
With labour markets tightening in many sectors, candidates have become more selective and less patient. They apply where the terms make sense to them. They withdraw if the process is slow or opaque. They share their experiences publicly.
None of this is surprising if you think about it from their perspective. It reflects the same logic that employers have always applied when filling roles: who is available, what are they worth, what is the minimum we need to offer. The dynamic running in the other direction is not a candidate problem. It is a market condition.
Treating candidates as a scarce resource, rather than a population to be filtered, changes how you design the process. Speed, clarity, and respect cost relatively little. Their absence costs more than most organisations track.
Pay is not a recruitment marketing problem
Salary expectations that are significantly out of step with market rates cannot be fixed by better advertising, stronger EVP messaging, or more creative campaigns. Recruitment marketing can bring people to the door. It cannot change what they find when they get there.
Employer branding now has a measurement standard. The Talent Gravity Standard is a six-driver framework for quantifying employer attractiveness and the gap between brand promise and employee experience.
If a business expects senior talent for junior salaries because it has persuaded itself that brand, culture, or mission is compensation enough, it will see that gap in the data. Applications drop. Offer acceptance rates fall. Time-to-fill rises.
The appropriate response is not a new campaign. It is a conversation about compensation benchmarks, expectations, and what the organisation is genuinely prepared to offer. Recruitment marketing can support that conversation with data. It cannot substitute for it.
A note on benchmarking
There is a tendency in employer branding to benchmark against the most celebrated employers: companies known for exceptional benefits, strong cultures, and high-profile campaigns. For most organisations, this is the wrong reference point.
The more useful benchmark is the direct competitor set in the labour market: organisations competing for the same candidates, in the same geographies, at similar pay levels. What are they offering? How are they communicating it? Where are they visible? That comparison is actionable. Benchmarking against companies with structurally different economics produces frustration, not insight.
What this suggests for practitioners in similar positions
If you are doing recruitment marketing for roles that are hard to sell, the main lesson from my experience is to work with the reality of what you are offering rather than against it.
Be honest about the job in your advertising. People who join knowing what they are signing up for tend to stay longer and complain less. Find the genuine positives and lead with those. Do not claim things that are not true.
Focus your budget on the channels that convert. Measure conversion, not engagement. Retarget. Test creative that emphasises specifics.
EBN
Use your data to make the case internally for changes that would actually improve hiring outcomes. If pay is the constraint, the data can show that. Presenting it clearly is most of the job.
And when the hiring problem is structural, say so. Recruitment marketing is a function with real capabilities and real limits. Knowing which is which, and being able to say it, is what separates practitioners from campaign managers.
Closing reflection
There is a version of employer branding that exists almost entirely in the aspirational register: purpose-driven organisations attracting candidates who share their values, building communities of future talent, winning awards for the quality of their candidate experience.
That version of the field is real, and it is worth aspiring to. But it represents a subset of employers and a subset of roles.
For the rest, recruitment marketing is a more straightforward commercial function. It is about getting the right message in front of enough people, at a cost that makes sense, through channels they actually use. The fundamentals are not glamorous. They work.
The honest thing to say about employer branding, from where I sit, is that the field would benefit from more practitioners sharing what actually happens in less advantaged hiring environments. Not because the aspirational version is wrong, but because it is incomplete. Most employers are not sexy. Most jobs are not dream jobs. Most budgets are not large. That is where most of the work gets done.
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Takeaways
What actually works in recruitment marketing for hard-to-fill roles?
Specific job information (pay, location, hours) outperforms culture messaging at the top of the funnel. Conversion campaigns on paid social and search outperform expensive channels like job fairs for most budget levels. Retargeting site visitors and building lookalike audiences from existing applicants are underused tactics.
Why does culture messaging underperform for undesirable jobs?
Candidates evaluating roles they are not already interested in are answering a practical question: is this worth my time? Tangible information answers that question. Culture messaging does not, at least at the point of first contact. Culture becomes more relevant once someone is already interested.
What does engagement actually mean in recruitment marketing?
On most social platforms, engagement is defined as likes, comments, and shares. For recruitment purposes, conversion to careers site visits is a more relevant metric. Campaigns optimised for conversion tend to outperform those optimised for engagement in terms of application volume.
When does building a talent community make sense?
Talent communities work best for employers with strong brand desirability and candidates who actively seek connection. For employers where roles are not in candidates' consideration set, the investment in building and maintaining a subscriber base tends to be hard to justify on application volume grounds.
What can recruitment marketing fix and what can it not fix?
Recruitment marketing can increase application volume, reduce cost per application, and improve the quality of the candidate pool. It cannot compensate for compensation significantly below market rate. When pay is the constraint, recruitment marketing data can make that case internally. The fix lies outside the function.
Is it worth benchmarking against top employer brands?
Only for awareness. For practical purposes, the more useful benchmark is the direct competitor set in the labour market: organisations competing for the same candidates at similar salary levels. What they offer and how they communicate it is the relevant comparison.
References
This piece is based on the direct experience of the author. Where the author references data, this refers to internal analytics and campaign performance data that cannot be attributed publicly.
Readers with relevant research on tangible versus intangible messaging in recruitment advertising, or on channel effectiveness for hard-to-fill roles, are invited to contact EBN at exit-interview@employerbranding.news.
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