Services · Recruitment
Job board spend was spread evenly regardless of fill rate.
This marketing & margin audit surfaced $39k in recurring annual margin in a Services business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 6 days.
The business
A recruitment agency spent across multiple job boards to source candidates, splitting its budget broadly evenly among them. Placements were being made and the pipeline looked reassuringly full, so the agency treated the boards as roughly interchangeable and never analyzed how fill rate and placement margin actually varied, often dramatically, from one source to the next.
What triggered the audit
Cost per placement was creeping up even though total spend and candidate volume looked stable, hinting the budget was flowing to boards that don’t fill roles. The audit joined job board spend through to actual placements and fees, testing which sources genuinely produced filled, billable roles.
What the audit found
Spreading budget evenly across boards had quietly buried a wide spread in performance. When spend was joined to placements, some boards reliably produced filled, billable roles at a healthy cost, while others generated applications and activity but rarely converted into a placement, yet each received a similar slice of budget regardless. The even split felt fair and kept the pipeline looking full, but it steadily starved the boards that actually fill roles while funding ones that mostly produced noise. Because the agency measured candidate volume rather than cost per successful placement, the misallocation was invisible. Realigning spend to genuine fill performance improved spend per placement by 24%.
What we changed
Reallocated job board budget by genuine fill rate and placement margin, rather than splitting it evenly across sources regardless of performance.
Cut or reduced spend on the boards that generate plenty of applications but rarely convert into billable, filled placements.
Fed placement outcomes back into board budgeting, closing the loop between spend and the roles that are actually filled and invoiced.
Switched the headline metric from candidate volume to cost per successful placement, so budget follows genuine revenue rather than raw application activity that never fills a role.
The result
The published chart shows cost per filled role falling from $1,150 to $870, a $280 reduction, or about 24%. The direction labels describe lower cost rather than a 24% increase in cost. Spend per placement improved 24% by funding the boards that actually fill roles, not the ones that just generate applications. For any recruitment or lead driven services firm, the even split is the trap: it feels fair and keeps the pipeline looking full while starving your best sources. If you judge boards on candidate volume rather than cost per placement, budget is likely flowing to noise. It takes joining spend to filled roles to see it. A fixed fee audit does that in days.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 6 days, inside our fixed 5–7 day window.
This 24% cost per placement reduction is ≈$39k/yr at the client’s revenue scale.
