You spend an awful lot of time in recruitment talking about how to attract candidates.
Which job board should you use? Should you sponsor the job? Do you need more budget? How many applications did the campaign generate?
All valid questions.
But I want to start somewhere else.
What happens when you actually get someone’s attention?
Because getting candidates to look at your jobs is only half the work. You then have to do something with them.
And this is usually where things start to unravel.
You can have a campaign doing exactly what you asked it to do. Impressions are up. Clicks are coming in. Applications are landing.
Everyone’s happy.
Except you still haven’t hired anyone.
So, before you blame the advertising, the job board, the candidate market, Mercury being in retrograde or the budget, I want you to follow the candidate.
They found your vacancy. Brilliant. Did they click?
If your vacancy isn’t getting impressions or visibility, you potentially have a media problem.
But if thousands of people are seeing it and hardly anybody is clicking?
That’s different.
Is the job title actually what candidates search for? Are you showing the salary? Is the location clear? If it’s hybrid, what does hybrid actually mean?
And when your vacancy appears next to five similar jobs, why would I click yours?
Putting another £500 behind an advert candidates don’t find attractive might get it seen by more people.
It hasn’t made the job any more attractive.
Congratulations, you paid for more visibility.
They still don’t want to click.
They clicked. Then disappeared.
You paid for that attention.
The candidate saw the vacancy, clicked to find out more and then vanished.
You’ve effectively been ghosted by somebody who never even finished applying.
Awkward.
So, where did they go?
Go to your careers site. Find one of your jobs. Do it on your phone, click apply and actually try to complete the application.
Not as somebody from HR who knows how the system works. Do it as a candidate who is on their lunch break, sitting on a train or on the sofa half watching Netflix.
How long does it take?
Do I need to create an account?
Nobody wants another password, a special character and the name of their first pet standing between them and a job application.
Am I uploading my CV and then being asked to type out everything that’s already on it?
Does it work properly on mobile?
At what point do you start getting bored?
We’ve looked at the journey of a job advert before, and every unnecessary click, redirect and repeated question gives a candidate another opportunity to disappear.
You talk a lot about cost per application.
Maybe you should spend more time talking about the candidates you’ve already paid to attract who never finished the application.
They applied. How quickly did you respond?
Now you’ve got somebody.
Potentially a good somebody.
If they apply on Monday, when are you speaking to them?
Monday? Tuesday? Friday? Next Monday because the hiring manager hasn’t looked at the CVs yet?
Your candidate is not sitting patiently beside their phone waiting for you.
They applied for a job. They didn’t sign an exclusivity agreement.
While you’re deciding whether somebody has time to review their CV, they’re applying elsewhere, speaking to another recruiter and booking interviews with your competitors.
Speed is part of candidate attraction too.
And communication matters even when you don’t have an immediate answer.
You wouldn’t leave somebody on read for a week in any other professional conversation, so why does it suddenly become acceptable once they’re a candidate?
That sounds obvious, doesn’t it?
Yet Greenhouse’s 2026 candidate research found that 42% of UK candidates who completed an AI interview never heard back afterwards.
Technology might make parts of recruitment faster, but it doesn’t excuse you from communicating with people.
You’ve found someone good. Please don’t make them regret applying
How many interviews do you really need?
How quickly can hiring managers make themselves available?
How long does feedback take?
Does the candidate know what happens next?
Are the tasks you’re asking them to complete genuinely telling you something useful?
And when somebody is good, are you prepared to move?
I’m not suggesting you throw proper assessment out of the window, but there is a difference between a robust recruitment process and a slow one.
A four-stage interview process is not automatically a rigorous one.
Sometimes it’s just indecision with a Teams link.
Your process should help you make a good hiring decision. It shouldn’t become the reason you lose the person you wanted to hire.
Every interaction shapes what a candidate thinks about the role, the company and the people they could be working with. Your recruitment process is part of your employer brand, whether you intended it to be or not.
And then there’s the hiring manager…
Recruiters, you knew I was going to get here eventually.
You can build a brilliant campaign, write a great advert, generate suitable applications and screen them quickly.
And then…
“I’ll look at the CVs later this week.”
We’ve all been there.
If hiring managers don’t understand the market they’re recruiting in, you end up fighting the same battle twice.
First, you have to find the candidate. Then you have to keep the recruitment process moving quickly enough not to lose them.
If a role is difficult to recruit, that conversation needs to happen before the candidates arrive.
When can interviews happen? Who needs to make the decision? What happens if you find somebody brilliant tomorrow?
Because “the hiring manager is on holiday for two weeks” isn’t particularly useful once you’ve spent a significant amount of time and money generating candidates.
At that point, you’re not managing a recruitment process. You’re relying on thoughts, prayers and an out-of-office reply.
So, where are you actually losing them?
Look at your recruitment candidate journey:
Seen the job → Clicked → Started application → Applied → Contacted → Interviewed → Offered → Hired
Where does the number suddenly fall away?
Lots of impressions but very few clicks? Look at attraction.
Plenty of clicks but very few completed applications? Look at conversion.
Good applications but candidates aren’t responding? Look at speed, communication and candidate intent.
Interviews but very few offers? Look at suitability and assessment.
Offers but candidates aren’t accepting? Look at salary, proposition, competing offers and the recruitment experience itself.
Different problems need different solutions.
Looking at application numbers in isolation doesn’t tell you enough. More applications don’t always mean better recruitment.
And if your advertising is producing candidates but you’re still not making hires, ask why your recruitment campaign isn’t leading to hires before putting more money into it.
Do you need more candidates, or do you need to stop losing them?
Some recruitment campaigns will absolutely need more visibility, more investment or access to a different candidate audience.
But before you increase activity at the top of the funnel, look at what happens underneath it.
Another 100 clicks won’t help if your application process loses half of them.
Another 50 applications won’t help if nobody reviews them for four days.
Another sourcing tool won’t solve a process that takes three weeks to arrange an interview.
That’s not a sourcing problem. That’s a red flag with a calendar invite.
You need to know what happens after an application arrives, who owns each stage and how quickly candidates should move through the process.
Sometimes the biggest recruitment opportunity isn’t finding more candidates.
It’s losing fewer of the right ones.
