Talent Acquisition In The Trenches
Oct 16, 2026 · 43 min · 10 segments
**Is your marketing spend a "black hole" of vanity metrics?** If you can’t prove outcomes, you aren't investing—you're guessing. In a post-cookie world, the gap between top-of-funnel spend and hires…
Ryan AffolterHostRyan, um, maybe, uh, an opportunity for you to lean in and, and, uh, um, with your background and, and point of view, kind of on the source attribution, um, i- idea.
And then, you know, off of Chris's point of view, which is basically like reverse engineering the problem, right? Start at the bottom of the funnel.
Um, you know, set those, set that pre-intelligence, uh, filters correctly, and then when you get to what you need, shut it off, right? Control it.
And so Ryan, what, what's, uh, what's your point of view on, on kind of where this conversation is headed here today?
[coughs] Absolutely, and align with you on the, on the multi-touch, uh, attribution problem.
Uh, this was actually, uh, part of my, uh, recruiter academy certified marketer class training this past week where we [laughs] dove deep into the, the struggle and pain points of, of attribution 'cause you're spot on, Chris.
Uh, especially on, uh, more complex media types like, uh, connected TV or other digital ads that might start with a QR code but then simply spiral to, to multiple different touch points.
Uh, to, to lean into this topic, I think the fundamental flaw in legacy kinda recruitment marketing is that we get stuck on ma- measuring activity instead of velocity.
Where might we have enough candidates in our funnel? Where are those specific bottlenecks? Are we still spending on requisitions where we have two or more candidates sitting with a hiring manager? Or even worse, we might be funding jobs that have, uh, you know, offers to candidates out there.
But they're fundamentally live on our career site and they're active, so our programmatic tells us to, to, to spend.
So, um, you know, we still spend a lot of, uh, budget to, to drive traffic to sometimes kinda broken or unoptimized, uh, processes in our funnel.
Uh, so if we don't have that end-to-end visibility to track where our bottlenecks are, where our leakage is, uh, to measure that true sufficiency, especially for each, each channel, it makes it really difficult to invest strategically.
Uh, we might just be, uh, you know, spending more, attacking more and more candidates into a broken process.
I do wanna talk about, [clears throat] you know, the, the keys that join, you know, a career site to a programmatic marketing distribution engine to an ATS together.
I, I wanna get there but, but before we go there, um, you know, I guess what I'm hearing both of you say is that there's this shift, right, this mental and strategic shift where, um, I'm moving right from volume, uh, of flow, uh, and celebrating volume, celebrating cost per click and activity, um, you know, into- to some type of, um, uh, um, quality measure down the funnel.
And so, you know, Chris, like when you shift an organization's mindset from, from optimizing for, for volume to quality, well, what actually happens to those other met- metrics? Um, you know, what...
Do they move around? Do they, does it get more expensive? Does it get less expensive? Does cost per click go up? Does spend go down? Like what, what actually happens when you shift your, your strategy around?
Ryan, um, maybe, uh, an opportunity for you to lean in and, and, uh, um, with your background and, and point of view, kind of on the source attribution, um, i- idea.
And then, you know, off of Chris's point of view, which is basically like reverse engineering the problem, right? Start at the bottom of the funnel.
Um, you know, set those, set that pre-intelligence, uh, filters correctly, and then when you get to what you need, shut it off, right? Control it.
And so Ryan, what, what's, uh, what's your point of view on, on kind of where this conversation is headed here today?
[coughs] Absolutely, and align with you on the, on the multi-touch, uh, attribution problem.
Uh, this was actually, uh, part of my, uh, recruiter academy certified marketer class training this past week where we [laughs] dove deep into the, the struggle and pain points of, of attribution 'cause you're spot on, Chris.
Uh, especially on, uh, more complex media types like, uh, connected TV or other digital ads that might start with a QR code but then simply spiral to, to multiple different touch points.
Uh, to, to lean into this topic, I think the fundamental flaw in legacy kinda recruitment marketing is that we get stuck on ma- measuring activity instead of velocity.
Where might we have enough candidates in our funnel? Where are those specific bottlenecks? Are we still spending on requisitions where we have two or more candidates sitting with a hiring manager? Or even worse, we might be funding jobs that have, uh, you know, offers to candidates out there.
But they're fundamentally live on our career site and they're active, so our programmatic tells us to, to, to spend.
So, um, you know, we still spend a lot of, uh, budget to, to drive traffic to sometimes kinda broken or unoptimized, uh, processes in our funnel.
Uh, so if we don't have that end-to-end visibility to track where our bottlenecks are, where our leakage is, uh, to measure that true sufficiency, especially for each, each channel, it makes it really difficult to invest strategically.
Uh, we might just be, uh, you know, spending more, attacking more and more candidates into a broken process.
I do wanna talk about, [clears throat] you know, the, the keys that join, you know, a career site to a programmatic marketing distribution engine to an ATS together.
I, I wanna get there but, but before we go there, um, you know, I guess what I'm hearing both of you say is that there's this shift, right, this mental and strategic shift where, um, I'm moving right from volume, uh, of flow, uh, and celebrating volume, celebrating cost per click and activity, um, you know, into- to some type of, um, uh, um, quality measure down the funnel.
And so, you know, Chris, like when you shift an organization's mindset from, from optimizing for, for volume to quality, well, what actually happens to those other met- metrics? Um, you know, what...
Do they move around? Do they, does it get more expensive? Does it get less expensive? Does cost per click go up? Does spend go down? Like what, what actually happens when you shift your, your strategy around?
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