Using Cost-Per-Application (CPA) Rates to Build Your Recruitment Advertising Budget

We believe every student and recent grad deserves a great career, and hiring early career candidates should be simple and cost-effective. To that end, we want our customers informed of current advertising costs to create better recruitment marketing and hiring plans. Below you’ll find the market cost-per-click (CPC) and cost-per-apply (CPA) rates by job function, and an interactive calculator to guide you through creating an advertising budget based on key hiring inputs. 

Benchmark CPC Rates by Job Category

First off, let’s review current CPC rates. According to Appcast’s 2024 Recruitment Benchmark Report, which highlights job advertising data from more than 1,200 US employers and 255 million job seeker clicks, the below represents the (highest) 75th percentile and (lowest) 25th percentile of CPC rates by job function.

To simplify the data, College Recruiter calculated the average costs by job function to show what you might expect to spend on a per-click basis to drive candidates to your job postings. The average click costs are shown in the middle portion of the bars.

Click and hover over the job function bars and the legend to interact.

For example, you’ll spend at least $.73 per click to drive candidate traffic for even the most easy-to-fill Healthcare roles. You might even spend $1.50 or more per click in some markets and for harder-to-fill roles.

That’s a good place to begin understanding the advertising costs for a job seeker to click your job postings from external sources like job boards and social media and land on your career site or applicant tracking system.

Benchmark CPA Rates by Job Category

But what does it cost to drive completed applications? That’s what we highlight in the next graph – market CPA rates by job function. Again, we take the most and least expensive CPA rates according to Appcast and present the average in the middle bars.

Using the same Healthcare example, we see that employers are spending $45 on average for a completed application, and are likely spending $68 or more on applicants for more niche roles. Some companies may spend $400 for specialized nursing applications in highly-competitive locations, while others spend $15 per application in easier-to-fill roles and markets with an abundance of candidates.

It’s worth noting that the above rates don’t cover the cost to receive a qualified applicant, which is much more difficult to track and report back from the ATS. But we know the cost is often much higher when we consider many applicants provided by sources aren’t relevant or qualified for an employer’s job openings. 

Recruitment Advertising Calculator – What does it cost to drive applicants to my jobs? How many hires can I expect?

With all these metrics in mind, how can you create a budget for recruitment advertising based on the jobs you are hiring for? How many hires can you expect and how many applicants will it take to achieve that number of hires? What is your expected cost-per-hire?

We’ve built the below calculator to help answer these questions.

It’s important to understand the budget necessary to drive enough applicants to produce the number of hires you need based on current advertising costs. And it’s just as important to partner with the best-quality sources to increase your applicant conversion rates by delivering higher-quality candidates to decrease your costs and reduce your time-to-hire.

College Recruiter Employer CPA Packages – Tell us how many applicants you need and over what time period to meet your hiring goals.

Check out our Employer CPA Packages built around the number of completed applications College Recruiter will deliver based on your hiring needs. 

Contact us if you need to drive qualified applicants to your job openings on either a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-application (CPA) basis to achieve your hiring goals. Our pay-for-performance model allows employers to only pay for the applicant results we deliver, which removes all risk of poorly converting candidate traffic. We’ll be happy to build a program for you that delivers higher-converting candidates at a lower cost than the market.