There’s no doubt that recruiting has changed, especially in the Internet age. Years ago, recruiting was often conducted often by word-of-mouth, candidates stopping into businesses seeking handshake deals, and plain old paper applications. These days, however, digital recruiting technology and techniques have changed the game forever.

Defining Modern Recruiting Via Digital Means

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Digital recruiting has often meant companies placing ads on job board sites. While this is by no means a bad strategy, it’s not a targeted strategy. Recruitment advertising platforms need to recognize the changing landscape that the Internet provides for both recruiters and job seekers. This is why a pay-per-applicant strategy must be offered to employers, in addition to other human resources solutions.

A pay-per-applicant solution is basically what it sounds like: clients only pay when they receive qualified applicants. In a traditional job board setting, companies pay to have open jobs listed. This may bring in more applicants, but it can also lead to hundreds or thousands of unqualified applicants. Does your organization have the time and resources to sift through the multitude of unqualified applicants you’ll receive using this strategy? Most do not.

Pay-Per-Applicant vs. CPC

CPC, or cost-per-click, is a digital marketing strategy that is used by many job board sites to generate interest in available positions while bringing in more money for the provider. Basically, the provider and the client agree upon a certain amount of money to be charged to the client per click on a particular ad. The downside to this is that it doesn’t do anything to qualify candidates or applicants. In fact, even if you’re not qualified for a position or even interested in the position, you can click on the posting and leave, meaning the client still ends up owing money in the end.

When working off of a per-applicant cost, employers only pay fees when qualified applicants are delivered to their human resources department. This not only means that the human resources department no longer has to spend time dealing with unqualified applicants, whether online or in person, but it also means that any job ad campaign budget is not wasted on irrelevant candidates. If you want to learn more about pay-per-applicant, RealMatch is one of the industry leaders for employers.

Is Pay-Per-Applicant the Future?

It seems likely that pay-per-applicant will be the way of the future as employers understand and use big data in their recruitment strategies. After all, there is only so much time in the day for a company to devote to reviewing applications and resumes.

One major employer in the US, LabCorp, recently introduced pay-per-applicant recruitment into its hiring strategy. Commenting on the success of the new PPA model, one regional HR manager said, “RealMatch’s service is all about quality and the results validated the matching for our jobs. The top performing jobs were critical positions where we needed a pipeline of qualified candidates who would be a fit. This looks like potentially the best recruitment solution [we] have seen in over 5 years.”

Utilizing a pay-per-applicant strategy, a company can rely on a third party like RealMatch to match the best candidates instead of having to wade through endless applications that lead to dead ends.

How much unnecessary costs do you incur when your company recruits using the CPC model? How much money do you estimate your company can save using a Pay Per Applicant model?

Andrew Rusnak is an author who writes on topics that include corporate recruiting and business development.