Visits to your careers page might look impressive in a monthly report but traffic alone doesn’t fill open roles.
In today’s talent market, candidates move fluidly across platforms, from social media to job aggregators to direct referrals. Each interaction contributes to awareness, but it’s the actions application starts, completed forms, and interview acceptances that determine recruiting success.

Modern recruitment marketing is no longer about driving eyeballs to job listings; it’s about orchestrating a candidate journey that nurtures curiosity into commitment. The most effective teams use data to track not just clicks, but candidate intent signals like multiple job views, repeat visits to team culture pages, or interactions with employee testimonial videos.

By focusing on the quality of engagement instead of raw traffic, marketers can align more closely with talent acquisition outcomes and demonstrate how branding content fuels the hiring funnel from top to bottom.

Why Web Traffic Isn’t Enough

Web traffic once served as a convenient proxy for interest. But in the current ecosystem, it’s a misleading metric. Aggregators like Indeed, LinkedIn, and ZipRecruiter dominate candidate discovery, meaning many prospects never land on your own site. Meanwhile, AI-driven job matchers and Google for Jobs snippets often give candidates enough detail to evaluate a position without ever visiting your careers page.

The candidate journey is also fragmented across devices and platforms. A software engineer might discover your company through a sponsored post on LinkedIn, watch a team culture video on TikTok, and finally apply through a referral link all without showing up as a single “site visit.”

This multi-touch environment means that relying on web traffic to gauge performance ignores 80% of what’s actually happening. It’s time to look beyond surface numbers and measure real progression through the funnel—from awareness to application to hire.

Metrics That Matter

1. Engagement: Job detail page time, number of roles viewed
2. Conversions: Apply-start and completion rates
3. Quality: Application-to-screen ratio
4. Hiring Health: Offer acceptance, 90-day retention
5. Brand Impact: Employee referrals, culture content engagement

An Example 

A “Day in the Life of an Engineer” video shouldn’t be judged by how many people watched it—it should be measured by how effectively it moved qualified candidates to act.

For example, if the video garners 25,000 views but only 20 people click through to your careers page, it’s an awareness piece, not a recruiting asset. But if 2% of those viewers start an application or join your talent community, that’s meaningful engagement.

Advanced teams now link video analytics to applicant tracking systems (ATS). This allows them to answer questions like:

• How many viewers started or completed an application within seven days of watching?

• Did viewers who watched 50%+ of the video advance further in the hiring funnel?

• What job roles or regions generated the highest engagement-to-application ratio?

By connecting storytelling content to pipeline data, marketers can show how employer branding translates to candidate flow—and which content formats actually drive conversions.

A Call to Action

The strongest recruitment marketing strategies don’t chase impressions—they close the loop between content and conversion.

It’s time to build dashboards that spotlight:

• Apply-start and completion rates (not just views or reach)

• Qualified candidate ratio (screened vs. submitted)

• Offer acceptance and 90-day retention as downstream indicators of message quality

When you measure what happens after the click, you start managing marketing like a recruiter: optimizing for fit, follow-through, and long-term value—not traffic spikes.

Because hiring velocity and candidate quality not vanity metrics, are what ultimately build winning teams.