Why are CPC/CPA job ads better for the employer than traditional, duration-based pricing if they’re hiring at scale, internationally, or evergreen?

Until about a decade ago, the vast majority of job advertising was done through traditional, duration-based pricing such as $X for Y days. Most job advertising in the U.S. is now performance-based, primarily cost per click (CPC) or cost per application (CPA) and the share of that is rapidly growing in other markets, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Why is advertising job openings on a performance- better for the employer than on a traditional, duration-basis if they’re hiring at scale, internationally, or through the use of evergreen postings?

If you’ve been in the talent acquisition game for a while, you know we’ve come a long way from the days of “post and pray.” I remember about a decade ago making a bold decision at my job board company: we moved away from the old model of charging a flat fee for a 30-day job posting and started charging only when that posting delivered results. It was a lightbulb moment for us. Why should an employer pay upfront for an ad that might work, when they could pay only for actual performance – a click, a qualified candidate, an application? Fast forward to today, and performance-based job advertising (whether Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Application (CPA) models) has shifted from a novel idea to a best practice.

This approach is pay-per-performance: you only pay when someone clicks on your job ad or applies for the job. Contrast that with the traditional, duration-based pricing: a fixed fee to post a job for a set period (usually 30 days), regardless of how many candidates you get. For talent acquisition tech buyers and recruiting leaders, the difference isn’t just semantics – it’s transformational. Paying for results instead of time on a page changes how you budget, how you measure success, and even how you strategize your recruiting campaigns. It especially shines in situations where you’re hiring at scale, internationally, or for evergreen roles that are always open. Let’s break down why performance-based advertising is better in each of these scenarios, and explore some real-life scenarios to bring these points to life.

Traditional vs. Performance-Based Pricing: A Quick Primer

Before diving into specific use cases, let’s clarify the two models:

• Duration-Based (Traditional) Pricing: You pay a flat fee to have a job advertisement live for a set duration (often 30 days). For example, you might pay $300 (or £300, or €300 – pick your currency) to post a job for one month on a job board. You pay that whether you get 0 applicants or 100 applicants. It’s the classic “post and pray” method: pay upfront and hope the right candidates find your listing during that time. If the position isn’t filled in 30 days, you might pay again to repost it for another month. And if you fill it sooner, well, you’ve paid for time you didn’t fully use.
• Performance-Based Pricing (CPC/CPA): You pay only when the ad performs. In a CPC (Cost Per Click) model, you’re charged each time a job seeker clicks on your job ad (usually to go to your career site or application page). In a CPA (Cost Per Application) model, you pay each time someone actually submits an application for the job. In both cases, the job can typically stay posted indefinitely, but you’re only billed for the results (clicks or applies) it generates. If an ad isn’t attracting interest, you don’t spend money on it. If it’s wildly popular and gets lots of response, you pay more – but in that case you’re happy to, because those clicks or applications are feeding your hiring funnel.

The core idea is that performance-based advertising aligns cost with value. As an employer, you’re shifting some of the risk to the advertising platform. The job board or ad network is motivated to actually deliver candidates, because that’s the only way they get paid. I often put it this way: you hire candidates, not page views. So why pay just for a page to be up on a site? Pay for the candidates who show up. This alignment of incentives is a win-win: employers get what they need (candidates) for their money, and job boards/agencies are rewarded for delivering actual results, not just for posting an ad and walking away.

Now, let’s explore why this model really proves its worth when you’re dealing with high-volume hiring, global recruiting efforts, or evergreen roles that never close.

Hiring at Scale: Performance That Grows with Your Needs

Imagine you’re the TA leader of a large retail company about to hire thousands of seasonal employees for the holiday rush. You might have 500+ open positions that need to be filled in a short timeframe. Using traditional postings in that scenario would be a logistical nightmare (and brutally expensive): you’d have to buy hundreds of 30-day job slots, manage each posting’s timeframe, and pray that each one yields enough applicants. If one posting isn’t attracting candidates, tough luck—you’ve already paid for it. If another posting gets flooded with applicants and fills the job in a week, you’ve paid for a month of exposure you didn’t need.

Performance-based advertising is built for scale. When you’re hiring at scale, here’s why paying per click or per application is far superior:

• Unlimited Reach, Flexible Budget: Instead of being limited by a set number of postings, you can advertise all your open jobs and let the performance model allocate budget dynamically. If one job needs 100 applications and another only needs 5, your spend will naturally flow to where the need is greater. You’re never stuck choosing which roles to advertise and which to skip—everything can be posted because you’re only paying for the results each job generates. This is how large enterprises can have hundreds or thousands of jobs live at once without breaking the bank upfront.
• Cost Efficiency at Volume: With pay-per-performance, you’re effectively paying proportional to the hiring outcome. In a high-volume scenario, this usually means a better return on investment. For example, instead of paying $300 * 500 postings = $150,000 regardless of outcome, you might allocate that $150,000 as a performance-based budget across all your jobs. If some jobs fill quickly with minimal spend, the remaining budget can funnel to harder-to-fill roles. Every dollar spent is working toward a candidate in your pipeline. Companies hiring at scale often find their cost-per-hire decreases under a performance model because there’s little to no waste on jobs that would have gotten few applicants. You’re essentially cutting out the “dead air” where a paid posting sits with no results.
• Speed and Volume: Performance-based platforms (especially those using programmatic technology) can ramp up quickly. Need more applicants fast? Increase your bid or budget and the system will generate more visibility and clicks in real-time. Conversely, with traditional ads, once you post, you’re stuck waiting for that 30-day clock, and if you misjudged the initial demand, you lose precious time. At scale, agility matters. A pay-per-click campaign can scale up the candidate flow in days or even hours, helping fill classes of new hires on tight timelines.
• Manageable Complexity: Handling 500 separate job postings manually is tedious. Performance-based advertising is often managed through centralized platforms or an integrated dashboard. All your jobs can be fed into one system, and you just monitor the aggregate results. It’s far easier for your team to manage one big campaign for 500 jobs than 500 separate postings and invoices. Less administrative overhead, more focus on hiring.

To illustrate, I’ve worked with Fortune 1000 employers who hire thousands of people per year. Their recruiting teams have no interest in the old post-by-post purchasing model. Instead, they use performance-based job ad campaigns that run continuously. One talent acquisition director told me it felt like moving from a rotary phone to a smartphone – suddenly everything was connected, automated, and on-demand. They could fill 200 sales associate positions across the country by pouring more budget into regions with hiring needs, all without having to go back and buy more job postings one by one. The performance model scaled with their needs, rather than charging them a la carte for each individual req. That’s the power of performance-based advertising when you’re hiring at scale: it grows with you, seamlessly and efficiently.

International Hiring: Reaching Global Talent without Wasted Spend

Now let’s say your company is expanding into new markets. You’re a TA tech buyer for a growing tech firm based in the U.S., and suddenly you need to hire engineers in Canada, the UK, India, and Germany. With traditional job postings, you’d have to navigate a different job board (and pricing scheme) in each country, pay for each posting in local currency, and cross your fingers that those investments pay off. Each market might have its own top job board or recruiting site. You could easily spend a lot of money upfront on postings in each country and still end up with uneven results – maybe great hires in one country but very few candidates in another, meaning some of that posting budget goes down the drain.

A performance-based approach makes international recruiting far more manageable and cost-effective:

• One Campaign, Global Reach: Many performance-based job advertising platforms have international reach. You can often run a single campaign that targets multiple countries or use a unified system to manage all your job ads worldwide. For example, you set up your jobs and define the countries or regions you want to hire in, and the platform will distribute the ads across its network in those markets. You don’t have to manually post on five different websites with five separate contracts. This streamlined approach saves time and ensures you have coverage in all target markets simultaneously.
• Pay Where the Talent Is: Crucially, you only pay for the clicks or applications you actually get in each market. Suppose hiring in Canada and the UK takes off, generating lots of candidate interest (and thus clicks/applies), but your job ads in Germany aren’t getting much traction yet. Under a performance model, most of your budget will naturally be spent in Canada and the UK where candidates are responding. You’re not losing money in Germany beyond maybe a few clicks testing the waters. In a traditional model, if you paid a fixed fee to post in Germany, that money is gone regardless of outcome. Performance-based pricing minimizes wasted spend in markets that don’t pan out and automatically channels your investment to where it’s working. It’s like an adaptive budget that follows the talent.
• Easier Multicultural Adaptation: When you advertise internationally with performance-based platforms, they often optimize your postings for you – things like language, local job site distribution, and even posting time can be handled by the network. You might not be an expert on the top job board in India or the nuances of European job ad timing, but the platform algorithm and its network can adjust to each locale to improve performance. Essentially, you get built-in local expertise as part of the service. You as the employer just see the results in the form of candidate flow, and you pay for those results.
• Simplified Management and Currency: Dealing with multiple currencies and contracts can be a headache for TA procurement. With a global performance-based campaign, you might have one master agreement (often in your currency of choice) with the vendor or platform. All those clicks from London, Toronto, Berlin, and Bangalore just roll up into one invoice or billing statement. This simplifies accounting and contracting immensely. Your focus stays on hiring great people, not on juggling foreign billing processes.

Consider a real scenario: A multinational corporation I know of decided to consolidate their recruiting advertising through a performance-based, programmatic platform. They were hiring across 10 countries. Prior to switching, their team was buying traditional job postings on a country-by-country basis, dealing with countless job board vendors. It took huge effort to track which posting led to hires in each country, and they often discovered they’d paid for ads in certain markets that yielded almost nothing. After moving to performance-based campaigns, they saw results like “300 applications from India for $X, 150 applications from Brazil for $Y”, and so on, all in one dashboard. They could instantly see where the talent pipeline was strong and where they might need to adjust their recruiting strategy. And if they decided to pause hiring in one country, that part of the spend simply stopped — no contract wasted, no unused weeks on a job ad. For them, the ability to hire internationally without the usual inefficiency and guesswork was a game-changer.

In short, performance-based job advertising turns international recruiting into a more predictable, data-driven endeavor. It gives you global reach without forcing you to pay for empty noise in markets that aren’t responding. Whether you’re hiring software developers in multiple countries or staffing up remote roles worldwide, a pay-for-performance model adapts to each region’s reality in real time, ensuring you pay only for the talent you actually attract.

Evergreen Roles: Always-On Recruiting Without Overpaying

Every organization has those roles that are always open. They could be high-turnover positions like customer support reps, delivery drivers, or retail associates, or simply roles where you continuously recruit to build a talent pipeline (for example, entry-level analysts that you hire year-round as your company grows). These are often called evergreen roles – the job posting never really “closes” because you’re always interested in great candidates who come along.

With the traditional model, advertising an evergreen role is clunky and costly. You might post the job for 30 days, then remember to repost it for another 30, and another, ad infinitum. You’re paying that flat fee every single time, month after month. Some months you might get a bunch of fantastic hires from the posting – great. Other months, perhaps when the labor market is tight or your need is lower, the posting might sit with few applicants, yet you’ve still paid the full price. You could easily end up spending far more on advertising than the value you get in candidates, simply because the clock keeps ticking on those postings.

Now let’s see how performance-based advertising handles evergreen roles:

• Continuous Presence, Metered Spend: In a CPC or CPA model, you can keep a job ad live indefinitely. There’s no 30-day expiration forcing a repost. The ad is essentially “always on.” However, you’re not paying constantly – you’re only paying as candidates interact with it. This means if one month nobody clicks on your evergreen job ad, your cost that month is $0. If the next month 50 people click and 10 apply, you pay for those clicks/applies. The spend naturally rises and falls with candidate interest and hiring need. You maintain continuous visibility in the job market for that role without the worry of a recurring flat fee. It’s like having an open sign on your door all the time, but you only pay when someone walks in.
• Budget Control and Pacing: Evergreen hiring often has ebbs and flows. Maybe in Q1 you want to hire 30 people for that role, but in Q2 you slow down to just keep the pipeline warm. With performance-based campaigns, you can easily dial the budget up or down to match these needs. Increase your cost-per-click bid or budget cap when you need a surge of candidates; lower it (or pause) when you’re mostly in maintenance mode. You won’t be locked into a fixed cost during periods when you don’t need as many applicants. Traditional postings can’t flex like this – you either pay for the listing or you don’t have it visible at all. Performance pricing gives you fine-grained control.
• Quality over Quantity: Because you’re paying per applicant in a CPA model (or per click in CPC), you’ll naturally pay attention to the quality of those candidates. Evergreen roles can sometimes generate a lot of unqualified applications (for instance, an “Apply anytime” listing might attract people who aren’t a fit just because it’s always there). With a performance model, you might choose to set the parameters in a way that targets your desired audience more narrowly – for example, using job ad targeting or programmatic rules to focus on certain locations, experience levels, or keywords – so that you’re paying only for more relevant clicks or applications. You have an incentive to keep tweaking the ad for quality, because higher quality means your cost per qualified hire goes down. In a duration model, if you got swamped with unqualified resumes, that’s too bad; your only recourse is to spend time sifting through them or pay again to post somewhere else. Performance-based advertising encourages continuous optimization of an evergreen posting so that it yields better candidates over time, not just more candidates.

Consider an example: A mid-sized call center always needs customer service reps due to turnover. They decide to switch their “Customer Service Representative – Applications Welcome Year-Round” posting to a performance-based channel. They allocate, say, $500 a month to that job in a CPC campaign. In months where they’re actively staffing up (perhaps before a new product launch or holiday season), that budget gets fully used and brings in a flood of applicants to meet their hiring goals. In slower months, far fewer people click the ad, and maybe only $100 of the budget is used — meaning they spent only what little was needed to keep a trickle of candidates coming. Over a year, they found they actually spent less than what they used to pay for constantly renewing a monthly job post, yet they never once had to take the job ad down. It was always out there, catching any great candidates who appeared. And when they anticipated a spike in hiring need, they simply increased the monthly budget for that role temporarily. The hiring managers were thrilled because they had a continuous pipeline of candidates and could hire on demand, while the finance team was happy that they weren’t cutting a check every 30 days regardless of results.

For evergreen roles, the beauty of performance-based pricing is that it matches the perpetual nature of the job opening. You maintain consistent visibility in the job market and adapt in real-time to the level of interest. You’re never paying for more exposure than you actually need, and you’re never going dark just to save money. This ensures that whenever a great candidate comes along, there’s an active job ad ready to capture their application – and you only paid for the value received.

Who’s Embracing Performance-Based Advertising? (Global Trends)

By now, you might be thinking, “This all sounds great in theory, but who else is doing it?” The short answer: a lot of employers – and the number grows every year. In fact, the larger the employer in terms of annual hires, the more likely they are to prefer and use performance-based pricing for their job ads. This makes sense: organizations that hire hundreds or thousands of people annually have the most to gain from the efficiency and scalability we’ve been discussing. Many Fortune 500 companies and big multinationals long ago shifted the majority of their job advertising to CPC and CPA models. It’s increasingly the default approach for enterprise recruiting teams.

Let’s talk about geographic adoption. The move to performance-based job advertising has been a global phenomenon, but it didn’t happen everywhere at once. Some regions have adopted it faster than others:

• United States: The trend started and took off here first. The U.S. has the highest adoption of performance-based recruitment advertising. Job aggregators and programmatic ad platforms gained early traction in the U.S., and American employers – especially in tech and retail – were quick to embrace pay-per-click and pay-per-application models to meet their large-scale hiring needs. If you look at most major U.S. job boards or recruitment marketing agencies today, almost all offer performance-based options (if not exclusively operate that way).
• Canada and the United Kingdom: These markets are right behind the U.S. in adoption. Culturally and economically, Canada and the UK have a lot in common with the U.S. in the talent acquisition space, so it’s not surprising they followed suit. Many Canadian and British employers (particularly larger ones) have shifted a significant portion of their job advertising to performance-based models. Job boards in these countries, even if they started with traditional postings, have added CPC/CPA offerings to keep up with employer demand. We’re now at a point where a big employer in Toronto or London is almost as likely as one in New York to say “we prefer pay-for-performance for our job ads.”
• European Union: The EU has been a bit slower on the uptake, but it’s catching up steadily. Part of the slower adoption is because some European countries have long-established traditional job boards and practices that don’t change overnight. Additionally, recruiting across multiple languages and markets adds complexity. That said, in the last few years, we’ve seen a surge in programmatic job advertising platforms and aggregators operating Europe-wide. Countries like Germany, France, the Netherlands, and others are seeing more employers experiment with CPC and CPA models, especially as global companies operating in Europe push for it. Many European job boards are now introducing performance-based pricing to stay competitive. The shift is underway, just a bit later than in North America.
• Rest of the World: In regions outside of North America and Europe – for example, parts of Asia-Pacific, Latin America, Africa – performance-based job advertising is in a more nascent stage. Traditional methods still have a strong foothold in many of these markets, often due to local job board dominance or different recruitment cultures. However, as multinational companies extend their recruiting practices globally, they bring these performance-based models with them. We’re also seeing homegrown job sites and recruitment tech startups in places like India, Brazil, and South Africa begin to offer innovative pay-for-performance solutions. So while adoption in “the rest of the world” is currently lower than in the U.S./Canada/UK, the trajectory is upward. The benefits of paying for results are universal, and forward-thinking employers everywhere are taking notice.

What does this all mean? It means that regardless of where you operate, performance-based job advertising is a proven approach. If your organization is ahead of the curve and already using CPC/CPA for most hiring, you’re in good company with some of the biggest and best. If you’re still primarily using traditional postings, know that the market is evolving in this direction, and you have a chance to get ahead by adopting these models sooner rather than later. The beauty of being a TA tech buyer today is that you often have access to platforms and tools that make implementing performance-based ads easier than ever – even if your headquarters is in a country where it’s not yet the dominant practice.

Also, one pattern is crystal clear: the larger the employer, the more likely they’ve embraced performance-based pricing. This isn’t to say smaller companies can’t benefit too (they absolutely can, even if you hire just a handful of people a year, why wouldn’t you want to pay only for the results?). But the push toward CPC and CPA has largely been led by big employers out of necessity. They had to find a better way to manage huge recruiting volumes and multi-country hiring, and they did. Now, those same methods are trickling down to mid-sized and even small businesses as the industry standard.

Conclusion: The Future of Hiring is Pay-for-Performance

As someone who’s witnessed and influenced this shift for over a decade – I can confidently say that performance-based job advertising isn’t just a fad or fancy jargon. It’s a fundamental improvement over the traditional way of buying recruitment ads, especially when you’re dealing with scale, global complexity, or continuous hiring needs. It aligns costs with outcomes, reduces waste, and provides the agility we need in modern recruiting.

For TA tech buyers, the implications are significant. Embracing CPC and CPA models means you’re investing your budget where it actually counts – on candidates coming through the door. It means vendors and platforms are truly accountable for delivering talent, not just a service. It also means you’ll have richer data and insights to refine your recruiting strategy (because when you pay per click or application, you tend to track metrics like conversion rates, cost-per-hire, and source quality much more closely). In today’s data-driven HR environment, that’s a huge plus.

Think of it like this: performance-based job advertising is akin to e-commerce replacing brick-and-mortar in retail. It offers efficiency, measurability, and flexibility that the old way just couldn’t match. If you’re hiring en masse, expanding your reach globally, or keeping the recruiting engine running constantly, why would you settle for a model that charges you regardless of success? Instead, you can adopt a model that scales with your needs, adapts to your markets, and ensures you pay for results – nothing more, nothing less.

The largest and savviest employers have already made the leap, and the rest of the world is following. It’s an exciting time to be in talent acquisition because we can do so much more with our budgets now – fill more roles, tap into more diverse talent pools, and respond quickly to hiring demands – all thanks to performance-based advertising. In the end, the goal is simple: get the right people into the right jobs efficiently. Paying for performance gets us closer to that goal than any duration-based posting ever could.

The bottom line: When it comes to job advertising, paying for outcomes beats paying for hope. And that’s a change that’s here to stay.

When putting this blog article together, I thought that it would be helpful for readers to also consider the opinions of 10 hiring experts and so I reached out to them to get their thoughts on why it is typically better for employers to advertise their job openings on a CPC or CPA basis, particularly if they’re hiring at scale, internationally, or through the use of evergreen postings.

• Align Skills with Mission for Quality Hires
• Self-Aware Candidates Bring Value to Teams
• Problem-Solvers Shine in IT Applications
• Emotional Intelligence Key in Domestic Work
• Intent and Alignment Define Quality Applicants
• Seek Bullseyes in Values Abilities and Skills
• Shortlisted Candidates Indicate Application Quality
• Quality Applications Match Job Criteria Closely
• Define Quality Throughout the Hiring Process
• Engaged Applicants Create Meaningful Conversations

Align Skills with Mission for Quality Hires

From my perspective as both an employment lawyer and someone who hires for a values-driven law firm, “quality” in a job application isn’t about how polished a resume looks; it’s about alignment. A high-quality candidate is someone who not only has the right skills and experience but also understands the mission of the organization and shows clear intent in applying. I value applications where the person has taken the time to explain why they want to work with us, not just what they’ve done. That intentionality matters more to me than how many resumes I receive.

For us, quality also means potential longevity and cultural fit. We serve people who are in vulnerable moments, facing discrimination, retaliation, or wrongful termination, so empathy, integrity, and accountability aren’t optional traits. If someone makes it to the interview stage, I already consider their application to be high-quality. If we extend an offer, it means we believe they can uphold the values we’ve built the firm on. We don’t just want to fill a seat; we want to invest in someone who will grow with us and deepen the impact we can have on workers’ rights.

Ed Hones, Attorney At Law, Hones Law Employment Lawyers PLLC

Self-Aware Candidates Bring Value to Teams

For me, quality starts with self-awareness. The best candidates know what they’re good at, but they’re also honest about what they’re still learning. That balance is powerful; it shows humility, curiosity, and a growth mindset, all of which are traits that build strong teams. I’m not looking for someone who acts like they’ve got it all figured out; I’m looking for someone who’s willing to keep figuring it out, especially when things get tough.

When someone applies with that level of honesty, not hype or buzzwords, it’s easy to see their potential. They usually speak from experience, not from ego. They’ve thought about their role on a team, how they respond to feedback, and where they can make the biggest contribution. That kind of awareness translates directly into accountability on the job.

It’s also a great indicator of coachability. If someone already understands their strengths and blind spots, they’re more likely to accept feedback without defensiveness and use it to grow. That saves time, builds trust faster, and creates a healthier team dynamic. People like that raise the standard for everyone else around them.

So when I say “quality,” I’m not just talking about resumes or interviews; I’m talking about mindset. The most impressive applications come from people who are clear on who they are, where they’re headed, and what they’re still working on. That kind of self-awareness can’t be faked, and it’s one of the most valuable things someone can bring into a new role.

Saralyn Cohen, CEO, Able To Change Recovery

Problem-Solvers Shine in IT Applications

As a veteran-owned IT company founder, I define “quality” applicants as those who demonstrate problem-solving abilities in real-world scenarios. When candidates can articulate how they’ve broken down complex IT issues into actionable steps for non-technical clients, that’s when I take notice. This quality matters because our clients need partners who can translate technical jargon into business solutions.

I once interviewed a candidate who included specific metrics about how they reduced a previous employer’s downtime by 35% through implementing proactive monitoring. That measurable impact demonstrated value far better than generic “experienced in network management” statements. Quality applications show me that someone has researched our company culture and customized their skills to match our discipline-focused, integrity-driven approach.

In the IT space where security threats occur every 39 seconds, I need team members who recognize the human element in technology. Quality applications highlight security awareness training they’ve conducted or policies they’ve implemented that reduced human error incidents. This signals they understand that even the best firewalls are useless if employees misuse them.

Training and adaptability are non-negotiable quality indicators as cloud adoption and security threats evolve daily. When candidates demonstrate continuing education or share examples of preparing clients for emerging threats rather than just reacting to breaches, that’s when I extend offers. These quality hires become partners to our clients rather than just service providers.

Mitch Johnson, CEO, Prolink IT Services

Emotional Intelligence Key in Domestic Work

Quality, to us, means the candidate who understands the responsibility of working inside a private home before even stepping through the door. We review every application with one question in mind: does this person show signs of emotional maturity, discretion, and self-awareness? Most agencies look at past roles. We look at how they speak about those roles. Do they respect previous employers? Do they mention what they learned? That tells us far more than years of experience ever could.

One common misconception we often address is the idea that any experienced domestic worker is automatically a match. That has never been the case. We define quality as someone who can step into a household and instantly read the energy of the space, someone who understands when to speak and when to hold back, when to offer help and when to quietly disappear into their role. It’s not about how many people apply. It’s about finding the one who already works with that kind of awareness.

Brooke Barousse, CEO, Lexington Executive and Household Staffing

Intent and Alignment Define Quality Applicants

The value of “human capital” today is much more valuable than financial capital, as an investment in quality human capital leads to the other. “Quality,” to me, begins long before an offer is extended. It starts with intent. A high-quality applicant isn’t just checking boxes—they’ve taken the time to understand who we are, how we operate, and where they could drive impact. We look for alignment in values, in culture, curiosity in the unknown, and an ownership mentality. Quality is someone who shows they’re capable and committed to helping the business grow, almost in the philosophy of Ubuntu, “I am because we are.” It’s not just about hiring them but building with them. In the long run, culture fit and potential outweigh credentials alone.

Blake Renda, Founder / Managing Partner / Co-CEO, Dragon Horse Agency

Seek Bullseyes in Values Abilities and Skills

In recruiting, just as in darts, we seek “bullseyes” – high-quality candidates whom we know we should absolutely hire based on their resume or a brief conversation. These candidates are strong fits in all three categories crucial to businesses: values, abilities, and skills.

A candidate can certainly be considered “quality” if they excel in at least one of these three areas, but ideally, businesses look for fits in two or three categories. Values are characteristics that rarely change over many years; abilities are qualities that can improve with hard work and education; skills are competencies that can change rapidly based on one’s values and abilities. Companies often focus on skills as most important (so the new hire can be immediately productive), but they won’t hire someone who’s just a skills fit if they’re not also high-ability or a strong culture/values fit.

Colin McIntosh, Founder, Sheets AI Resume Builder

Shortlisted Candidates Indicate Application Quality

From my experience, a quality candidate is someone who progresses beyond the initial screening stage and is shortlisted for an interview. This indicates they meet essential criteria and show potential to thrive within the organization. For example, we recently recruited a senior compliance officer. Although we received over 150 applications, only around 15 were shortlisted for interviews. These candidates clearly understood the role, had relevant experience in international regulatory frameworks, and expressed a strong motivation to join our team.

Focusing on quality rather than quantity saves valuable resources and significantly increases the likelihood of hiring someone who will positively contribute to the company’s success.

Aleksei Kariakin, General Manager, Uniwide

Quality Applications Match Job Criteria Closely

For me, quality means having candidates who match the job description most closely and checking if they meet most, if not all, of the baseline criteria needed for a perfect fit. It’s akin to checking off a list of desired skillsets.

Even if you have 10 “quality” candidates instead of 100 mediocre candidates, you can still fill the position, so quality definitely outweighs quantity of applicants.

Susan Snipes, Head of People, Remote People

Define Quality Throughout the Hiring Process

When employers say they want “Quality” job applications, they are using a term that can mean different things to different people. Let me break down what quality could mean at various stages of hiring:

Quality as fulfilling basic qualifications: Here quality means applicants who meet the job requirements. It is frustrating when people apply without the needed skills. A quality application shows the candidate’s experience fits the position.

Quality as interview-worthy candidates: Quality could also mean applicants who stand out enough to get an interview. They meet the requirements and show potential that makes hiring managers want to know more.

Quality as offer-worthy candidates: For some, quality means applicants who pass the interview and get a job offer. They offer the right skills and fit both on paper and in person.

Quality as successful hires: The ultimate quality is when candidates accept offers, join the team, and become successful. It is about the final result; did they become a valuable team member or not?

Why different definitions matter:

How an employer defines “Quality” impacts their entire recruitment process:

1. If quality means “meets basic qualifications,” they might focus on clearer job descriptions.

2. If quality means “interview-worthy,” they might make the application process more strict to filter candidates earlier.

3. If quality means “successful hires,” they should look at their conversion rates throughout the whole hiring funnel.

What makes the most sense?

The most practical definition of quality includes a mixture of all these views. Quality applicants are those who have the core skills and experience needed for the job. Candidates also understand the company and position they are applying for. They must show motivation and a good fit with the organization.

Nathan Fowler, CEO Quantum Realm | Founder Quantum Jobs USA, Quantum Jobs USA

Engaged Applicants Create Meaningful Conversations

To me, the best application is one that’s more of a conversation rather than a pitch. It’s not so much qualification-based; it’s about connection. If someone walks in and you can tell they’re thinking of the brand, not just the role, that’s quality.

I’ve received applications where the applicant spoke about a tutorial we had posted or how they applied our products to their projects. That degree of detail lets me know they’re already engaged. It’s not so much box-checking but more about them presenting themselves purposefully. I don’t even need to get to the offer stage to label it as “quality”—sometimes the applicant shows it in the first line of the application.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Quantity overwhelms your inbox. Quality makes you pause.

I would rather have five thoughtful applications than fifty rushed ones. Because in a hands-on, soul-driven business like ours, I am not so much hiring a technician as asking someone to come to a place they already feel they’re a part of before the interview even occurs.

So no, quality isn’t merely a function of whom I hire, but of who arrives at the application itself with energy, curiosity, and care. That’s the one I recall—and that’s the one I create.

Sara Millecam, Founder, Beautiful Brows and Lashes