Is your recruitment system undercounting the hires your ads produce?

If you recruit through Google and Meta ads, it is worth checking whether your recruitment system gives them the credit they earn. It records the application. It does not reliably record what caused it.

On always-on campaigns I ran for UK care providers, proper tracking showed the ads were producing 3.7 times more hires than the recruitment system credited. A channel that looked marginal turned out to be the cheapest source of hires.

This article covers where the credit goes missing, what fixing it involved, and five checks you can run on your own numbers.

What does a recruitment system actually record?

A recruitment system is built to manage candidates. It records who applied, for which role, and what happened next: screened, interviewed, offered, started. That is its job, and most do it well.

What it records badly is cause. Many systems hold a single source for each candidate. That source comes from a dropdown the candidate picks from, a default set by the job board that sent them, or a tag that only survives if the candidate arrives in one clean step. None of those is a reliable record of which advert did the work.

Where does the credit go?

These are the usual places to look. Which of them apply depends on how your careers site and recruitment system are set up.

• The trail breaks at the handover. The advert sends someone to a careers page. The application form often sits on the recruitment system's own website. Unless the tracking is built across that step, the campaign details are dropped and the application arrives with no source.
• Candidates do not always apply in one sitting. Someone sees an ad on their phone during a break, then applies that evening on a laptop, through a job board, or by searching the employer's name. The ad may have started it. The system credits the last door they walked through.
• The candidate picks the source. "How did you hear about us?" gets answered quickly, sometimes days after the candidate first saw the ad, and the answer is only as good as their memory.
• Applications and hires live in different places. The ad platform sees a form submission. The hire happens weeks later inside the recruitment system. Unless the two are joined, nobody can say which campaign produced a person who actually started.

Why does it matter if the ads get less credit?

Because budgets follow the numbers. A channel credited with a fraction of its hires looks expensive per hire, so it gets cut, capped, or compared unfavourably with a job board that may be getting credit for candidates the ads reached first.

The ad platforms make it worse. They optimise towards whatever they can see. If all they see is a generic form submission, they learn to find people who fill in forms. If every application counts as the same conversion, the platform optimises as though a nurse and a care assistant were worth the same, even though they come from different candidate pools and cost very different amounts to hire.

What fixing it involved

For the care providers, tracking came first.

• Each application could be traced to the campaign, the region and the role that produced it.
• Budget was weighted by live vacancies, so spend followed real hiring need rather than last month's plan.
• Reporting was brought into one dashboard.

Cost per lead fell 41%, across more than 50,000 applications. And the tracking showed the campaigns were producing 3.7 times more hires than the recruitment system credited.

How can you tell if it is happening to you?

Five checks, using what you already have.

1. Compare the totals. Count a month of applications in your recruitment system, then the conversions your ad accounts reported for the same month. Some gap is normal, because the platforms count differently and on different dates. A very large gap that nobody can explain is worth a closer look.
2. Read the source field. Those labels may be right. But if a large share of hires sits under "direct", "website" or "other" while you are spending steadily on ads, check where those candidates first came from.
3. Follow one application. Agree a test with your recruitment team and mark it clearly so it can be removed. Click your own ad, submit the test application, and see what source the recruitment system records against it. One test only proves the simplest journey, but if that fails, the rest will too.
4. Ask what the ads are optimising for. If the conversion is any form submission, the platforms treat every application as equal, whatever the role and whether or not it led to a hire.
5. Count hires, not applications. If nobody can say how many people who started came from paid ads, the channel is being judged on activity rather than on hires.

Where to start

If you cannot explain the gap between your recruitment system and your ad accounts, that is the place to start. I build this tracking for recruitment campaigns on Google and Meta, and the full case study is linked below.