Every conversation we have with a new client starts somewhere similar. There’s a question about budget, a question about what actually counts as recruitment marketing versus recruitment advertising, and usually a quiet question underneath it all about whether any of this will make a real difference to hiring. We’ve pulled together the questions we hear most often, answered the way we’d answer them across a call, so you have somewhere to start before that first conversation.
What is recruitment marketing, and how is it different from recruitment advertising?
Recruitment advertising is the media spend: sponsoring a job on Indeed, running a paid social campaign, buying visibility on a job board. Recruitment marketing is the wider discipline that decides whether that spend actually works, covering employer brand, job content, candidate experience and the strategy behind where and how you show up. Advertising gets a job in front of people. Marketing determines whether the right people notice it, believe it, and go on to apply.
How is Yoke different from a traditional recruitment agency or a media buying agency?
A recruitment agency finds and places candidates directly. A media buying agency manages ad spend across channels. Yoke sits between the two, closer to a strategic partner than either. We combine deep platform expertise, particularly on Indeed, with the technology and channel breadth to manage recruitment advertising end to end, and we stay involved in diagnosing performance rather than handing over a report and moving to the next client.
Do we need to be spending on Indeed, or can Yoke help across other channels too?
Indeed is where our expertise runs deepest, five of our team spent years working inside the platform, but we don’t start every engagement there. Some roles and audiences are better served by LinkedIn, programmatic advertising, paid social or a combination of channels working together. Our starting point is always your hiring goals, not a preferred platform, and where Indeed genuinely is the right channel, we bring a level of insight few agencies can match.
How quickly will we see results after working with Yoke?
It depends on what we’re solving. A campaign restructure or job content fix can shift application quality within a couple of weeks, since some of the biggest wins come from correcting things that were quietly working against you. Deeper changes, such as rebalancing budget across a full channel mix or addressing a structural candidate experience problem, tend to show meaningful movement over one to two hiring cycles. We’ll always give you a realistic timeline for your specific situation rather than a generic promise.
How do you measure whether a recruitment marketing campaign is actually working?
We look past application volume to the metrics that connect spend to an actual hire: qualified application rate, cost per qualified candidate, conversion through to interview and offer, and time to fill. A campaign generating plenty of applications that never turn into hires isn’t succeeding, whatever the dashboard says, and we build measurement around outcomes from the start rather than retrofitting it later.
What’s included in an Indeed Health Check?
We review your account structure, spend allocation, job content, campaign setup and measurement, then tell you plainly what’s working, what’s leaking, and what we’d change first. It’s a practical, evidence-based look at your account rather than a sales pitch, and most employers come away with at least a few changes they can make immediately, whether or not they go on to work with us further.
How much should we be budgeting for recruitment advertising?
There’s no single figure that applies across roles, industries and locations, and anyone offering one without knowing your hiring plan is guessing. Budget should follow difficulty: roles that fill easily need little sponsorship, while scarce or urgent roles justify a higher cost per application. We typically start by mapping your open roles against difficulty and volume before talking about numbers, so the budget reflects what you actually need to hire rather than what was spent last year.
Can Yoke help if we already have an in-house talent acquisition team?
Yes, and it’s one of the most common ways we work. Many in-house teams are stretched thin managing day-to-day hiring and don’t have the bandwidth to continuously optimise advertising accounts or diagnose performance issues as they arise. We typically sit alongside internal teams, handling the specialist platform and strategy work while your team focuses on the parts of hiring that need a human in the building.
Do you only work with large enterprises, or can smaller businesses work with Yoke too?
We work across both. Larger employers tend to bring more complex channel mixes and higher hiring volumes, while smaller businesses often need the same strategic thinking applied to a tighter budget where every pound has to work harder. The scale of the engagement changes. The standard of thinking behind it doesn’t.
Do you work with US-based employers, or only UK companies?
Both. Recruitment advertising principles carry across the Atlantic, though the detail, from pay transparency requirements to how candidates search for roles, genuinely differs between the UK and US markets. We work with employers hiring in both, and increasingly with employers hiring across both at once.
