When hiring volumes climb, the standard advice from media partners is to put more money behind them. That works for a while. Then it stops working, because costs rise faster than results and the extra investment buys steadily less.
Five Guys had reached that point. The brand was hiring at scale across frontline restaurant roles in several markets, and demand was still growing. Every conversation about performance came back to the same answer, which was to increase spend. For a business that has built its reputation on doing the basics exceptionally well, that felt like the wrong trade.
The Problem Underneath The Budget Question
Spend was the symptom rather than the cause. Five Guys was working through a narrow mix of recruitment channels, which limited how far the brand could reach and how much could realistically be optimised. When a small number of sources carry all the volume, there is very little room left to improve. You can pay more, or you can accept fewer applicants. Neither option protects the speed and consistency that high-volume frontline hiring depends on.
Left alone, that pattern tends to compound. Costs climb, returns flatten and flexibility disappears at exactly the moment hiring demand is at its highest.
What we changed
Working with Five Guys and our technology partner Joveo, we rebuilt how the hiring investment was deployed rather than how large it was. Programmatic recruitment advertising opened up a far wider set of talent sources, and budget moved between them automatically, in real time, based on what each one was actually delivering.
The practical effect is that money follows performance. A channel that produces applicants in a particular town on a particular week receives more of the budget that week. A channel that stalls receives less. Nobody has to notice the problem, write a report about it and manually correct course a fortnight later.
What happened
Between May and October 2025, Five Guys recorded:
– A 48% reduction in average cost per hire, while hiring more people
– An 84% increase in total hires
– Over £4,500 per month in added value from improved efficiency and return on investment
The volume and the cost moved in opposite directions, which is the outcome that matters most when you are hiring continuously rather than filling a fixed number of vacancies.
The part that does not show up in the numbers
James Tamlyn, Senior Talent Partner at Five Guys, has been clear that programmatic was the engine, but not the whole story.
“Before working with Yoke, we had an ambition to strengthen our talent attraction strategy, but we were struggling with how best to achieve it. They took the time to understand our business, our candidate journeys and our hiring pressures, which meant we quickly came up with a strategy that worked for us.”
The knock-on effects went beyond media performance. With attraction running more efficiently, the internal talent team recovered time that had been going into keeping the pipeline full. That time went into direct sourcing, candidate experience, stakeholder relationships and building out the EVP. There has also been work on the employer brand side, and a route opened up into social campaigns as an additional attraction channel.
“What we’ve valued most about working with Yoke is the partnership. They operate with genuine care, open communication and a collaborative approach that makes them feel like an extension of our team.”
Why this generalises
Very few employers hiring at frontline volume are short of effort. Most are running hard inside a channel mix that has quietly stopped giving them room to improve. The gains here did not come from spending more or working harder. They came from widening the pool of places a budget could go, then letting evidence decide where it went.
If your own attraction spend has plateaued and the only lever on offer is a bigger number, there is usually more to find in how that budget is being distributed.
