How we measure results

You can tell two completely different stories with the same campaign. It all depends on what you count. Do you count everyone who clicks on an ad, or only candidates who match the profile? Do you include the media budget in the costs, or just the fee? Anyone who wants their numbers to look good simply picks the most flattering definition.

We take the other route: we write our definitions down and stick to them, in every report and in every case on this site. That makes our results verifiable, and it makes conversations about expectations a lot more honest.

For us, a hire only counts as a hire once the candidate has accepted the offer. Candidates who are in the final interview round do not count. That prevents results from looking better on paper than they are in practice.

In cost per hire we include every cost attributable to the recruitment effort: media budget, content and creative, sourcing hours and the partnership with SocialFind itself. A low fee can hide a high real cost, which is why we always look at the total. Want to apply that logic to your own situation? Take a look at the business case.

For us, time to hire runs from the moment the vacancy intake is completed to the moment the candidate accepts the offer. Because we use the same start and end point every time, time to hire is genuinely comparable across vacancies and periods.

An applicant is anyone who responds. A qualified candidate is someone who, after screening, meets the criteria we agreed with you up front. That distinction is essential: a high volume of unqualified applicants solves nothing, so the difference should be visible in every report.

We report per vacancy and per fixed reporting period, from the first day of the campaign through the last. No cherry-picking the best month, no leaving out the ramp-up phase. What went well and what did not are shown side by side in the same report.

We handle candidate data in line with the GDPR. In cases and reports that are shared more widely, we work with aggregated numbers. Results are traceable to the measurement, never to an individual candidate.

Where do our advertising figures come from and how do we check them?

Our advertising figures come straight from the Meta Ads Insights API of SocialFind's own ad account and cover the whole account, internal campaigns included. We store the daily figures per ad ourselves and publish full months only: the current month still changes with every measurement.

Definitions: budget spent is the spend reported by Meta, not an invoice check. Estimated reach is Meta's estimate of unique accounts, not a count of people. An application is a completed submission in one of our own application forms: someone filled the form in to the end and sent it. We count that submission in the form itself rather than through a measurement code on the page, so it also counts in forms without such a code. These are form submissions and not unique people, and we do not attribute them to ads. We publish client figures only with permission.

Verification: the sum of the daily figures per ad is compared per month with Meta's account total, and on top of that with a single account-level query over the whole period (10 August 2023 to 31 August 2026). Spend, impressions and link clicks are identical in all three sources; reach comes solely from the full-period query (reach is unique per period and cannot be added up). Until September 2026 this page also carried a figure for the number of times the form page fully loaded after a click, counted with Meta's measurement code. On re-checking, that figure proved insufficiently reliable: a large part of it came from a small group of campaigns where the number of applications did not move along with it. We therefore no longer publish it, and from now on we first test such platform figures against the applications underneath them. Last check: 15 September 2026, by two independent reviewers. See our measurement methodology.

How we read these figures, and what they do and do not tell you, is set out in our article What do three years of Meta ads for recruitment actually deliver?