TL; DR If your pipeline is growing, why aren’t your hires improving? Here’s the thing: With fewer qualified candidates and lower screen-to-interview rates, the challenge isn’t attracting more applicants—it’s attracting the right ones. So, what are the top teams doing differently? They’re moving beyond volume—getting precise about who they target, how they segment, and how they use data to continuously improve results.

Here are the facts:

• The number of applicants per role soared to just over 257 in 2025.

• At the same time, the average qualified applicant rate fell from 11.6% to 11.5%.

• And screen to interview rates dropped from 38.9% to 34.9%.

In other words, more volume isn’t translating to better hiring. It’s simply creating more noise, more screening, and more time spent trying to find that needle in a haystack.  

The teams getting ahead in this environment? Have shifted their recruitment marketing strategies from driving volume to driving quality connections by aligning around clear personas and more targeted audiences.

In this blog, we’ll show you how to put that into practice—so you can reach the right candidates, engage them meaningfully, and turn your recruitment marketing into real results and your next great hire.  

1. Get Clear on Who You’re Trying to Reach

Before anything else, you need a clear picture of your ideal candidate.

Without that, even the best recruitment marketing can miss the mark. Messages go out. Engagement is inconsistent. And the candidates you actually want? Still hard to reach.

That’s where candidate personas come in—but not as a checkbox exercise.

Think of personas as a shared understanding across your hiring team. Not just what the role requires, but who succeeds in it. And why.

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