These are the recruitment marketing benchmarks for 2025

What is a good CTR? When is your CPM something to write home about? And what percentage of your target audience actually watches your video? Recruitment marketing is all about data, but without benchmarks it quickly feels like shooting with hail. That is why we have listed the most important benchmarks for 2025 - and introduced a new feature that allows you to always have up-to-date figures at your fingertips.

Recruitment marketing benchmarks in 2025

Within the MrWork platform, a huge number of campaigns are run every year. In 2024, our clients collectively reached 70% of the entire Netherlands and realised more than 5 million clicks. With this bulk of data, we can establish very reliable benchmarks for recruitment campaigns. And so we did!

All benchmarks in this article are based on actual data in the MrWork platform over a 12-month period.

However, you can't just call out one number for a strong CTR or CPM. This is because what is 'good' depends heavily on the channel and the type of campaign. For example, a CTR of 0.5% is decent for an employer branding campaign on Linkedin, but on Meta such a CTR is substandard. We therefore break down the benchmarks by channel, type of campaign (branding or vacancy) and campaign objective.

Benchmarks for employer branding campaigns

In employer branding campaigns, you can optimise for video views or traffic to your recruitment website, among other things. There are many channels suitable for employer branding campaigns. LinkedIn, Meta and Youtube are frequently chosen media, but Snapchat and TikTok are also increasingly used among the young target group.

For 2025, use the following benchmarks when analysing your employer branding campaigns.

Campaign target video views

Campaign objective traffic to website

Benchmarks for job campaigns

Vacancy campaigns mainly use LinkedIn and Meta. Here, too, it is important to pay attention to the different campaign objectives. In the table below, we distinguish between the most frequently used objectives: traffic to the website, conversion (on the website, measured with a pixel) and lead generation.

Benchmarks for Google Display and Google Search

Google Display and Google Search can be used in various stages of the candidate journey, but always with the aim of generating clicks to the website. The benchmarks for recruitment campaigns via Google Display and Google Search are as follows.

Benchmarks for conversion on work-at-home sites

The ultimate goal of a recruitment campaign is almost always: more candidates. So you don't just want to look at click-through rate and cost per click. What these website visitors subsequently do on your recruitment site is at least as important. Do they view vacancies? Do they start an application? Or do they leave after only 2 seconds?

These are the benchmarks for conversion on your work-at-home site:

• Job views per session: 13.90%
  On average, one in seven visitors views a vacancy.
• Engagement rate: 79.99%
  A large proportion of visitors do something on your site - from clicking to scrolling. A good indication of engagement.
• Application start per session: 1.91%
  In about 2 out of 100 sessions, a visitor clicks 'apply'.
• Completed applications vs. started applications: 40,11%
  Not everyone completes the application: 4 out of 10 applications are actually completed.
• Conversion to application per session: 0.52%
  Ultimately, an average of 1 in 200 visitors to your site applies.
• Application after viewing vacancy: 3.76%
  Once you have the attention? Then almost 4% apply after viewing a vacancy.

A conversion rate to applications of 0.52% may seem low, but it is in line with what we typically see. Nevertheless, this is often where you can make the biggest impact: small adjustments to your strategy can lead to relatively large increases in results.

Optimising recruitment campaigns based on benchmarks

Now that you have a better picture of average campaign performance, you can make the right choices to optimise your campaigns. While doing so, please note the following:

• Don't focus on the percentage data. It can happen that ads are only shown very rarely. Even if such an ad then has the highest CTR, for example, this does not mean that it is the best-performing ad. If another ad scores 0.1 percentage points lower in CTR, but has been shown thousands of times, this ad is more successful at the bottom than the one that appeared only a few dozen times on your target's timeline.
• Quality over quantity. In addition to the number of clicks, CTR and CPC, it is good to look at website behaviour to determine which ads, channels or campaigns yield the most. If, for example, you get a lot of clicks to the website via Meta, but this traffic actually leaves immediately, the campaign via LinkedIn - with a lower CTR, but where website visitors do apply for a job - could still be better.

With the updated data dashboard, including benchmarks, we have a very clear overview of our campaigns’ performance. Thanks to the benchmarks, it’s immediately clear which adverts or channels are performing well and where we need to focus our attention. – Niels van Harten, Recruitment Marketer at Enexis

With the right insights, you can optimise your campaigns by, for example, adjusting your targeting, changing your copy and/or visuals, pausing the lowest-performing adverts and/or reallocating your media budget. In this blog, you’ll find out what the best practices are for content by channel and campaign type.

Get current benchmarks in the MrWork platform

Benchmarks are invaluable when analysing and optimising your recruitment marketing efforts. That's why we recently added a new feature to the MrWork platform: the data benchmark tool.*

At a glance, you can see where your campaigns are doing well - and where they are lagging behind. Our new benchmark feature puts your performance directly next to the market averages. No more endless searching for comparable data or doubting whether your results are 'okay': you just see it. It is also a nice extra to reinforce your good results in management reports or quarterly meetings.

The MrWork benchmarks are updated every month, so you can be sure you are working with up-to-date data. You can compare your results with the benchmark at the level you want: from all totals to types of campaigns or just per specific campaign. You'll never be in the dark again!

The new dashboard, including the benchmark feature, helps us to critically evaluate our campaigns and make targeted improvements. It is valuable to compare our results with those of other organisations. We look forward to the tool being tailored even more specifically to the healthcare sector — that will make it even more powerful. – Léon Badart, Senior Data Marketer at’s Heeren Loo

In the near future, we will further develop this dashboard with benchmarks, so you will also be able to filter by sector/target group. Because it can make a big difference whether you recruit in engineering or business services, for example.

Would you like to have access to up-to-date benchmarks at all times? And save a lot of time when running campaigns? And boost your conversion rate? Take the first step towards a stronger recruitment strategy using automation and data: unlock our demo videos or book your personalised tour of our software.

*In the data benchmark tool in the MrWork platform you will find all the above benchmarks that are campaign-related. The benchmarks regarding conversion on work-at-home sites are not tracked in this dashboard.