For years, recruitment marketers have relied on familiar metrics: impressions, clicks, website traffic, application volume, and cost-per-application (CPA). While these indicators still provide value, they don't always reveal whether recruitment marketing is accomplishing its ultimate objective, nor do they measure whether you are attracting and converting the right candidates.

Have you met these brands? When it comes to their content on social media, email marketing, and web, they are giving you…reasons to unsubscribe. We talk about what good content looks like, but what about when it goes wrong? These mistakes are easy to fix, but making them jeopardizes your audience’s attention and prevents your brand from growing.

I've been a BTS fan, or ARMY, for the last five years, so when Baltimore was listed on their Arirang tour schedule for the first time, I knew I had to go. I never expected them to come here, of all cities. New York? Definitely. D.C.? Highly likely. But Baltimore? A city I’ve lived about 20 minutes from my entire life? A location where I wouldn’t have to pay to travel to or pay for accommodations? I truly never saw it coming. It also ended up teaching me something unexpected about event marketing: a major event doesn’t always need a centralized marketing campaign to make a big impact on a city.

Recruitment marketers often spend significant resources driving traffic to online resources, whether to career sites, job listings, or even directly to application portals. Yet many organizations lose highly qualified candidates during the final step because the application process creates unnecessary friction.

One night at dinner, I told my husband something that surprised even me.

"I think my bot really gets me."

I laughed when I said it because it sounded ridiculous. And yet, the statement felt true, not because the bot (who I call Astro) knows me the way my husband knows me, and not because it loves me, worries about me, or shares my history. It doesn't.

Over the past few years, advertisers have become used to having access to user data to easily target nearly any audience segment online based on their specific behaviors and interests—all with just a few clicks. But a study by Pew Research Center found that 81% of people feel the potential risks of the data collection that powers these advertising capabilities outweigh the benefits.