Podcast Archives - Superfast Recruitment

This post looks at paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram, run through Meta Ads, and where it fits for a small recruitment, search or staffing business. It’s the paid companion to our earlier episodes on organic Instagram and Facebook. The short version is this: Meta ads can be genuinely useful, but they’re rarely the right first move for winning cold clients. The reach is real. Meta’s planning tools suggest advertisers can potentially reach around 38.8 million people on Facebook and 35.5 million on Instagram in the UK alone, with similar coverage across the US and Australia. But reach is not the same as attention, and neither is the same as someone being in a hiring mood. Facebook and Instagram are places people go to switch off, which makes Meta a discovery channel rather than an intent channel. That single distinction shapes everything else. We cover the four jobs Meta does well for recruiters, candidate attraction, retargeting, waking up your database, and getting a useful resource into the right hands, alongside what good recruitment creative looks like and the honest answer to whether Meta can win you clients. It can contribute, mostly by warming people up rather than closing them, but a cold ‘book a call’ advert to strangers rarely works. We also cover the money and the measurement: budgets, how long to give a campaign, and why chasing the cheapest lead is a false economy. We’re clear throughout about what the data does and doesn’t show, including where reliable UK and Australian recruitment benchmarks simply don’t exist. And we give you permission to skip the channel entirely if it doesn’t suit your business. What You Will Learn in This Post What Meta ads is, and how the paid side differs from organic posting on Facebook and Instagram Why reach on these platforms is not the same as buying intent, and what that means for recruiters The four jobs Meta ads genuinely does well for a recruitment business What separates recruitment adverts that get noticed from ones that get scrolled past The honest answer on whether Meta can win you cold clients How much to budget, how long to wait, and why lead quality matters more than cost per lead Who should skip Meta ads altogether A recruitment owner said something to me recently that sums up how many people feel about Facebook advertising. He’d put a small daily budget behind a ‘We’re hiring’ post, waited a couple of weeks, and got very little back. His conclusion was simple. Meta ads don’t work for recruitment. I understand why he’d think that. But it isn’t quite right. What happened is that he asked the wrong channel to do the wrong job for the wrong audience, in the wrong way. Once you understand how paid advertising on Facebook and Instagram really works, that becomes a very fixable problem. This is the paid side of Meta. We covered organic Instagram and Facebook, the posting and the profiles, earlier in this series. Today is about paying for reach and where that money is best spent for a recruitment, search, or staffing business. What are Meta ads Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram. Meta ads is the system you use to pay for reach across both platforms from one place, through Ads Manager. You choose a goal, choose who you’d like to see your advert, supply the words and pictures, set a budget, and then Meta’s system decides who to show it to. That last part matters more than it used to. Meta’s delivery is now heavily AI-led, which means your detailed targeting choices act more as suggestions than strict rules. The platform tries to find whoever is most likely to give you the result you asked for. That has a big consequence, which we’ll come back to: the quality of the information you feed the system matters more than the cleverness of your targeting. The reach is real, and so is the catch Let’s start with the thing everyone leads with. Scale. In the UK, Meta’s own planning tools suggest an advertiser can potentially reach around 38.8 million people on Facebook and 35.5 million on Instagram. In the US, the figures are roughly 198 million and 182 million, and in Australia around 17.7 million and 15.2 million. These come from DataReportal’s Digital 2026 reports, drawing on Meta’s planning data from late 2025. Instagram’s reachable audience is also growing faster than Facebook’s. Now the catch, because it’s the whole game. These are estimated advertising audiences, not counts of real, active users. Meta itself is clear that the figure is not a proxy for how many people really use the app, and that it moves around for technical reasons that have nothing to do with more or fewer real people. So ‘can reach’ is not ‘is paying attention’, and it’s a long way from ‘is in a hiring mood’. It helps to think about how people use these apps. In the UK, Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found people spend, on average, around 43 minutes a day on Facebook and Messenger, and around 20 minutes a day on Instagram. That’s real time and real attention. But it’s leisure time. Family photos, Reels, hobby groups, holidays, football. For context, Meta’s family of apps reached an average of 3.60 billion daily active people in June 2026, and Instagram passed 2 billion daily users in mid-2026. Those are global, family-wide figures, not Facebook-and-Instagram-only numbers and not country-level advertising reach, so they’re best treated as background rather than something to plan around. Discovery, not intent This idea explains almost everything else. Facebook and Instagram are discovery channels. People are there to switch off, not to buy recruitment. Compare that with LinkedIn or search, where someone is much closer to a work frame of mind. It’s worth being precise about who is reachable, without falling into lazy generalisations. Facebook’s audience includes a large share of working-age adults aged 35 and over, among them managers and hiring decision-makers. In the US, Pew Research found adults aged 30 to 49 were the most likely age group to use Facebook. Instagram reaches a higher proportion of younger adults, with use strongest among those aged 18 to 29. The point is not that one platform is for older adults and the other for young people. The point is that being reachable is not the same as being ready to buy. A hiring manager can be sitting right there in the audience and still have no interest in a recruitment pitch while they’re scrolling in the evening. None of this makes Meta useless. It makes it a discovery channel, and that changes what you should ask it to do. How Meta Helps Recruiters Meta ads does four jobs genuinely well for a recruitment business. Candidate attraction. This is Meta at its strongest. Job seeking happens in the evenings and at weekends, outside professional networks. Facebook has huge reach among working-age adults, and Instagram and Reels let you show what a role or a workplace is really like. If you recruit in volume, or locally, or into roles where people decide on their phone, care, hospitality, logistics, construction, manufacturing, and early-career technology and digital, it can be a very cost-effective way to be seen by the right candidates. Retargeting. This is the one most recruiters underuse. Retargeting means showing adverts to people who’ve already interacted with you. They visited a job on your website, watched most of one of your videos, opened a form, or downloaded your salary guide. They already know you exist, and a well-timed reminder does far more than shouting at strangers. Waking up your database. You can take your own lists, your candidates, your past clients, the people who came to a webinar, and, where you have the right permissions, show them adverts directly through Custom Audiences. Most recruitment businesses are sitting on a database they barely speak to. One word of care: using your own data like this comes with real privacy obligations. You need a lawful basis and a clean process. Don’t skip that part. Getting a useful resource into the right hands. This is the one we’d most want you to take away. Not ‘book a call’, but a genuinely useful thing: a salary guide for your niche, a local hiring report, a short guide on why offers are being turned down, or a webinar on what’s changing in your sector. You advertise the resource, the people who want it give you their email to get it, and you’ve turned rented attention into an audience you own. Our Marketing Trends Report works the same way. What good recruitment creative looks like A generic vacancy graphic with a logo and a salary gets scrolled past. The adverts that stop people do one of four things: teach something useful, name a specific problem, show real proof with permission, or make the next step genuinely easy. So ‘the three salary trends affecting data engineers in Manchester this quarter’ works far better than ‘we are hiring’. And short, native vertical video matters more than it did. Meta’s current guidance points to 9:16 Reels, and a 20- to 40-second specialist insight recorded on your phone is often more persuasive than a polished, generic corporate film. Can Meta win you clients? The honest answer is that it rarely does on its own, and rarely from a cold start. But it can play a real part. It contributes to client work by warming people up, not closing them. Picture the sequence. A hiring manager sees your useful salary guide. Another week, they see a short video of you explaining something smart about their market. Weeks later, they get an email from you or a note on LinkedIn, and this time your name is familiar. You didn’t win that client on Facebook, but Facebook did some of the early groundwork. It goes wrong when a small business expects a cold advert to do the job of a proper conversation. ‘We recruit accountants, get in touch’ means nothing to someone who’s never heard of you and wasn’t thinking about hiring. ‘The three things pushing up finance salaries in your city this quarter’ might make that same person stop. One is a pitch; the other is useful, and useful travels much farther here. The strongest results come when Meta is one part of a joined-up approach: useful content, Meta distribution, retargeting, email nurture, and LinkedIn or direct outreach, with fast follow-up behind it all. The money and the measurement On budget, don’t dip a toe in with a fiver a day and expect to learn anything. Meta’s own guidance is that where you set a cost-per-result goal, your daily budget should be at least five times that goal. A five-pound target cost per result implies a daily budget of at least twenty-five pounds. A serious test needs enough spend to produce real evidence, not just a few clicks. Give a lead campaign enough time to run properly. Meta suggests aiming for 50 or more conversions a week, with performance often improving after the first two weeks and a sensible minimum run of around three weeks. For a niche recruiter with a smaller audience, that volume isn’t always achievable, so judge results over weeks, not days. On quality, this is the point that saves the most money. If you tell Meta to find you the cheapest possible leads, it becomes very good at finding people who fill in forms cheaply and are worth nothing to you. Meta’s own figures show that when you feed the system information about which leads turned out to be good ones, through the Conversions API for CRM, cost per quality lead fell by around 21 per cent on Instant Form campaigns and around 9.5 per cent on website-form campaigns, compared with optimising for volume. Feed it the outcomes that matter. A word on benchmarks, and what the data won’t tell you It’s worth being straight about this. Reliable, like-for-like 2025 to 2026 Meta cost benchmarks, broken out separately for the UK, the US and Australia and specifically for recruitment B2B client acquisition, do not exist in the public data. Anyone quoting you a precise ‘cost per recruitment client’ from Facebook is guessing. The most-cited dataset is WordStream and LocaliQ’s 2025 Facebook Ads benchmarks, which are US and cross-industry. Their broad ‘Career and Employment’ category showed an average click-through rate of 2.81 per cent, an average cost per click of 0.86 US dollars and an average cost per lead of 17.64 US dollars. Treat that as rough US context only. It is not a UK or Australian figure, it is not a recruitment B2B benchmark, and a cheap form-fill is not a placement. Two advertiser examples illustrate how the levers behave, though they are not results you should expect. A B2B company, BLISS, found a shorter Instagram lead form produced 2.5 times the conversion rate and a 40 per cent lower cost per lead than a longer one, although the longer form gave higher-quality leads. Another, Appsee, reported 3.4 times higher click-through and a 25 per cent lower cost per qualified lead from Instagram Stories. Mechanisms, not guarantees. Whatever you run, measure the right things. Not just reach and cost per lead, but qualified leads, booked meetings, job orders, placements, revenue and gross profit. That’s the difference between a campaign that looks busy and one that pays. A note on compliance Recruitment advertising isn’t just a marketing exercise. Employment adverts sit within Meta’s Special Ad Category, which limits some targeting options, and any use of client or candidate data in Custom Audiences needs a lawful basis under UK GDPR and the equivalent rules in the US and Australia. This post is marketing guidance, not legal advice, so take specialist advice for your own circumstances. When to leave it alone Some recruiters should skip Meta ads altogether, and that’s a perfectly good answer if you run a small, confidential senior-search business, where the roles are rare and discretion matters; public advertising on Facebook is usually the wrong tool. Your work happens through relationships and direct approaches, not lead forms. If you can’t yet say clearly who you help and what makes you different, sort that out first. An advert only amplifies your message; it can’t rescue a fuzzy one. And if you don’t have the capacity to follow up leads quickly, or a proper page to send people to, don’t start yet. There’s no prize for being on every channel. The prize is being good on the few that suit your business. What to do this week If you’re curious but cautious, don’t launch a cold campaign at strangers. Start where the warmth already is. First, take a resource you already have, or could make in an afternoon- a salary guide, a short market report, a hiring checklist for your niche- offer it, and let people swap their email for it. Second, if you’ve got a bit of website traffic or a following, set up a simple retargeting campaign so the people who already brushed past you keep seeing you. Both are low-risk; they build something that lasts, and they teach you how the platform behaves before you ever try anything colder. Remember the pattern: Meta rewards useful, and it rewards warm. Get that right, and it stops being a money pit and starts being a proper part of your marketing. Thanks Denise The post Meta Ads for Recruitment: What Facebook and Instagram Advertising Can and Can’t Do appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Ket Takeawys From This Podcast and Post WhatsApp is the highest open rate channel a recruitment or search business can use, but it deepens relationships you already have rather than starting new ones. What that means in practice: WhatsApp has more than three billion monthly users, with open rates of 95 to 98% against roughly 20 to 25% for email. It has no discovery algorithm and no professional targeting layer, so it cannot introduce you to anyone new. It works best with candidates and clients who have already given you their number, where it speeds up screening, scheduling, briefs and updates. Clients genuinely do come through it, but only where the relationship already exists. Used to approach people cold, it risks blocking, reporting and a breach of UK consent rules under PECR and GDPR. The deciding question is not candidates versus clients; it’s warm versus cold. Of all the channels in this series, WhatsApp is the one I get asked about in the most roundabout way. Business owners rarely ask me whether it works. They ask me what it’s for. That makes sense, because most of you are already using it. It’s on your phone. You message your team on it. You message your family on it. You’ve probably messaged a candidate on it, because it was quicker than email and they replied in four minutes rather than four days. So the question isn’t whether WhatsApp works. It clearly does something, or you wouldn’t keep reaching for it. The question is whether it belongs in your marketing plan, and if it does, what job it’s doing there. I’ll give you my answer up front. WhatsApp doesn’t start relationships. It deepens the ones you already have. Get it the wrong way round and use it to approach people who don’t know you, and it will do you real damage. How Big Is WhatsApp? WhatsApp has more than three billion people using it every month, a figure confirmed by Mark Zuckerberg on Meta’s earnings call in April 2025. Trackers in early 2026 put it between 3.14 and 3.3 billion. Somewhere between 2.3 and 2.6 billion people open it every day, around 83% of the monthly base, and it’s available in more than 180 countries. For context, Facebook sits at around 3.07 billion monthly users, so the two are neck and neck at the top of this series. In the UK, research cited by the communications regulator and published in December 2025 found around 90% of UK online adults used WhatsApp, roughly 44.2 million people. That’s the most authoritative UK figure available. The US and Australia are messier. US estimates run from 87 million to 124 million depending on which tracker you read. Australia sits somewhere between 9 million and 13 million. I’m giving you ranges rather than a tidy number because Meta doesn’t publish country by country data, and I’d rather tell you the truth than give you false precision. The number to hold on to is the UK one. Nine in ten UK adults online are on this app. Your candidates are there. So are your clients. What WhatsApp Is Not This is the part that changes how you think about it. Every other channel in this series has an algorithm. On Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok or YouTube, you create something, the platform decides who sees it, and if it’s good enough it reaches people who have never heard of you. Reach is earned. WhatsApp doesn’t work that way. There’s no feed ranking your content and no discovery mechanism putting you in front of strangers. Your reach is limited to people who already have your number, or people who click an advert to start a chat. WhatsApp doesn’t build your audience. It communicates with the audience you already have. There are two partial exceptions. WhatsApp Channels, launched in 2023, is a one way broadcast feature that had reached 500 million monthly users by June 2024. And WhatsApp Status, viewed daily by around 500 million people, takes up roughly a third of the time people spend in the app. Both are useful. Neither will introduce you to a hiring manager who has never heard of you. The second structural point matters just as much. WhatsApp has no professional layer. There are no job titles, no company data and no seniority filters. Nothing tells you whether the person on the other end is an HR director or a school leaver. LinkedIn knows who people are professionally. WhatsApp knows a phone number. Where WhatsApp Is At Its Strongest If it won’t introduce you to anyone new, what will it do? It will make every conversation you’re already having faster, warmer and far more likely to be read than anything else you have. Look at the numbers. WhatsApp messages are opened at somewhere between 95 and 98%. Email sits at roughly 20 to 25%. Broadcast campaigns on WhatsApp are reported to convert at 15 to 25%. And 78% of job seekers now apply on a smartphone, so your candidates are already living in this format. Here’s where recruiters are genuinely getting value: Screening questions answered in minutes rather than over two days of phone tag Interview scheduling and confirmations, which cuts no shows Status updates during a process, so candidates aren’t left in silence QR codes that take someone straight into a chat to start an application Sourcing internationally, particularly in markets like India, Brazil and the Middle East where WhatsApp is the default messenger Keeping a warm client contact updated, once they’ve given you their number Every one of those is about speed and experience with someone who already knows who you are. And Yes, It Works With Clients Too It would be easy to read the last section and conclude WhatsApp is a candidate only channel. It isn’t. Once a hiring manager has given you their mobile number, WhatsApp becomes the fastest route to them you’ll ever have. Briefs come through as a voice note on the way to a meeting. Questions get answered in minutes. You stop being a supplier they email and start being the recruiter they message. We’ve won clients through WhatsApp ourselves, and so have members of ours. But in every case the relationship came first, and the number was given rather than found. That’s the distinction that matters here, and it isn’t candidates versus clients. It’s warm versus cold. The Line Between Warm and Cold This goes wrong at exactly one point, and that’s when you use WhatsApp to approach someone who hasn’t given you their number and doesn’t expect to hear from you. I know the temptation. You’ve got mobile numbers sitting in your CRM going back years. It feels like an easy win sitting there. Leave it alone, for three reasons. One: There’s No Cold Route In You need a number someone has given you, or you need them to click an advert. There’s no equivalent of a LinkedIn connection request here. And if you’ve bought a list of mobile numbers, you’ve got a bigger problem than channel choice. Two: The Consent Risk Is Real Unsolicited business messaging on WhatsApp can breach UK consent rules under PECR and GDPR. This isn’t a grey area you can talk your way out of, and the penalties attach to the business rather than the individual who sent the message. Three: It Breaks the Social Contract A hiring manager gave their number to their kids’ school, their plumber and their friends. A pitch from someone they don’t know arriving in that space doesn’t read as enterprising. It feels like an intrusion, and the two buttons available to them are block and report. Note what you lose. The same message on LinkedIn would have been unremarkable. Sent on WhatsApp to someone who never gave you the number, it costs you a contact permanently. There’s one more thing, and it isn’t comfortable. WhatsApp has become a common vector for recruitment scams. Fake recruiters, fake roles, fake interviews, all run through this app. Candidates are increasingly wary when a recruiter they don’t know appears in their messages. That doesn’t mean you can’t use it. It means you introduce yourself properly, identify your company immediately, and give people a way to verify you. What WhatsApp Costs Basic use is free. A WhatsApp Business profile costs nothing and takes minutes to set up. A photo, a business description, a greeting message and an away message, and you’re running. Costs appear when you want to send at volume or advertise. From the first of January 2026, Meta moved to charging per message rather than per conversation. UK rates published across 2026 sources range from just over a penny to about seven pence per marketing message, depending on category and source. Messages a customer starts remain free within a 24 hour window. To send in bulk or automate anything you need a Business Solution Provider. Platform subscriptions typically start between nine and fifty pounds per channel per month, plus VAT, on top of the per message cost. Click to WhatsApp adverts run through Meta Ads Manager on Facebook and Instagram, and open a chat rather than sending someone to a landing page. US benchmarks from 2026 put a good cost per click between ten and fifty cents, and a cost per lead who goes on to start a conversation at one to three dollars. No UK or Australian benchmarks exist in the sources reviewed, so if you test this you’ll be gathering your own numbers. How to Measure It Native analytics on the free Business app are basic: messages sent, delivered, read and received, visible in your settings. The Business Platform adds message level data, and third party platforms will layer on a proper funnel view for a subscription. For most recruitment business owners, four numbers tell you everything: Response rate. What proportion of people reply? Time to first response. How much faster is this than email? Message to booked conversation. How many turn into an interview or a call? For paid adverts, cost per conversation started and cost per qualified lead Best Practice, and the Mistakes to Avoid What works Set up a separate WhatsApp Business profile rather than running your desk from your personal number Brand it properly with a photo, company name and what you do, so anyone receiving a message sees straight away who you are Use it for screening, scheduling, updates and confirmations Use Status or a Channel for passive nurturing of your candidate pool rather than messaging people one by one Use simple automation for first response and interview slot booking What to avoid Cold business development messages to hiring managers who haven’t opted in Failing to identify yourself in the first line, which in the current climate makes you look like a scam Over messaging. The moment WhatsApp feels like a mailing list, you’ve destroyed the thing that made it work Treating it as a brand building channel. Nobody is discovering you here Is WhatsApp Right For Your Business? Four Questions If you answer yes to two or more, it’s worth setting up this month. One. Does your business handle high volume or time critical candidate communication, where being first to respond wins you the placement? Two. Do you source candidates internationally, particularly in markets where WhatsApp is the default way people communicate? Three. Is candidate experience somewhere you’re currently losing people, through slow responses, silence during a process or no shows at interview? Four. Do you have candidates or clients who have given you their mobile number and would expect to hear from you on it? If you answered no to all four, and particularly to the last one, the problem isn’t WhatsApp. It’s that you don’t yet have enough relationships to put on it. Build those first, on LinkedIn, on email and through your content. Then come back to this. Pulling This Together WhatsApp is one of the two largest platforms in this series and easily the most misunderstood. It won’t build your brand and it won’t put you in front of anyone who has never heard of you. Those jobs belong to other channels. What it will do is make every relationship you already have faster, warmer and more likely to turn into something. That includes candidates, and it includes hiring managers who have come to trust you enough to give you their number. So build the relationship first. Let people give you the number rather than digging it out. Then use this channel for what it’s genuinely brilliant at. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Knowing which channels to use is one thing. Having the content, the campaigns and the plan to run them consistently is another. That’s what we do inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done for you content every month, monthly coaching calls and a clear system that takes the guesswork out of what to post, where and when. If you want to find out more get in touch. The post WhatsApp for Recruiters: Where It Wins You Clients and Candidates, and Where It Costs You Both appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

TikTok reaches around 24.9 million adults in the UK, roughly 136 million in the US and 10.2 million in Australia. That’s somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the adult population in each of those markets. The audience sits mainly in early- to mid-career stages, and because the For You Page hands out reach based on interest rather than follower count, a brand-new account can get in front of thousands of people. For recruitment, search and staffing businesses, the honest answer is that TikTok is a candidate channel, not a client one. There’s no sourced example of a recruitment business winning new client work through TikTok, and no verified UK, US, or Australia return-on-investment benchmark for the sector. The people who sign off recruitment spend aren’t concentrated on the platform. So if you hire at volume for entry- to mid-level roles, it’s worth testing with a small, defined budget of around 300 to 500 pounds over a fortnight, measuring your own cost per lead rather than relying on anyone else’s numbers. If you’re targeting senior or executive people, put that time into LinkedIn, your email list, and direct outreach instead. This post covers the audience data, what the algorithm rewards in 2026, what a test costs in time and money, and four questions to help you decide either way. What You Will Learn in This Post Who’s really on TikTok in the UK, the US and Australia, and what those numbers mean for the roles you fill Why the change of ownership in January 2026 removes the one objection that stopped a lot of recruiters from looking at the platform at all What the algorithm rewards now, and why a brand new account with no followers can still get real reach Why TikTok can get you candidates but there’s no evidence it will get you clients The difference between attracting candidates and winning clients, and why mixing the two up costs you money What a proper test costs in time and money, and four questions that’ll tell you whether to run one at all I know what some of you are thinking. TikTok is for dancing. It’s not for a serious recruitment business. My clients aren’t on there. Some of you will be right about that. And I want to say up front, you have my permission to walk away from this one. Not every channel is for every company, and part of my job is helping you say no with confidence rather than adding another thing to a list you’re already struggling to get through. But it’s a fair question, so let’s answer it properly. Here’s where I’ve landed after going through the research. TikTok can get you candidates. I couldn’t find any evidence that it will get you clients. That’s the short version. The rest of this post is why, and what you should do about it. What Changed in 2026 Let me start with what’s shifted, because if you looked at TikTok a year or two ago and backed away, your reason might not apply anymore. TikTok is a short-form video app owned by the Chinese technology company ByteDance. It launched internationally in September 2017. In January 2026, its US operations were sold to a new, majority American-owned entity called TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, led by Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. They hold 80.1 per cent between them, with ByteDance keeping 19.9 per cent. The deal closed on 22 and 23 January 2026. Why does that matter to you? Because for years, the objection I heard most about TikTok had nothing to do with the audience. It was the risk that the whole thing might disappear overnight in the US. Hard to build a plan on that. That question has now been answered. I’ll be straight with you, though. Some legal commentators, including at Harvard Law School, argue the data and influence questions haven’t been fully settled. So not every concern is gone. It’s that the one that made planning impossible has. If you parked TikTok because of that, it’s worth another look. Who’s Really on TikTok in Your Market These are TikTok’s own advertising reach estimates for adults, which are the most current, source-dated data available. UK: around 24.9 million adults, roughly 36 per cent of the population US: around 136 million adults, roughly 39 per cent. Estimates vary between sources from 136 million up to 153 million, so treat it as a range Australia: around 10.2 million adults, roughly 37.5 per cent So in all three of the markets most of you work in, somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the adult population is reachable on this platform. That isn’t a niche. Which is why it’s worth making a proper decision about, rather than dismissing it because of what you assume is on there. Now, the make-up of that audience is what matters for you. In the UK, TikTok’s adult audience is around 62 per cent female, which is a big difference from the global picture. The largest UK segments are 25 to 34, at around 29 per cent, and 35 to 44, at around 23 per cent. In Australia, the gender split is close to even, and the 25 to 34 group is the biggest single segment at around 48 per cent. Globally, around two thirds of adult users sit in the 18 to 34 bracket, with about 8 per cent aged 55 and over. What does that mean in practice? TikTok’s built-in audience sits mainly in early to mid-career stages. It’s not where you’ll find a concentration of senior hiring decision-makers, board-level people or business owners. They’re on LinkedIn, and we covered that channel in a previous episode. One more thing if you work in the Australian market. The under-16 social media ban came in during December 2025 and applies to TikTok, which has pushed the active base further towards adults. For reaching early career professionals in Australia, that makes it slightly more relevant, not less. How the Algorithm Works, and Why It Matters to a Small Business TikTok doesn’t work like LinkedIn or Facebook, and this is where people get caught out. On most platforms, your content goes to your followers first. If you’ve got fifty followers, you reach fifty people. TikTok hands out reach through the For You Page, which works on interest rather than your follower list. That means a brand-new account with nobody following it can get in front of thousands of people if the content works. Please sit with that for a second, because it’s rare. On almost every other platform, you have to build an audience before you get reach. Here you don’t. For a small recruitment or search business starting from nothing, that’s the strongest argument for testing this channel. In 2026, the algorithm has moved further towards rewarding completion rate, rewatches and total watch time. Not likes. Not follower count. Whether people watch your video to the end, and whether they go back and watch it again. TikTok tests each video on a small sample first, then decides whether to push it wider. There’s a second shift worth knowing about. People increasingly use TikTok as a search engine, typing questions into it the way they’d type them into Google. For a recruiter, that’s useful, because content answering real questions- what a role pays, what the interview process looks like, how to move into a sector- keeps working long after a trend has died. On frequency, general guidance is one to four organic posts a week, with newer accounts sometimes benefiting from a few more while they build momentum. On engagement, the estimates vary depending on who you read. One 2025 study puts TikTok at 4.86 per cent, another gives a median of 1.73 per cent, and a third gives 3.7 per cent. Different methodologies so that I wouldn’t build a business case on any single one. What they all agree on is that TikTok beats Instagram, Facebook and X on average engagement. Why TikTok Won’t Get You, Clients Now for the part I really want you to take away, and I’d rather you heard it from me than found out three months into a content plan. When I went through the research for this episode, I was looking for one specific thing. A recruitment or search business that had won client work through TikTok. A PSL, a retained brief, an exclusive assignment. Something that started because a hiring manager saw them on the platform. I couldn’t find one. Not in the UK, not in the US, not in Australia. There is documented recruitment activity on TikTok, and some of it has real numbers attached. But it’s all candidate attraction and employer branding, and none of it is UK-based, so I’m not going to wave it in front of you as though it tells you something reliable about your market. Does the absence prove it’s never happened? No. But it tells you something, and the audience data explains why. The people who sign off recruitment spend aren’t concentrated on this platform. There’s a second gap worth naming while we’re being honest. There’s no reliable UK, US or Australia benchmark for return on investment on TikTok advertising specific to our sector. So if you go in, go in as a test with a defined budget and measure it yourself. Attracting Candidates and Winning Clients Are Two Different Jobs This is the bit that sits underneath everything else, and it costs recruitment business owners real money. We talk about recruitment marketing as though it’s one thing. It isn’t. It’s two jobs. One is attracting candidates. Getting people to apply, building an employer brand, filling your talent pool. The other is winning clients. Getting in front of hiring companies, starting conversations with decision-makers, landing briefs and retainers. Different people. Different messages. Different channels. And a channel can be brilliant at one and useless at the other. Why does this matter so much? Because you can spend six months posting away, watching the views come in, feeling like your marketing is finally working, and then wonder why your client pipeline hasn’t moved an inch. It hasn’t moved because you were doing the other job. I see this a lot. Someone tells me marketing doesn’t work for them, and when we unpick it, the marketing was working. They were doing something other than what they needed. For winning company clients, the routes with proper evidence behind them are still LinkedIn, direct outreach, your email list and consistent content that builds your authority in your sector. What It Costs You, in Time and Money Time Posting on TikTok is technically easy. Record, add captions, publish. A smartphone and the built-in editor will do, and you don’t need to buy any tools to start. The harder part is the style. TikTok rewards content that feels natural, informal and gets to the point in the first two seconds. If you upload the polished corporate video you had made for your website, it’ll sink without a trace. That shift in thinking is the real investment, not the technology. I’ll be honest that there’s no verified benchmark for how many hours a non-marketer needs to put in before they see results. Working back from the one to four posts a week guidance, plan for a few hours a week for filming, editing, captions and looking at what worked. That’s my estimate, not a sourced figure, and I’d rather tell you that than pretend otherwise. Money Organic is free. If you want to test paid, here’s what it looks like. Minimum campaign budget: 500 dollars lifetime, or 50 dollars a day at campaign level Minimum ad group budget: around 20 dollars a day in the US, 20 pounds a day in the UK, 30 Australian dollars a day in Australia Cost per thousand impressions: sources give ranges of 3.20 to 10 dollars, and 10 to 15 dollars for the US and UK specifically, so treat these as indicative Cost per click: typically 50 cents to 1.50 dollars A realistic first test: 300 to 500 over a fortnight, which is roughly what the algorithm needs to optimise For comparison, a February 2026 UK benchmark puts Google Ads at around 1.55 pounds a click and Facebook at around 78 pence. So TikTok clicks can be competitive, and sometimes cheaper, once you convert them. The number I’d hold onto is that first test figure. Three to five hundred over a fortnight is something most of the business owners we work with could stand to lose if it doesn’t come off. It isn’t a bet-the-house decision. What Good Looks Like on TikTok If you decide to test it, here’s what to do. Use TikTok’s in-app lead generation forms rather than pushing people off to your careers page. Every extra click loses you people Connect those leads to something fast for the follow-up. WhatsApp works well here. Speed protects the momentum you’ve paid for Build an account with a personality behind it, not a job board feed. Give people a reason to follow you before they need you Post consistently, one to four times a week, so the algorithm has enough to work with Answer the questions people in your sector are searching for. That content keeps earning long after a trend has passed And what to avoid. Treating it as a way to win clients. The audience data doesn’t support it Over-polishing, because production value works against you here Posting in bursts. Three videos one week, then nothing for a month, gives the algorithm nothing to go on What to Measure If you can’t measure it, you can’t decide whether to carry on with it. Reach and impressions Video views, and importantly average watch time and completion rate, because that’s what the algorithm rewards now Engagement, meaning likes, comments, shares and saves Follower growth, as a secondary number rather than a headline one Click-through rate to any landing page or lead form If you’re running paid, cost per lead, and then how many of those leads turn into placements TikTok gives you all of this through TikTok Studio for organic content and TikTok Ads Manager for paid. Both are free and fairly easy to read. The last one on that list is the one that matters to your business. Leads on their own don’t pay anybody’s wages. Questions to Help You Decide Grab a pen and paper for this one. I’d rather you wrote the answers down than did it in your head. Where does the talent you place sit? If you’re hiring at volume for entry- to mid-level roles, the platform’s audience lines up with the people you need. If you’re doing executive search or senior professional services appointments, it doesn’t. Is your main goal candidates or clients? If it’s candidates and employer brand, this channel is worth a look. If it’s winning new clients, put the effort into LinkedIn and your email list instead. Can you sustain one to four posts a week in an informal style? Be honest with yourself here. If the answer is no, and for a lot of small teams it is, then adding a channel you can’t keep going will make your marketing worse, not better. There’s Also Another Answer Some of you will want to be on there anyway, on the basis that the people in early career roles today are the hiring managers you’ll be selling to in ten years. That’s a fair argument, and I’m not going to talk you out of it. Just be clear with yourself about what you’re buying. That’s a long-term brand play, not lead generation. Give it a small budget you wouldn’t miss, judge it on whether people know who you are rather than on placements, and don’t let it eat the time that belongs to the channels bringing money in this quarter. What I wouldn’t do is run it as a brand play while privately hoping it produces clients. That way you’ve built the disappointment in from day one. Final Thoughts TikTok reaches between a third and two-fifths of the adult population across the UK, the US and Australia. Its audience sits mainly in early- to mid-career stages. It also gives small accounts a genuine shot at reach, which very few platforms do anymore. But candidates and clients are two different jobs, and this channel only does one. So if you place volume roles and you need applicants, test it properly, with a real budget and real measurement. And if you run a search business placing senior people, close this door and put the time into something that’ll pay you back. Saying no to the wrong channel is a marketing decision, and it’s a good one. Because the mistake I see most often isn’t picking the wrong channel. It’s picking too many. Doing all of them at half effort. Then deciding marketing doesn’t work. Marketing worked. It was just spread so thin that none of it got enough of you. Pick two or three. Do them properly. Be consistent. I hope that’s been useful. Thanks Denise How We Can Help You Choosing the right two or three channels is one thing. Showing up on them consistently while you’re running a business is another. That’s what we help with inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done-for-you content every month, coaching calls and a clear marketing system, so being visible to the clients and candidates you want becomes straightforward rather than another thing on the list. If you’d like to talk it through, book a call with us here: www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call https://recmarketingandsales.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ep515.mp3 The post What Recruiters Need to Know About TikTok This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Let me start with a question I get asked more than almost any other when it comes to marketing channels. Should I be using Facebook for my recruitment business? It usually comes with a follow-up. Is it not just for personal stuff now? Has everyone not moved on to LinkedIn or Instagram? Is it worth my time? Here is the honest answer. Facebook can be genuinely useful for recruitment, but only for a particular kind of hiring, and only if you use it in a particular way. A lot of the owners I work with get this wrong on both counts. Some write it off completely and miss a real opportunity. Others pour hours into it expecting it to bring them clients, then feel let down when it does not, because winning clients was never what Facebook was for. So let me clear it up. Here is what Facebook is good for, what it is not, and how to decide whether it deserves a place in your marketing for the rest of the year. Facebook is bigger than you think First, let us deal with the myth that everyone has left. Globally, Facebook has more than three billion people using it every month. It is still the biggest social network in the world. Closer to home, in the markets most of you work in: Around 56% of the UK population have a Facebook account, roughly 55 to 56 million people. In the US, around seven in ten adults use Facebook. In Australia, around 65% of the population are on it. In our markets, the audience is broadly stable rather than growing fast, but it is enormous, and it is not going anywhere. So no, Facebook is not dead. Not even close. But scale is not the same as relevance Here is the thing to hold onto. A huge audience only matters if the right people are on it and you can reach them. So the real question is not how big Facebook is. It is who is on there for you, and whether you can get in front of them. What Facebook is really for in recruitment When it comes to recruitment, Facebook has one clear job. Candidate attraction, and specifically for volume and local hiring. It is not a client channel, at least not organically. It is not where you win business development or reach senior hiring managers. And this is not just my opinion, it is built into how the platform works. On LinkedIn, people show up as professionals. They tell the platform their job title, their company, their seniority. That is why you can target a hiring manager or a head of talent so precisely. On Facebook, people are not there as professionals. They are there as people, catching up with friends, sitting in local groups, watching video. So the targeting recruiters rely on, by job title, by seniority, by company, either is not available or is not reliable. That single difference tells you almost everything. Facebook is brilliant at reaching a broad, local, personal-life audience. It is weak at reaching a specific professional one. One exception, and it is paid There is one important caveat. Everything above is about organic Facebook, the free posting side. Paid is a different lever. When you put budget behind Meta ads, you can build brand awareness with a far wider audience than your own followers, and that can include potential clients, not only candidates. It will not replace LinkedIn for winning business, but it can keep your name in front of the right people. There is a fair bit to running Meta ads well, and we will cover that properly in a dedicated episode later in this series. The reach problem nobody tells you about Now for the single most useful thing I can tell you about Facebook. If your Facebook strategy is a company Page that you post to now and again, I am sorry to say, almost nobody is seeing it. Organic reach on a Facebook Page, the number of your followers who see a post without you paying, has collapsed. The benchmarks now sit at around 2% of your followers per post. So a thousand followers might mean twenty people see a post. Ten years ago that figure was closer to 16%. It has fallen off a cliff, and it is not coming back, because Meta makes its money selling reach through ads. So where is the life on Facebook? Groups. Facebook Groups reach 15 to 40% of their members per post, five to fifteen times more than a Page. The algorithm favours Groups because people opt in and engage there. A niche local jobseeker group, or a sector-specific community, will do far more for you organically than your company Page ever will. That flips the usual advice on its head. The instinct is to build your Page and post your jobs. The reality is that your Page is the weakest tool Facebook gives you, and Groups are the strongest. If you take one thing from this, let it be that. Where it works, and where it does not Let us make it practical. Facebook works well when your hiring depends on candidate volume in a specific area. Retail, trades, hospitality, industrial, warehouse, driving, admin. Roles where you need a steady flow of local applicants, and where those candidates are living their everyday lives on the platform and in local groups. For that kind of hiring, Facebook’s local reach and low cost are hard to beat. Where does it fall down? Executive search. Specialist technology roles. Professional services placements. Anything where the candidates and clients are senior, specific and few. Those people are far easier to reach on LinkedIn or through niche channels, and Facebook’s lack of professional targeting works against you. So the question is not whether Facebook is good or bad. It is whether the hiring you do matches what Facebook is good at. For some of you that is a strong yes. For others it is a clear no. Both are fine, as long as you are honest about which one you are. A real example Here is what this looks like done well. A technical staffing company wanted more applications for the roles it was filling. Rather than relying on its Page, it ran a tightly targeted local campaign, focused on people of working age within about a fifty-mile radius, using job-related search terms, backed by consistent content. Over the year, job applications rose by 82%. They nearly doubled. Follower numbers climbed sharply, and website traffic rose too. Notice the pattern. Local. Targeted. Consistent. A little paid spend to earn reach, rather than hoping the Page would deliver it. That is the Facebook playbook for recruitment in a nutshell. If you use it, here is what works If you have decided the hiring you do fits, here is what works, based on the data rather than guesswork. Lead with Groups, not your Page. Get active in niche and local groups where your candidates already are, or build one if the right group does not exist. That is where your organic reach lives now. Use video, and caption it. Native and live video get the highest reach by a distance, and most people watch with the sound off on their phone. Captions are the difference between being watched and being scrolled past. Do not treat Facebook as free. Pair organic activity with a small, consistent paid budget. Even ten to twenty pounds or dollars a day, run properly and given time to settle, will do more than occasional bigger bursts. Go hyper-local for volume roles. Target by area and by interest, exactly as in the example above. And the mistakes to avoid: relying on your Page as your main channel, posting rarely and expecting reach, using Facebook to chase senior decision-makers it was never built to target, and running paid campaigns on too small a budget for the platform to learn anything. How to decide if Facebook is right for you Three questions to consider Does my hiring depend more on candidate volume in a specific area than on reaching senior client decision-makers? If yes, Facebook is worth a proper look. Do I have even a small budget, say ten to fifty a day, and a few hours a week for content and a group presence? If not, organic-only effort at today’s reach levels probably will not repay the time. Is my priority reaching hiring managers or senior clients in professional services or technology? If so, Facebook is a secondary channel at best, and LinkedIn is where your energy should go. Answer those honestly and you will know. That is the whole point of this series. Not to be on everything, but to choose the channels that fit how you win, and give those your full attention. How we can help you this year Working out which channels are right for your business, and then producing the content consistently, is exactly what we help recruitment and search companies with inside Superfast Circle. Our members get done-for-you content, monthly coaching and a clear plan, so marketing stops being the thing that slips when you get busy. If that is the kind of support you have been looking for, book a call and let us show you how it works. www.superfastrecruitment.co.uk/call Thanks Denise The post What Recruiters Need to Know About Facebook This Year appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.

Key Takeaways From This Post In this episode of The Recruitment Marketing and Sales Podcast, Sharon Newey explores why imposter syndrome disproportionately affects the most capable recruitment business owners, what it actually costs commercially, and three practical actions you can take this week to start showing up with the authority you have already earned. You are on a call with a client you have worked with for a while. Good relationship. The conversation is going well. And then, almost as an aside, they say: “We had a really useful piece come through this week from another agency. A benchmarking report on salaries in our sector. Really timely.” They are not threatening to leave. They are not complaining. It is a throwaway comment. But something shifts. Because you know that topic. You have lived it. You have had the exact same conversation about salary expectations with four clients this month. You know what is happening in that market, why it is happening, and what businesses should be doing about it. You could have written that report. You should have written that report. But you did not. And someone else did. And now your client is talking about them on a call with you. That feeling is not a content problem. It is not a time problem. It is imposter syndrome. And it is costing your business more than you realise. The Statistic That Changes how you see This Research suggests that up to 85% of high-achieving professionals experience imposter syndrome at some point in their careers. Eighty-five per cent. That is not a niche phenomenon. That is not something that happens to people who lack confidence or ability. That is a pattern that affects the majority of people who are genuinely very good at what they do. Imposter syndrome is not evidence that you are not ready. It is frequently a signal that you are more capable than you give yourself credit for. The doubt is not a warning sign. It is a side effect of expertise. What Imposter Syndrome Actually Looks Like in Recruitment In a recruitment business, imposter syndrome rarely announces itself as imposter syndrome. It disguises itself as something far more practical. It looks like waiting until the website is ready. You know the marketing needs to happen. But the website is not quite right, so you will start once that is sorted. The website gets sorted. Then it is something else. It looks like not posting because it is not good enough. You draft something, read it back, and think: this is obvious. Everyone in my sector already knows this. So you delete it, and nothing goes out. It looks like avoiding video, permanently. You know video works. You have seen the data. But something about pressing record feels impossible, so the video conversation gets shelved for another quarter. It looks like undercharging and struggling to defend your fees. When you do not fully believe in your own authority, you drop your rate before the client has even pushed back. You discount as a reflex, not as a strategy. And it looks like watching competitors win work you know you could do better. They are not better than you. They are simply louder. They are showing up. They are saying the things you are thinking. Recognise any of that? Most recruitment directors and founders will recognise at least three of those patterns immediately. And they will have filed them under time, or priorities, or just not my thing. But that is not really what they are. Why High-Achievers are Most at Risk The people most susceptible to imposter syndrome are not the least competent. It is the opposite. The more expert you become, the more likely you are to experience it. And there is a name for this: the paradox of competence. When you are a junior recruiter, you know what you do not know. The gaps are visible and that feels appropriate. But as you become genuinely expert, your awareness of the field’s complexity increases at the same rate as your knowledge. You can see further. Which means you can also see further ahead of where you currently are. You know more, and so you are more aware of the things you do not yet know. And that awareness can feel, incorrectly, like inadequacy. There is a specific version of this that we see consistently. Many of our clients built their career inside a corporate agency. They were brilliant at what they did, and the brand gave them a platform. Candidates and clients trusted them, but some of that trust was borrowed from the institution. And then they went out on their own. Courageous, commercially smart. But it came with a hidden tax. Because now the brand is them. The credibility is theirs to build, not to borrow. And a voice surfaces that says: was it ever really me? The answer is yes. Thirty years of sector expertise does not evaporate when you hand back a corporate email address. But the voice does not always believe that, and the voice is loud. The Commercial Cost you are not Counting Imposter syndrome is not just an internal discomfort. It has a real, measurable commercial cost. And most recruitment business owners have not fully calculated it. The first cost is visibility. When you are not showing up consistently, not posting, not putting your expertise into the public domain, you are invisible to people who are actively looking for someone exactly like you. Your ideal client is on LinkedIn right now, forming opinions about who they trust. If you are not there, you are not in the conversation. Visible competitors win the work you should be winning. Not because they are better. Because they are present, and you are not. The second cost is fee pressure. Authority and pricing power are directly linked. When a client already knows who you are, has read your posts, has seen that you understand their market in a way that other recruiters do not, the fee conversation starts from a completely different position. They have already bought your expertise before you pick up the phone. When you are invisible, you are just another recruiter. And just another recruiter competes on price. We saw this play out clearly with a client who had close to thirty years in her sector. Before she started showing up consistently, she was competing on contingency terms like everyone else. Within months of building a visible presence, she was having completely different conversations. Fee negotiations became almost secondary, because clients had already bought into her expertise before terms were discussed. She went on to secure her first ever retained projects after decades of contingency work. The third cost is referrals. Referrals are generated not just by the quality of your work but by how front of mind you are. If your network has not heard from you in six months, they will refer someone else. Not because your work was not good. Because the other person was more visible at the moment the referral conversation happened. Three Things You Can do This Week These are low-risk, practical actions that genuinely move the needle. Post one piece of content about what you know, not who you are. The best content from a recruitment leader is about the market. What are you seeing in your sector right now? What are clients getting wrong? What do candidates need to understand about the current hiring picture? That is expertise sharing, not self-promotion. Start there. One post. This week. Share a client or candidate outcome. Not a polished case study. Just a moment. “We helped a client hire a head of finance last month, and here is what made the difference in the search.” Two paragraphs. It demonstrates your expertise and is built entirely from something that already happened. You are not inventing content. You are making your existing work visible. Say the thing you think is too obvious to say. Your market hears these things all the time and still makes the same mistakes. Obvious to you is not obvious to them. The insight that feels like basic knowledge inside your industry is exactly what your ideal client is waiting to read. Say it. None of these require a content strategy, a copywriter, or a professional photoshoot. They require you to decide that your knowledge is worth sharing. That is the only prerequisite. Something to Sit With Before you move on, one question worth sitting with honestly. What is the one thing you know you should be saying publicly that you have been holding back? And what is the real reason? Not the practical reason. Not the time, or the website, or the platform. The real reason. In thirty years of coaching, I have rarely met a business owner who lacked something worth saying. What I have met, time and again, are people who had everything they needed and were waiting for permission that was never going to come from anywhere external. You already have the expertise. You have earned it. The only question is whether you are going to let it stay invisible. Thanks, Sharon How We Can Help Working on your marketing consistently is one of the most important things you can do for the long-term health of your recruitment business. Visibility builds authority. Authority builds better fee conversations. And better fee conversations build the kind of business you actually want to run. We have just updated our Superfast Circle programme with new resources and support designed specifically for recruitment business owners who are ready to show up consistently and with confidence. If you would like the full details, email us at [email protected] and we will send everything across. The post Imposter Syndrome Is Keeping Your Recruitment Business Small appeared first on Superfast Recruitment.