How much does an application cost in recruitment advertising? What I have measured

When people asked me “how much does an application cost?”, I used to answer “it depends”. That is true, but it is not an answer. So here is what I have actually paid, with the limits of each figure.

What I count, and what I do not count

The word “application” means three different things depending on the source. I keep them apart, because mixing them up is the first way to get it wrong.

An example of the gap: on the Angers Loire Métropole ad, 46 applications arrived during ad delivery, and Meta linked only 5 of them to the ad. Depending on which figure you take, an application costs €6.30 or €59.25. I tell the whole story of this case in a dedicated article.

The path of an application, with figures that add up

Here is what €100 of ad budget gives across my 17 landing page ads in 2026 (512 applications received for €5,048 of ad spend).

If you redo the multiplication, it comes out exactly: that is deliberate. “All clicks combined” means clicks on the link, but also on the image, on “see more” or on the profile: Facebook counts them together on my 2026 ads, and I cannot yet isolate link clicks.

Two ways to apply, two orders of magnitude

For the form ads, the average of €1.56 says almost nothing: three ads, one of them in Berlin for a rarer job, at €5.83 per application. The details are here.

Why the gap from one ad to another

Across my 17 landing page ads, half fall between €7.73 and €15.43, and 12 out of 17 between €6 and €12. But the most expensive reaches €44.18. What I see behind these gaps:

• The job and the local labour pool. For the same client over the same period, Édifice Industrie paid €7.63 for a technician in Baud and €11.08 for a site manager in Nantes.
• The volume. An ad that receives 3 applications (€44.18 each in my figures) does not have the same statistical reliability as an ad with 90: a single candidate more or less shifts the price.
• The budget. My ads at under €10 a day cost more at the median (€15.24 against €8.32), but the sample is small. I talk about it here.

And before 2026?

My ads from 2023 to 2025 give €17.81 per lead counted by Meta (26 ads, €25,791 of ad spend). That cannot be compared as it stands with the €9.86 of 2026: we are not counting the same thing. On the same definition, that is counting only Meta's conversions, my 2026 ads give €13.36.

So I do not conclude that “it has become cheaper”. I note that the two periods can only be compared with this caveat.

What I cannot tell you yet

• The number of hires. I count applications, not hires: the employer does not always tell me who they hired.
• A national average for the Facebook form. Three ads do not make an average.
• A cost per promising application. Scoring scales vary from one client to another, and my ads for a network with 308 applications have almost no scores to date.
• The cost on platforms other than Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. I have no figures for TikTok, YouTube or Google: I say so here.

In summary