The right person might be in there. Somewhere…..
There’s an uncomfortable truth about hiring from a job advert: the people who most want the job may not be the people most suitable for it.
That isn’t an argument against job adverts. Hirefinity use them regularly and, particularly in the current market, they can be a brilliant way of reaching people. There are some quite brilliant people looking for work and a well-written advert can absolutely find them.
But an application is really only telling you one thing: that person decided to apply.
Post a half-decent Technology job advert at the moment and you can quite easily find yourself with hundreds of applications. That sounds like a great position to be in, and sometimes it is. But volume can also create the illusion of choice. 300 applications doesn’t necessarily mean 300 relevant options.
Some applicants will be completely unsuitable. Some will have applied to 30 other jobs that morning and approaching the job search with the impression that volume will generate results. Some might not have read the job advert properly. Others might look close on paper but be missing the one or two things that really matter to you.
At the same time, some of the people who would be absolutely perfect for the role won’t be amongst those applications at all.
Maybe they’re happily employed. Maybe they’re considering a move but haven’t seen your advert. Or perhaps they did see it, but there wasn’t enough information to make them want to apply. No mention of hybrid working or flexibility. Very little about the company’s plans or ambitions. No compelling benefits.
And the big one: no salary.
We looked at a sample of 200 Technology jobs advertised in Q2 and 87% contained no reference to salary. Sadly, that’s almost become generally accepted. It’s crazy, and probably deserves a blog all of its own, but it creates another challenge when you’re trying to turn applications into a relevant shortlist.
You can find someone who looks fantastic amongst 200 CVs, arrange a call and spend 30 minutes talking through the company, role and their experience, only to discover they’re looking for £80k and your budget is £60k. Nobody has done anything wrong. The candidate didn’t know the salary and you didn’t know their expectations. But everyone has wasted their time.
And I think this is where application numbers can become a bit of a vanity metric or box ticking exercise.
Ultimately, you’re not trying to attract the most people. You’re trying to identify a small number of relevant people who you would genuinely want to hire.
An advert can absolutely help you do that. But so can speaking to people who aren’t actively applying, approaching people with the specific experience you need, using your network and understanding who exists in the market before they ever become an applicant.
For me, good recruitment is about bringing all of those things together.
I’m Matt. I’ve been hiring in Technology for 20 years, working with over 200 businesses to find and place people into their teams. In 2026, Hirefinity has made a placement from an average of just 2.8 candidate submissions per vacancy.
That’s the bit I care about. Not how many applications we can generate, but how few relevant people a client needs to meet before finding the right one.
If that’s the kind of hiring process you want, we should talk.