Cost per applicant

Cost per applicant tells you what one application costs you. It's the number most recruitment campaigns get judged on, because it's easy to see and easy to compare.

A heads up on the abbreviation. In recruitment, CPA usually means cost per applicant (or cost per application). In general marketing and in ad platforms, CPA usually means cost per acquisition or cost per action, which can be anything you set as your goal. So when someone says "our CPA is low", ask what they're counting. Is it a submitted application, a form start, a lead, a hire?

And here's my honest take: cost per applicant is a starting point, not the goal. It's very easy to make it cheap. Make the ad vague, make applying super easy, target everyone, and you'll get lots of cheap applications from people who were never a fit. Then your recruiters spend days sorting through them. That's why cost per qualified applicant matters more.

How to calculate it

Divide your total ad spend for a vacancy or campaign by the number of applications it brought in.

Example

Say you spend €500 on a campaign and get 50 applications: your cost per applicant is €10. Another campaign costs the same and brings 20 applications, so €25 each. Looks worse. But if only 3 of the first 50 are a fit and 10 of the 20 are, the "expensive" campaign is actually the better deal.