“We decided quality mattered more than volume”
At this year’s DJAx Awards, Placed won the award for Innovation in Job Advertising.
The judges recognised an approach that challenges one of the recruitment industry’s longest-standing assumptions: that success is measured by clicks, traffic and application volume.
Instead, Placed has built a platform focused on candidate quality, hiring outcomes and return on investment.
We spoke to Jennifer Johansson about why recruitment advertising needs to evolve and how Placed is helping employers make smarter hiring decisions.
“Employers don’t need more applicants. They need better applicants.”
What challenge were you trying to solve?
For years, recruitment advertising has been very good at generating volume.
Employers could see impressions, clicks and application numbers, but much harder to understand was whether those applicants were actually suitable for the role or likely to become successful hires.
We felt there was a gap between attraction and hiring outcomes.
Employers are under increasing pressure to do more with the same budgets, so they need evidence that recruitment spend is actually delivering value.
That became the problem we wanted to solve.
“We built visibility into the entire application journey”
What makes Placed different?
One of the biggest differences is that candidates apply directly within the Placed environment.
That gives us far greater visibility into candidate behaviour and application quality than traditional job advertising platforms.
Rather than simply measuring clicks or application starts, we can understand how candidates engage, how suitable they are for specific roles and which applications are most likely to lead to successful hiring outcomes.
That data feeds into our own internal candidate scoring framework.
Importantly, this isn’t purely automated. We use what we call a human-in-the-loop approach, where recruitment specialists continuously test, validate and refine the matching logic.
Technology provides the intelligence, but people help ensure we’re optimising towards quality rather than simply engagement.
“We focus on outcomes, not activity”
What impact has the platform had?
The results have been significant across a range of enterprise clients.
For Telent Technology, Placed delivered the lowest cost per offer across all recruitment channels while achieving a 57% interview-to-offer rate – more than double the performance of a leading professional network platform.
For Evri, Placed delivered a 50% lower cost per applicant than the next best-performing supplier.
UPS generated 567 conversions in six weeks while reducing cost per acquisition by 12%.
We’ve also worked with organisations such as Lidl, Royal Mail and Vets for Pets, helping improve application quality while reducing wasted spend and recruiter workload.
“The system gets smarter as it grows”
How have you made the innovation scalable?
The platform is designed around continuous learning.
Because applications happen within our own environment, we can identify patterns that indicate stronger hiring outcomes and use those insights to improve future performance.
As hiring needs change – whether that’s because of seasonal demand, labour market shifts or different candidate behaviours – the platform adapts alongside them.
We’ve also invested heavily in product and technology to ensure growth strengthens results rather than diluting them.
That approach has enabled us to expand successfully into both the US and European markets while maintaining performance standards.
“Recruitment advertising should be accountable”
Why do you think this approach resonates with employers?
Because employers increasingly want transparency.
They’re no longer satisfied with paying for reach and hoping for results. They want partners who can demonstrate genuine hiring impact.
By focusing on candidate quality, suitability and outcomes, we’re helping move recruitment advertising towards a more accountable model.
One where success isn’t measured by how many people clicked an advert, but by how many great hires were actually made.
For the judges, Placed stood out because it isn’t simply generating more activity. It’s helping employers make better hiring decisions through a smarter combination of technology, data and human expertise.