Key takeaways:
- Recruitment costs climbed in 2025 even as the labor market softened, a disconnect that has direct implications for how staffing agencies budget and allocate their recruitment marketing spend.
- The talent pool is anything but uniform: white-collar roles are drawing more applicants than ever, while frontline and healthcare positions remain expensive and difficult to fill.
- Where you recruit matters as much as how you recruit. Geography is now a significant driver of cost-per-application, and Sun Belt markets in particular are delivering stronger ROI.
Appcast’s 10th Annual Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report, drawing on more than 302 million clicks and 27 million applications from almost 1,200 employers, offers a detailed picture of where recruitment marketing dollars go and what they actually return.
For staffing agencies, the data reinforces something many leaders already sense: the rules of the hiring market shifted again in 2025, and the firms best positioned for 2026 are those paying close attention to cost, segment, and geography.
Costs went up, and the market slowed down
The 2025 labor environment was defined by what Appcast calls a “low-hire, low-fire” dynamic. Employees largely stayed put, a continuation of the stability that followed the turbulence of the pandemic years. Job openings softened, and hiring activity slowed.
And yet, cost-per-application (CPA) and cost-per-hire (CPH) both rose sharply. The culprit wasn’t candidate scarcity (apply rates actually stayed high), but rather pricing shifts across job boards and programmatic media models. In short, more people are applying, but reaching them with approaches like job boards is getting more expensive.
For staffing agencies managing recruitment advertising on behalf of clients, or running their own candidate attraction programs, this cost-volume situation is worth building into planning conversations. Volume is not the same as efficiency, and high apply rates don’t automatically translate to lower spend.
The two-speed talent market is getting more pronounced
One of the report’s most strategically relevant findings for staffing leaders is the widening gap between white-collar and frontline hiring. The so-called “white-collar recession” that began to emerge in 2024 deepened throughout 2025, with office and professional roles seeing significantly higher apply rates. Candidates in those segments are more plentiful and, relatively speaking, more accessible.
On the other hand, frontline roles, particularly in healthcare, remained among the most expensive to fill and the hardest to attract qualified candidates for. Staffing firms specializing in light industrial, healthcare, or skilled trades are navigating a fundamentally different market than their counterparts in professional or commercial staffing.
This divergence matters when it comes to benchmarking. Comparing CPAs or fill rates across segments without accounting for these structural differences can produce misleading conclusions about what’s working and what isn’t.
Geography has become a meaningful cost variable
The report confirms what regional staffing leaders have long observed anecdotally: where a job is located has a measurable effect on what it costs to fill it. Sun Belt states, particularly fast-growing markets in the Southeast and Southwest, are outperforming in both apply rates and cost efficiency. Firms recruiting in those markets have structural advantages baked into their geography.
Meanwhile, rural markets and states with older demographic profiles continue to produce the highest recruitment advertising costs. For multi-state or national staffing operations, this regional variability creates an opportunity to get more precise about where to invest recruitment marketing budgets and where to set different performance expectations with clients.
A fuller view of the funnel
This year’s report introduced candidate disposition benchmarks, which track what actually happens to applicants after they apply. This allows staffing and talent acquisition leaders to benchmark the full funnel, from click to application to hire, rather than optimizing for top-of-funnel metrics alone.
A high apply rate is only valuable if candidates are moving through the pipeline in reasonable proportions. Disposition data helps surface where candidates are dropping off, and whether the issue lies in the attraction phase, the screening process, or somewhere in between.
The full 2026 Recruitment Marketing Benchmark Report is available for download at appcast.io.
