This executive roundtable works through where those candidates go and why. 78% of candidates visit a career site before applying anywhere else, which makes it the highest-intent traffic most employers have. Even so, 60% of the average talent acquisition budget goes to buying jobseeker traffic from paid media rather than converting the traffic already arriving.
The specific friction points: requiring registration on the career site drives roughly 60% drop-off. Every additional page in an ATS application workflow costs another 38%. 72% of people apply for jobs exclusively on a mobile phone, while most ATS workflows are built desktop-first for internal users. The panel also gets into why average cost per hire has stayed near $4,700 for a decade, why a 10% improvement in career site conversion cuts that figure by roughly half, and why paying 89 cents for an unqualified click and receiving 450 applicants per job is a targeting problem rather than a volume one.
Chapters
00:00 Why the career site is the new storefront
02:34 What career sites actually look like to candidates
04:22 Career site benchmarks: 78% visit first, 60% of TA budget on paid traffic
06:34 Treating the career site as a revenue channel, not an HR resource
08:35 Why employers fund job ads but not the destinations they point to
11:39 Why TA owns hiring outcomes but not career site infrastructure
18:42 Conversion over volume: where career site visitors get lost
20:19 Setting career site conversion baselines
22:07 What changes when budget shifts from acquisition to conversion
24:38 Is applicant volume a proxy for bad targeting?
26:38 Application friction: registration walls, ATS pages and mobile
30:21 Good friction versus bad friction
33:32 Helping candidates find the right job before they apply
36:02 Why legacy ATS platforms are hard to escape
42:34 Hidden talent pools in your existing database
47:23 Why candidate re-engagement is still an afterthought
50:51 Source tracking, last-click attribution and ATS limits
53:10 Cost per qualified application versus cost per hire
55:12 Breaking job board dependency: closing takeaways
Speakers
Matt Charney, Principal Analyst, Kyle & Co. (host)
Sam Fitzroy, Founder and CEO, Dalia
Carrie Corbin, Managing Partner, Hope Leigh Marketing
Michael Goldberg, Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition, US Renal Care
About Dalia
Dalia is a candidate conversion platform for high-volume employers. It surfaces, matches and converts jobseekers who are already aware of your brand, capturing the ones who are not ready to apply yet and re-engaging them across sessions until they do. Employers using Dalia typically see 24 to 38% reductions in Indeed spend and roughly 50% lower cost per hire. https://dalia.co
Recorded 28 April 2026. Second edition of the Dalia executive roundtable series.
#CareerSite #TalentAcquisition #RecruitmentMarketing