Matt Charney hosts Sam Fitzroy, co-founder of candidate conversion platform Dalia, and Claire McTaggart, founder of SquarePeg, for an hour on what actually happens between a candidate’s first click and a hire. Recorded March 31, 2026.
What the panel covers:
Recruiters now carry 56 percent more open reqs than they did in 2022 while working with a quarter fewer colleagues. At the same time, mass-application tools and AI resume rewriting have stripped nearly all friction out of applying, so volume climbs while signal falls. Claire notes that for remote tech roles, up to 25 percent of applicants can be fraudulent.
Sam’s position on spend: roughly 70 percent of all employer job board spend goes to Indeed, and most employers never separate organic performance from sponsored. Employers who start tracking that split are typically overspending by at least 50 percent, and can cut it by half or more with no drop in hires. Career site applicants are hired far more often than applicants who arrive from external boards without ever seeing the company.
Claire’s position on evaluation: keyword filtering and Boolean no longer work against resumes that were written by AI to contain those exact keywords. The answer is not more filters, it is research on what candidates actually did and workflows personalized to the job type.
Practical fixes named in the session:
Open your own career site on a phone, hold it in one hand, and navigate with your thumb. Compliance banners and misplaced buttons cover the apply path more often than teams think.
Stop making the top of the funnel email-only. People hold email addresses, they do not read email.
Ask candidates for the minimum at application stage, then ask for more only after you have signalled real interest back.
Measure speed to first contact, not time to fill.
Give the conversion metric an owner, or nobody is accountable for it.
Chapters:
0:00 Introductions: Dalia, SquarePeg, and the format 2:01 The capacity crunch: more applicants, more reqs, fewer recruiters 4:56 Why Dalia was built, and how the problem changed after 2021 7:29 Why SquarePeg was built: robo-apply, fraud, and noise at the top 10:20 Why more applicants is not better, and why Dalia added 2FA 11:41 If 90 percent of hires are internal or referral, does inbound matter? 14:59 Where referrals run out: healthcare, skilled trades, hourly 16:18 The easiest career site fix: get off email and test on a phone 18:11 Keyword filters versus AI-optimized resumes 20:40 The misconception that inbound has no qualified applicants 22:36 The economics: cost per unconverted applicant and where TA budget goes 23:56 70 percent of job board spend is Indeed: track organic versus sponsored 26:19 Making the CFO case that less volume is better 30:42 Why conversion projects fail inside big companies 32:42 What improves downstream when top-of-funnel conversion improves 33:45 Personalizing workflows by job type and fraud signal 37:43 All-in-one platforms versus point solutions 39:44 Vendors that make the client do all the work 42:46 Employer brand versus career site technology 45:18 How much to ask of a candidate, and when to ask for it 49:27 Does employer brand still matter when candidates robo-apply? 51:32 Why career site applicants get hired more often 53:00 The next 18 to 24 months: always-on sourcing, and the end of ghosting 56:07 Building a TA stack for conversion from scratch 58:15 Three takeaways for TA leaders 59:55 Where to reach the panel
About Dalia: Dalia is a candidate conversion platform. Employers using Dalia see 24 to 38 percent reductions in Indeed spend and roughly 50 percent lower cost per hire by converting the career site traffic they are already paying for. Career site applicants are about 3x more likely to be hired than applicants from external sources, and a standard career site converts under 5 percent of visitors into applicants, which runs about 3x higher when the site is fully maximized.
Free 30 Day Audit of Dalia’s Premium Conversion Products: https://www.dalia.co/audit
Guests: Sam Fitzroy, Co-Founder and CEO, Dalia. sam@dalia.co Claire McTaggart, Founder, SquarePeg. claire@squarepeg.ai Matt Charney, Principal Analyst. matt@mattcharney.com
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