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Je Best Candidates

Are Scrolling,

Not Applying

A UK Perspective on Modern Talent Acquisition

By Niels Geominy

Let's start with a simple question.

Before you checked your email this morning, did you open a feed?

Not your email, not a newspaper, not your ATS. A feed. Instagram. LinkedIn. YouTube. TikTok. Whatever your digital morning ritual looks like.

If you did, you're normal. If you didn't—well, congratulations. You're a rare specimen, and I'd love to study your habits.

Here's why this matters for recruitment:

Your best candidates aren't sitting at their laptops thinking, "I should look for a new job today." They're employed. They're busy. They're living their lives. And yes, they're scrolling.

I'm Niels. I've got two master's degrees that I essentially never used because I fell into building recruitment technology instead. My first business was a job board, and there I learned that attention is the upstream variable in recruitment. If you never get seen, nothing else in your funnel matters.

Today, I want to make one idea feel obvious, backed by UK data you can cite in your next leadership meeting:

If you want to reach the best people—including those who aren't actively job hunting—you need to show up where their attention already lives. And that place is feed-shaped.

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The Attention Reality

Half of UK Online Time Sits With Two Company Families

51%

of all time spent online by UK adults goes to Meta & Alphabet

2 hours 18 minutes per day, just inside these two company families

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The Environment

What "Normal" Looks Like in the UK

4h

30m

UK adults online daily

6h

20m

Ages 18-24 online daily

Highest usage group

77%

of online time on smartphones

Mobile-first reality

The mental picture is wrong: Recruiting isn't someone sitting down with a laptop. They're scrolling on their phone.

Source: Ofcom Online Nation Report 2025, Figure 1

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The Context Shift

LinkedIn Is Job Mode.

I'm Talking About Life Mode.

The People You Actually Want

Good people who would move for the right role, but are not raising their hand right now.

Passive candidates are reachable, but only in passive contexts.

Smartphone App Reach (UK Adults)

92%

Facebook

85%

YouTube

72%

Instagram

67%

TikTok (18-34: 65%)

46%

Source: Ofcom Online Nation Report 2025, Figure 14

Here's a reflex I hear constantly in recruitment:

"We're hiring professionals. They're on LinkedIn. SO We'll advertise there."

Fair enough—when people are actively job hunting, yes, they're for sure also doing that on LinkedIn.

But that's not the game I'm talking about today.

I'm talking about the people who aren't job hunting. The ones you actually want. The people who would move for the right role but aren't actively looking for it yet.

LinkedIn is where people go in job mode. I'm talking about life mode.

People don't enter the internet through a job board. They enter through a small set of apps they open every single day, long before they ever think about a job move.

Ofcom publishes reach data for the UK's most-used smartphone apps. In May 2025:

WhatsApp reached 92% of UK online adults
Facebook app reached 85%
Google Maps reached 77%
TikTok reached 46% overall—and hit 65% among 18-34 year-olds

I know gen z is even using tiktok as search engine, and I’ve tried it too, it’s scarily good.

Let's try a quick test tho, to illustrate the idea i’m hinting at:

Hands up if you're in recruitment or talent acquisition.� Great. Keep your hand up, that’s almost all of you.

Now, keep your hands up if you use Instagram.� Keep your hands up if you use YouTuube.� Keep your hands up if you use Facebook.� Who here uses TikTok?

You see the point, right? Even among recruiters, who’s bread and butter is LinkedIn, LinkedIn doesn't own all daily attention.

So the idea is: Passive candidates are reachable, but only in passive contexts.

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Cross-Border Validation

Europe Tells the Same Story

97%

Daily internet use

EU ages 16-29, 2024

88%

Social network participation

Same age group

The attention format is the same: mobile, app-based, feed-led — whether you hire in the UK or across borders.

Source: Eurostat 2024

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Market Signals

Follow the Money

£35.5bn

UK digital ad spend, 2024

↑ 13% year-on-year

£8.3bn

Video display spend

↑ 20% year-on-year

64% of all online display spend is now video

The Uncomfortable Truth

Most recruitment advertising still looks like: job description screenshots, logos, generic "we're hiring" banners.

But you're competing against the entertainment industry. Against creators. Against consumer brands.

Same Feed.

Same Auction.

Different Creative Standards.

Source: IAB UK Digital Adspend 2024

So attention pulls advertising. And advertising spend reveals where the market places its bets.

IAB UK reports that UK digital ad spend reached £35.5 billion in 2024, up 13% year-over-year. An interesting detail for recruitment teams here: video display grew 20% to £8.3 billion, and more than half of all online display spend now goes to video.

The market is telling you what wins attention: video, in feeds, on mobile.

Now here's where it might get uncomfortable for some of you here.

Most recruitment advertising still looks like recruitment advertising. A screenshot of a job description. A company logo. Maybe a stock photo of diverse people in a meeting room. A big Job Alert sticker in the corner. We’ve all seen them, and maybe even used them.

Meanwhile, you're not competing against other employers for attention. You're competing against the entertainment industry. Against creators. Against consumer brands. Against every company on Earth trying to win the same two seconds of thumb-stopping attention.

Same auctions. Same scroll. Same thumb.

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Detour to the Netherlands

Quick personal detour.

I was recently at a recruitment tech meetup in the Netherlands. Smart people, CEOs of the biggest Recruitment Tech companies of our little country, veeeery confident energy. The vibe in the room was essentially: "We're the Netherlands. We lead in European recruitment tech."

And I had never heard that the Netherlands was leading in recruitment tech. So the energy was a bit like this.��I remember thinking: okay, if you're genuinely leading, it should show up somewhere measurable. Not in conference speeches—in actual behavior.

So I opened the Meta Ad Library - a public database almost nobody in recruitment actually uses. It's imperfect, but it's real, it's transparent, and it shows what ads are currently running for each company out there.

Here's what I did.

I filtered the Ad Library to employment-related ads, then ran simple keyword searches using common call-to-action phrases:

UK keyword: "apply"
Dutch keyword: "solliciteer" which means Apply.

I captured total results across the last 13 months.

The result genuinely shocked me.

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The Data Surprise

A closer look at The Netherlands vs UK

Meta Ad Library Employment Ads Comparison

UK Total Ads

115,800

13-month rolling window

Netherlands Total Ads

444,000

3.83× the volume

Per Million People

UK: 1,666 | NL: 24,396

14.6×

higher in NL

Vacancy check: NL has ~2× more vacancies per capita, not 15×. The gap isn't explained by job openings.

Source: Meta Ad Library, ONS, CBS | Directional proxy, not spend or outcomes

Across those 13 months:

UK total results: 115,800 ads
Netherlands total results: 444,000 ads

That's almost 4 times the volume from a country with a much smaller population.

So the Netherlands shows far more total volume in this proxy.

When you normalize for population (69.5M in UK, 18.2M in Netherlands), the per-capita difference is even starker—roughly 15 times more employment ads per million people in the Netherlands.

I'm not here to declare the Netherlands "ahead." That would be lazy analysis. But I am comfortable saying this:

Inside one of the two ecosystems, Meta, that own half of the online time of people, the Netherlands appears to be pushing far more employment advertising volume than the UK.

And that raises the only question worth asking: Why?

Because if there's a gap, there's also an opportunity.

So let me ask you a question again:

Please hands up if your team currently runs any paid hiring campaigns on Meta.

Keep your hand up if you refresh these creatives at least monthly.

I saw you put your hand down: could you please shout out what stops you from refreshing content? Is this content volume, measurement capability, or internal confidence?

…��Okay yeah, I’ve heard …, …, and …��Let me address the elephant in the room.

Some of you are thinking:

‘Fine. Maybe the Netherlands runs more ads.� But are people actually job hunting on Instagram?’

That’s a fair question.

And the answer is:� No. They’re not.”

(Short pause.)

“And that’s exactly the point.”

Short pause…

I’m not claiming everyone is actively job hunting on instagram, in a feed.

I’m claiming something more precise.�A meaningful fraction of high-quality candidates can be influenced—but only if you can appear in passive contexts with low-friction actions.

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Diagnostic Framework

Where Did It Break?

Attention

No visibility

Metric: Impressions, reach

→

Intent

No interest

Metric: Engagement, clicks

→

Conversion

Path too hard

Metric: Applications, starts

→

Quality

Wrong fit

Metric: Hires, retention

When someone says "We tried social, it didn't work," you don't ask which platform. You ask where it broke.

That goes something like this: �People scroll. They see something. They form an impression. They save it. Maybe they follow a page. They mention it to a friend. Then weeks later, they apply. Or they don't apply, but they take your call when you reach out, because you're now familiar rather than unknown.

This is how buying decisions work. Career moves are also decisions.

So instead of arguing about channels like it's a religious debate, I prefer a simple measurement framework, displayed on the slide now. Four words, in order:

Attention. Intent. Conversion. Quality.

If you can't measure those four stages, you end up with the classic complaint: "We tried social media. It didn't work."

That sentence is meaningless unless you can identify which stage broke.��And now we get to the part you probably hear everybody about today. Two letters. AI.

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Practical Application

Where AI Actually Helps

No Hype. Just Production Cost.

Before

1 idea → 1 asset → long approval loop

Now

Many drafts → fast review → faster iteration

The constraint moved from production to judgment.

What Changed

Last year: 3 video variants took days and a painful queue

This week: 10 drafts in minutes, spend time on judgment

What Didn't Change

Humans still own truth, taste, and brand. AI removes the bottleneck of "we can't make enough to test."

Most AI discourse swings between hype and fear. I'm interested in neither.

I'm interested in one practical thing: AI changes the cost of producing variations.

If you accept the earlier uncomfortable truth—that you're competing with entertainment companies for attention—then "one safe, rather boring creative asset" isn't a strategy. It's an expensive way to be ignored.

Historically, the excuse was valid: "We can't produce enough content."

Fair. Video production is hard. Creative takes time. Stakeholders want approval rounds. You end up with one piece of creative that tries to please everyone and ends up pleasing nobody.

Here's what changed for me personally:

Last year, making three decent video variants would take days and an awkward production queue. This week, I can spin up ten drafts in an hour and spend the time on judgment instead of production.

AI shifts that production curve. Not because it magically creates perfect content or ads (it doesn't), but because it removes the bottleneck of "we can't make enough." That doesn't eliminate the need for taste, authenticity, or judgment. It just moves the constraint from production to decision-making.

This is where I want to show you something concrete.

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Three Ads.

Ad 1

Ad 2

Ad 3

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The Reveal

Three Ads.

One Plot Twist.

Ad 1

AI-Generated

Ad 2

AI-Generated

Ad 3

Every single one was AI-generated. Made with RecruitmentAds.com — job inputs into feed-native video drafts, fast.

The Point Isn't "AI is Magic"

Creative iteration became cheap enough to behave like performance marketers.

The Conversation Shifts

From "Should we do feeds?" to "What do we test?"

AI-Generated

Ad 2

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Your Best Candidates

Aren't Ignoring You

They're just busy watching something else.

That's not bad news. That's a map.

Feed-First

Video-Shaped

Diagnosed

Iterated

A

Free Competitor Feed Audit

What your market is running, what looks strong, what looks lazy, and where the white space is.

B

Creative System Demo

How to produce feed-native video ads quickly and consistently.

Full deck + supporting data

Built to forward internally

Free 15 minute call for A or B recruitmentads.com/demo

If you take nothing else from this, take this:

Your best candidates aren't ignoring you. They're just busy watching something else.

And that means there's opportunity. Not for louder recruiting, but for smarter recruiting.

Feed-first. Video-shaped. Measured by stage. Improved through iteration.

This isn't experimental anymore. It's modern distribution for modern attention.

If you want the full slide deck and supporting data, scan the QR code. It's built to be forwarded internally to whoever controls your recruitment marketing budget.

And if you want hands-on help in two specific ways, choose one:

Option A: We'll run a competitor feed audit with you—what your market is actually running, what's working, what's lazy, and where there's white space you can exploit.

Option B: We'll show you our creative system—how to produce and test feed-native video ads quickly and consistently, without hiring an agency.

That's it.

Thank you. Let's open it up for questions.