Talent Hunt 2026 showcased some excellent recruiters and the many ways recruitment can be done. But one question stayed with me after the conference.
If a job ad appeals to a great many people, it will probably attract many candidates. But what do we actually gain from that volume of applications?
Every application needs to be reviewed in some way. Someone screens, compares, writes, calls and interviews. That takes time. And time costs money.
We might go through a hundred candidates only to discover that the right person was not among them.
The money has been spent. There is no result.
But hiring someone does not yet mean the investment has begun to pay off.
Next come onboarding. Training. Equipment. The time of managers and colleagues. At first, someone else does part of the work, checks it, explains things and corrects mistakes. All of this is a cost too.
Eventually, the new hire reaches the point where they can work independently and begin creating the value the company expected.
How long do they stay after that? And will the value they create even repay the entire investment made up to that point?
If someone leaves soon after training, the whole undertaking may have made a loss. And now we start the same cycle of costs again.
For me, that is the central question in recruitment. How much do we invest in total, and how much do we get back?
In that sense, recruitment is pure mathematics.
Yet we too often judge its success by the number of candidates, the speed of filling the role or the direct cost of hiring. Those measures are useful, but none of them alone tells us whether we made a good investment for the company.
Someone hired quickly and cheaply may turn out to be very expensive. A longer, costlier search can repay itself many times over if the person fits the role, reaches independent productivity quickly and creates value for years.
And that brings me back to the job ad.
At the other extreme is an ad so specific that nobody applies. But the question is how we make it specific.
Do we write a long list of requirements? Or do we describe the work so that the right person recognises the opportunity they have been looking for?
What will they be able to do in this job? What problems will they solve? What will they be responsible for? Which strengths can they use? What way of working and which challenges will genuinely appeal to them?
This is also one of the things Sparkly helps people understand about themselves: which work activities they need in order to use their strengths and feel good at work.
We can use that knowledge when writing a job ad. Describe the opportunity so that someone wants to apply because of the work itself.
Kersti Vannas repeatedly raised the question of channels at the conference. In which medium will the message appear? The channel shapes the format.
But where does the potential employee actually spend their time? In which professional communities, groups or channels? Recruiters should know that too. Otherwise, we may pay to distribute a message somewhere the person we need will never see it.
If the message and channel are more precise, we may get fewer candidates. But if more of them are suitable, we spend less time reviewing applications and reach meaningful conversations sooner.
That is already a financial gain.
The same logic applies to entry-level roles. A person does not have to be looking for a major career leap. They may be looking for work whose pace and tasks suit them, and which they want to do for a long time. For the company, what matters is how quickly they learn the job, how well they do it and how long they create value.
All of this can and should be measured: the total time and money spent on recruitment, the cost of training and onboarding, the time until independent productivity, the length of employment and the value created during that time.
Yes, this data is often scattered across different systems. Some of it is in recruitment software, some in HR and payroll systems, and some in systems that track work results. Bringing it together can be difficult.
But that is no reason to settle for simpler, more distant measures. We need to bring it together. It can be done.
We can supplement gut feeling with a calculation that shows whether our hiring decision paid off.
A large number of candidates is not the desired outcome. The desired outcome is the right person, who stays for a long time and creates more value than the investment made in hiring them.
An expanded version of Talent Hunt was promised for next year. We will see whether these numbers play a bigger part. In the meantime, we can keep practising this approach at Sparkly.
Mikk Orglaan, Sparkly.hr CEO