300+ fresh CVs for under €1,200 — by walking away from the job boards
Top Jobs Abroad places candidates into international language roles. Rather than keep competing for the same recycled job-board candidates every rival agency already has, they opened a candidate channel of their own — paid campaigns that reach people before the boards do, at €3.20–€4.50 per CV.
The challenge
Top Jobs Abroad's candidate flow ran through the same job boards every competing agency used. That created a problem the boards will never fix: the same candidates apply through several agencies at once.
By the time a CV reached a client, it had often already been submitted by someone else, or was sitting in the client's database from a previous approach. In a placement-fee industry, that is not a minor inefficiency — ownership of the candidate is the entire commercial basis of the business. Duplicate submissions mean wasted work and awkward conversations, and nothing separates one agency's shortlist from the next.
What the business needed was access to candidates nobody else had touched yet.
What we did
Google and Meta campaigns were built specifically for candidate acquisition — with one deliberate constraint that shaped everything.
The job boards were treated as competition to be excluded, not a channel to be matched. Board traffic was pushed out with negative keywords and the campaigns were built around different search terms entirely, so the people arriving were not already circulating in the shared pool. That single decision is what made the candidates genuinely theirs.
Funnels were set up on their own website so every euro of spend had a measurable outcome attached to it, with conversion tracking and continuous A/B testing behind it. The campaigns have run under active management for over six months, holding a steady €3.20–€4.50 per CV.
We also advised on automations for handling the incoming candidate flow, which their team has since put in place.
The results
Over six months, Top Jobs Abroad generated more than 300 CVs for under €1,200 in total ad spend — a cost per CV of €3.20 to €4.50, well below what job-board sourcing costs them, and with candidates who were not already in circulation.
Against placements made, that is roughly a 10x return on ad investment.
The honest ceiling here was their own capacity: as a two-person team, they could only place so many of the candidates they were now attracting. But the candidate data belongs to them. If even ten of those 300+ CVs convert to placements over time, the campaigns return upwards of 30x on what was spent to acquire them.
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