Job advertising and passive candidates: the guide

The best profiles are rarely actively looking. They do not visit job boards, do not upload their CV and do not answer job ads. To recruit them, you have to reverse the logic: stop waiting for their application and go and find them where they spend their time, with the methods of digital advertising. This guide explains how.

What is a passive candidate?

A passive candidate is an employed person who is not actively looking for a job, but who remains open to an opportunity if it matches their expectations. They do not visit job boards and do not apply spontaneously: you have to come to them to spark their interest.

In practice, there are three profiles on the labour market:

• Active candidates: looking for a job, they visit job boards, apply and update their CV.
• Open passive candidates: employed, they will listen to a well-presented opportunity, but will never take the first step themselves.
• Closed passive candidates: satisfied with their situation, they will only move for an exceptional offer.

Passive candidates are the majority on the labour market. On Seeqle campaigns, 80% of the profiles reached are passive profiles, reached through display, audio and social networks: targeted advertising is designed precisely for this population.

Why are job boards no longer enough?

Job boards only reach candidates who are actively looking, a minority of the market. For hard-to-fill jobs, this minority is already over-solicited: the same CVs circulate between all recruiters, and difficult positions stay vacant despite growing job ad budgets.

The French context illustrates the problem. According to France Travail's labour-needs survey (Besoins en main-d'œuvre), 50.1% of hiring projects were rated difficult by employers in 2025, and still 43.8% in 2026. Even in a period of slower hiring, nearly one hire in two remains complicated. The reason is structural: for these jobs, the candidates available on job boards are too few compared with the needs.

Three concrete limits of job boards alone:

1. A restricted pool: only active candidates are there, and they are the minority of qualified profiles.
2. Head-on competition: every company in the sector posts in the same place, at the same time.
3. A waiting logic: the job ad hopes to be found; it does not go looking for anyone.

Sources: France Travail, Besoins en main-d'œuvre surveys 2025 and 2026.

Where do passive candidates spend their time?

On social networks, mobile apps, streaming platforms and content sites. In France, internet users spend more than 3 hours a day online, around 80% of it on mobile. That is where job advertising can reach them, not on job boards.

Médiamétrie's figures for 2025 show the scale of the phenomenon:

A site manager, a nurse or a maintenance technician may never visit a job board, but they scroll Instagram in the evening, listen to Spotify in the car and watch TikTok during their break. Targeted job advertising means placing a relevant opportunity in those moments.

Sources: Médiamétrie, L'Année Internet 2025, published February 2026.

How does targeted advertising reach passive candidates?

It turns the job offer into an ad shown on the social networks, apps and sites the target audience uses, based on professional criteria (job, skills, location, interests). The candidate does not need to search: the opportunity comes to them.

The mechanism rests on three building blocks:

• Audience targeting: the profile sought is defined from professional and behavioural criteria. Programmatic platforms build precise audiences; Seeqle, for example, relies on 5,100+ professional audiences and more than 400,000 targeting criteria to distribute on more than 2 million sites and apps, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Spotify and Google.
• The ad creative: the text job ad becomes a visual or a short video, with a message focused on the candidate's benefit (pay, schedule, location, career progression), not on the job description.
• A simplified application journey: a short, mobile-optimised form, with no account to create. A passive candidate will never fill in a twenty-field form.

This approach works because it respects the passive candidate's psychology: they do not want to "apply", they want to assess an opportunity in a few seconds, from their phone.

Which ad formats convert best?

Short, native and mobile formats: 15 to 30-second vertical video, image carousels, stories and audio. The message must answer the passive candidate's question within a few seconds: "what's in it for me?". Long, corporate formats convert poorly with this audience.

Guidelines by channel:

Three core rules, whatever the channel:

1. A concrete benefit in the first 3 seconds: pay, proximity, hours, training.
2. Proof: an employee testimonial, real behind-the-scenes footage, a verifiable figure.
3. A frictionless call to action: "apply in 2 minutes", a mobile form, no mandatory CV at first contact.

How do you measure a job advertising campaign?

By tracking the full funnel: impressions, clicks, cost per click, applications, cost per application, then qualification rate and hires. Application volume alone is not enough: a campaign is judged on the cost per application relative to the qualification rate and, ultimately, on the cost per hire.

The indicators to track, in funnel order:

• Impressions and reach: how many people in the target audience saw the message, and how many times.
• CPC (cost per click): measures how attractive the message is and how relevant the targeting is.
• Form conversion rate: a low rate signals an application journey that is too heavy.
• Cost per application: the first economic indicator that can be compared between channels.
• Qualification rate: the share of applications that genuinely match the criteria of the role. This is the decisive indicator: an average of 53% is observed across Seeqle campaigns, whereas a traditional job ad often generates a majority of off-target applications.
• Cost per hire and time to fill: the only figures that interest senior management.

Good management practices: compare channels on cost per application relative to the qualification rate rather than on raw cost per application, reallocate the budget every week to the channels that perform, and test two or three messages in parallel on each audience.

What results can you expect from a targeted campaign?

A well-targeted campaign greatly widens reach, lowers acquisition cost and produces mostly passive applications, which are therefore absent from competitors' pools. Results vary by job and area, but measurable gains appear in the first weeks.

A few documented cases:

• Canal+ tripled the reach of its student audience (work-study students in the first and second year of a master's degree) compared with its previous campaigns, with a CPC down 25%, over a 3-week campaign (Canal+ case study).
• Anett Kalhyge obtained 115 maintenance technician candidates in 20 days, for a very hard-to-fill job.
• Rothelec reaches 45% qualified applications on its sales campaigns, and Stanley Field 42%.

These orders of magnitude illustrate the principle: when the target is well defined and the message suits the channel, passive candidates respond. What these campaigns have in common is that they combine broad distribution with systematic qualification of the responses, so that the additional volume does not turn into a screening overload for recruiters.

How do you get started with targeted job advertising?

Start with a hard-to-fill role, define the target precisely, launch a multichannel test campaign over 3 to 4 weeks with a controlled budget, then measure the cost per application and the qualification rate before extending. Specialised platforms automate the setup and make testing accessible without media expertise.

A five-step roadmap:

1. Choose the right use case: a recurring, difficult job where the active pool is exhausted.
2. Define the audience: job criteria, geographic radius, professional interest signals.
3. Produce two or three creatives suited to the chosen channels, focused on the candidate's benefit.
4. Launch and let it learn: distribution algorithms need a few days to optimise.
5. Measure and decide: cost per application and qualification rate by channel, then budget reallocation.

The technical barrier has disappeared: specialised tools launch a multichannel campaign in a few minutes from a simple job offer, with entry plans of a few hundred euros per month. The real investment is strategic: accepting that recruiting passive candidates is a marketing discipline, with its tests, messages and metrics, and not simply a matter of posting job ads.