Originally posted as article on UKRecruiter.co.uk.

Over the past decade, Indeed and LinkedIn have become the undisputed giants in staffing media. Their vast reach, scale, and product development have rightfully earned them a core place in nearly every staffing firm’s media plan. But with that dominance has come an increasing sense of over-reliance—one that’s being felt more acutely this Summer than ever before.

There are two urgent drivers for exploring alternative Candidate sources. In the short term, Indeed’s intentions around minimum daily budgets will likely increase your media costs by 20-30% for the same Candidates. Then, in the long term, you know that Indeed will ultimately drive to remove Staffing firms from the journey, like they did with our job board customers.

Already, with rising minimum spends, evolving platform rules, and steady increases in cost-per-click and cost-per-application (CPA), many staffing firms are seeing the added value of these platforms decline, even as their budgets remain anchored to them. In theory, these platforms offer the efficiency of scale. In practice, they are becoming harder to scale efficiently.

And the consequence? Too often, everything else gets overlooked.

The Hidden Cost of Over-Reliance

When major platforms dominate your media plan, it also shapes your candidate funnel, cost structure, and ultimately your risk exposure. Changes to bidding models, spend thresholds, and algorithms can have immediate and outsized impacts on lead flow and cost-per-hire.

It’s not that Indeed or LinkedIn are no longer useful—they remain important. But they’re no longer sufficient. And for staffing firms chasing tight SLAs, urgent requisitions, and squeezed margins, relying too heavily on them is strategically limiting.

Despite this, alternative channels—job aggregators, social platforms, niche job sites, display retargeting, and even paid search—often remain under-funded or operationally deprioritised. Not because they lack value, but because why would you commit the resource when the big two seem to “just work.”

Marginal Gains Come From Media Mix

As the economics of core platforms continue to shift, the search for marginal gains—small, measurable improvements in CPA, fill rate, or reach—has become a major theme in 2025 media planning. And in many cases, those gains aren’t coming from squeezing another 5% out of Indeed or LinkedIn—they’re coming from bringing the “long tail” of performance media into the light.

Channels like Meta, TikTok, Reddit, Adzuna, ZIP, Talent.com, niche boards, and Google Search all offer proven reach into under-tapped talent pools. They may not be able to match Indeed’s volume on their own, but collectively, they represent a significant opportunity to diversify, control costs, and reduce reliance on any single supplier.

These channels also tend to offer:

• Lower CPAs for specific role types (especially volume and early-career)

• CPA buying instead of CPC (which Indeed stepped back from)

• Access to passive or semi-active candidates not actively job searching

• Flexibility with budget caps, job-level targeting, and campaign timelines

The issue hasn’t been potential—it’s been practicality.

Why the “Everything Else” Bucket Stalls

In many staffing firms, media outside of LinkedIn and Indeed falls into an informal category: “everything else.” And this is where things often break down.

“Everything else” typically means:

• Extra logins and workflows

• No unified performance data

• No consistent CPA targets

• No clear owner internally

And so, despite its potential, this pool of opportunity remains fragmented, under-managed, and underperforming.

One Managed Campaign, One Outcome: CPA

Instead of asking internal teams to manage multiple small platforms, budgets, and dashboards, more staffing firms are turning to managed performance media campaigns that consolidate all those sources into a single, CPA-optimised campaign.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Unified access to social, aggregators, search, and display

• No minimum spend per job or platform

• CPA targets, tracked across all media

• Dynamic allocation of budget to whichever channel performs best

• One reporting dashboard and campaign manager

It also means these firms can:

• Decrease their dependency on Indeed 

• Tap into niche and passive talent pools

• Lower their blended CPA

• Adapt faster to changes in core platform performance

• Run experiments without long-term commitment

In short, they turn “everything else” into a controlled, scalable, performance-led channel that complements their investment in Indeed and LinkedIn—without the platform risk.

Diversification as a Competitive Edge

In a market where staffing margins are under pressure and candidate demand can shift week to week, media agility is a competitive advantage. Firms that can allocate budget across multiple sources, and measure ROI in real time, are better positioned to respond to shifts in volume, cost, and urgency.

It’s no longer about replacing Indeed or LinkedIn. It’s about making sure they’re not the only levers you can pull. Staffing firms must now diversify media to manage both cost and control.

Final Thought

2025 is the year to rethink how staffing media is planned, prioritised, and measured. The best-performing firms won’t be the ones who bet everything on scale, they’ll be the ones who manage diversity with discipline.

Where to start

Whether you’re trying to reduce CPA, access niche roles, or simply regain control over rising platform costs, expanding your channel mix through a single, performance-led campaign could be the difference between hitting or missing your goals.

Understanding clearly where your business gets value from its current mix, and exploring the advantages of a broader reach, challenging the trend for spending more on a few, dominant platforms, could be the key to opening up competitive and financial gains this Autumn.