What your CFO wants to see from Marketing

“Which of this spend actually led to placements?” 

Every quarter, the same scene plays out: the marketing manager presents impressions, click-through rates, and cost-per-click across LinkedIn, Indeed, and Google Ads. The CFO asks the one question it can't answer. 

“Which of this spend actually led to placements?” 

Nobody can answer it, not because the team isn't working hard, but because the tools weren't built to connect a marketing channel to a placement. This is the structural problem underneath most recruitment marketing ROI conversations. Research from the Digital Marketing Institute indicates that companies without proper attribution models misallocate up to 30% of their marketing budget, pouring money into underperforming channels while starving high-performers.  

This guide covers the metrics your CFO needs to see, why standard dashboards tell the wrong story, and how to build a measurement framework that gets marketing treated as an investment, not a cost centre.