If you’re weighing up recruitment marketing platforms, "Gaia vs Adway" is a comparison you’ll want to explore. Both platforms promise automation, efficiency and better candidate attraction. But under the hood, they work in very different ways. This post breaks down those differences and shows where each solution shines.
Adway is a recruitment marketing platform that connects employer brands with talent using paid media automation and social recruiting. Its platform allows employers to build branded job ads and distribute them across five social platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok and Snapchat.
The campaign engine uses fixed rules to determine where and when ads run. Customers can customise branding templates, set budgets and target specific audience demographics. Adway also provides a central dashboard for performance reporting and integrations with major ATS platforms.
Its strength lies in simplifying paid media execution for in-house recruitment teams and employer branding specialists.
Gaia is built for a fundamentally different goal: maximum performance, not just presence. While Adway uses predefined rule logic, Gaia’s platform is trained on 1 billion real-world hiring signals to continuously optimise which candidates see which roles, on which channels, and when.
Gaia campaigns don’t just look great; they adapt in real time. Smart targeting algorithms select the best mix of platforms (Google Display, Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Pinterest, Snapchat), and cookie-free retargeting brings back interested candidates even after they leave your site.
Where Adway delivers a polished employer brand ad, Gaia delivers this plus applicants via a 45-second mobile-first application UX that triples conversion rates versus legacy ATS forms. All this data flows into Gaia’s onestop performance dashboard, and seamless integrations with every major ATS keep metrics and candidate records perfectly in sync.
And unlike Adway’s fully managed model, Gaia gives you control. Choose managed service with GaiaComplete or self-serve with GaiaSelfServe, switch between the two as hiring demands change, and build campaigns at your pace.
Adway clients value its ease-of-use and brand control. Gaia customers, meanwhile, highlight the dramatic lift in outcomes:
“Gaia’s AI-driven strategy helped us reach the right talent faster, overcoming location and skills shortages while strengthening our employer brand. Their precision targeting and datadriven approach made a real difference in how we attract and engage candidates.”
Several customers who previously used Adway or Wonderkind have made the switch to Gaia specifically for its performance-led targeting and flexibility.
If you only need a basic brand presence across a handful of social platforms, Adway can do the job.
But if you want measurable performance that lowers cost per hire and delivers deeper insight, Gaia is purpose-built for you. Especially if you:
Adway helped bring recruitment marketing into the age of social. Gaia takes it into the age of performance.
In a market where hiring budgets are under pressure and job-board channels are collapsing, automation alone isn’t enough. You need intelligent targeting, real-time optimisation and channel breadth. Gaia delivers all three.
Ready to see it in action? Book a demo of GaiaComplete.