Tips for Tracking Recruitment Campaigns
Why should you be sure you’re tracking your recruitment marketing campaigns? Isn’t it enough that you know they’re bringing in candidates? Frankly, no, not really.
This may look a lot like a list of metrics, and there’s a good reason for that. The ultimate goal of a recruitment marketing campaign is to attract potential candidates, right? So what better way to check that they’re working then to track things like, you know, applicants?
We’ll explain along the way how to use each metric for its intended purpose, if you find ways to use the same numbers for tracking other aspects of your marketing activities, all the better!
1) Source of Hire
ROI and overhead costs have to remain at the front of your mind when you’re laying out new campaigns and evaluating existing ones. Watching for the channels that are sending the most quality applicants into your funnel is key to keeping those costs under control. By analyzing source of hire, you can gain an understanding of which channels are working best for that particular campaign, shut down the under-performers, and funnel the funding over to the top performers.
This works as well for analog channels as well as digital. Referrals, job boards, internal careers listings, and social media platforms are all channels you may be making use of in your marketing campaigns. While the digital ones have built in metrics dashboards (and if they don’t, your automation software should), how do you track the effectiveness of something like employee referrals?
Tracking Tips: There are really two good options here; ATS integration, and surveys. Your ATS most likely has a built in feature (whether it’s activated or not is another question) that allows you to track where an applicant entered the system from. Be sure that’s set up if you have it. And if not, a simple 5 or 6 question survey given to new hires that asks them directly where they found out about the opening is your best option.
2) Current Employee Referral
We know, we just talked about this. It’s an important source of both quality candidates and information on the status of your current employees, so we thought it deserved a bit more detail. Tracking applicants that made their way into the talent pool by way of a friend who already works for your company is a fantastic way to judge how well your employer brand is sitting with current employees. I mean, would you recommend a friend apply to work for your company if you hated it?
Having potential candidates seek you out in order to apply for a position is the goal of any recruitment marketing activity. You’re putting your employer brand out there for the world to see, then watching for action. What you may not be watching for, but absolutely should be, is your army of brand ambassadors in the form of current employees to be doing the same thing on your behalf.
Tracking Tips: Like we mentioned above, a survey given to new hires is your best bet for accurate information. It’s manual, we know, but you’ll get the best, most honest information if you ask about this directly.
3) Applicant Experience
Before you can have happy, engaged employees; you need happy, engaged applicants. That means you need to be tracking them throughout the funnel to ensure all touchpoints are covered, with personalized care and attention paid to email correspondence, chat sessions, phone calls, and so on. This care and attention is how you develop applicants who will rave about you and the service you provided them, and who will turn into that army of brand ambassadors we mentioned above.
Careful tracking of applicants at this stage is also key to having them enter your workforce on a high note. Knowing how they found you is the first step, but knowing about their experience throughout the hiring process is the second and is just as important for knowing the power of your recruitment marketing campaigns. What use are great campaigns if once a person enters the funnel they become disenfranchised by out of touch recruiters, lackluster service and support, and an utter lack of communication?
Tracking Tips: We have to suggest surveys again here. They’re pretty much the only way to effectively measure something as nebulous as user experience. That said, you can use the stats from your CRM and ATS to track the actual contact touchpoints to verify that they’re happy all the way through the process. The combination of manual surveys and automated process tracking will give you a fuller picture of the entire funnel experience.
4) Social Engagement
This is a broad category, covering all of the interactions you have with followers of your blog and your social media presences. It is a great source of data, once you sort out the pieces of information you need from the rest that are superfluous.
Things to monitor include the comments section of your blog, where you can have substantive conversations about topics that matter to you and your audience. This list also includes watching your social media accounts for any “@” mentions you get, in order to respond directly to the user who’s talking about you. That includes the good mentions, and the less-than-good.
Staying on top of all mentions on social media is extremely important since people, even outside of your target audience, will be paying attention to how you respond to criticism. Handling it promptly, clearly, in voice, and in-channel are the best way to diffuse these situations.
Tracking tips: Metric dashboards are available in most platforms, including the CMS (content management system) for your company blog, and Facebook, Twitter, et al have some powerful analytics dashboards for business accounts. Or, if you use recruitment marketing automation software, chances are that tool will have a campaign dashboard where you can track of all the channels used for a given campaign.
5) Quality of Hire
How do you measure something as objective as the quality of a new hire? Since this often listed as the #1 most important metric in all of recruiting, there must be something concrete to look at, right? Yep:
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- Retention rate
- Performance reviews/ramp up time
- Pre-hire metrics including:
- Competing offers
- Time-to-acceptance
- Award-winning or otherwise known in the field
- Passive vs active (passive are often higher quality since they weren’t actually looking to move at the time)
Tracking tips: Surveys (are you sensing a pattern?) to hiring managers for initial satisfaction with the hire as well as follow-ups for performance information. These don’t have to be long or involved, in fact, the shorter and more succinct the more likely you’ll get buy-in from the managers.
Surveys are also your best bet for the less tangible, like finding out if the candidate had competing offers, awards in their field (though that one should be on their resume as well), and whether they were a passive or active job hunter at the time of application.
All of the metrics and tips offered above are only worth the value you place on them. The more time and energy you devote to tracking your recruitment campaigns, the higher quality the data you’ll get out. And the higher quality your data is, the more impact you can have on your hiring process going forward.
About the Author
Adrian Cernat is the CEO and founder of SmartDreamers, a recruitment marketing automation platform that helps companies engage with candidates across the web, powering up their employer brands and building brand gravity in the process. SmartDreamers was founded in 2014 and currently operates in Europe, the US and the APAC region.