When evaluating the success of your recruitment sourcing strategy, it’s important not to only focus on the final results in terms of time to hire and cost per hire but ultimately look at how you ultimately ended up with these results.  In the end, you want to determine what strategies and sources contributed to your success and what ones were not worth your time.  All so you can improve your strategy for future campaigns.

Now when you look at the performance of your recruitment sources you should look at and track everything you do from a recruitment sourcing perspective.  This includes:

• Job distribution to job boards, niche sites, social media, Google, sponsored listings, etc.  (Anywhere you post a job should be tracked…)
• Sourcing campaigns via resume databases, web sources, Boolean search, your own Talent Pipelines.
• Tracking all activity on your Career Site.  From what keywords drive candidates to your landing pages as well as how they navigate the site once they get there.
• Email & SMS campaigns to candidates that have opted in to your Talent Network.  (Messages should be targeted to the different talent pipelines.)
• Referrals from your employees

However a candidate finds your job before they apply should be measured and tracked for every job campaign you run.  This can give you an idea of what sources provide the most value to your organization.

If you are measuring your recruitment sourcing efforts correctly you should easily be able to answer the following questions about your strategy:

What sources produce the most hires (and qualified candidates)?

Source of Hire is the holy grail of recruiting technology right now.  And while there is a growing terminology debate on Source of Hire vs. Source of Influence, Source of Application for every hire is a very attainable reality today for every recruiting source you use. This functionality can provide you the last source that a hired candidate used before they applied for a position giving you an idea of the sources that produce real value in finding top talent.

Now while it’s very important to track the actual hires from your search, it is also beneficial to track the candidates that got to the hire stage but were the runner-ups.  These are all qualified candidates and the recruitment sources should receive credit for sourcing this quality for your organization.  These candidates are also great contacts that you should add to your Talent Network.

(For reliable results in tracking Source of Application, I would advise straying away from “candidate self-selection” that some ATS provide and lean more to tight source capture that is available in many job distribution solutions.)

Where do I get the best ROI?

Getting hires and qualified candidates are great but at what cost are you achieving these results?  It’s important to consider the “Source of Hire” data above with the monetary cost associated with the sources you use.  This can give you insight into where you should be spending your recruiting budget and provide some real leverage when re-negotiating contracts with job boards and other niche sites (especially if they are under-performing.)

Do my results change for different job types and functions?

Taking a holistic view of your recruitment data is important but sometimes it can be misleading.  Depending on the jobs you recruit for more often, I’d also look at your data in sub-sets based on job types.  Various job types can show wildly different recruitment source results from the norm and this can help you target your recruitment sourcing strategy better for these targeted job populations.  For instance, DICE might be a better source for technology talent but terrible for marketing talent.  I encourage you to test different sources for the various job types you recruit for and then analyze the data to see what sticks.

With the right recruitment metrics and reporting, you should be able to answer all these questions easily.  They will help you compare and contrast the recruitment sources you use and help you better optimize your recruitment strategy for future job campaigns.

You can read the initial post at the following link: http://blog.smashfly.com/2012/06/07/3-s-you-should-be-able-to-answe...

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