Recruiting organizations are faced with more sourcing choices today than ever before.  And they are constantly looking for ways and insight to make sense of them.

It’s no secret that having the right data is extremely important to this process.  If used properly, metrics enable companies to make crucial recruitment campaign decisions that successfully drive sourcing results.

However, it’s not just about capturing the “right” data but just as much about capturing the “right” data accurately.  This is an important distinction.  Many organizations understand what data they need to be collecting and the value that this data brings.  But many of them are confused on how to capture this data to ensure near 100% accuracy.

The fact is if you are using data that you can’t guarantee is accurate to make your decisions, you may as well just make educated guesses.  Why spend the time capturing and analyzing the data when an educated guess is what you are doing anyway?  Accurate data is crucial to making informed and better strategic decisions and needs to be a focus of your recruiting organization.

So in what areas should you focus on the accuracy of your data?

Here are a few areas that many organizations fail to ensure quality in the data they are capturing:

Relying on Candidate Self-Reported Data:  Many ATS provide a way for organizations to ask a candidate where they heard about the position from during the apply process.  While a good idea in theory, the actual execution of this feature produces some of the most inaccurate data you can collect in recruiting.

In this instance, the candidate is not to be trusted.  For the apply process, they are concentrating on making sure all their information is correct from their resume to references to contact information.  The last thing they are thinking about is providing an accurate recruitment source for their application.  And in many cases, they may choose the Career Site or Referral because they think it might be favorable to getting an interview.

There is absolutely no reason that you shouldn’t be able to accurately track the recruitment source of every application.  With ATS source-code tracking and a job distribution technology, you can easily ensure that you know every source that is leading to applications in your ATS.  This data can help you determine what sources are providing you with the most bang for your buck in terms of converting both applicants and hires.

Career Site Tracking:  How accurately are you tracking your Career Site data not only in terms of web page views and search engine keywords but also for source of applicants and hires?  Many Career Sites today have trouble capturing and understanding where candidates come from into the Career Site unless they create landing pages (which may or may not be an option).  One major problem in the tracking is determining source after a candidate navigates off the initial webpage to other areas of the Career Site.  In these cases, the source and data is often confused or lost.

However, there are Career Site Optimization technologies that can track the initial source for any Career Site visitor no matter where they navigate on the Career Site.  By tracking the full session, it will enable your organization to append the source if the candidate applies for a position and understand how candidates are interacting with your Career Site and recruitment marketing content.

Ignoring everything before the applicant:  While tracking source of applicant is extremely important (examples above) there is a wealth of data before a candidate applies that can be just as valuable.  Capturing views and apply clicks in addition to applicant and contact data can provide you with insight into bottlenecks in your recruitment marketing funnel.

From the effectiveness of your job ads to understanding candidate drop off rate in your application these recruitment metrics help you understand where in your funnel you are excelling and where you can improve.

Applicant and hire data are the meat and potatoes of the recruitment data you are collecting, however, the recruitment marketing metrics earlier in the process can help you improve the process to bolster and improve this applicant flow.

There has been a lot of talk about how metrics can get HR and recruiting a seat at the table.  But I think it’s simpler than that.  Accurate data and metrics can help recruiting organizations better allocate their resources and make better overall decisions on their recruiting strategy.  Both of which will lead to increased results for the organization and it will go from pleading your case to already proving it.

You can connect with me on Twitter @smashfly!