For more thoughts on recruitment marketing analytics, check out our post “Why the Time for Talent Analytics in Recruitment is NOW”.

When you look to build a metrics & analytics strategy, what result are you truly looking for?  You aren’t doing it because you just like looking at spreadsheets or you think dashboards are pretty but because you want to gain insight from it.  You want to become smarter and gain knowledge that you can take action on to improve your process and overall strategy.

However, insight can only happen if a few key areas are met:

1. The data you capture is accurate and trustworthy.

2. You have an analytics engine that enables you to easily make meaningful connections between data points and identify key trends.

3. You have all the important data you need in one location for analysis across the data set.

This is becoming extremely important in the recruitment marketing space and is something that needs to be a strength of organizations looking to make their people strategy a competitive advantage.  And it’s number 3 in this group that I really want to focus on in this post.

Silo-ed Data = Silo-ed Insight

In your recruitment marketing strategy today, you are doing a whole host of different initiatives.  This can (and probably does) include job posts (to numerous job boards), social recruiting, mobile, Career Site, SEO, email communications, referral campaigns, proactive sourcing, employer branding, candidate experience and other campaigns.  With each initiative you have data you capture that measures candidate traffic, applicant flow and candidate quality among other metrics.  All of this data that helps you measure the performance of your recruitment initiatives.

When you are capturing this data, organizations run into two main problems:

• They use technologies that are not equipped to accurately capture and display your recruitment marketing data.

• They leverage multiple solutions to handle these initiatives which leads to data being stored in multiple places making it harder to access and analyze.

For the first, this typically means the ATS.  The problem typically stems from not having an easy way to append the right source codes to applicants that enter the system with candidate self selection being the biggest offender of inaccurate data.  Second, ATS reporting is typically focused on applicant tracking data, not recruitment marketing data.  So it’s not just a problem of ensuring that accurate data goes in but also being able to pull relevant analysis out.

For the second, you might be using solutions around CRM, job distribution, SEO / Career Site, mobile, Talent Networks and social referrals.  And you might be using more than one of them in order to cover your full strategy.  Not to mention you may also be doing some of these manually.  In all of these cases, you will either have segmented data within each solution you use and/or will have gaps where you execute manually.  The big problem here is that taking the data you have and integrating it together is incredibly hard especially in real-time.  Add in the lack of analytics capable of making sense of this diverse data and you have an internal data structure that limits your ability to gain insight.

All in all, both of these data techniques severely limit your ability to make meaningful connections and gain actionable knowledge on your strategy, something that will affect your organization not only in the short term but in your long term strategy as well.

Data in one place for all initiatives

When we talk about a recruitment marketing analytics strategy, this is our goal.  We want one place to capture and store key metrics and data for our entire recruitment strategy across all the initiatives we utilize to find and attract candidates.  This enables us to more effectively analyze and identify key trends in the data and evaluate what activities are truly providing the most value to our strategy.

This helps you answer questions like:

• What recruitment sources should I use to advertise my jobs?
• Is social recruiting providing value in my strategy?
• What interactions do candidates have before applying for a job?
• How does my sourcing team’s efforts compare to our job advertisements?  Our employer branding campaigns?
• How many candidates visit our Career Site from mobile devices?  Opt-in to our Talent Network from mobile?  Apply via mobile?
• How do candidates get to our Career Site?  How many through search engines?  Direct Traffic? Job Boards? Other channels?
• How effective are our marketing communications?  To our Talent Network? In our job ads? On our Career Site?
• And most importantly, how does job board performance compare to social recruiting? Referrals? Employer Branding? Career Site? SEO? Mobile? Events? Proactive Sourcing? Talent Network? Other one-off campaigns?

However, these questions can only be answered if you have a technology that enables you to execute and measure all these initiatives.  And this is where the growing category of Recruitment Marketing Platforms comes in.

A Recruitment Marketing Platform is solution that helps organizations execute all their recruitment marketing (think pre-applicant attraction) initiatives.  A single solution to manage and measure your job postings, social recruiting, proactive sourcing, candidate campaigning and engagement, employer branding on your Career Site, SEO, Talent Network and mobile initiatives. And one that integrates fully with your ATS for seamless candidate experience and data capture.

The key here is that because it helps execute every one of these initiatives it can capture and store data in a single location and build a real-time analytics engine on top of this data.  This enables organizations to compare and contrast all these initiatives side by side with the ability to drill down into the data as needed.

Your strategy isn’t silo-ed so your data shouldn’t be either

Let’s face it.  While your recruitment strategy today is diverse, everything you and your recruiting team do is toward the same goal of “attracting qualified candidates”.  If one or two of these initiatives is not performing up to snuff then you need to be thinking either about how to improve it or if you should be diverting resources elsewhere where you can get more bang for your buck.

However, you only know this if you have confidence in your data and analytics.  And it is only through centralized and comprehensive data that you can truly gain the actionable knowledge and insight needed to move your recruitment strategy forward and make it a competitive advantage.

Want to talk comprehensive recruitment marketing analytics?  Let us know at www.smashfly.com.