One of the hardest things to deal with when you are evaluating marketing and recruiting channels is working through your perceived value vs. the actual performance that they provide.

You have great relationships with your vendor contacts and they bend over backwards to make you happy until you are satisfied with the value their solution provides.  They say all the right things and prove why their solution will work for your business with plenty of case study examples.

However, you don’t care about the success of other companies, do you?  You only care about the success a recruiting channel can have on your own recruiting initiatives, right?

So what can you do?  Well, you start collecting recruiting metrics yourself.  By collecting them yourself, you will be able to get an accurate assessment of what recruitment marketing channels are working and not working in your recruiting strategy.  This will help you make the tough decisions on what recruiting channels you will continue using and what ones you ultimately need to end relationships with.

So how do you start collecting these recruiting metrics.  Here’s a few ways:

Job Distribution Solution: Any job distribution solution worth its salt will have a robust recruiting metrics function as part of its solution.  It should provide you with real-time detailed metrics on all your recruiting channels.  These metrics will not only include how many applicants you get from a recruiting channel but also how many views, apply clicks, contacts as well as application drop-offs you had for each recruiting channel.

Applicant Tracking System: Depending on the ATS you have, you will be able to obtain applicant data for most if not all your recruiting channels.  The accuracy of this data can vary depending on the ATS but this data can be a valuable metric to analyze when you are making decisions on your recruitment marketing mix.  And best of all, these metrics should exist in your ATS today so take a look.

URL Short Codes: Services like bit.ly and tinyurl.com can provide you with the opportunity to create short links for your job ads that track the click-throughs.  This data can show you how well recruiting channels are sending candidates to your job application.

Don’t like the recruiting channels that you are using because you think they are providing value to your recruiting strategy.  Like the recruiting channels you use because they are performing and adding real value to your recruiting organization!

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Technology Blog.