Your recruiting content and messaging can have a tremendous impact on how many candidates as well as what type of candidates are applying to your company.  It’s important to track and understand what types of content are working in promoting the right behavior and which messaging is falling flat.

When you look at all the content you create in your recruitment marketing strategy it exists in a number of places including your Job Ads, Career Site and Social Recruiting Channels (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, etc.)

Today, you are probably measuring the impact of your job ads on your overall applicant flow with recruitment marketing metrics.  By measuring the views, apply clicks and applicant metrics you can understand how well your job ads are at convincing candidates to ultimately apply for the job.  Many of these metrics should come standard with the job distribution provider you use (and if not they should.)

However, when it comes to Career Sites and Social Recruiting many organizations are not quite there in measuring the impact of these channels to the applicant and most importantly hire level.  Most have robust metrics around views, keywords and engagement metrics but tying it back to the ultimate conversion goal is many times elusive.

This can be for a number of reasons including:

• The use of multiple systems to track and interpret recruiting data
• Loss of the data point when candidates leave and come back to a job ad later
• Lack of integration with the ATS to determine when particular candidates become applicants and hires

Being able to measure the impact of every piece of recruiting content you produce is important so you can determine what’s working and what’s not.  By replicating popular content, you will be able to reach a wider audience of candidates and hopefully improve your overall applicant rates.

But how can you ensure that you are capturing this data?  Here are a few ways:

• Work with your technology partners to ensure integration with other systems in your process.  Make sure that you can track a single data point (aka the candidate) throughout the entire apply process.
• Take a look at a centralized recruiting platform that can help you track all this data in one location.
• Utilize tracking links or specialized landing pages to track candidate applies from specific job or social recruiting campaigns.
• Conduct post-hire surveys to determine sources of hire and influence

These are just some of the ways you can start capturing the data to understand what content provides the most value.

The Future

Recruiting technology is moving closer and closer to the goal of tracking all your online recruiting efforts.  Not only capturing the raw statistics but capturing each individual candidate experience.  By this I mean capturing every piece of content that a candidate interacts with before and after they become an applicant in your ATS.  From what content they read on the Career Site to engagement on social sites to what job pages they viewed, companies will begin being able to track the full range of interactions a candidate has with them before and after they apply.

I’m interested to see what this data can tell us about candidate behaviors.  Are you?