70% of Talent Recruiting Leaders believe that they’re using data poorly.

Applicant tracking systems simply aren’t designed to provide the data you need to plan and execute an effective recruitment marketing strategy.

At the heart of the problem is flawed source tracking.

Chris Hoyt (aka @TheRecruiterGuy) writes that source tracking - the foundation of recruitment marketing analytics - is “an absolute train wreck.”

He writes:

Let's forget for the moment that there are actually multiple sources for nearly every candidate. Let's forget that without incredible levels of intervention and unrealistic expectations put upon each applicant at each step along the way that the majority of talent teams can't account for the first source that made someone aware of us or the secondary source that got them interested in us as an employer or the source that brought them back (1x, 2x, 3x) before that final source that officially made them an applicant.

Chris isn’t the only person to notice this problem. As a recruitment marketing leader I ran into this exact problem and more.

Even though we were using Google Analytics to track career site performance, simple job-level insight was difficult to get.

Worse, there was a constant disconnect between the data in Google Analytics and the data in our ATS.

We built Hiregrid Analytics to solve these problems and more. Getting recruitment analytics right is the first step to an effective recruitment strategy.

And today I have great news to share with Chris and Talent Recruiting Leaders everywhere.

Hiregrid Analytics is available and you can get started for free.

Getting Accurate Applicant Source Data Is Now Easy

Applicant Tracking Systems rely exclusively on dropdowns or source codes to track applicant source.

This leads to highly inaccurate data because recruiters can’t anticipate every source and many visitors find your career site via links that aren’t tagged with accurate source codes.

Applicant Tracking Systems fail to give you data everyone who visited your career site but never applied. This is a hugely valuable segment of your candidates!

For the average career website, this means you’re missing data on as much as 95% of your candidates.

Hiregrid Analytics solves both of these problems by automatically tracking the source, medium, and device of every visit to your career site.

We even go a step further and organize all of this data by job.

Install Hiregrid Analytics and you can start accessing powerful insights in seconds.

You can easily see what your top sources are, compare Job Views (visits to a job description page) and Candidates (unique visitors to a Job Description page) and much, much more.

Simple Answers To Complex Questions

Hiregrid Analytics doesn’t just make it easy to collect your data.

We also make it incredibly easy to drill down and look at data for complex combinations of jobs, candidates, sources, devices and more.

Want to see which Jobs have an Application Rate greater than 3%? Easy. Which Jobs have less than 5 Views? Also easy. Which Jobs have an Application Rate greater than 3%, less than 5 Views and more than 1 Application? Also, super easy.

You can filter that same data by Candidate Source, Medium, Device.

You can also look at data only for Candidates who applied, or only Candidates who did not Apply.

Want to see data for Candidates who visited more than once? That too is just a click away.

Who’s Applying?: New vs. Returning Candidates

If I wanted to write out every use case for Hiregrid Analytics, I’d end up with a blog post roughly the size of War and Peace.

So for the sake of brevity, let’s just look at the issue Chris Hoyt raises: comparing sources that are great at driving new traffic and sources that bring people back.

In Hiregrid Analytics we make a distinction between Candidates and Applicants.

A Candidate is anyone who visits one of your Job Descriptions.

An Applicant is a Candidate who completes an Application on your Career Website.

As Chris points out, your ATS can’t show you what visit people are applying on. So, let’s see what we can find out in Hiregrid Analytics

If we take a close look at the data, we see that the top sources for Job Views break down into two distinct groups: Indeed vs. Direct Entry & Search Engines.

The traffic coming from Indeed is 100% new. This means that every Candidate attracted via an Indeed ad during this time visited the Career Site for the first time.

Indeed also has a 1:1 ratio of Job Views to Candidates. This is not very surprising because Candidates who find your job on Indeed were most likely looking for a specific job, and who your company is was a secondary factor.

Traffic from that came directly (meaning someone typed your url into their browser, used a bookmark, or came via an untagged email link) was not only far more likely to be a returning candidate - but these Candidates were also more likely to look at more than one job.

Traffic from search engines follows the same pattern.

When we sort the data by Applications instead of Job Views a clearer picture begins to emerge.

Several sources have high application rates but a low volume of Job Views: Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and SimplyHired.

These sources can’t compete with Indeed for Job Views, but they all have one hugely important quality that Indeed is not matching: high application rates.

Like Indeed, they also are attracting a high percentage of New Candidates.

We quickly get a clear picture of how candidates are finding our jobs and going on to fill out an application.

First, Job Boards like Indeed, Glassdoor, and SimplyHired are driving new candidates to the career website.

A small portion of those candidates fill out an application on their first visit.

The majority of applicants end up making a return visit before applying. They find the career website again via Direct Entry (typing the url into the browser, using a bookmark, or untracked email) and apply later.

Evaluating Performance By Source + Medium

I’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible in Hiregrid Analytics.

I’ll leave you with just one more example.

In Hiregrid Analytics “Source” tells you where your Candidates and Applicants are coming from.

“Medium” tells you how they got to your Career Site.

When the Source is LinkedIn, Medium can be an Inmail, Organic Social, Sponsored Social, Organic Job Posting, or Paid Job Posting.

Without using source codes, Hiregrid Analytics automatically detects the difference between these different types of traffic on LinkedIn.

This is hugely important when you’re evaluating the ROI of your LinkedIn spend.

In the example above, you can see at a glance that traffic from LinkedIn is pretty easily split between Inmail, Organic Social, and Paid Job Posting.

In Hiregrid Analytics candidates with a Medium of “Organic Social” are people who clicked to your career website via a link in the LinkedIn newsfeed.

If the price on all three types of LinkedIn traffic was equal, you’d probably be fine with the split.

But, since “Organic Social” is free, and Inmail and Paid Job Postings can get quite expensive on LinkedIn, if you saw this split you would want to start exploring ways to grow your Organic Social strategy on LinkedIn.

One Unified Source Of Truth

In Hiregrid Analytics we give you two options: Basic, and Advanced.

Hiregrid Analytics Basic tracks every visit to your Career Site and automatically tracks the Source, Medium, Device as well as what jobs are viewed and when a candidate applies.

Hiregrid Analytics Advanced gives you everything that is offered in Basic but offers an additional layer of data by integrating directly with your ATS.

Hiregrid Analytics Advanced is designed to give you one unified source of truth from Job View to Hire.

Getting Started With Hiregrid Analytics

Starting today we’re offering anyone with a Career Site the opportunity to try Hiregrid Analytics for free.

To get started all you need to do is fill out this interest form: http://hiregrid.io/features/analytics_signup_form

From there we’ll deliver a one line tracking script that you will copy/paste onto your website.

We’ll take care of the rest.

Accurate, comprehensive recruitment analytics will give you a huge competitive advantage. You already know that 70% of the people you’re competing with for hires don’t have good data.

Hiregrid Analytics does the work of a team of expert digital analysts. What used to be hours of work in Google Analytics is now as simple as logging in.

We built Hiregrid Analytics for recruiters. So it's not only easy to sign up, it's easy to start using right away.

By getting started with Hiregrid you’ll quickly get the data you need to build a recruitment marketing and advertising strategy that will attract higher quality talent in less time and for less money than your competitors.

Ready to get started?