On this blog, I talk a lot about recruiting metrics and why they are so important to understand how your recruiting is doing and how they can help you make better recruiting decisions. And I think that we’ve finally got to the point where organizations realize the importance of collecting these metrics in real-time for their recruiting. The main problem is they are still in the dark about what metrics they should be using and the analytics that are available in the marketplace.

There are many different types of metrics available for recruiting, however, I want to focus on two that most companies have available to them and how they are both valuable in their different ways: Applicant vs. Marketing Data.

Applicant Data

When I say to Applicant data, I’m referring to the data you usually receive from your Applicant Tracking System (ATS). This data includes how many applicants you receive for a specific job requisition (and hopefully the job source of the applicant) as well as data in between the applicant and hire stages in your funnel. This data enables you to get a clear view of the back end of your recruiting process and can tell you important information like time/hire, cost/hire and in some cases where your ultimate hires are coming from.

This data can be extremely valuable and should most definitely be provided by your ATS.

Marketing Data

Recruitment Marketing metrics focus on the front end of your recruiting taking a look at how you distribute your recruitment message and how effective your messaging and processes are in getting qualified candidates to become applicants.

Most importantly, recruitment marketing metrics focus on the recruiting channels that you use to distribute your job ads (job boards, social networks, email, SMS, career site, referrals, etc.) and measure how effective these channels are at providing your recruiting organization with qualified applicants. Marketing metrics collected for recruiting focus on four main areas in your recruitment funnel:

Awareness - This is the measure of how many candidates actually view your job ad. The candidates obviously have some interest in the title of the position you are hiring for and have taken action to read your job advertisement.

Interest - This is the measure of candidates that take action on your job ad and click to apply for the position. These candidates read your job ad and determined that it could be the right fit for them. When you see that not a lot of candidates are dropping off between the Awareness and Interest phases you know that your job ad messaging is spot on.

Contacts - This is the measure of candidates that become marketing contacts in your system. Usually this is an intermediate step in the recruiting process that enables candidates to add themselves to your Talent Network for updates on future job openings at your company. This is important as you want to capture as many qualified candidates as you can and this is a great way to capture the passive candidates that might drop off at some point during the application process.

Conversion - This is the stage when a candidate finally clicks “Submit” on your job application and becomes an applicant in your ATS. You obviously want as little drop-off as possible between all these steps in your recruitment funnel.

This marketing data can be provided by a number of vendors and is an important in increasing the # of qualified candidates you convert into your ATS as applicants for each job campaign you run. The key is measuring and analyzing every step in your funnel and how you can increase the amount of candidates that come across your ads while decreasing the percentage of candidates that drop off at each stage of your recruiting process.

Overall, both applicant and marketing metrics for recruiting are extremely valuable to have and it’s crucial to make analyzing them a daily part of your recruitment marketing process. The key is finding the right combination of technology to provide you with these metrics across your entire recruitment funnel from initial awareness to hire.

Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.