Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

I talk a lot on this blog about the importance & power of metrics and data. But one aspect of metrics & data that is not talked about but is extremely important is how quickly you report and make available the data which you make decisions on every day.

Ask yourself. When making an important decision at your company or more simply in your life, how recent do you want to data that you are receiving? Most people will say they want the most recent data available!

The fact is that data a few years ago or even a few months ago can be imperfect in helping you make decisions for today’s business climate and competitive companies need to find ways to collect & present all the data collected in real time!

For recruiting, it’s even more important to have all the most recent recruitment metrics / data at your fingertips. Here are 3 ways that real-time data can help you make better recruiting decisions:

Identifying New Recruiting Channels: Recruitment Metrics in real time can help you quickly identify new channels you should distribute your job ads to directly in your recruitment marketing process. Just like Google Analytics can help you quickly identify keywords or referral sources you should target for your website, recruitment metrics can identify free recruiting channels you should be using as well as identify channels that are not performing as well.

Best of all, metrics in real time allow you to act on these recruiting channels, enabling you to leverage these new channels in tomorrow’s job campaign.

Our Online Application Stinks: Real-Time Metrics are great also at telling you what’s broken. Let’s say that your online application is too long and more than 50% of applicants have been failing to complete the application. Real-Time
Metrics could be telling you today that this needs to be fixed so you can take immediate action. Which is much better than learning a month later and realizing you’ve lost 1/2 your applicants for something that could have been fixed in a day’s time.

New Initiative: is it working? – Real-time Metrics can give you a quick look into if a new initiative is working or not, without having to wait a month or longer to determine success. Are you using a new job board, starting to leverage social recruiting or trying out a new job ad format? Metrics in Real time can help you gauge the performance of these new initiatives and enable you to make & test small changes with them along the way.

When you begin to think about collecting metrics in your recruitment marketing funnel, don’t settle for anything less than real-time. Historical data will always be important for some decisions but real-time data enables you to make more informed decisions on the best data available. Get your data in real time, you won’t be disappointed!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies and staffing firms to easily distribute and more importantly measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.

The WildFire recruitment marketing platform offers every tool you need for your recruitment marketing needs all in one centralized solution including Real-Time Recruitment Metrics, Job Ad Distribution (job boards, social networks, SEM, email & SMS campaigns), Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.