Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

I spend a lot of time on this blog speaking about the importance of setting up the process of collecting and tracking recruitment metrics in your recruiting process. But in the end, that is only the first step of the process!

The second step is harder and probably more important. It is showing a commitment to the metrics you collect and integrating these metrics into your overall decision making process. This is where most recruiting organizations fall off, however, it is extremely important that metrics become a part of the long term plan.

The power of recruitment metrics comes from the iterative nature that they possess. The more data and metrics you collect, the better you can understand your recruiting process and make important recruiting decisions. It makes no sense to collect and track these metrics in your process if you never look at them when you are making decisions.

If you are not yet convinced, here are three reasons why a commitment to metrics is necessary:

Avoid Costly Mistakes - Recruitment Metrics help you identify what's wrong in your recruiting process. Whether it's an expensive job board that is driving only a few applicants to career site or the application process you have where a majority of your applicants drop off, recruitment metrics can help you identify and remove these problem areas: saving you money and increasing the amount of qualified applicants in the process.

Identify Important Trends - Metrics can help you identify key new recruiting channels that are up and coming for your industry. By keeping on top of the metrics, you will be able to see what recruiting channels are growing and what are languishing and accurately plan your recruitment mix for the future.

Quickly Test Ideas - Recruitment metrics are a great way to quickly test if you ideas and decisions are sound. By carefully monitoring the right performance metrics against recruiting activities that you already do, you can quickly identify what recruiting campaigns you should continue and which ones are not worth your valuable time.

So as you are building out of the processes for collecting and tracking your recruitment metrics, please know that this is not the be all end all. Now starts the most important part of the process, using these valuable metrics to strengthen and optimize your recruitment marketing efforts.

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 recruitmentmarketing 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.