Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

I won’t lie, I’m in love with Recruiting Metrics! I’m totally enamored with them! I love the way they look with a big “+” sign in front of them, I love the way they look on my computer dashboard and most importantly I love the knowledge they possess. Overall, recruiting metrics rock and I’d like to share with you my top 5 reasons why I love recruiting metrics. Here’s the rundown we have so far:

Reason # 5: They Tell Me What I Think I Know!

Reason # 4: They Tell Me What I Don’t Know!

Reason #3: Experimentation & Testing

As an organization if you are not experimenting with new avenues / tools / processes, you are most likely not experiencing the success you expect. To succeed and grow, you need to keep in touch with the next big thing and understand how “the new” can affect your company in the future and how you can utilize these tools to create a competitive advantage for your company (decrease cost, increase quality, increase quantity, etc.) An integral part of this process is setting up the right metrics in order to measure the impact of these new ventures because without data you have no idea whether they are working or not working.

This is especially true in recruiting as companies are trying to find cheaper and better ways to attract more top talent. Whether it’s delving into Social Recruiting, updating the company’s job board mix or exploring new recruitment marketing channels, it is crucial for companies to have the right metrics in place in order to evaluate the new ventures that they are testing and see how they perform against their current processes.

Here’s a great example of how recruitment metrics can help your company evaluate their job post messaging to encourage more job seekers to apply to a position:

The Problem: A company has been using the same recruiting messaging in their job post for several years, but they are seeing recently that while a lot of people are viewing their job advertisements, very few are taking the next step to apply. The problem they determine is their messaging. So here’s what they do:

The Plan: They determine 3 different job messaging formats to try out:

1) Their current 3 paragraph description

2) Bulleted job requirements & benefits

3) Short and Sweet with a link to their career site for more information

To see which one of these descriptions work best, they pick out 2 jobs they are looking to fill. For each job, they create the 3 job messages above and post them to the same job sites.

The Conclusion: After a week’s time, they have enough results to make significant conclusions. The big winner of the job descriptions was the bulleted version as it sent twice as many visitors to apply via the job application. From this little test and the metrics behind it, they were able to determine a way for them to get twice as many candidates for every job position they post. All in a little less than a week. (To see a real world example of this, check out this blog post.)

Metrics are a valuable and necessary evaluation tool to help you determine if your experiments are worth continuing or a waste of time. Develop a way to capture critical recruitment metrics in your recruitment marketing funnel and start experimenting! I promise you that your company will thank you!

About the Author: Chris is a Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly provides the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies to easily launch and more important measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.

The WildFire recruitment marketing platform offers Job Ad Distribution, Social Networking Delivery, Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.