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.

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

Like most people, I like to think I know a good deal about my business. I make educated guesses on activities I should plan and campaigns I should run and am successful most of the time. But it’s not because of luck. It’s because of Metrics. Metrics allow me to make these educated guesses because I’m able analyze the impact of my decisions in real-time. Bad decisions I root out quickly, good ones I repeat more often. Metrics allow me to take what I think I know and turn it
into what I definitely know!

The same is true for recruitment metrics. Let’s take a look at an example of a company that wants to start a social recruiting strategy because they think it will bring in more qualified applicants than what they are doing currently. The company thinks that Twitter is the best social media tool to use (but they will also use Facebook)and that they want to just post open job positions using a Company Account (although they may post a blog article or two). Metrics will be key to understanding if these assumptions are valid!

Let’s say 2 months go by and they’ve brought in a total of 10 applicants, which is a low number. (That may mean social recruiting is not a portal for them to source qualified applicants or that could mean they just aren't using the tools effectively.) But in these 10 applicants 7 are from Twitter and 6 of them came through the site due to a blog article on “Top 10 Resume Tips”. While their assumptions on using Twitter over Facebook were right, their assumption of just posting jobs was wrong (they obviously need to create more blog content.) Now they know alter their social recruiting strategy to reflect these new insights.

Metrics are a validation tool and without them you are lost without a compass. You may have a hunch on what direction to go in but no real basis to support the decision. The farther you go, the more farther you probably are from your desired destination.

Start measuring your recruitment marketing efforts and make sure what you think you know is what you actually know.

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 offersJob Ad Distribution, Social Networking Delivery, Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.