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!

You might think that Reason #4 is the same as what I wrote about in Reason #5 but that’s not true. What you think you know and what you don’t know are two totally different things. What you think you know is an educated guess, you have a little information on the topic at hand and can somewhat accurately make the right decision. What you don’t know is what kills you. These are usually situations where something is horribly wrong with your messaging, process, strategy, etc. You may know that a problem exists but you are unaware of the real source of the problem.

Not only can recruitment metrics help you identify these problems but they can help you focus in on what processes in your recruitment marketing funnel our causing these problems.. Let’s take a look at an example.

The Problem: A company is looking at the # of applicants that they had apply for a new Customer Service position and are disappointed. They think that they should have gotten more applicants than they received and therefore take a look at the recruitment metrics for their recruitment marketing funnel. They first take a look at the job boards and social networks to see how well they performed in getting potential applicants to their application process. To their surprise, the job boards and social networks did very well sending over nearly 1000 job seekers to start the application. It was in their back end that they see all the drop off with only 100 applicants finishing the apply process. That’s only a 10% conversion rate of people finishing the application.

The Conclusion: Their application process is obviously broke. Whether it’s too long or too confusing, the recruiting staff needs to fix it in order to fully get the benefit of all the traction that the job boards and social networks provide.

In this example, the company didn’t know that their application process was broken, but recruitment metrics were able to point them in the right direction when they realized the problem. This is an example of how recruitment metrics can show you what’s wrong but there are plenty of examples where metrics can help show you what you don’t realize is going right.

Set up metrics and collect data on your recruiting process, so that can fully realize all the important problems and opportunities that arise in your recruitment funnel.

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.