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

Reason #2: Apples to Apples Comparisons

I’m not going to lie, making informed decisions is tough! But from life experience, I’ve found a few ways to make this process easier. My favorite of which is making side by side comparisons where I go over the pro’s and con’s of each decision and decide what works best for myself or the company I’m representing. Side by Side comparisons are best when they are Apples to Apples meaning that they can be measured based on certain commonality between the choices being compared. Apples to Apples comparisons not only allow you to make better decisions but they also help you make them more quickly!

The key for making Apples to Apples comparisons is metrics. Metrics allow you to take two choices and simply compare them based on the metrics you define as important. This last part is crucial! Just because you have metrics doesn’t mean you will have immediate insight into what decisions should be made without any work involved. You need to determine what metrics are useful to your organization and the specific situation you are making a decision on and make sure you are actually collecting these metrics in your process. Once you have these ingrained into your organization, your company’s decision making process will be quicker and yield better results, guaranteed!

For recruiting, there are a ton of situations where apples to apples comparisons can help make recruiting decisions easier and more effective. Here are some examples of recruiting questions that should be measured and the recruitment metrics that can be used to make the most informed decisions about them:

1. Which Job Boards are Performing the Best?
   • Method to Use: Measure and compare the performance of the job boards that your company posts jobs to. Must make sure to look at the metrics for the same job positions.
   • Metrics to Use: 1) # of applicants, 2) # of hires, 3) $Cost/Applicant and 4) $Cost/Hire.
     
     • 1 & 2 are simple but effective ways to determine not only how many candidates but the quality of candidates that job boards are “bringing to the party”.
     • 3 & 4 are great metrics to determine what job boards provide the best bang for your recruiting buck.
     • Please Note: One thing to note for these metrics, is that while # of Hires & $Cost/Hire seem like the best metrics (and are in most cases) it may not be an overall indication of quality of candidates as some high quality candidates may not end up being hired by your company (either by going to a competing company or losing out on the position to a more qualified applicant.) So it’s important to track both Applicants and Hires.
     
     
2. Is Social Recruiting outperforming Job Boards?
   • Method to Use: Measure and compare the performance of the same job ads you send to social networks and job boards.
   • Metrics to Use: 1) # of applicants, 2) # of hires 3) time spent.
     
     • As above, 1 & 2 provide a nice overview of the # of candidates each network can bring in as well as the quality of the candidates.
     • The one thing that is unique to this situation is that the major cost for social recruiting is the time (not $) spent. Therefore, you need to determine if the time spent on your social recruiting efforts (time that could be spent elsewhere) is worth the return you receive from them as compared to the $ and time cost of job boards.
     • Please note: In this time spent case, an Apples to Apples comparison is not attainable so you need to do your best to acquire as much information as possible to analyze the comparison and determine your overall recruitment marketing strategy.
     
     
3. Do Web Commercials and Interactive Content Help me attract and Convert qualified candidates?
   
   • Method to Use: Conduct A-B testing on your apply process with and without Web Commercials. In addition, measure the traffic your online content directs to your career site.
   • Metrics to Use: 1) Applies/Views, 2) # of Views, 3) # of Applicants 4) # of Hires
     
     • 1 provides a great way to see how your micro-sites and web commercials help to get candidates to fill out your application. The higher the number the better and this is how it should be if your content is working.
     • 2, 3 and 4 are the generic metrics you should be tracking for every recruiting source you have and can help tell you how effective your content is in bringing in qualified candidates.
       
     • Please note: Views are specifically important when tracking your interactive content. This is because the higher the views on content the more opportunities you have to convert candidates into applicants. Also, candidates that are experiencing your content may only apply to your career site once but may keep up to date with your content on a regular basis. Views also gives you a quick look at how effective and viral your content is, giving you insight into what content you want to replicate in the future.

Those are just three examples, but there are a lot more ways that recruitment metrics can help you make better comparisons and in turn better decisions. To make these comparisons you need to determine what are the important actions you want to measure and making sure you collect these metrics in your recruitment marketing process. There is a good deal of technology that can help you collect and analyze these metrics, the key is to find a vendor that fits your organizational needs and your recruiting strategy, enabling you to have the right metrics at your fingertips.

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

The WildFire recruitment marketing platform offers every tool you need for your recruitment marketing all in one solution including Job Ad Distribution, Social Networking Delivery, Recruitment Opt-In Database, Recruitment CRM, Web Commercials / Micro-sites and Resume Sourcing services.