As a marketer, I’m continuously looking at our marketing / sales funnel to get a better understanding of how effective every step of the process is in our funnel and identifying the areas in our marketing plan that could be improved. We measure everything from how many visit our external content streams (blog articles, press releases, Google, etc.)to how many times this content leads to hits on our website to how effective our website is in getting users to sign up for a live demo of our recruitment marketing platform.

We measure everything because we want to know what’s working and what’s not working with our marketing which helps us make decisions on our marketing and in turn helps us better utilize our marketing budget.

The Recruitment Marketing funnel is very similar to a traditional marketing funnel. You are generating unique content (in the form of job ads) that are bringing candidates in to your ATS system in the form of applicants and in the end hopefully hires. These are the conversions you need to be tracking in your recruiting process and are the most crucial when you are making important decisions on your overall recruiting strategy.

Let’s take a look at a Recruitment Funnel and the different steps of the process from a candidates point of view and how measuring these steps can provide you with insight into your overall recruiting strategy.

Job Ad Distribution sources - The first step for most recruiting organizations is determine the sources where they will push out their job ads to. This includes major job boards, niche job boards, social networks, email, SMS, career site, internal memos and any other way they distribute jobs. When you track your funnel, you need to be able to identify every step in the process for each individual job source as you’ll want to identify which job sources bring in the most qualified candidates.

This will be the first point of contact with any qualified contacts that come through your system.

Job Title - The first thing that any job seeker will see is the job title and your company name on the job ad. This job title needs to be compelling enough for the job seeker to click on the link to look at overall job ad. Never underestimate the power of a catchy job title!

Job Ad Copy - Once the job seeker clicks on the link of your open job position, they will view your job ad. This is probably where the biggest drop off in the whole recruiting process occurs. You want your job ad to be compelling and answer the question, why should you work for our company?

If you receive a high number of views of your job ads but very few click-throughs to the application, you know that you need to make your job ads more compelling!

Application Clicks - If the job seeker finds your job ad compelling, they will click the "Apply Now" button in your job ad. You can measure that this job seeker has now entered your job application but it doesn’t mean that they will ultimately complete the application.

Become an Applicant – If a job seeker completes the application, they become an applicant in your ATS. If you see a high number of apply clicks with very few applicants then you know there is a problem with your job application itself that is forcing candidates to bow out of the application.

Interviews - An applicant is brought into the office for an interview and is obviously a qualified candidate.

Hire - An interviewee aces the interview, is offered a job and is accepts the position.

In every step of this recruitment funnel provides insight into what you are doing well and what you are not doing so well in your recruiting process. From the quality of your job ads to the ease of use of your application to the top performing job sources you use, real-time recruitment metrics can provide great insights into your overall recruiting strategy. Which will help you find more qualified candidates as well as make the best use of your recruitment marketing budget!