Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

As a marketer, I’m continually coming up with new ideas. This is a big part of my job but not the most important. Coming up with new ideas is great but it’s the evaluation of performance of these ideas where the real value lies as it enables you to create more content that will appeal to our target market. This is important because I usually have a perception of which marketing plans will work and which won’t.

However, it isn’t until I collect metrics to back up my assumptions that I receive real knowledge on if the idea was successful. I am continually testing my assumptions up against our real results to better hone my ability to identify great opportunities and ideas earlier in the creation process. The key to it all is collecting the right metrics to determine success!

The same is true for recruiting. You need to determine the right recruitment metrics that help you determine success of your recruiting efforts. But how do you pick the right metrics? Here’s a few helpful hints:

Determine your ultimate goal: This one is easy. What is your main goal from your recruiting efforts? Is it: Increasing the # of applicants that apply to a position, Increasing the # of hires, Reducing the overall cost to hire a new employee, Hiring new employees in under a week, or some other recruiting goal.

Determining this ultimate goal can go a long way toward helping you identify the metrics that can help measure the performance of your recruitment marketing initiatives. (Please note: You may have multiple recruiting goals that require you to collect multiple metrics.)

What you can collect today - The best advice I can give on collecting metrics is to start today! Take a look at your existing technology solutions and determine what metrics you can start collecting and analyzing today. These metrics may be imperfect for every recruiting goal you want to measure but they can provide meaningful insights that can be valuable to your overall strategy.

What you want to collect tomorrow - After taking a look at what you can measure today with existing technology, identify the gaps in what you want to measure. Once you know the metrics you want to collect but can’t, you can start to search for technology that helps you collect these recruitment metrics.

To be successful in recruiting, you need to always be testing your assumptions on what will work with the cold hard results of what actually works! The more comparisons you do, the better you’ll be able to identify great recruiting opportunities and the more effective you will be with your recruiting strategy.

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that provides companies and staffing firms with the best real time recruitment metrics for all their recruiting efforts online.