When implementing and executing your recruitment marketing strategy it is extremely important to measure and analyze the performance of all your initiatives.  From job boards to social networks to sourcing, you need to know what initiatives are driving positive recruiting performance for your organization.

The question is how do you determine success and what recruitment metrics do you look at when making this determination?

First, success can be determined in a number of ways, however, when looking at recruiting success of initiatives I ask two main questions:

1. How successful was the initiative at attracting candidates that became employees at my company?
2. How successful was the initiative at attracting candidates that were qualified for the position?

These two questions focus on the quantity and quality (this is very important) of candidates that are brought in through your recruiting channels.  So how do you measure these two questions?

When measuring the performance of getting quality candidates, you are looking at the end of your recruitment marketing funnel and most likely data from your ATS.  The metric for the first question is easy: it's "Hires"!  Tracking the candidates you hire and being able to link them back to the source they came through, will enable you to quickly identify what recruiting channels are bringing in the best qualified candidates, your hires!

But hires aren't the only qualified candidates that you should be measuring.  There are plenty of non-hires that you interview and are qualified that you should not only be measuring but putting in your Talent Network and utilizing for future job campaigns.  The question is how do you determine a qualified candidate and what metric should measure it?

To determine if a candidate is qualified you need to first determine the qualification standards for the job position you are recruiting for.  Once that's determined, you should be able to track this status during your recruiting screening process in your ATS.  Make sure your ATS or job distribution provider enables you to track and measure these candidates and the source that they came from, so you can use this metric in evaluating recruiting channels.

The key is to continue to evaluate and improve your recruiting strategy based on the metrics that you collect.  Your recruiting budget is finite and through recruiting metrics you can make sure you are using it to yield the best recruiting ROI.

Check out more recruiting articles on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.