A simple question that is not so easily answered!  However, if you can answer this question and focus your recruitment marketing efforts on the channels and places on the web that bring in your best candidates, your recruiting organization can yield great success.  The thing is there is no secret formula for what channels will work best for a specific organization as every recruiting strategy will have different channels and methods that will work for it.  Recruiting success stories from other companies can provide some insight into what can work but it’s important for your organization to test and understand what channels work best for them.

With social recruiting, job boards, SEM, resume databases and other channels, you need to determine if the effort, time and cost of these channels is justified for their performance to your organization.

So the question is how do you answer it?  Here are a few ways that if combined should give you a good answer.

Recruiting Metrics: When looking at your recruiting metrics, you should be able to quickly look and see what recruiting channels provide the most qualified candidates for your organization.  Also take a look at the recruitment marketing metrics for each channel (i.e. views, apply clicks and applicants) as they will give you insight into how well you are converting candidates at each stage of your recruitment funnel.

Hires: One of the most important metrics resides in your ATS and that is where your hires come from.  By tracking where your hires are coming from in terms of job boards, sourcing channels and social networks, you will be able to understand where your greatest recruiting successes are coming from so you can replicate them.

Sourcing Campaigns: As you are sourcing candidates from resume databases and the web, you need to keep track of the source that you are adding these candidates to your Talent Network from.  These candidates may not be the hire for the current campaign you are working on but they could be hires for open job positions down the road.  Keep track of these candidates so you can understand the sourcing channels that you should be using more often.

Those are some ways to find the answer to this question so you can find out for your organization what channels provide the best candidates for your job distribution and sourcing campaigns.  “Best candidates” is a relative term and isn’t universal.  What works for one company, may not work for yours.

The key is having the systems in place to know what is working for your own organization!