Pay for Performance is something everyone always strives to achieve.  Whether it’s buying a new car, being Theo Epstein (the General Manager of the Boston Red Sox) or placing an advertisement for your company, you are always seeking ultimate value you are receiving from the resources that you dedicate to a specific commodity.  The more value for each dollar you can earn, the better.  This is especially true in this economy when you are looking to recruit top talent to your organization.

There are three major trends that are facilitating this push for pay for performance in recruiting:

1. Less Budget - With the down economy and companies hiring less than usual, one of the most common places to cut budgets is recruiting.  Now recruiting organizations are expected to produce similar results with less budget to do it with.  They have to work smarter and that means identifying the recruiting channels and initiatives that provide the best return on investment (ROI) to the organization.
2. Less Headcount - Less employees on the recruiting staff means organizations cannot conduct as many recruiting initiatives as they did before.  This means that they will need to pick and choose from the existing initiatives that they run and decide which provides the most value to the recruitment marketing organization.
3. More Recruiting Channels - With Social Recruiting, Job Boards, SEM, Email, SMS, Mobile Recruiting and many more there are more recruiting channels now than their have ever been.  The question now is which channels should you use and not use.  Recruiting organizations are looking more than ever to identify and test channels based on their real performance rather than perceived performance.

With these three trends, pay for performance is becoming more and more important in the recruiting industry.  Companies need to be able to track and measure the performance of all their recruiting channels to determine what channels are actually worth the investment and what ones aren’t.

Here are a few ways that your recruiting organization can begin measuring the performance of your current recruiting channels:

Ask your recruiting channel partners: To understand how well different recruiting channels are performing for you might be as simple as asking your job board partners to provide you with some metrics.  Also, ask for standardized global metrics of how well other companies job ads are performing on the job board as well.

I truly believe that job boards are going to need to provide more recruitment metrics on how well your job ads are performing to remain competitive in the marketplace.

Start measuring yourself: I strongly encourage you to take a look at your existing technology and see if you can accurately measure recruiting channel performance in terms of applicants for every job ad you place.  If you can’t, take a look at solutions that can help you track recruiting metrics so you can understand how well your recruitment marketing funnel is performing and what recruiting channels are the most valuable to your organization.

Collect Contacts AND Applicants: What is the main goal of any recruitment marketing campaign?  To get qualified candidates to apply to your job ad.  The problem with many recruiting processes is that a lot of qualified applicants fall off at some point during the process.  I strongly encourage you to begin trying to collect these contacts at some point during the recruiting process and start building your Talent Network with recruiting database or Recruiting CRM.

The fact is that collecting Contacts during your recruiting and apply process can be a way to provide yourself with a continually growing recruiting channel that is absolutely free for you to contact with any future job campaigns.  Best of all it’s relatively easy to do as well.

Take a look at your current recruitment marketing strategy and start analyzing what recruiting channels and initiatives provide you with the best ROI on your precious recruiting budget dollars.  Don’t settle for decent results but aim to get the most out of recruiting dollars and focus on paying only for the best performance.

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies.  SmashFly provides the first Recruitment Marketing Platform that provides Job Posting Distribution, Recruiting Metrics and Recruitment CRM all in one centralized platform.