Recently, I had the distinct pleasure to listen to three of our clients speak about their recruitment strategies at the Taleo World SIG this past week.  What really hit me is that each organization had their own unique story to tell about their recruitment marketing strategy.  One spoke about their need to innovate despite internal restrictive compliance and regulations.  Another spoke about their focus on increasing quality in their recruitment funnel.  The last one spoke about their efforts to target their recruitment advertising to recruit high churn positions nationally.

While all had unique and interesting stories to tell (and different problems to overcome) the one constant in all of their stories was their well thought out vision of what their strategy should be and how they went about executing it.  In all three cases, they sought out technology that fit this vision and captured key recruitment metrics in order to consistently navigate and improve on their strategy.

Building your Story through Metrics

No matter if you are listening to a presentation at the HR Technology Conference, an online webinar or an internal budget meeting, what really fuels a successful story are the insights that you can provide on your strategy as a whole.  And many if not all of these insights are found through the data and metrics you are able to collect.  These might be qualitative observations, survey responses, web data, funnel analytics and/or other any data you are capturing and making decisions based on.

It is not the data itself, however, that makes these stories compelling but the insights and observations you make from this data that make your story one that is worth being told.

The key is to determine what you want figure out in your process.  And many times this resembles a simple science experiment.

• You have a hypothesis (or group of hypothesizes) about your recruitment strategy that you want to test.
• You build out the metrics and data you need to capture in order to test this hypothesis as well as the process in order to execute it.
• You capture a significant number of data points to make insights and evaluate your hypothesis and process.

Through this experiment, you should be able to better understand your process and use this past data to better forecast what will drive results for future initiatives.  Again the key is figure out what you think the best strategy is and testing it to be able to optimize and alter it when needed.

Recruitment Data that fuels your story

As we look at the data you can use to make recruitment strategy insights, there are a number of areas you can look to capture data.

Here are a few:

• Recruitment Funnel Metrics: This measures all interactions with candidates before they become an applicant (views, apply clicks, contacts, applicants).  This typically can give you insights on your recruitment process and potential bottlenecks (and improvements) you can make in your recruitment advertising funnel.
• Conversion Metrics (Source of Hire): This measures the overall quality of the candidates you are capturing in your process.  Insights gleaned from this can be recruitment source evaluation, best use of media mix and overall conversion success.
• Source of Influence: An up and coming metric, source of influence would measure every interaction that you have with a candidate from initial recruitment source to interactions on your Career Site and social recruiting.  All these interactions could then be shown in aggregate to determine what initiatives are having the most influence on (qualified) candidates applying for positions and ultimately getting hired.
• Survey Data: This can be captured during the apply process, interview process or in other instances.  This can typically give you a good view of general sentiment and valuable qualitative data from candidates.
• Social Recruiting: There are a number of ways to measure social success.  From an influence / branding perspective or through overall applicant conversion, it’s important to identify the purpose of your social initiatives and then gain insights on how social is impacting your recruitment strategy.
• Hiring Success: Many recruiting departments are working with their HR brethren to begin measuring how well hired employees are performing in their organizations.  This can help recruiters better identify talent that will succeed at the organization and understanding where the best employees came in from in the recruiting process.

There are a number of recruitment data points that can help garner insights in your recruitment strategy.  It’s all about figuring out which data is the most important to you being able to make better decisions on your strategy.

A Better Recruitment Story

A great recruitment story has a few key parts.  First, you set up your story with the goals you wanted to achieve (typically set up due to problem(s) you have) and the strategy you formulated to achieve them.  Second, you walk-through how you built out and executed on this strategy (and how you tracked it.) Third, you share the metrics and the insights you gained from the process, how you determined success and how you used these insights to further improve your recruiting.

As you continue to test and improve, you will be able to start putting words to your story and start producing strong arguments for what you can & should do to improve your performance.  This is not a one-off process, however, but a continuous one that should provide you with a detailed look into what you are doing and how you can improve it on a daily basis.

And it’s through this consistent evaluation that you can ensure that your story has a happy (and rewarding) ending.

Have any thoughts?  Connect with me on Twitter @smashfly