This post is not to emphasize the need for metrics in recruitment marketing. It is rather about what to measure and a bit on how to measure.

Irrespective of how one measures (more on that below), source of hire and cost of hire seem to be the most sought after metrics. While they are important, do not provide the complete picture. To get a complete idea of what your recruitment marketing is delivering, break down the job seeker cycle into phases and align your marketing objectives.

Job seeker cycle can be divided into, discovery of jobs / awareness, getting influenced and applying to a job. Most active job seekers go from discovery of jobs to applying to a job very fast and with minimum touch points. The most passive job seekers on the other hand take lot of time as well as several more touch points to apply to a job. The metrics should talk to both the situations. For ex: if one looks at the job seeker cycle, discovery of jobs is more to do with creating awareness, paid search etc. So, one should measure the unique reach, target less cost per click and bounce rates / early exits. For ex on the periphery a particular media might have given millions of reach / impressions. However if the users are not spending even few seconds on the page, it is of no or limited use. Lower cost per click combined with lower bounce rate is a great measure of awareness. However, the same media with a different call to action, can be measured for efficiency in driving applications.

When measuring influence, it is important to measure, session wise the number of pages , properties, touch points, time spent etc. Combined these will tell if the users are being influenced and the creatives and media are working well or not. So, the metrics to chase here are time spent, completed video views etc.

The final frontier of conversions has to be measured by the ratio of apply clicks to the completed applications. Higher the ratio, better the media is (which of course has to be corroborated by qualified applications). As mentioned above, the correlation usually gives a far better meaning and picture than just the completed applications. All these put together can give a great insight into the path of conversion which is anything but linear for several roles and levels.

However, the most important aspect of getting right metrics is to measure in the right way. Many companies even today base their recruitment metrics by user defined fields that both recruiters and job seekers fill. For obvious reasons, this is by far the most inefficient method to measure. Though GDPR regulations have made it difficult and complex, cookie based tracking is still the best way to measure the path to conversion. Next best is possibly UTM tags. In short anything is much better than manual selection of sources. This also helps in building data, creating audience and doing re targeting campaigns.