Recruitics is the leading recruitment marketing analytics and advertising platform making it easier for employers, staffing companies and job boards to understand and optimise their job advertising strategies by leveraging real-time data and programmatic technology. They are joining us on 7th June at the Technology Event in London which you can register for right up until the day (although you might want to book early for the discounted Early Bird tickets!). Here they talk about how you can use recruitment analytics to answer important questions about your job advertising strategies.
“How are my online job advertisements performing?”
It’s an abstract question, but it is ultimately the big question you should be trying to answer when you take a dive into your recruitment marketing analytics. In order to answer this question about performance, you first need to answer a few other questions that lie underneath performance.
Let’s take a look at which questions you need to ask yourself to understand performance and which KPIs you should be leveraging to form your answers.
Are Candidates Interested in Your Jobs?
Advertising your jobs online can be frustrating at first, sometimes feeling as if you’re shouting into an empty abyss. In today’s “war for talent,” the candidates hold the upper hand, and it has become your job to initiate the hiring process. Step one of that process lies in attracting talent to your open positions in the first place. With that said, you’ll want to ask yourself, “are candidates interested in my jobs?” In using your click data, and click-through-rates (CTR) when available, you’ll be able to properly assess this question. Here’s how:
Clicks can be a telltale sign of general job seeker interest in your specific job title and that type of job overall. Typically, more clicks means more interest, reflecting a well-written job title, a high-demand opportunity, or an easy-to-fill job type.
Click-Through-Rate (CTR) takes your understanding of “interest” one step further by providing you a measure of job seeker engagement with your job advertisements, if you have access to impression data. Unfortunately, not every website you advertise jobs on will provide the impression data needed to calculate this metric, as mentioned earlier in this resource. But when available, understanding the story this KPI tells is simple–the higher the CTR, the more intrigued job seekers are by your job.
So, are job seekers interested in the jobs you’re advertising online? If you’re clicks and CTR are high, then chances are job seekers are in fact interested in what your organisation is posting. If not, then you may need to take a closer look into these metrics in order to better understand why job seekers aren’t as interested in your jobs as you may have thought.
How Much Do You Spend on Job Advertising?
Since your goal is to increase ROI (or in other words, make the hires you need within your recruitment budget, as an employer, OR to make more placements and increase gross margin, as a recruitment agency), you need to understand where your money is being spent well and where it may be wasted. However, before you can get there you’ll need to understand how much you’re spending to advertise your jobs online. By leveraging the spend and cost-per-click (CPC) KPIs, you’ll be able to make this assessment. Here’s how:
Spend might seem like the obvious metric to look to, but it’s often analysed at the highest-level, making insights difficult to uncover. But, once you begin breaking it down to the job-level, you can really start to get at important insights. For instance, in understanding how much you’re spending on each individual job, you’ll easily be able to identify which jobs may be producing waste or inefficiency in your budget by spending more or less than what’s needed.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC) can help you break down job spend data and understand competition even further. If you analyse your CPC at deeper levels – by job, by department, by source, by location and more – you’ll get a better understanding of which jobs, or which groups of jobs, are more or less competitive on certain sources or in certain locations. This level of spend granularity can also help you determine where the reallocation of funds are needed most–or conversely, where your budget is being wasted most.
When it comes to analysing your online job advertising budget, it’s simply not enough to understand total cost. By digging into your data to unearth your job-level spend and cost-per-click at varying levels, you can understand where your budget dollars are going and what affect they have on your ROI.
Where Are Your Top Candidates Coming From?
At this point, you should now be able to figure out if candidates are interested in your jobs and what the cost associated to advertise these jobs is, at a number of different levels. Next, let’s talk about quality.
In the end, recruitment marketing is about hiring the right talent to drive your business forward. Before you can hire the right talent, though, you’ll first need to determine who “the right talent” is–who are your ideal, top candidates. Once you know that, you’ll want to ask yourself, “where are my top candidates coming from?” The conversion rate and quality applicant metrics can help you answer that question. Here’s how:
Conversion Rate, analysed specifically by source, can help you understand source quality. For instance, you might have one source that generates a high volume of clicks but a very low volume of applications. This may tell you that candidates from this source are interested in your jobs (based on the job title), but then decide not to apply for whatever reason. In this case, that source may simply be attracting a lower quality of candidate than what your job demands, and that posting this particular type of job on that particular source may not be beneficial.
Quality Applicants, also analysed by source, can help you determine which sources are driving the most valuable candidates to your jobs. Furthermore, quality applicants can be looked at on the job-level to help you determine which sources are best for advertising particular jobs on.
Most importantly, by determining where your top candidates come by leveraging your conversion rate and quality applicant data, you’ll be able to answer the next, and possibly the most important, question.
How Much Does it Cost to Make Great Hires?
As you progress further and further down the recruitment marketing analytics funnel, you’re likely trying to understand what it costs to put people in the positions that drive your business forward. So ultimately, what you want to ask yourself is, “how much is it costing me to make great hires?” By evaluating your cost-per-applicant (CPA), cost-per-quality-applicant (CPQA) and cost-per-hire (CPH), you can get at that answer. Here’s how:
Cost-Per-Applicant will tell you how cost-effective you’ve been in attracting talent initially, since an applicant is the final piece of the top of your funnel. This is the first piece of the puzzle in determining how much it costs to bring top talent through your organisation’s doors.
Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant goes one step further by showing you how much you’ve spent to produce applicants you deem “qualified.” CPQA takes you out of the top of the funnel and into the hiring process. It explains your cost associated with finding talent worthy of an interview.
Cost-Per-Hire is no doubt the metric you’ve been waiting for. The CPH metric ultimately answers your question of, “how much is it costing me to make great hires,” but all the prior metrics discussed go into answering this question in the end.
The question of performance isn’t one that can be answered simply. However, it can be answered if you have end-to-end recruitment marketing analytics. And until you can answer these questions, you can’t really identify areas of waste and inefficiency to be able to optimise for improved ROI.
To learn more about recruitment marketing analytics, and to get further insight on optimisation opportunities, download this free eBook: “The 2017 Guide to Recruitment Marketing Analytics”
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