A Beginner’s Guide: How to Develop a Data-Driven Mindset on Your Hiring Team

A Beginner’s Guide: How to Develop a Data-Driven Mindset on Your Hiring Team

It’s important for your recruitment marketing team to have a data-driven mindset. With one, you can understand how your jobs are performing and adjust when necessary. A great first step for your team is to have analytics that allow you to have visibility at a granular level -- so that you can make sense of the data and make the best decisions for your company. Here’s some advice and first steps in ensuring your team is developing a data-driven mindset.

 

#1 Know Where to Find Your Data 

An important step in having a data-driven mindset would be to have the ability to even see your data. The great way to do that is to get your hands on the recruitment marketing data results by partnering with an analytics provider. Analytics allows companies that are trying to drive recruitment marketing results to be able to track metrics on a granular level down to an individual job, by job site and by job category.  It’s so important to have the ability to track everything.

 

#2 Understand What The Metrics Can Do

Understanding the metrics behind your recruitment marketing results empowers companies to fully manage and understand their current investments as well as plan best for the future. 

Proper recruitment marketing data allows you to closely track results in the present, ensuring they align with hiring goals. With that data, you can also strategically plan for future talent acquisition initiatives, because you have a strong handle on the metrics it has historically taken to make hires or placements by job type and where best to advertise those jobs.

With proper recruitment marketing data, you can know how many applications it will take to reach your hiring goals and intelligently plan for future talent acquisition needs, instead of shooting in the dark.  

Tracking your recruitment marketing results allows us to make smarter media buying decisions, based on candidate quality from job sites by analyzing how many applications / hires, or for a staffing firm placements a specific job site has generated and to which job types. 

With a deep understanding of the underlying analytics, you can figure out what the best job sites are to rely on for quality candidates by job type. For example, if after over a year, you identify that zero tech hires were made from one specific job site, you can make a wise media buying decision that you're not attracting top tech talent from this source. You can significantly reduce or stop spending all together on tech jobs at that source -- freeing up budget for use on job types that are performing well at that source. Using end-to-end / down-funnel analytics, with cost per hire data (not just applications), we can analyze and better understand media source performance.

With the insights that come with a full view of your recruitment marketing analytics, companies are empowered to set strategic and appropriate budgets per initiative to reach hiring goals, knowing how much it costs on average to generate an application to a certain job type. With that information, you're able to appropriately budget and plan for new hiring initiatives -- for example, hiring 140 Outside Sales professionals in Phoenix in Q-3. 

Tip: Partnering with a recruitment marketing agency allows a company to complete some deep analysis into how different aspects of your job inventory are performing. For example, when you understand how sales jobs perform versus how IT jobs perform, and you’re dialed into the performance metrics, you can better craft an ideal plan for reaching hiring goals by job type.

 

#3 Knowing the Metrics to Track

Application Volume

When analyzing performance, one important metric to look at is the volume of applicants. Our efforts in recruitment marketing are with the intention of providing recruiters with a lot of candidates to evaluate, reach out to, and engage with. If you aren't giving recruiters a healthy volume of quality applicants, they're at a disadvantage -- as they need a lot of applicants and a lot of potential job seekers to reach out to. The more applicants we can drive, the greater likelihood an employer has of finding an applicant that they can hire. 

 

Conversion Rate (CR%)

A conversion occurs when a potential candidate submits their resume and completes the full application to an open job posting. Conversion rate, which is the percentage of conversions, or applications, out of the total clicks or job views, and can be a reflection of the efficiency per source. This metric can be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by click volume, then multiplying by 100. 

Low CR% indicates lower job seeker interest in completing the application after clicking. Specific jobs or entire job sites that perform at a lower CR% will take more clicks to generate an applicant. Analyzing conversion rate helps understand how many clicks it typically takes to generate a completed application.  

When we're talking about efficiency (which is making good use of media spend on programmatic job sites) we're thinking about the conversion rate. The conversion rate is like our batting average -- how often does a job seeker that clicks on one of our job ads complete the application. A high conversion rate represents job seekers who read our job description, love it, and want to complete the application at a healthy rate. This can be a sign of a lot of things. It's a sign of job seeker interest in your employer brand and that your employer branding and reputation are strong. It is also a sign of the unique supply and demand dynamics for talent in the specific regional market. 

A high conversion rate is an indicator that your budget dollars are being used efficiently. Oftentimes, when job seekers click on the job ad on the pay for performance job site, like Indeed, they are continuing on to complete the application. 

 

Cost-Per-Application (CPA)

Quite possibly the most important recruitment marketing metrics to know are going to be your cost-per metrics. Understanding your CPAs (or better yet, your Cost-Per-Quality-Applications, or CPQAs) can help you pick and choose which sources are most cost-effective in generating you the applicants for less.

With CPA, we're looking at what it costs to bring in an applicant. That's how much we spent divided by the number of conversions (applications) generated. 

 

Cost-Per-Click (CPC)

A key element of programmatic job advertising is using a Max CPC to bid for placement on job sites. Your Max CPC bid (the maximum cost you’re willing to pay a vendor, per click) combined with the job’s relevancy match to the job seeker’s search query determines on what page your job ads appear in the search results. Knowing the CPC bids being used by job type is key to understanding exactly what you’re paying each vendor for each paid click and ensuring your strategy is aligned with your priorities.  

 

Job Visits Volume or Clicks

Getting a job seeker to click on your job ad is the first step to generating a completed application. Generating a high volume of clicks to a job ad positions the job well to generate completed applications. When tracking job seeker interest, click volume can indicate if a job is easy to fill or tough to fill.

This metric shows how many job seekers click into your job description after seeing the title and snippet. Therefore, more clicks often means more interest, reflecting a well-written job title or a very high-demand opportunity.

 

App-To-Hire Ratio

You could also learn what an app-to-hire ratio is, and know how many applications it takes to generate a hire. With that information, you're able to appropriately budget and plan for new hiring initiatives. You can track and analyze the number of applicants needed to generate a hire by region, by specific job title, by job category / department - or by using a combination of multiple elements.

Understanding app-to-hire ratios by job type unlocks clarity on how different aspects of your overall open job inventory perform and how to strategically plan to achieve hiring goals.

For example, after many years of hiring for Systems Engineers in Phoenix, a company can identify that if they generate 65 applicants, they can make a hire out of that pool. This means their app-to-hire ratio is 65:1, and they must generate 65 applicants to make a hire.

 

Cost-Per-Hire (CPH)

Having access to end-to-end analytics gives you the ability to see full funnel performance metrics even after the completed application. End-to-end analytics allows for visibility into any and all of the steps a candidate goes through between application and hire.

Your CPH is a critical metric in the funnel as it allows you to assess how much it costs you to make a hire, ultimately helping you forecast the budgets you need to achieve hiring goals.

 

#4 Understand Month-Over-Month Performance Changes

Sometimes companies get alarmed by varying results when looking at overall performance -- application volume and CPA month-over-month. The results are varying because companies can have a shifting count of open job types in the job inventory and have prioritized different job types as needed month-to-month.

With a slightly different job mix and strategy month-over-month, overall metrics vary. Companies might invest heavily on tough-to-fill jobs one month, that they barely spent on in the previous month. As a result, the metrics are going to look different month-over-month. This is because you're putting out different content to the job seekers month-over-month, investing more heavily in the areas of greatest need and are driving traffic to different types of jobs.

 

Advice for Recruitment Marketing Efforts

Try to best align your recruitment marketing efforts with your hiring goals to ensure that you’re promoting the most important areas of need most aggressively. This means you can generate healthy application volume for recruiters, so they can screen those candidates and achieve hiring goals.

By understanding the hiring goals in your organization, you can advertise more aggressively on the areas of greatest need -- investing more dollars in job types that need the most hires and investing less heavily on jobs that you tend to easily generate healthy application volume on. Identifying jobs that you get plenty of applications on organically, people coming to your career site, and allows you to focus your budget on the areas of greatest need.

It’s also important to analyze by source -- identify where you're generating the best results by source and invest heavily on that source. Certain job sites may be best to rely on for specific job types, but not others.

 

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Making sure your team has developed a data-driven mindset is important so you can understand the data and make the right decisions for your company.

If you would like to know more about your recruitment marketing data or need help understanding conversions, Recruitics is happy to help!

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