Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant & Cost-Per-Hire: The Holy Grail of Recruitment Marketing Analytics

Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant & Cost-Per-Hire: The Holy Grail of Recruitment Marketing Analytics

 


recruitment marketing analytics

When recruitment marketing analytics first hit the market, the ability to see click volume, applications and cost data for individual jobs, or for group of jobs, was considered a breakthrough.

For the first time, businesses had visibility into the real performance of their online job advertisements, as well as the cost associated with them. And these insights weren’t just nice to have. Rather, they quickly became the lifeblood for any successful recruitment marketing strategy--allowing HR and talent acquisition professionals to make smarter, data-driven decisions based on insights that were previously unavailable.

“Recruitment marketing analytics are integral to success in talent acquisition today,” said Recruitics President Jonathan Zila. “For years, studies have been pointing to tougher hiring climates, and today it’s harder to find, attract and hire candidates than ever before. Recruitment marketing analytics provide insights into the performance and effectiveness of your current talent acquisition strategies, allowing your organization to better understand how and where you can improve processes for greater efficiency and ROI.”

Nevertheless, while basic analytics like these are helpful, and still critical, to talent acquisition, the holy grail of recruitment analytics has been missing. That is, until recently, as platforms like End-to-End Analytics were introduced to the space.

The Holy Grail of Recruitment Marketing Analytics: What Are CPQA and CPH?

End-to-End Analytics solutions, like the one offered by Recruitics, help companies bridge the gap between the top-of-funnel recruitment metrics they receive from vendors (like clicks and applications) with the bottom-funnel metrics (like submittals, interviews and hires) they get out of their Applicant Tracking System (ATS), such as iCIMS’ leading platform.

In fact, as one of our first ATS partners, we reached out to iCIMS to get their insights on the importance of Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant and Cost-Per-Hire metrics.

As iCIMS Chief Marketing Officer Susan Vitale puts it, End-to-End Analytics “offers companies a more comprehensive view of hiring activities and provides actionable insights,” to the businesses that leverage them. As a matter of fact, having End-to-End Analytics is the only way to get access to what many would consider the “holy grail” of recruitment marketing metrics: cost-per-quality-applicant and cost-per-hire.

If you’re unfamiliar with these “holy grail” recruitment marketing KPIs, here’s a quick refresher:

  • Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant (CPQA): CPQA is an important metric because it allows you to understand how much you’ve spent on a job, campaign or source to produce an applicant that you’ve deemed “qualified” for a given role. To calculate your CPQA, take your total spend on a particular job or set of jobs and divide it by the total number of quality applicants received on the same job(s).
  • Cost-Per-Hire (CPH): If you have End-to-End Analytics, you can see what happens from the time someone clicks on your job to the time you make a hire, and all of the data points in between. One of the most essential metrics in that funnel is your CPH. How much does it cost you to make a hire? This will be key in forecasting what recruitment budgets are needed based on the number of hires that you will need to make.

“These specific metrics are extremely important in showcasing the actual monetary cost of talent acquisition activities,” Vitale says. “Organizations can use [CPQA and CPH] to understand the impact of their efforts, easily pivot on current strategies and anticipate future costs.”

What Makes CPQA and CPH So Important?

The reason we went from the “Big Data Trend” to the “Age of Big Data” is because companies quickly learned that the more data they have around their recruitment processes, the closer they could get to predicting outcomes. So, while some data is better than no data, the more recruitment marketing analytics you can pull, the more likely you’ll be able to create forecasts accurate enough to base a solid strategy off of.

That’s because CPQA and CPH go beyond just showing the true costs of recruitment. With Cost-Per-Quality-Applicant and Cost-Per-Hire, HR and talent acquisition professionals can:

  • Improve time-to-fill by using these deep recruitment marketing analytics to identify and then eliminate deficiencies in your strategy
  • Estimate how much adding a new role to a department would cost and therefore help inform the strategy around adding this talent to the team
  • Determine which media channels and vendors produce the highest quality candidates for certain positions or skill sets
  • Understand where their recruitment budget may be being wasted based on cost data that surpasses estimates
  • Identify a more accurate cost of employee churn
  • Reveal recruitment costs based on job type, location and/or industry

As trends in the recruitment space continue to point towards recruitment marketing as the future (and present) of talent acquisition, analytics like CPQA and CPH are no longer nice to have, but a must in an increasingly competitive space.

“Recruiters are recognizing that they must think more like marketers to prepare for future hiring needs and avoid talent shortages, and that means having a data-driven approach to their efforts,” Vitale says. “By utilizing analytics [like CPQA and CPH] to develop targeted, more effective strategies based on tangible evidence, recruiters can showcase the ROI of their efforts to elevate their role within the business.”

To learn more about CPQA, CPH or End-to-End Analytics, contact Recruitics today.

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