Data is that overachiever we all hate — never wrong, always telling the truth, wants to contradict popular opinion, and yet always seems to be the most popular one in the room.
Has anyone ever told you, “That’s not what the data says”? While I want to hate data, I’ve decided to go the other direction and embrace it. After all, my great, great grandmother’s name was Data (true story), so you could say data is in my blood.
(Pictured: myself and my Great, Great Grandmother Data)
To be honest, I have no option but to wrap my arms around data with all my love because I work in the world of marketing — recruitment marketing, to be exact. Something tells me you want data to be your best friend, too. What used to be a talent attraction operation laced with gut feelings on what worked and what didn’t has turned into a sophisticated data-rich industry, and I’m now knee-deep in tools that help me interject, “That’s not what the data says.” I recently had the chance to present the challenging topic of recruitment marketing analytics at LinkedIn Talent Connect with fellow data nerd, Ryan Christoi. If you prefer a video, feel free to stop reading this post and watch the two of us take you through recruitment marketing analytics .
Disclaimer: I don’t have everything figured out, but I’ve worked hard to figure out ways to be that annoying overachiever with data. To help you face your fears just as I have over the last decade, here is a list of some of the tools that other recruitment marketing professionals and I use to collect, organize and analyze data.
Google Analytics
GA is by far one of the best (and free) tools out there. We believe in it so much we make all employees get Google Analytics certified, even our accountants. Advanced users (like everyone at Recruitics) can cross-domain tracking between your ATS and career site to give you a full line of sight from initial candidate entry to a completed application.
URL Builder
In many cases, such as with Google Analytics, you can collect good clean data by appending your job links that are advertised for the world to see with URL source tags. Google offers a simple builder, but you should leverage a template that can give you multiple tags at scale.
Career Site Platform
If you are thinking of building a new career site, you should consider a platform like those provided by growing tech companies, such as Phenom People, Smashfly and Clinch to name a few. By centralizing the job search and apply process on one site, it can provide you with good clean data that can be harder to collect when you have disparate sites with varying domains and UX.
Tracking Tags
There are a variety of tag options. Some easy tags to install come from many of the job sites you advertise with (including LinkedIn). They can give you a tracking pixel that you can use to get more accurate data down to completed apply. This is one of the easiest ways to measure unit costs such as cost per application (CPA) and cost per hire (CPH), as long as you have the right URL tags in place (see URL builder above).
Programmatic Job Ads
You down with PPC? If you are, you absolutely need to be running PPC campaigns programmatically. Programmatic job ads use real-time data to buy and optimize each and every sponsored job with software. This is serious, people! You could be wasting a ton of your advertising investments on jobs that don’t need applications.
Pivot
You can’t slice and dice data if you don’t know how to pivot. and watch the tutorials if you need help. If anything, you will impress your colleagues (and your boss) the next time you need to navigate 300,000 rows of data exported from your ATS.
Create a Funnel
Recruitment marketing works like a funnel where there is first-interaction data that leads to final conversion data (e.g. Impressions >> Clicks >> Apply Starts >> Completed Applications >> Interview >> Offer). Helpful tip: create a funnel that you can scale by location, job category and source. The funnel will be your primary tool when making a business case for a talent attraction investment.
Nerd alert! Here’s how funnel data can shape your next conversation with your executive team.
“Based on historical data, our average apply conversion rate of 11% suggests we need 55,000 clicks to generate 6,000 applications, which is what we need to make 285 hires if we expect our apply-to-hire ratio of 24 to remain the same. With an average CPC of $0.81 we’ve seen over the last six months, we need a budget of $33,000 to make 185 hires, assuming we can make 35% of our hires through organic (free) resources.”
See you later, gut feeling. Helloooooo, data. I love you.
Visualization tools
Tableau is a household name for data enthusiasts and for good reason. It can handle more data than your laptop can store, and it forces you to be precision accurate. Domo and Google Data Studio are excellent choices too, just to name a couple.
Oldies but Goodies
Excel (yes, Excel) and Google Sheets are -ish tools that can still handle large data analysis jobs, but not too large. If Excel didn’t bog down after hitting 50MB, it might be my number one choice. Advanced features such as Slicers and Regression Analysis don’t exist in many data visualization tools.
This list might only scratch the surface, but whatever tools you look to use, think of how they will help you collect, organize and analyze data. Those three things represent the lifecycle of tracking and analytics. Always think in questions:
If you’re in the business of talent attraction and you haven’t embraced data yet, I invite you into our little nerdy circle of overachievers. Join us, because the data, and my Great, Great Grandmother Data, suggest it’s in your best interest.
