Recruiting for candidates in professional services like finance, legal, insurance, and marketing can be challenging because of the unique, finely-honed, high-level skill sets required. However, elevating your ability to attract these candidates through a data-driven approach will make life a lot easier.
Since the talent in this sector is so skilled, it can be difficult to hire in this industry. Such a skilled workforce expects elevated benefits and tends to have higher expectations overall. There’s also more to know about them (from a recruiter’s standpoint) than people in other industries.
In order to help recruiters and businesses overcome the challenges associated with hiring in the professional services industry, this article will focus on the importance of understanding recruitment marketing data and how analytics can be beneficial when preparing recruitment strategies for this industry. Rather than relying on guesswork, anecdotal evidence, or judgment calls, recruiters can employ recruitment data and analytics platforms to craft a more scientific, data-driven approach to their recruiting campaigns.
Tracking multiple metrics to evaluate the performance and success of recruitment marketing efforts is far more effective than tracking just one metric, such as the effectiveness of a given sourcing channel. Looking at just one unit of data can cause hiring professionals to miss out on valuable insights and correlations between the data being reviewed.
There are quite a few metrics that recruitment marketing professionals might consider. Some of the most important of these include:
Application Volume: This is a measure of the overall volume of applicants. This has to be adequate to the positions that need to be filled – to give recruiters the ability to work from enough applicants. It is also necessary as a baseline for a few of the following metrics.
Conversion Rate (CR%): When a job seeker submits their resume and completes the application to an open job posting, this is known as a conversion. The conversion rate is calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the volume of overall clicks and multiplying by 100.
Cost-Per-Application (CPA): This represents the overall cost of bringing in an applicant, or total cost divided by the number of total conversions (applications) for that position.
Cost-Per-Click (CPC): This metric represents what the organization is paying a given vendor for placement on job sites. In programmatic advertising, the organization typically sets max CPC parameters to regulate spend. The CPC can be determined on the dashboard.
Job Visits Volume (Clicks): This metric shows how many job seekers have clicked on the job ad. While they may not necessarily complete the application, this represents a certain level of interest.
Application-To-Hire Ratio: This metric represents how many applications it takes to generate a hire. The insights gained can help to budget and plan for new hiring initiatives.
Cost-Per-Hire (CPH): This is the overall cost per candidate hired. Here is a great example of where end-to-end analytics are particularly useful. E2E allows for visibility into all aspects of the candidate experience and illustrates full-funnel performance metrics and costs.
Retention Rate: According to Indeed, this is one of the more important KPIs companies should monitor. A metric that reflects employee turnover, the retention rate is the total number of employees who stayed with the organization for an entire predetermined period of time by the total number of employees at the start of that time frame.
Other metrics that come into play include sourcing channel effectiveness, sourcing channel cost, time to hire, offer acceptance rate, and turnover rate. It is important to remember to analyze groups of metrics globally and independently. An analysis of individual metrics by themselves can cause recruiters or managers to miss out on the bigger picture. Looking at the data units as a whole also provides more precise insights. It is essential to ensure that those analyzing the data have access to as many data points as possible, and make sure they can easily understand how to interpret it all for various insights.
Tip: Partner with a platform that can customize a dashboard so hiring professionals can review their analytics. Recruitics’ analytics solutions can be custom-tailored to deliver deep insights.
Even the most seasoned talent acquisition professionals can find tracking a candidate from one end of the funnel to the other to be a time-consuming task, so it’s essential to invest in analytics programs that work well.
Enter end-to-end analytics, through which talent acquisition professionals gain access to data from the earliest engagement with a candidate through the entire recruitment and hiring process. This paradigm gives recruiters a holistic view of their recruitment marketing picture and fosters more actionable insights. Additionally, it flags processes that aren’t working well and highlights those that are working well.
E2E analytics are beneficial when hiring in the professional services industry because they allow for the inclusion of a wide range of metrics – such as the ones listed in the previous section. For example, retention data is an important part of this process, so data collection and its relevance shouldn’t end when a candidate is hired.
The benefits of recruitment marketers gaining as much of an understanding of recruitment marketing analytics as possible are clear, especially when it comes to hiring in the professional services industry. Since it’s been established that recruiting in this industry can be challenging, resources that simplify understanding the data itself – such as customized analytics platforms and E2E analytics – are indispensable to recruitment marketing professionals.
Such resources can help recruiters unearth insights about the performance of their advertisements across different vendors and platforms. These insights can be used to improve efficiency and cut recruitment marketing costs.
Understanding a sufficient volume of data in the proper context means understanding the story that the data is sharing. Recruiting for professional services requires addressing some of the same issues and aspects as recruiting for other industries, in addition to the more nuanced requisites unique to this industry. As indicated throughout this article, however, a deeper understanding of the talent pool is needed compared to other industries.
With this data, recruiters can also strategically plan for future talent acquisition initiatives, because they will have a strong handle on the metrics it has historically taken to generate quality hires. When companies have historical data to lean back on, they can look back to the past and make better, data-driven decisions.
When engaging analytics platforms, recruitment marketers should make sure that they have a comprehensive recruitment marketing analytics dashboard that makes it easy for them to analyze all of the data, and how it relates to the recruitment strategy. It would consolidate information into reports based on selected parameters; this helps recruiters make better, data-driven decisions.
Such resources allow recruitment marketers to:
Track results in real-time
Ensure that results align with hiring goals
Strategically plan for future talent acquisition initiatives
Make smarter media buying decisions
Of equal importance is that analytics platforms, when engaged properly, also facilitate recruiters’ ability to adjust sampling parameters and analyze results to reflect the demands mentioned above and more nuanced requirements of the professional services talent pool. Recruiters can then use the data to optimize and improve recruitment marketing strategies, because a clear picture will emerge of how to make hires better, and where and how to advertise those jobs.
Recruitment marketing professionals should be mindful that the main premise for developing deep analytics utilities is to help them overcome the challenges of hiring in the professional services industry – they’re not just packed with extraneous bells and whistles that recruiters don’t need.
But such utilities need to be used properly, and the data has to be examined and appropriately utilized. Do this to ensure recruiters get all the important insights, interpret their recruitment marketing efforts' effectiveness, and save time, money, and resources.
If recruiters don’t look deeply into the data, they cannot understand how jobs perform and adjust the sails when necessary. They could spend too much in one area and not enough in others. The data helps recruiters adjust their strategies in real-time and on an as-needed basis, thus avoiding such missteps.
Admittedly, there’s more to unpack when recruiting for the professional services industry than with others, but this refinement is necessary to overcome the existing challenges. The talent market is more competitive than ever, and the chief asset professional services firms have are their people; so for recruiters, the extra effort is certainly worth it.
To be effective at recruiting top talent, recruiters must create a holistic view of their ideal candidates – and the most effective way to do this is through judiciously applying the resources described here.
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If your organization is ready to supercharge its recruitment marketing for the professional services industry, feel free to reach out to us!
