There are so many metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be measured through your recruitment marketing strategy, that understanding them all can be overwhelming for those who don’t consider themselves to be sophisticated recruitment marketers.
Therefore, understanding exactly which metrics and KPIs are most important to the success or failure of your strategy is critical if you wish to optimize for further efficiency and with the goal of increasing your ROI.
We tapped into our team of in-house recruitment marketing experts to compile a list of which questions you need to be looking to the data to answer, and which metrics, exactly, you’ll be able to find the answers in:
Are Top Candidates Interested in Your Jobs?
- Click Volume: When tracking job seeker interest, click volume can be a telltale sign. This metric shows how many job seekers click into your job description. Therefore, more clicks often means more interest, reflecting a well-written job title, or a very high-demand opportunity. And, since pay-per-click (PPC) media is billed based on click volume, this metric is also very important in knowing cost when it comes to programmatic buying on PPC sites like Indeed.
- Click Through Rate (CTR): The click through rate helps you measure job seeker engagement, rather than interest, in your online job postings. However, this important metric isn’t provided by all vendors and does require a bit of calculation. In order to determine CTR, you need to know your click volume and the number of impressions (how many times your job ad appeared in job seekers’ search results pages) your posting has received. Dividing the former by the later, and multiplying by 100, will produce your CTR percentage. To understand this metric is simple; the higher the CTR the more intrigued job seekers are by your job posting, and vice versa. Furthermore, a CTR can provide insight into which job titles may need to be improved upon or which jobs may just be hard-to-fill (HTF).
How Much Are You Spending on Your Jobs?
- Spend: As an important metric and KPI, spend must be understood on the source and job level. By understanding the advertising costs on these micro levels, you’ll be able to quickly identify which sources produce higher quality and more cost-effective applicants. It also allows you to understand on which jobs waste is occurring in your budget, and eliminate it. Similarly, it will allow you to identify where you may need to focus more of your budget if HTF and high priority jobs aren’t receiving enough traffic to hit the goals you’ve set for them. Furthermore, without access to source- and job-level spend data, it’s almost a guarantee that there’s wasted spend in your strategy.
- Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Recruitment marketing efficiency today is synonymous with performance-based ad models today like PPC. Therefore, knowing your CPC is key to understanding exactly what you’re paying each vendor for the results they’re producing for you. When it comes to programmatic buying, your CPC bid (the maximum cost you’re willing to pay a vendor, per click) can determine how often and where your job ads show in search results, which is what makes CPC such an important data point to track.
Where Are Your Applicants Coming From?
- Applications by Source: You might pay for clicks, but what you’re looking for is a conversion, or when a job seeker submits an application to your open position. Therefore, tracking applications by source will help tell you exactly where your conversions are coming from, how many you’re receiving, and ultimately, will allow you to rank the effectiveness of your sources. Even better, if you can track the volume of quality applicants per source, you can identify exactly where your highest quality applicants come from and take action based on that information; for example, by dropping your lowest quality sources from your strategy.
- Conversion Rate (CR%): As noted above, a conversion occurs when a job seeker submits an application to a job posting on one of your vendors’ sites. By taking a deeper dive into your CR%, you can actually determine the quality of applicants coming out of a particular source. If a source is giving you a decent volume of applicants, but the conversion rate is very low, that source likely has a low quality audience of job seekers and is probably not as cost-effective for you.
How Much is it Costing You to Make Great Hires?
- Cost-Per-Application (CPA): Quite possibly the most important recruitment marketing metrics to know are going to be your cost 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 sending you the best quality applicants (and therefore, hires) for less!
- 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.
When it comes to recruitment marketing metrics and KPIs, the list above truly only scratches the surface. However, for sophisticated recruitment marketers, these are the critical data points they rely on to optimize their strategies and drive higher ROI.
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If you’re unable to glean the insights above, you might need a recruitment marketing analytics and automation solution like Recruitics to get true efficiency out of your PPC job advertising efforts. Contact Recruitics today, to learn how we can help you easily achieve great results with your recruitment marketing strategy.
