With so many key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that can be used to measure the performance of your recruitment marketing strategies, it isn’t always easy to know where to start when it comes time to analyze your data.
Having knowledge of the recruitment metrics and KPIs that are critical to the success of your strategy is important as they give you the power to optimize for a more efficient recruitment marketing strategy and increased ROI.
We’ve put together a list of KPIs to help empower you to understand your data and to make it easy for you to know how to optimize your recruitment marketing strategy. Understanding the following recruitment marketing metrics, and knowing what they mean to your strategy planning and performance, is critical to your efficiency and ROI. Read on to learn more.
How to use Data to Gauge Candidate Interest in Your Jobs
- Click Volume: A good indicator of potential candidate interest, click volume shows recruiters how many potential candidates click on a job based on the title. A high click volume reflects high job seeker interest in a job, which can relate to a highly sought-after opportunity or an appealing job title. When programmatic buying on PPC websites, it’s important to know the cost of clicks as it affects your spend on pay-per-click (PPC) media.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): While click volume reflects candidate interest, click through rate allows you to measure engagement within online job postings. Not all vendors provide this metric, but it can be calculated if click volume and number of impressions (the amount of times a job as has appeared in potential candidates’ search results) is known. To calculate CTR percentage, divide click volume by impressions, and then multiply by 100. Click through rate directly correlates with candidates’ interest in a job posting- the higher the CTR, the more interested candidates are in a job posting, with less interest being reflected by a low CTR. Knowing your job postings’ click through rates can help you identify which postings’ titles need to be optimized and which are just hard-to-fill (HTF).
How to Use Data to Assess Your Job Advertising Spend
- Spend: Understanding spend on the source- and job-level allows recruiters to see which sources offer higher quality, cost-effective applicants and provides insight needed for finding the right talent. Looking at jobs with wasted spend can provide insight into which jobs are HTF or just not getting enough traffic, which gives you the opportunity to focus efforts and budget on better performing jobs for more successful and efficient marketing strategies. Chances are your strategy has wasted spend if you don’t have access to source- and job-level spend.
- Cost-Per-Click (CPC): In programmatic buying, your cost-per-click, or maximum amount to be paid to a vendor per click, is an important metric to know as it also impacts how often job ads show in search results, and where they show in those search results. Your CPC tells you what you’re paying or should expect to pay each vendor and the results each is producing for you, which is important to know as recruitment marketing is equivalent to PPC’s performance-based model.
How to use Data to Discover How Applicants Found Your Job Ads
- Applications by Source: Even though you’re paying for clicks, your goal is for job seekers to submit applications to open positions, what we call conversions. Knowing and tracking which sources applications come from allows you to see which sources lead to conversions, including the number of conversions, so you can see which sources are more effective for getting applicants. Taking tracking a step further, knowing the amount of quality applicants from each source also helps you identify which sources result in the highest quality applicants which allows you to use budget more efficiently by focusing your strategy budget and efforts on higher converting sources with higher quality talent.
- Conversion Rate (CR%): As mentioned previously, a conversion occurs when a potential candidate submits an application to an open job postings through one of the vendors’ sites being used. Conversion Rate, which is the percentage of conversions, or applications, out of the total clicks or job views, can be a reflection of the quality of applicants per source.This metric be calculated by dividing the number of conversions by click volume, then multiplying by 100. A low CR% on a source may indicate a low quality audience of job seekers, and this information allows you to optimize for a more effective strategy as you can identify which sources are of higher quality and aren’t as cost-effective.
How to Use Data to Understand the Cost to Make Hires
- Cost-Per-Application (CPA): With budget being a key component of your recruitment marketing strategy, cost metrics are very important to know when reviewing performance. By knowing your CPA (as well as your Cost-Per-Quality-Application, or CPQA), you can determine which sources are the most cost-effective and best for obtaining high quality applicants, which become hires at a lower cost to you.
- Cost-Per-Hire (CPH): Having access to end-to-end analytics gives you the ability to see what full funnel performance metrics between the time a potential candidate clicks on a job ad all the way through to the hire, including any or all of the data points in between these two events. Your Cost-Per-Hire (CPH) is a critical metric in this funnel as it allows you to assess how much it costs you to make a hire, ultimately helping you forecast the budgets you need in relation to the amount of hires you need to make.
These KPIs and metrics are just the beginning when looking at all the data points that can be utilized while analyzing and optimizing recruitment marketing strategies. Recruitment marketers of all levels of experience should have access to these core recruitment metrics when reviewing job advertising strategy performance in order to optimize for an increased recruitment ROI.
If you’re unable to obtain all of these data points above and want truly efficient PPC job advertising, you may find it helpful to use a recruitment marketing analytics like Recruitics Analytics, the industry’s first FREE recruitment marketing analytics dashboard. Sign up to see how we can help you understand your recruitment marketing ROI for free.
