Measurement and reporting are loved and loathed by recruitment marketers in almost equal measure. When done well, they can be used to make important budgeting decisions. Without them, you’re working in the dark. But what should you be measuring and how do you go about doing it?Measurement and reporting are loved and loathed by recruitment marketers in almost equal measure. When done well, they can be used to make important budgeting decisions. Without them, you’re working in the dark. But what should you be measuring and how do you go about doing it?
Let’s start with what recruitment marketing stats you should be measuring
Candidates
- The source of every candidate who applies for a job
- Engagements via social media
- Salary survey downloads
- Blog subscriptions
- Event engagements
- Surges in website traffic
- Job shares
Clients
- The source of every lead
- Social media engagements
- White paper downloads
- Blog subscriptions
- Webinar registrations
- Event engagements
- Surges in website traffic
I’ve stopped my list at seven but I could go on. It’s simple, you should measure every direct and indirect source for both clients and candidates. No-one calls in out of the blue. They will have seen your name in the media somewhere or engaged with you in some way. Track it, or you’ll never know what is and isn’t working for you. It may take, two, three, or even ten engagements before you see a conversion but you need to understand every step of that journey to inform your strategy moving forward. Tracking just the last point of their path to convert only gives you part of the picture and may mean you are discounting valuable recruitment marketing conversion points.
That’s great but how do you capture these recruitment marketing figures?
Your CRM.
No, it’s not that simple. It all depends which CRM you are using as to whether it includes a full marketing reporting suite. However, what they will all do is give you the opportunity to capture information whether it’s automated or done manually.
One anecdote we often talk about at BlueSky PR is one of our clients who tracked the source of candidate applications via a drop down box on their CRM. They found that a huge percentage of candidates were coming in from AccountancyAge, which was funny as they had stopped advertising there a few years back. It turned out that AccountancyAge was just the first option in the drop down, and was being selected whenever consultants didn’t know what the source was. I’ve fallen into the same trap myself in the past and I found myself traipsing back through the email history and previous notes to find out what the actual story was. My issue was that I didn’t pay enough attention to the source until a placement was made, it was only at that point I would look back and see where the money had come from. Now, I track the engagement points of every lead from beginning to end and often find there isn’t just one source, there is an original source, a latest source, and often multiple sources in between.
How effective is your measurement? Can you clearly see your ROI?
We conducted a poll during a webinar with The Association of Professional Staffing Companies (APSCo) a couple of years back and 88% of respondents weren’t confident they were measuring their return on investment (ROI) from recruitment PR and marketing effectively. It came down to one key thing, knowing your numbers is one thing but interpreting them is something else entirely.
Once you’ve got your tracking in place, you need to know what you are measuring against. What are your goals? What are the overall business’ goals at that point in time?
I’m afraid to say, there is no one size fits all method to measure ROI – you need to find a way that works for your company, that effectively tracks engagements and gives a rounded view of each success.
So why bother to measure at all if it’s so challenging?
Recruitment marketing is, more often than not, seen as a cost rather than an investment. And costs need to be justified.
Recruitment is a sales led industry and without rigorous tracking, you will struggle to get recognition for leads that are generated from marketing rather than sales. And yet, if you are doing your job well, and measuring your efforts, you’ll probably find that virtually all leads have been influenced by marketing before they convert.
I’ve been working in recruitment marketing for over ten years now and once upon a time I had a magical spreadsheet where I tracked everything manually. It took a long time to build and it held a vast quantity of data but that spreadsheet was invaluable to me. I used it each month to see what content was working for me. I used it to decide whether to renew advertising contracts. I used it to justify where I spent my time and money.
Nowadays I am very lucky to have a suite of integrated tools to track the majority of engagements and highlight leads based on a number of scoring metrics but no matter how you track your recruitment marketing data, the important thing is that you do.
Want to find out more? Register for our free on-demand webinar on how to measure ROI from recruitment marketing.
This blog was provided by TRN Gold Partners BlueSky PR, international PR and communications firm, specialists in Recruitment, HR & Talent Management are Gold Partners of The Recruitment Network.
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