Number of Apply Clicks and Cost Per Click for Job Posting Ads

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A commonly used cliche has the buyer of advertising stating that he knows that half of his advertising is working but he just wishes that he knew which half. That cliche pre-dates the Internet as today’s marketers should and sometimes do know which of their ads is working. But even then, how do you define “working?”

One of the interesting developments since CollegeRecruiter.com went live way back in 1996 is the increased attention employers are paying to metrics so they can better understand where their money is being well spent. For 16 years we’ve heard employers say that they use niche job boards such as ours because they care more about quality than quantity yet when it came time to decide whether to renew a job posting package our sales team would invariably hear yes or no based upon how many applications the employer received from our candidates. Those employers were saying they were basing their decisions on quality but actually were basing them on quantity. Continue Reading

Source of Hire: Is It Even Possible to Track?

By Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads

With all the enterprising recruiters who pride themselves on being strictly ‘social’ recruiters, we fantasized what a map would show about the job seeker’s path to a job in the future:

1. First, the candidate would likely tell (some) friends on Facebook they were looking for a new job. (So far so good).
2. A friend might then suggest asking Siri to search Google.
3. And perhaps somebody paid off Siri to forward him to Indeed which led him to Job Central which linked him to a great position on the career site of a firm in his commute range.
4. The candidate then went to Linkedin and found a friend of a friend who worked there and had gone to the same school as he did.
   Wanting to be cool he followed the employee on Twitter, then put him in his “must meet” circle on Google+ and soon found out that he (the employee) would be at a meet-up nearby where they #accidentally-on-purpose-met. Dropping the name of the friend they both knew in common, they found other common ground (they both pinned Italian recipes on Pinterest) and the now new friend and employee agreed to be his referral for an open position.
5. When asked in the application, “How did you find us?”, the candidate put in the name of the referral and, internally, the employee completed his form referring the local candidate. When the recruiter searched his ATS, the software’s [proprietary] algorithm weighted and tagged the referred candidate as a highly qualified match and the rest is history.

Except, the firm’s SOH reporting had switched to last IP address and, since the candidate had come directly from his home computer to the company career site, the ‘unknown’ IP address was coded “Other” for Source of Hire. Fortunately the external service that put the cookie on that particular prospect at the moment he reached Indeed was able to update the ‘source’ field – except, the recruiter altered the field again based on his interview of the new hire and so he changed it to, “Facebook”.

– Gerry Crispin and Mark Mehler work full time consulting, educating and discovering how talent and opportunity connect through emerging technology. They can be reached via email at mmc@careerxroads.com, phone at 732-821-6652, or on-line at http://www.careerxroads.com.

Job Boards Are 2nd Largest Source of Hire; College is 5th

Mark Mehler and Gerry Crispin of CareerXroads just released their 11th Annual Sources of Hire (SOH) Study – a snapshot of how large, highly-competitive, high-profile firms find their employees. Tracking and monitoring the sources of actual hires tells companies where to dedicate their hiring resources and tells job seekers where to direct their efforts.

Why track source of hire data? Companies need to know where to spend their time, effort and recruiting dollars. Job seekers need to know where to focus their efforts. This data helps both sides of the recruiting process because it tracks where employers actually hired people – not numbers of resumes received, not dollars spent, but actual hires. The top five sources of hires in 2011 were: Continue Reading

Unless You’re Smoking Crack, Your Web Site is Not a Source of Hire

Alex Charraudeau of 4MAT

In a nutshell, Stop Gap Group used Broadbean to distribute their job postings to a number of job boards and then were quite disappointed with the apparent lack of applications and hires. Broadbean is a partner of our job board, CollegeRecruiter.com, so I’m quite familiar with them. They do a great job of distributing jobs to a wide variety of job boards and then measuring the responses to those postings but they can only measure what the employer has allowed them to measure. Continue Reading

83% of Candidates Incorrectly Self-Identify Their Referral Source

There’s been a significant increase in the number of employer clients would prefer to pay for postings and other recruitment advertising on a for performance basis so that they only pay if they hire someone from the ad. I’d love to get there as well as it would ensure that the interests of the candidate, employer, and CollegeRecruiter.com would be well aligned but we can’t get there until the employers make the proper investments in their applicant tracking systems.

Of the hundreds of clients we have, we’d be hard pressed to count on one hand how many of them are properly tracking the source of their hires. It is really pathetic, actually. We have one client who spend $200,000 on an applicant tracking system but didn’t spend $20,000 to add the module that would give them fully automated tracking with unique URLs. So instead they have those horrid drop-down boxes. Don Firth at AllRetailJobs.com and JobsInLogistics.com published a study showing that 83 percent of candidates misidentified their source when they clicked directly from the job board to the employer site and the job board was actually listed.

I can only imagine how much higher the percentage would be if the study included candidates who saw the posting on sites to which it was crossposted. For example, if an employer posts a job to our site then we crosspost it to thousands of other sites in our network. It is part of our selling proposition so there’s full transparency with our clients. If a candidate sees the posting on one of our partner sites and then applies on the employer site, will the candidate know to identify CollegeRecruiter.com? No way.

The only solution is fully automated tracking where the employer provides a unique URL to every board and other source to which they post the opportunity. Then regardless of where the candidate sees the posting the source will be properly tracked. Of course, that assumes that the ATS is setup to properly track those URLs and that the HR people using the ATS are properly trained on how to make that work.

We’re talking with a client right now about a pay-per-hire deal. We are confident that the client is properly tracking. We’d welcome more such deals as they’re great for all concerned, but I suspect that we’ll get a lot of interest from employers whose systems don’t measure up to their desires.

Originally posted by Steven Rothberg